Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  The war had lasting economic consequences. It took the lives of one in six Soviet citizens living at its outset, and destroyed perhaps one quarter of the Soviet prewar capital stock. Economic and demographic recovery took decades. The success of the war effort also had lasting consequences: It confirmed the authority of Stalin, as well as that of a new generation of wartime industrial and political managers who survived him and remained in power for thirty more years. The success of the war economy was used to discourage critical thinking about basic economic policies and institutions. For example, Stalin claimed that the war demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet system over capitalism for organizing economic life in both wartime and peacetime. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; STALINGRAD, BATTLE OF; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Barber, John, and Harrison, Mark. (1991). The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR, 1941-1945. London: Longman. Harrison, Mark. (1996). Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Harrison Mark, ed. (1998). The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Samuelson, Lennart. (2000). Plans for Stalin’s War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925-1941. London: Macmillan.

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  WARSAW TREATY ORGANIZATION

  Simonov, Nikolai S. (1996). “’Strengthen the Defence of the Land of the Soviets’: The 1927 ‘War Alarm’ and Its Consequences.” Europe-Asia Studies 48(8): 1355-64.

  MARK HARRISON

  WAR OF THE THIRD COALITION

  One of the Napoleonic wars, the War of the Third Coalition, occurred between 1805 and 1807. Russia first participated in the conflicts arising from France’s efforts to expand its dominance over continental Europe and the Middle East in 1798, in the War of the Second Coalition, along with Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and the Ottoman Empire. Most of the direct Russian involvement was in the Eastern and Northern Mediterranean, with Admiral Fedor Ushakov occupying the Ionian Islands and General Alexander Suvorov campaigning through Italy. Emperor Paul, however, became annoyed with his allies, especially Britain. In 1800 he withdrew and formed an alliance with France, led by Napoleon Bonaparte. This dramatic reversal contributed to a reaction and the assassination of Paul in March 1801.

  His successor, Alexander I, influenced by pro-British and anti-French advisers such as Adam Czartoryski, signed an alliance with Britain in April 1805. This was the linchpin of a third coalition war against Napoleon that also included Austria, Naples, and Prussia. Russian action again centered on the Mediterranean, with a fleet under Admiral Dmitri Seniavin sent from the Baltic to assure dominance of the Adriatic Sea and curb French expansion into the Balkans, especially at the fortress-stronghold of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). Though the British reaffirmed their supremacy over the French at sea at the Battle of Trafalgar (September 1805), poor Russian and Austrian leadership on land in Central Europe led to Napoleon’s decisive victories, especially at Austerlitz in December 1805. Austria was forced to sign a peace treaty, while Russia suffered additional defeats. Finally, at a historic meeting between Napoleon and Alexander I at Tilsit in July 1807, Russia agreed to peace terms that abandoned its Mediterranean positions to Napoleon and joined the French Continental System against Britain, thus leaving all of Europe except Russia under French dominance. Napoleon’s effort to expand that dominance to Russia in 1812 provoked another coalition war that led to his eventual defeat. See also: ALEXANDER I; AUSTERLITZ, BATTLE OF; NAPOLEON I; TILIST, TREATY OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Mackesy, Piers. (1957). The War in the Mediterranean, 1803-1810. London: Longmans, Green. Saul, Norman E. (1970). Russia and the Mediterranean, 1797-1807. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  NORMAN E. SAUL

  WARSAW, BATTLE OF See WORLD WAR II.

  WARSAW TREATY ORGANIZATION

  The Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), also referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was created on May 14, 1955, by Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. Officially known as the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, it was a Soviet-led political and military alliance intended to harness the potential of Eastern Europe to Soviet military strategy and to consolidate Soviet control of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The organization was used to suppress dissent in Eastern Europe through military action. It never enlarged beyond its original membership, and was dissolved in 1991, prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.

  The Soviet and East European governments presented the WTO as their response to the creation of the Western European Union and the integration of West Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1955. Though often described as an alliance, the facade of collective decision-making in WTO masked the reality of Soviet political and military domination. The 1955 treaty established the Joint Command of the armed forces (Article 5) and the Political Consultative Committee (Article 6), both headquartered in Moscow. In practice, however, the Joint Command, as well as the Joint Staff drawn from the general staffs of the signatories, were part of the Soviet General Staff. Both the Pact’s commander in chief and its chief of staff were Soviet officers. The Joint Armed Forces had no command structure, logistics, directorate of operations, or air defense network separate from the Soviet defense ministry.

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  Over the years the military structure of the Warsaw Pact was adjusted to reflect the evolution of Soviet strategy and changes in military technology. During the first decade of the organization’s existence, political control over the non-Soviet forces was its principal focus. Following Stalin’s death, East European militaries were partly renationalized, including the replacement of Soviet officers in high positions with indigenous personnel, and a renewed emphasis on professional training. The Polish October of 1956, and the Hungarian revolt that same year, raised serious concerns in Moscow about the reliability of non-Soviet Warsaw Pact forces.

  In the 1960s the lessons learned from de-Stalinization, as well as Albania’s defection from the Warsaw Pact, brought about greater integration of the WTO through joint military exercises, intensified training, and the introduction of new Soviet equipment. The most significant reorganization of the WTO took place in 1969, including the addition of the Committee of Defense Ministers, the Military Council, the Military Scientific Technical Council, and the Technical Committees. These and subsequent changes allowed increased participation from the East Europeans in decision making, and helped the Soviets better coordinate weapons research, development, and production with the East Europeans.

  In addition to its external defensive role against NATO, the Warsaw Pact served to maintain cohesion in the Soviet bloc. It was used to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and again to prepare for an invasion of Poland in 1980 or 1981 if the Polish regime failed to suppress the Solidarity movement. The Warsaw Pact was also an instrument of Soviet policy in the Third World. In the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union relied on several non-Soviet WTO members to assist client states in Africa and the Middle East.

  The alliance began to unravel with the introduction of Mkhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union, and his attendant redefinition of Soviet-East European relations. Though the alliance was renewed in 1985, as required by the treaty, deteriorating economic conditions and the rising national aspirations in Eastern Europe put its future in question. The Soviet military attempted to adjust to the shifting political landscape. In 1987 the WTO modified its doctrine to emphasize its defensive character, but this and other proposed changes proved insufficient to arrest the decomposition of the alliance. The key development that

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  hastened the WTO’s demise was the unification of Ger
many, which constituted an irreparable breach in the Pact’s security perimeter. Under pressure from Eastern Europe, the decision to abolish the military structures of the Pact was taken at a Political Consultative Committee meeting in Budapest in late February 1991; the remaining political structures were formally abolished on July 1, 1991.

  The overall value of the Warsaw Pact to the Soviet Union during the Cold War remains a point of debate. Clearly, the organization legitimized the continued Soviet garrisoning of Eastern Europe and provided additional layers of political and military control. In addition, the potential contributions of the East European armed forces to Soviet military strategy, as well as the use of the members’ territory, were significant assets. On the other hand, throughout the Warsaw Pact’s existence, the ultimate reliability and cohesion of its non-Soviet members in a putative war against NATO remained in question. In addition, the declining ability of the East Europeans to contribute to equipment modernization, especially as their economies deteriorated in the late 1970s and 1980s, raised doubts about the overall quality of the WTO armed forces. See also: COMMUNIST BLOC; NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Herspring, Dale R. (1998). Requiem for an Army: The Demise of the East German Military. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Johnson, A. Ross; Dean, Robert W.; and Alexiev, Alexander. (1982). East European Military Establishments: The Warsaw Pact Northern Tier. New York: Crane Russak. Jones, Christopher D. (1981). Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe: Political Autonomy and the Warsaw Pact. New York: Praeger Publishers. Michta, Andrew A. (1990). Red Eagle: The Army in Polish Politics, 1944-1988. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Nelson, Daniel N. (1986). Alliance Behavior in the Warsaw Pact. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. The Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. (2003). «http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/index .htm». Volgyes, Ivan. (1982). The Political Reliability of the Warsaw Pact Armies: The Southern Tier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  ANDREW A. MICHTA

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  WESTERNIZERS

  WESTERNIZERS

  The word Westernizers appeared in Russia at the turn of the eighteenth century as the antonym to Easternizers and was used to denote Russian religious figures who minimized the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Easternizers interpreted the term West as “sunset,” “decline”; hence for them Westernizers embodied decline and darkness. In the 1840s, in the course of a heated discussion held in the Russian press as well as in St. Petersburg and Moscow literary salons, Russian thinkers discussed the specific character of Russian culture, the interrelation of Russia and Europe, and the further development of Russia-either with Europe or along its own special path. Those who advocated rapprochement between Russia and Western Europe and adoption of the European way of life were called Westernizers. Those who defended a nativist course for Russia’s development were called Slavophiles. These terms born in polemics were widely used in the press, literature, and everyday language of the intelligentsia. They were used for the division of people into allies and opponents. They were also used to mobilize the public under one banner or the other. After the 1860s, the term Westernizers was applied to the representatives of a variety of ideological trends whose pedigree could be traced to the Westernizers of the 1840s.

  In modern scholarly literature, the term Westernizers is used in both a broad and a narrow sense. In its broad meaning the term denotes all people of a pro-Western orientation, irrespective of historical period, from the ninth century to the present time who, unlike Slavophiles, regard Russia and western European countries as indivisible parts of a united Europe, with common cultural and religious roots and a common destiny. In the narrow sense the term is used to denote Westernizers of the first post-Decembrist generation of the 1830s through the 1860s, and in this case they are called classical Westernizers.

  Classical Westernizers had European education and largely belonged to the privileged nobility estate and intellectual elite-publicists, literary men, scientists, and university professors. In St. Petersburg of the late 1840s, some of them formed a group known to society as the Party of St. Petersburg Progress, which mainly consisted of young officials. The philosophical views of Westernizers were formed under the influence of Western enlighten-ers and philosophers such as Georg Hegel, Johann Herder, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, Johann Fichte, and Auguste Comte. As a way of thinking, Westernism was based on the recognition of the leading role of human intellect. Intellect pushed back faith, offering an opportunity to conceive of the world (including the world of social relations) as a system of cause-and-effect relations, governed according to laws common to animate and inanimate nature. The historical views of Westernizers were largely derived from the contemporary western European scholars Henry Buckle, Fran?ois Guizot, Barthold Niebuhr, Leopold Ranke, and Auguste Thierry. Westernizers perceived historical process as the progress of society, a chain of irreversible qualitative changes from worse to better. They asserted the value of the human being as the carrier of intellect. They opposed individualism to traditional social corporatism (korpora-tivnost) and defined a just society as one that held all the conditions for the existence and self-realization of the individual.

  The views of the Westernizers cannot be contained in a single work or document because these views had numerous shades and peculiarities. Some views differed substantially. As early as the 1840s two trends took shape among Westernizers: a radical one (A. I. Gertzen and N. P. Ogarev were its brightest representatives) and a liberal one comprising the overwhelming majority of Westernizers. Representatives of the first trend were not numerous. Some lived as emigrants and justified the use of violence for changing the existing political system. Representatives of the second trend were advocates of peaceful reforms. They advised bringing the pressure of the public opinion upon the government and spreading their views in society through education and science. Despite differences, however, the Westernizers’ sociopolitical, philosophical, and historical views shared common features. They denounced serfdom and put forward plans for its abolition. They demonstrated the advantages of hired over serf labor. They criticized censorship, the absence of legal rights, and persecutions on ethnic and religious grounds. They contrasted the Russian autocratic system with the constitutional orders of western European countries, especially those of England and France. They advocated civil rights, democracy, and representative government. They called for a speedy development of industry, commerce, and railways, and

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  supported the replacement of protectionism with a free-trade economic policy. Nevertheless, many Westernizers maintained a critical attitude toward the sociopolitical system of western European countries, which they regarded as a point of reference and not an ideal for blind imitation.

  During the reign of Nicholas I, when practical political activities outside the frame of official ideology were impossible, Westernism was a purely ideological trend. Under Alexander II, Westernizers seized new opportunities for practical work: They played an active role in the preparation and implementation of the Great Reforms of the 1860s and early 1870s. In the post-reform era, Westernism provided the theoretical basis for the politics of liberalism. It also became the ideology of radical theories, which promoted ideas for changing an unjust society, based on belief in the value of the individual and the inadequacy of the official Orthodox religion.

  After 1985 Westernism experienced a rebirth in Russian social thought. Polemics between supporters and opponents of Russia’s rapprochement with the West continue to rest on arguments first articulated by the classical Westernizers and Slavophiles. See also: GREAT REFORMS; INTELLIGENTSIA; SLAVOPHILES; THICK JOURNALS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Edie, James M.; Scanlan, M. P.; and Zeldin, Mary-Barbara, eds. (1965). Russian Philosophy, Vol 1: The Beginnings of Russian Philosophy: The Slavophiles; The Westernizers. Chicago:
Quadrangle Books. Roosevelt, Priscilla R. (1986). Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofey Granovsky. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Treadgold, Donald. W. (1973). The West in Russia and China: Religious and Secular Thought in Modern Times, Vol. 1: Russia, 1472-1917. New York: Cambridge University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, tr. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Oxford: Clarendon. Walicki, Andrzej. (1979). A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, tr. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  BORIS N. MIRONOV

  WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  The question “What Is To Be Done?” crystallized critical issues inherent in the Russian revolutionary movement between 1850 and 1917. Specifically, it defined the focus and direction of the struggle to reform and modernize Russia’s archaic political, economic, and social structure of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had subsequently given rise to the Russian autocracy and Russian state. Ultimately, two distinct responses emerged, generated by Nikolai Gavrilovich Cherny-shevsky in 1863 and Vladimir Ilich Lenin in 1902. Interestingly, each was titled “What Is To Be Done?” Although the works were separated by forty years, they had much in common.

  As a proponent of change in pre-industrial, populist Russia, Chernyshevsky accepted the peasant obshchina (commune) as the basis for the new Russia. He believed that the obshchina not only represented a truly democratic (egalitarian) socialist society, but also enabled Russia to avoid the evils of capitalism that existed in European industrial societies. However, Chernyshevsky insisted that revolution, not gradualism, was necessary for the transformation of Russia, and even then it could occur only through the dedicated commitment of revolutionary activists, which he called the new revolutionary archetypes.