Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  With the transformation of Soviet foreign policy under Mkhail Gorbachev, away from confrontation and toward meaningful cooperation with the West, Vietnam ceased to have much value to the Kremlin. Deciding to reduce its commitments to Hanoi, Moscow encouraged a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia, as well as a political settlement under United Nations auspices.

  The Russian Federation, founded in 1991, was focused on its own economic transformation, not with subsidizing impoverished Third World clients. Yet it had inherited an unpaid debt of $10 billion from Vietnam. Overcoming the massive debt that had resulted from the failed political-ideological crusades of the twentieth century assumed greater significance than any other goal for Russia in its relations with Vietnam at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gaiduk, Ilya. (1996). The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Gaiduk, Ilya. (2003). Confronting Vietnam. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morris, Stephen J. (1999). Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Quinn-Judge, Sophie. (2003). Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

  STEPHEN J. MORRIS

  VIKINGS

  From the 750s to the 1050s, the Vikings were warriors, pirates, and traders from Scandinavia who employed the most sophisticated naval technology of the time in Northern Europe to launch extensive raiding and trading expeditions stretching west to Canadian Labrador and east to the Caspian Sea.

  Vikings (called Rus in the Arabic and Varangians in the Greek sources), primarily from Sweden and the Isle of Gotland, first entered European Russia in small groups in search of trade and tribute in the second half of the eighth century. By the ninth century, the Rus had established a complex commercial network stretching from the Baltic to the Islamic Caliphate. By the tenth century, the Rus extended this network southward to the Byzantine Empire via Kiev, continuing the eastern trade through intermediaries on the middle Volga in Volga Bulgaria. Also by the tenth century, the Vikings traveling through Russia had entered the service of the Byzantine Emperor (tenth through twelfth centuries) and helped found the first East Slavic kingdom, Kievan Rus.

  The Russian Primary Chronicle relates that in 862 the Viking Rurik and his kin were invited by Slavic and Finnic tribes to come and rule over them, after which they developed a system of tribute that encompassed northwestern Russia, Kiev, and its neighboring tribes. The Chronicle’s account is substantiated by finds of Scandinavian-style artifacts (tortoise shell brooches, Thor’s hammer pendants, wooden idols, armaments), and in some cases graves, found at Staraya Ladoga, Ryurikovo Gorodishche, Syaskoe Gorodishche, Timerevo, and Gnezdovo. These sites were tribal and commercial centers and riverside waystations, typical of those found along trade routes used by the Rus, most notably that of the Volga Route to the Islamic Caliphate and the Route to the Greeks along the Dnieper.

  In contrast to Viking activity in the West, which is characterized primarily by raiding and large-scale colonization, the Rus town network and subsequent tribal and political organization was designed for trade. Subject tribes living along river systems supplied the Rus with the furs, wax, honey, and slaves that they would further exchange for Islamic silver (especially dirhams), glass beads, silks, and spices in southern markets. The Rus expansion into Byzantine markets began in earnest in the early tenth century, with Rus attacks

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  1639

  VILNIUS

  on Constantinople in 907, 911, and 944, which resulted in trade agreements. By the end of the century, in 988-989, Vladimir I (ruled 980-1015), a quarter Viking through his father Svyatoslav, had married into the Byzantine royal family and converted to Byzantine Christianity, thereby laying the foundation for the Eastern Slavic relationship with the Greek world.

  The tenth century marks the high point of Viking involvement in the East. Much of the Scandinavian-style jewelry found in European Russia and a majority of the Scandinavian-style graves date to the second and third quarters of the tenth century. Vladimir I and his son Yaroslav the Wise (ruled 1019-1054) enlisted Viking mercenary armies in internecine dynastic wars. In the eleventh century, however, the Viking foot soldier armies had become obsolete as the Rus princes were forced to adapt to another enemy in the south, the Turkic nomads who fought on horseback. The defeat of Yaroslav’s Viking mercenaries by a nomadic army at the Battle of Listven (1024) is indicative of this trend. See also: GNEZDOVO; KIEVAN RUS; NORMANIST CONTROVERSY; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; ROUTE TO GREEKS; VLADIMIR, ST.; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200. London: Longman. Noonan, Thomas S. (1997). “Scandinavians in European Russia.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, ed. Peter Sawyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pritsak, Omeljan. (1981). The Origin of Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Stalsberg, Anne. (1988). “The Scandinavian Viking Age Finds in Rus: Overview and Analysis.” In Bericht der R?misch-Germanischen Kommission 69. Mainz am Rhein, Germany: Philipp Von Zabern.

  HEIDI M. SHERMAN

  VILNIUS

  The capital of the Lithuanian Republic and historically the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Vilnius occupies a special place in a number of national cultures. Lithuanians constitute a majority of the city’s 543,000 inhabitants. Russians make

  1640

  up about 20 percent, Poles 19 percent, Belarusians 5 percent, and Jews 2 percent. Jews, who according to the Russian census of 1897 had constituted a plurality of the population, have called “Vilna” (or in Yiddish “Vilne”) the “Jerusalem of the North,” a center of rabbinic learning. Poles considered “Wilno” Polish in culture. Some Belarusians, pointing to the Grand Duchy’s multinational character, insist that Vilna should be part of their state. Under Russian rule in the nineteenth century, Vilna was the administrative center of the empire’s Northwest Region.

  When the great Eastern European empires collapsed at the end of the World War I, Vilnius became a bone of contention between the newly emerging states. Between 1918 and 1923, the flag symbolizing sovereignty over the city and region changed at least eight times. The two major contenders were Lithuania and Poland, although the city also briefly served as the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and then the Lithuanian-Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. In July 1920, as part of its recognition of Lithuanian independence, Soviet Russia agreed with Lithuania’s claims to Vilnius, but in October 1920 Polish forces seized the city, establishing the rogue state of Central Lithuania. In 1923, Poland formally incorporated the territory, but Lithuania refused to recognize Polish sovereignty. Still claiming Vilnius as their capital, the Lithuanians called Kaunas their provisional capital and insisted that Poland and Lithuania were in a state of war.

  After Soviet forces had occupied Eastern Poland in September 1939, the Soviet government turned Vilnius over to the Lithuanians. The Polish government in exile protested the Lithuanians’ move into Vilnius, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the western powers chose not to challenge the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland. In 1940, and again from 1944 to 1945, Soviet troops occupied Lithuania, and Vilnius was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991.

  Under Soviet rule, Lithuanians dominated the city’s cultural life. Before World War I, when Lithuania lay on the border between Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany, the Russians had limited the economic growth of the region and the development of the city. Therefore few Lithuanians had come to the city from the countryside. After 1945 the Soviet government permitted and even encouraged Poles to emigrate from the USSR to the Polish People’s Republic, and Lithuanians flowed to the city. The decade of the 1960s, when the

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  VIRGIN LANDS PROGRAM

  Lithuanian population reached 45 to 47 percent, was decisive
in the development of the city’s Lithuanian character.

  In January 1991 Soviet troops in Vilnius seized a number of public buildings in an unsuccessful effort to crush Lithuanian independence, and the city became a symbol of the failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika. See also: JEWS; LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; POLAND

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Cohen, Israel. (1992). Vilna. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1966). The Great Powers, Lithuania, and the Vilna Question. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.

  ALFRED ERICH SENN VINIUS, ANDREI DENISOVICH See WINIUS, ANDRIES DIONYSZOON.

  VIRGIN LANDS PROGRAM

  Nikita Khrushchev promoted two major agricultural programs in his first years as general secretary: the corn program and, as he called it, the virgin and wasteland program. These two programs were interrelated. An important objective of agricultural policy was to increase the production of meat and milk significantly to meet the demands of the population. To produce more meat and milk required more feed. His solution was to expand greatly the production of corn (maize) throughout the Soviet Union. The virgin lands program was created to prevent the reduction of the wheat area as the corn area increased. This aspect of the virgin lands program is often missed, but in a speech on February 14, 1956, Khrushchev highlighted it: “The interests of increasing production of grain required a change in the structure of acreages, for the purpose-while extending the acreage under wheat, groats, and other crops-of sharply increasing acreage under corn.” He noted that in 1955 there were 18 million hectares of corn sown, some 13.6 million hectares more than in 1954. Without the virgin lands program, the area of wheat would have been substantially reduced, and a crisis in the bread supply would have occurred. The new lands were located primarily in Khazakstan and Siberia, areas of limited rainfall. Khrushchev’s objective had been to reclaim 28 to 30 million hectares of virgin land and wasteland. The estimated area of virgin and fallow land developed from 1954 to 1956 was 36 million hectares. Prior to institution of the virgin lands program, the sown area of grain in the USSR was approximately 100 million hectares; in 1954 it was 102 million. By 1956 the grain area had increased to 128 million hectares, while the wheat area had increased from 48 million hectares in 1953 to 62 million hectares in 1956, and maize sown for grain from 3.5 to 9.3 million hectares. Thus he achieved his objective of increasing the total cropped area and increasing both wheat- and maize-sown areas.

  Not all of the increase in grain area came from plowing up virgin and wasteland. Aradius Kahan concluded that 10 million hectares of the increased sown area could be attributed to the reduction of the area of fallowed land-land that was in cultivation but cropped only every other year. In areas of limited rainfall, land is often fallowed as a way of accumulating moisture and nitrogen from one year to the next, which both increases and stabilizes yields. The practice of fallow is to leave land idle for a year, but cultivate it to prevent the growth of weeds that would utilitize the available moisture. The accumulation of moisture and nitrogen through fallow will increase the yields by 50 or more percent, and, with the saving of seed, the increase in net yield is even greater. In this light, more than a quarter of the reported increase in sown area represented a fraud: The land was neither virgin nor waste.

  Was the virgin lands program successful by Khrushchev’s criteria, namely, increasing the output of wheat and other grains as the corn area expanded? It appears so. In part this was due to good luck-the weather in the virgin land area in the late 1950s was quite favorable. The national yield of grain per hectare, as estimated by the government, was actually higher from 1955 to 1959 than from 1950 to 1954, even though the virgin land area normally had a somewhat lower yield than the national average. One positive feature of the virgin lands program was that annual yields in the area generally were negatively correlated with the yields in the European area of the USSR. This meant that the year-to-year variations in yields tended to be offsetting to a significant degree, thus adding stability to the national average. The average of the official (and exaggerated) estimates of grain production from 1956 to 1960 was 121 million tons, or 41 percent more than in 1954. Not all of this increase was due to the virgin lands program, but much of it was.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  1641

  VIRTUAL ECONOMY

  The corn program, however, was a dismal failure and was later largely abandoned. Corn requires a relatively long and warm growing season and much more moisture than wheat or most other grains. Most of the farm areas of the USSR were short on all three of these. Hardly any of the corn grown in new areas reached maturity-it had to be utilized as green feed or silage.

  Overall grain production in the USSR more than doubled between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. Part of this increase was due to the virgin lands program, but most was due to increased yields from seed improvements and increased applications of fertilizer. However, with the demise of the USSR, grain production has fallen by about 40 percent, while fertilizer use declined by much more. See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kahan, Arcadius. (1991). Studies and Essays on the Soviet and East European Economies, Vol 1: Published Works on the Soviet Economy. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Laird, Roy D., ed. (1963). Soviet Agriculture and Peasant Affairs. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

  D. GALE JOHNSON

  VIRTUAL ECONOMY

  The term virtual economy has been used to describe conditions in Russia’s transition economy where privatized enterprises continued to engage in value-subtracting production because they maintained buyers from the Soviet era who were willing to purchase goods at prices that failed to accurately reflect production costs or market value. Relying on relational capital, contacts and connections with other managers and government officials developed in the Soviet economy, enterprise directors in Russia’s transition economy were able to acquire resources and goods without cash payments either prior to, or after, the acquisition. Since neither the privatization process nor their ongoing operations provided Russian manufacturing firms with funds to renovate their obsolete capital stock, enterprise managers faced few options for upgrading product quality or changing the firms’ production assortment in order to compete effectively in domestic and global markets. In effect, the term virtual econ1642 omy refers to the situation where Russian privatized firms continued to operate as they had in the Soviet economy despite the facade that profitability considerations and market forces governed their activities.

  As Russia’s transition process progressed in the 1990s, purchases between manufacturing firms increasingly involved barter and other non-monetary transactions, reducing the cash available for firms to acquire materials or pay taxes. In a virtual economy, barter and other non-monetary transactions play an important role in sustaining ongoing operations which transfer value from productive activities to loss-making sectors of the economy. Reliance on barter transactions restricts the firms’ ability to restructure their operations in order to produce higher value-added output. See also: VALUE SUBTRACTION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ericson, Richard E, and Ickes, Barry. (2001). “A Model of Russia’s ‘Virtual Economy.’” Review of Economic Design 6(2):185-214. Gaddy, Clifford, and Ickes, Barry. (2002). Russia’s Virtual Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Krueger, Gary, and Linz, Susan J. (2002). “Virtual Reality: Barter and Restructuring in Russian Industry.” Problems of Post-Communism 49(5):1-13. Marin, Dalia. (2002). “Trust versus Illusion: What is Driving Demonetization in the Former Soviet Union.” Economics of Transition 10(1):173-200.

  SUSAN J. LINZ VKLADNYE KNIGI See DONATION BOOKS.

  VLADIMIR MONOMAKH

  (1053-1125), one of the ablest grand princes of Kiev and the progenitor of the Monomashichi of Vladimir in Volyn, Smolensk, and Suzdalia. Born Vladimir Vsevolodovich, he inherited his sobriquet “Monomakh” from his Greek mother, a relative of Empe
ror Constantine IX Monomachus.

  In reporting his early career in his autobiographical “Instruction” to his sons, Monomakh writes how his father Vsevolod, a son of Yaroslav Vladimirovich the Wise, had him administer

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  VLADIMIR, ST.

  Pereyaslavl, Rostov, Smolensk, Turov, and Novgorod, and how he campaigned against Polotsk and the Czechs. In 1078, when Vsevolod became grand prince of Kiev, he transferred Monomakh from Smolensk to Chernigov, therewith depriving his nephews, Svyatoslav’s sons, of their patrimony. In 1093, when his father died, Monomakh declined the Kievans’ invitation to be their prince, evidently not wishing to violate the ladder system of succession allegedly introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. He deferred to his genealogically elder cousin Svy-atopolk Izyaslavich, with whom he formed an alliance against the Polovtsy. The latter attacked the cousins, inflicted a crushing defeat on them, and then intensified their raids on Rus.

  In 1094 Oleg Svyatoslavich and the Polovtsy evicted Monomakh from Chernigov, forcing him to occupy his father’s patrimony of Pereyaslavl. Because Oleg refused to join him and Svyatopolk against the nomads, the two drove him out of Chernigov. After Oleg fled to Murom, where he killed Monomakh’s son Izyaslav, Monomakh wrote him an emotionally charged letter (the text of which survives) pleading that he be pacified. Oleg responded by pillaging Monomakh’s Suzdalian lands. In response, Monomakh’s son Mstislav of Novgorod marched against Oleg, defeated him, and forced him to attend a congress of princes in 1097 at Lyubech, where Oleg submitted to his cousins. Soon afterward, Svyatopolk broke the Lyubech agreement by having Vasilko Rostislavich of Tere-bovl blinded. Monomakh therefore joined his cousins, the Svyatoslavichi of Chernigov, against Svyatopolk, and the princes met at Uvetichi in 1100 to settle the dispute. After that, all the cousins, led by Monomakh, campaigned successfully against the Polovtsy in 1103, 1107, and in 1111, when they inflicted a crushing defeat on the nomads at the river Don.