by James Millar
During the reign of Catherine II (1762-1796), the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished and the crime lowered to the level of fraud. In 1775 she transferred cases dealing with witchcraft to courts handling such affairs as popular superstition, juvenile crimes, and the criminally insane. Sorcery, however, persisted among the East Slavic peasants into the nineteenth century, in large part because of their continued use of charms, spells, potions, and herbs in folk medicine. See also: IVAN IV; KIEVAN RUS; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zguta, Russell. (1977). “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia.” The American Historical Review 82(5):1187-1207. Zguta, Russell. (1978). “Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia.” The Russian Review 37(4):438-448.
ROMAN K. KOVALEV
WITTE, SERGEI YULIEVICH
(1849-1915), minister of communication (1892); minister of finance (1892-1903); chairman of the
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WITTE, SERGEI
YULIEVICH
Sergei Witte, a gifted Russian statesman, drafted the 1905 October Manifesto. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUS?E DES 2 GUERRES
MONDIALES PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
Committee of Ministers (1903-1905); prime minister (1905-1906); responsible for program of industrialization and political reforms.
Sergei Witte descended from russified Lutheran Germans on his father’s side and from Russian nobility on his mother’s side. He was born in Tbilisi. In 1865 he finished a Tbilisi gymnasium and in 1870 graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Novorossysk University (Odessa). He dreamt of an academic career, but on his relatives’ insistence he entered the state service on the Odessa Railway. In 1877 Witte moved to the privately owned Society of Southwestern Railways and there made a brilliant career, soon becoming its manager. In 1883 he published a book The Principles of Railway Tariffs for the Transportation of Goods, which earned him renown as a railway expert.
In the 1870s Witte fell under the sway of Slavophile ideas. He took a great interest in the theological writings of Alexei Khomyakov and participated in activities of the Odessa Slavic Philanthropic Society. Here he became a friend to Mikhail Katkov, an influential right-wing journalist. Witte also published feuilletons under a pen name. In 1881 and 1882 he participated in the pro-monarchist secret aristocratic society Svyataya Druzhina (The Holy Retinue) organized on Witte’s advice by his uncle General Rostislav Fadeyev, a well-known military historian and publicist of Slavophile views. In 1882 the society was liquidated.
In 1887 Witte was appointed director of the Railway Department of the Mnistry of Finance. In 1892 he advanced to the post of minister for railways and then to minister of finance. Witte soon became the most influential minister in the government, and his ministry the center of the entire state government. Witte proved to be an outstanding politician, capable of getting his bearings in the most complicated situations, designing long-term programs, and then carrying them out effectively. Soon Witte gave up his Slavophile views and turned into a modernizer of the European type. He sought to accelerate the industrial development of Russia with the aid of state support and foreign capital. He contended that Russia would catch up with advanced Western countries industrially within a decade and would secure a strong position for Russian manufactured goods in the markets of the Near, Middle, and Far East.
The program of industrialization, “the Witte system,” as he called it, included (1) intensive railway building; (2) protectionism and state subsidies for private entrepreneurs; and (3) a great influx of foreign capital to industry, banks, and state loans. Never before in Russia had state economic intervention been used so widely and effectively. The state acted by purely economic means through the state bank and institutions of the Mnistry of Finance, which monitored the activities of joint-stock commercial banks. In order to penetrate the markets of China, Mongolia, Korea, and Persia, the Mnistry of Finance founded the Russo-Chinese, Russo-Korean, and Loan and Discount Banks. Witte’s program achieved the desired results. In the period from 1892 to 1902, state finances were strengthened, foreign investment capital poured in (over 3 billion rubles or 1.544 billion dollars), and a stable monetary system was formed. The highest rates of economic development in Europe were attained (from 1883 to 1904 the volume of industrial output increased 2.7 times, or 6% per year). The annual growth rate of the national income averaged nearly 3.5 percent. The intensive economic development of Russia was accompanied by the improvement of the living stan1670
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WOMEN OF RUSSIA BLOC
dards of the broad masses of the population, as data on the increase in the height of recruits testify.
After setting industry on its feet and ensuring its self-development, Witte planned to carry through an agrarian reform. His attempts, however, met fierce resistance of conservatives. He was able only to simplify passport rules and abolish the rules on shared responsibility for taxes and other obligations laid on the peasants. The other aspects of the agrarian program designed by Witte were later introduced by his successor, Petr Stolypin.
Although Witte was transferred to the less influential post of Chairman of the Committee of Ministers in August 1903, the deteriorating political situation in the country, caused by Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and the insistence of public opinion brought him back to active service in the summer of 1904. Witte led the Russian delegation that concluded peace with Japan in the Treaty of Portsmouth. He then participated in preparing the October Manifesto of 1905, in which the emperor granted civil freedom. Witte took the post of prime minister in the new government and ran political affairs in a European style. He paid attention to public opinion, regarded the Russian and foreign presses as representative of public opinion, and exerted influence upon the public through the press. His government introduced the political rights granted by the October Manifesto, worked to appease the population and win it over to the government’s side, curbed punitive excesses and pogroms, and conducted the elections to the Duma. Witte’s activities, however, received criticism from all sides. The emperor viewed him as a rival in influence and popularity. The wealthy were disappointed in the Duma elections, whose results proved unfavorable for them. Revolutionaries cursed Witte for his repressive measures. Liberals censured him for his defense of the monarchical prerogatives in the Basic Laws and his other concessions to rightists. Conservatives were dissatisfied with Witte’s participation in the demolition of the old political system and transition to a new one. After Witte had concluded the Portsmouth Peace Treaty with Japan, brought troops from the Far East back to European Russia, restored public order in the country, prepared the Basic Laws, organized elections to the Duma, and secured a big loan in Europe (843.75 million rubles or 434.16 million dollars) that brought stability to government finances, he was forced to resign.
Until his final days Witte hoped to return to power. In order not to be forgotten, he used all
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means available to him: the rostrum of the State Council, the press, intrigues, and connections in the West. Witte died in 1915 at the age of 66, his health undermined by hard work and forebodings. He opposed Russia’s participation in World War I and predicted grave consequences similar to the upheavals that occurred after the Russo-Japanese War. See also: ECONOMY, IMPERIAL; INDUSTRIALIZATION; OCTOBER MANIFESTO; PORTSMOUTH, TREATY OF; RAILWAYS; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gindin, I. F. (1972). “Russia’s Industrialization under Capitalism as Seen by Theodore von Laue.” Soviet Studies in History 11(1):3-55. Gurko, Vladimir Iosifovich. (1939). Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Judge, Edward. (1983). Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902-1904. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Kokovtsov, Vladimir Nikolaevich. (1935). Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, Russian Minister of Finance, 1904-1914, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1911-191
4, ed. H. H. Fisher; tr. Laura Matveev. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Laue, Theodore von. (1963). Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia. New York: Columbia University Press. Mehlinger, Howard, and Thompson, John. (1972). Count Witte and the Tsarist Government in the 1905 Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weissman, Neil B. (1981). Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and Local Government, 1900-1914. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Weissman, Neil B. (1987). “Witte, Sergei Iul’evich.” The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History 44:9-14. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Witte, Sergei. (1921). The Memoirs of Count Witte, tr. Abraham Yarmolinsky. London: Heinemann.
BORIS N. MIRONOV
WOMEN OF RUSSIA BLOC
Women of Russia (Zhenshchiny Rossii, or ZhR) was formed as a political movement on the eve of the 1993 Duma elections. It contained the Union of Russia’s Women (formerly the Committee of
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WOMEN’S DEPARTMENT
Soviet Women), Association of Russia’s Women Entrepreneurs, and the Union of Women of the Navy. The movement was headed by Alevtina Fed-ulova, leader of the Union of Women; Yekaterina Lakhova, adviser to Boris Yeltsin on matters of family, childbearing, and children; and the popular actress Natalia Gundareva, and received 4.4 million votes (8.1%, or fourth place) and twenty-one Duma seats in 1993. The success was due to the amorphousness of the political scene, where the lack of parties and transience of elections made a good flag sufficient. In the Duma, the ZhR faction, which was called the first of its kind in the history of world parliamentism, basically supported the government and did not distinguish itself in any way. At the beginning of the 1995 campaign, ZhR was regarded as a potential participant in a broad left-centrist coalition, but it chose to enter independently. In the end it did not attain the 5 percent threshold required to merit proportional representation, winning 3.2 million votes (4.6%, fifth place); three candidates, including Lakhova, were elected in single-mandate districts. At the time, incidentally, most electoral associations included their women candidates in the top three places on the lists.
In 1997, Lakhova, leaving ZhR, founded her own Sociopolitical Movement of Russia’s Women (OPDZh). In the beginning of the 1999 campaign, both Fedulova of ZhR and Lakhova of OPDZh entered Yuri Luzhkov’s Fatherland, then the bloc Fatherland-All Russia (OVR). After Lakhova was included in the central part of the OVR list, and Fedulova was not, ZhR announced its departure from the bloc, with the explanation that OVR, in assembling its list, had demonstrated its traditional, conservative approach to women’s role in society. The ZhR results (2.0%, eighth place) were much lower than expected, partly because “women” diverged: some stayed in the OVR; in addition, ZhR had a double, the Russian Party for the Defense of Women (0.8%). Moreover, social problematics fundamental to ZhR were actively exploited by more powerful electoral associations: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and OVR. On the threshold of the 2003 elections, a paradoxical situation arose, when Fedulova’s virtual ZhR, having met for the last time in an all-Russian conference in the summer of 1999, and not having shown a sign of existence since that time, gathered 4 to 7 percent support in a social referendum. Lakhova’s OPDZh, having dissolved into United Russia, tried to resurface politically, entering the April 2003 elections with the somewhat vague bill
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“concerning governmental guarantees of equal rights and freedoms of men and women and equal opportunities for their realization.” See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; FATHERLAND-ALL RUSSIA; FEMINISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. McFaul, Michael, and Petrov, Nikolai, eds. (1995). Previewing Russia’s 1995 Parliamentary Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Remington, Thomas. (2002). Politics in Russia, 2nd ed. New York: Longman.
NIKOLAI PETROV
WOMEN’S DEPARTMENT See ZHENOTDEL.
WORKERS
In the general sense of the term, there have of course been workers present since the dawn of Russian history, including slave laborers and serfs. Viewed more narrowly to mean persons employed in industry and paid a wage, however, workers became important to the Russian economy only in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially during the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), who placed a high priority on Russia’s industrial development. But even under Peter most workers employed in manufacturing and mining were unfree labor, forced to toil long hours either in privately owned enterprises or in factories owned by the government. The continued coexistence of free and forced labor at a time when forced labor, except for convicts, had virtually vanished from the European scene was a noteworthy and notorious characteristic of Russian society until as late as 1861, when serfdom was abolished and almost all labor was placed on a contractual footing.
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WORKERS
With the abolition of serfdom, Russia began a new spurt of industrial development. In the 1890s Russian industry expanded rapidly, growing at an average rate of 8 percent per annum. The number of industrial workers, if viewed as a percentage of the overall population, was still small by the end of that decade; according to the 1897 census, the Empire’s population was over 125 million, while the number of workers was roughly two million. However, their social and political importance became increasingly evident, in part because of their concentration in politically sensitive areas such as St. Petersburg (the capital), Moscow, the port city of Baku, and the industrial regions of Russian-occupied Poland.
The most dramatic manifestation of the workers’ importance was their participation in strikes and demonstrations. If strike is loosely understood as any work stoppage in defiance of management, then strikes certainly took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they began to be taken seriously by Russian officials, publicists, and political activists only in the 1870s and especially the 1890s. By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonizing competition had begun between radicals of various persuasions (Social-Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc.), liberals, religious organizations, and the government for working-class political support. In the 1905 Revolution, radicals emerged as the clear winners in this competition, though with no single faction dominating. At least in major urban industrial centers, workers played the leading role in the revolutionary struggles of that year. Their moment of greatest triumph came with the October general strike and the creation of citywide workers’ councils (soviets), one of which virtually became the governing body of the city of St. Petersburg. However, the bloody suppression of the armed uprising of Moscow workers in December 1905 marked the end of the workers’ triumphant period. Although labor unrest continued in 1906, workers ceased to pose a serious threat to the Russian government until the labor movement revived in the period between 1912 and 1914.
Nevertheless, the 1905 Revolution did bear some fruit for Russia’s workers, including the government’s recognition for the first time of their right to form unions and engage in strikes (albeit within very tight restrictions) and the right to elect their own delegates to the new Russian Parliament, the Duma (albeit under a very restricted franchise). Russian industry soon began to recover from the setbacks it had undergone in the first few years of the century, and by 1910 was again experiencing a robust expansion. As the position of workers in the labor market became more favorable, workers grew less and less tolerant of management misconduct and government repression. A government massacre of Russian goldminers in the spring of 1912 resuscitated the dormant labor movement and ushered in a two-year period
of militant strike activity and demonstrations in many parts of Russia, most dramatically in St. Petersburg and, in 1914, Baku. Politically, this worker militancy worked to the tactical advantage of the Bolsheviks and, to a lesser extent, the Socialist Revolutionaries, while working to the disadvantage of the more moderate Mensheviks, who feared that workers’ passions had been aroused to a degree that could prove counterproductive. Some historians have argued that Russian industrial centers were on the cusp of a new revolution when the onset of World War I, in the summer of 1914, put a temporary damper on worker unrest. However, it must also be acknowledged that the labor movement was dying down before war was declared.
Be that as it may, once the war began to go badly for Russia, there were growing signs of a revival of the labor movement, especially in 1916. By late February 1917, St. Petersburg workers (women textile workers as well as the traditionally militant, mainly male, metal and munitions workers) were joining with other elements of the urban population, including the military garrison, in increasingly confrontational demonstrations. Workers now played a prominent role in the overthrow of the tsarist regime and, in cooperation with the radical intelligentsia and their party activists, resurrected an updated version of the soviets of 1905, this time with the crucial participation of soldiers. Over the next few months, worker militancy in the form of strikes, street demonstrations, factory occupations, and participation in the organizations of the revolutionary parties added enormously to the difficulties of the new Provisional Government, which was simply unable to satisfy worker demands under wartime conditions. Hence when the Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional Government in October 1917 and dispersing the recently elected Constituent Assembly the following January, they would do so with a great deal of working-class support, though this support was not for Bolshevik single-party rule but for a soviet government consisting of a coalition of left parties and supportive of worker democracy within the factory. The ensuing Civil War of 1917-1921