by James Millar
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bohlen, Celestine. (1999). “Yeltsin Dismisses Another Premier: KGB Veteran Is In.” The New York Times (August 10, 1999). Bohlen, Celestine. (2002). “Sergey Vadimovich Stepashin.” National Politics. «http://lego70.tripod.com/rus/ stepashin.htm». Shevtsova, Lilia. (1999). Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
JACOB W. KIPP
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STEPENNAIA KNIGA
STEPENNAIA KNIGA See BOOK OF DEGREES.
STEPPE
To the forest-dwelling, inland-looking Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarus), the steppes of Central Russia and Eurasia historically were much like the oceans and seas to maritime civilizations. In song and verse, these vast grasslands were the dikiye polya (wild fields) inhabited by the equivalent of untamed, bloodthirsty pirates. Between 700 B.C.E. and 1600 C.E., the steppes were the realm of marauding horse-riding nomads, scions of the V?lkerwanderungen (peoples’ migrations), such as the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Polovtsy, Mongol-Tatars, and multi-cultural free-booting Cossacks. Indeed, until the invention of the steel-tipped, moldboard plow in the nineteenth century, Eastern Slavic farmers were unable to cultivate the rich black-earths (chernozems) of the steppes, and they confined their settlements mainly to the forest zones.
Steppe climates are sub-humid, semiarid continental types. Summer lasts from four to six months. Average July temperatures range from 70 to 73.5 degrees Fahrenheit (21 to 23 degrees Celsius). Winter, by Russian standards, is mild, with January averaging between -4 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit (-13 and 0 degrees Celsius). It generally persists for three to five months. There is a distinctive lack of soil moisture. Average annual precipitation is 18 inches (46 centimeters) in the north and 10 inches (26 centimeters) in the south. Most of it derives from summer thunderstorms. The depth of snow cover in winter ranges from 4 inches (10 centimeters) in the south to 20 inches (50 centimeters) in the north.
Steppe ecology exhibits subtle diversity. Herbaceous vegetation abounds. The only natural forests follow the river valleys and ravines, but shelter-belts, planted since the 1930s, parallel the roads and farms to trap snow in winter. Salinized soils (solonets) occasionally interrupt the predominant chernozems and chestnut soils. Small mammals typify the steppe, including marmots, hamsters, social meadow mice, jerboas, and others.
This zone and the wooded-steppe to the north yield Russia’s best farmland. Between 1928 and 1940, most of the steppe was converted to state and collective farms. In the 1950s, long-term fallow lands (perelog and zalezh) were plowed in Rus1478 sia’s Altay Foreland and in northern Kazakhstan (the “Virgin Lands”); thus most of the natural steppe is gone. Common crops are wheat, barley, sunflowers, and maize. See also: CLIMATE; GEOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gregory, James S. (1968). Russian Land, Soviet People. New York: Pegasus. Jackson, W. A. Douglas. (1956). “The Virgin and Idle Lands of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan.” The Geographical Review 46:1-19. Shaw Denis J. B. (1999). Russia in the Modern World: A New Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
VICTOR L. MOTE
STILIAGI
A Soviet youth subculture that emerged in the late 1940s and extended into the early 1960s.
The term stiliagi first appeared in the Soviet press in 1949 to provide a negative characterization of young men who pursued what they believed to be Western models of behavior, leisure, clothing, and dance styles. Stil’ (style) was essential for them and the very first stiliagi-almost exclusively men-sported elaborate haircuts and colorful suits and ties. In the early 1950s the stiliagi clothing style became more subdued as they adopted a more “American” look and wore narrow black pants and thick-soled shoes. The stiliagi, displaying a pronounced American orientation, called themselves shtatniki (United States-niks). They listened to American jazz, smoked American cigarettes, and used American slang. In the late 1950s and early 1960s some stiliagi embraced rock culture as it began to spread in the West. Nightlife was important for the stiliagi and they regularly gathered in public and private spaces to listen to jazz and dance Western dances.
The stiliagi phenomenon is most strongly associated with the ideological relaxation and the growing material well-being in the post-Stalin period. The predominant majority of the stiliagi were students of higher educational institutions in major urban centers. They came from families of the Soviet professional, political, and managerial elite, also known as the nomenklatura. Under Stalin and later Soviet leaders, the nomenklatura received a
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STOCK EXCHANGES
number of privileges (e.g., access to special stores, trips abroad, better housing, financial bonuses) in exchange for political conformity. The stiliagi phenomenon reflected the growing consumerist and leisure-oriented mentality of the upper crust of Soviet society.
The stiliagi culture was widely denounced by the Soviet media. The official Komsomol campaign targeted their “parasitic” and immoral attitude toward work, lack of political involvement and loyalty, and pro-Western spirit. In individual cases, the stiliagi were forced to change their dress and hairstyles and were expelled from the Komsomol.
In the mid-1980s, parallel to glasnost and per-estroika, there was a revival of the stiliagi culture. The new stiliagi included girls and adopted a dress code of black suits, white shirts, and narrow ties. They were fans of the Soviet rock ‘n’ roll bands “Brigada S” and “Bravo.” This new generation of stiliagi was part of the growing number of nefor-maly (non-formal), youth groups that emerged outside of the official youth culture controlled by the Komsomol and reflected the growing crisis of cultural and political identity among Soviet youth. See also: NOMENKLATURA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Edele, Mark. (2002). “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953.” Jahrb?cher f?r Geschichte Osteuropas 50(1):37-61. Kassof, Allen. (1965). The Soviet Youth Program: Regimentation and Rebellion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pilkington, Hilary. (1994). Russia’s Youth and Its Culture. A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed. New York: Routledge.
LARISSA RUDOVA
STOCK EXCHANGES
Stock market exchanges are a real or virtual location for the sale and purchase of private equities. A way for private enterprises to raise investment funds.
The first stock market exchange in post-Soviet Russia was primarily trade in privatization vouchers. As privatization proceeded apace, so did the volume of transactions on Russian exchanges. Shares
Trade at the Moscow Stock Exchange, August 29, 1998. © R.P.G./CORBIS SYGMA in certain Russian enterprises, particularly those of oil and gas companies, were also increasingly offered on the market, but the stock market or markets in Russia have yet to offer enterprises significant sources of either domestic or foreign investment funds.
Initially, the Russian stock exchanges were wild and risky places to venture funds. The early days witnessed two major boom and bust cycles: 1994-96 and 1996-98. Following the financial crisis of 1989, the Russian stock market almost ceased to exist. The Russian government sought to regulate the market step by step. Prior to 1996 enterprises were not required by law to maintain independent, public registries of stock outstanding, and both domestic and foreign investors learned to their dismay that they could be defrauded of their equity claims. The 1996 Russian Federal Securities Act required public registries and created the Federal Securities Commission and charged it with coordinating the various federal agencies that were
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STOLBOVO, TREATY OF
responsible for governing the securities market. Conditions have improved for investors, but much remains to be done to create a reasonable market in equities comparable with those in more advanced capitalist countries. It remains more a site for speculation than for raising significant amounts of investment funds. See also: ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET
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p; BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley. Gustavson, Thane. (1999). Capitalism Russian-Style. New York: Cambridge University Press.
JAMES R. MILLAR
STOLBOVO, TREATY OF
Signed February 27, 1617 in Stolbovo village, this treaty terminated Swedish intervention in Russian affairs after the Time of Troubles. King Gustavus Adolphus recognized Mikhail Romanov as the legitimate tsar of Russia; withdrew the claim of his brother Charles Philip to the Russian throne; and evacuated Novgorod. Russia ceded eastern Karelia and Ingria to Sweden, foregoing direct access to the Baltic Sea, and paid an indemnity of twenty thousand rubles.
King Charles IX had initially intervened in 1609 to provide aid against Polish attempts to place a pretender on the Russian throne. Following the deposition of Vasily Shuisky in 1610, the boyars’ council agreed to accept Prince Wladyslaw, son of King Sigismund III, as the next tsar of Russia. Sweden declared war and advanced the candidacy of Charles Philip to the vacant throne. Novgorod was seized in July 1611.
Sweden found it difficult to control northwestern Russia effectively, and its occupation drained away military resources needed to protect Swedish interests in Central Europe. The Stolbovo terms met Sweden’s primary objective, ensuring that the Baltic coast-and with it, the primary east-west trade routes remained in Swedish hands.
Stolbovo marks the high point of Sweden’s eastward expansion beyond the border first confirmed by the 1323 Treaty of N?teborg. The Swedish
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government promoted Lutheran missionary activity among the Orthodox inhabitants and encouraged settlement from other Swedish dominions. The Stolbovo settlement was reconfirmed by the 1661 Treaty of Kardis, but overturned by the Treaty of Nystad (1721) that ended the Great Northern War.
Sir John Merrick, an English merchant, helped to negotiate the treaty, testifying to Russia’s growing links with Western Europe. The treaty is also connected with a famous relic, the Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God, a copy of which was brought to Stolbovo for the negotiations. See also: NOVGOROD THE GREAT; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH; SMO-LENOK WAR; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
K?ng, Enn. (2001). “The Swedish Economic Policy in the Commercial Aspect in Narva in the Second Half of the 17th Century.” Ph.D. diss. Tartu University, Estonia.
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV
STOLNIK
The highest general sub-Duma rank of military and court servitors in Muscovy.
Literally meaning “table-attendant,” stolnik first appears in 1228 and 1230 for episcopal and princely court officials. As Moscow grew, younger and junior memoirs of the top families and provincial serving elites needed a place at court. Accordingly stolnik lost its earlier meaning and was granted to many members of these strata. Above it was the much smaller number of postelniks (chamberlains), and below a large contingent of striapchis (attendants, servants-a term that appears by 1534), and Moscow dvorianins. The service land reforms of the 1550s and 1590s assigned Moscow province estates to these ranks.
From the end of the sixteenth century to 1626, the numbers of stolniks, striapichis, and Moscow dvorianins grew respectively from 31-14-174 to 217-82-760, plus another 176 stolniks of Patriarch Filaret, much of that growth occurring during the Time of Troubles. After measured growth to 1671, the numbers of stolniks mushroomed from 443 to
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STOLYPIN, PETER ARKADIEVICH
1307 in 1682 and 3233 in 1686. By this time an elite category of chamber stolniks arose, growing from 18 in 1664 to 173 in 1695. Some stolnik were always in the tsar’s suite, attending to his needs.
In 1638, the average stolnik land-holding was seventy-eight peasant households, sufficient to outfit an elite military servitor and several attendants, as opposed to 24 and 28-29 respectively for the average striapchiu and Moscow dvorianin, and 520 for the average Duma rank.
The most eminent family names virtually filled the stolnik rosters in the early seventeenth century. Among those on the 1610-1611 list were Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, the military hero of 1612 and the young “Mikhailo” Romanov, elected tsar in 1613. The percentage of non-aristocratic stolniks surpassed two-thirds toward the end of the century. Under Peter I (the Great) these terms disappeared, but former stolniks and their progeny constituted the critical mass of the upper ranks of his service-nobility. See also: BOYAR; DUMA; MUSCOVY; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
DAVID M. GOLDFRANK
STOLYPIN, PETER ARKADIEVICH
(1862-1911), reformist, chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1906-1911.
Peter Arkadievich Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1906-1911, attempted the last, and arguably most significant, program to reform the politics, economy, and culture of the Russian Empire before the 1917 Revolution. Stolypin was born into a Russian hereditary noble family whose pedigree dated to the seventeenth century. His father was an adjutant to Tsar Alexander II, and his mother was a niece of Alexander Gor-chakov, the influential foreign minister of that era. Spending much of his boyhood and adolescence on a family estate in the northwestern province of Kovno, Stolypin came of age in an ethnically and religiously diverse region where Lithuanian, Polish,
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Jewish, German, and other communities rendered privileged Russians a distinct minority. Stolypin’s nationalism, a hallmark of his later political career, cannot be understood apart from this early experience of imperial Russian life. Peter Stolypin introduced key agrarian reforms under Nicholas
II. © HULTON ARCHIVE
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As did an increasing number of his noble contemporaries, Stolypin attended university, entering St. Petersburg University in 1881. Unlike many noble sons intent on the civil service and thus the study of jurisprudence, Stolypin enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty, where among the natural sciences the study of agronomy provided some grounding for a lifelong interest in agriculture. Married while still a university student to Olga Borisovna Neidgardt (together the couple would parent six children), the young Stolypin obtained a first civil service position in 1883, a rank at the imperial court in 1888, but a year later took the unusual step of accepting an appointment as a district marshal of the nobility near his family estate in Kovno. He spent much of the next fifteen years immersed in provincial public life and politics.
STOLYPIN, PETER ARKADIEVICH
Scholars generally agree that these years shaped an understanding of imperial Russia, and the task of reform that dominated his later political career. Of primary importance was his experience of rural life. For much of the 1890s the young district marshal of the nobility also led the life of a provincial landowning gentleman. Residing on his family estate, Kolnoberzhe, Stolypin took an active interest in farming, managing income earned from lands both inherited and purchased. He also experienced the variety of peasant agriculture, perhaps most notably the smallholding hereditary tenure in which peasant families of nearby East Prussia often held arable land.
Stolypin’s understanding of autocratic politics also took shape in the provinces. There he first encountered its peculiar amalgam of deference, corruption, bureaucracy, and law. In 1899 an imperial appointment as provincial marshal of nobility in Kovno made him its most highly ranked hereditary nobleman. Within three years, in 1902, the patronage of Viacheslav von Pleve, the Minister of Internal Affairs, won him appointment as governor of neighboring Grodno province. Early 1903 brought a transfer to the governorship of Saratov, a major agricultural and industrial province astride the lower reaches of the Volga river valley. An incubator of radical, liberal, and monarchist ideologies, and the scene of urban and rural discontent in 1904-1905, Saratov honed Stolypin’
s political instincts and established his national reputation as an administrator willing to use force to preserve law and order. This brought him to the attention of Nicholas II, and figured in his appointment as Minister of Internal Affairs, on the eve of the opening of the First State Duma in April 1906. When the tsar dissolved the assembly that July and ordered new elections, he also appointed Stolypin to chair the Council of Mnisters, a position that made him the de facto prime minister of the Russian Empire.
His tenure from 1906 through 1911 was tumultuous. Typically, historians have assessed it in terms of a balance between the conflicting imperatives of order and reform. Ironically enough, contemporary opponents of Stolypin’s policies, most notably moderate liberals and social democrats who pilloried Stolypin for sacrificing the possibilities of constitutional monarchy and democratic reform to preserve social order, offered opinions of his politics that found their way, however circuitously, into Soviet-era historiography. In this view, Stolypin favored punitive force, police power, clandestine financing of the press, and a general negli1482 gence of the law to dominate political opponents and assert the preeminence of a superficially reformed monarchy. Hence, in August 1906, he established military field court-martials to suppress domestic disorder. More drastically, he undertook the so-called coup d’?tat of June 3, 1907, dissolving what was deemed an excessively radical Second State Duma and, in clear violation of the law, issuing a new electoral statute designed to reduce the representation of peasants, ethnic minorities, and leftist political parties.