Russia 1900-1941

Fundamental Laws

1906 these laws were re-issued by Nicholas II to reassert his Autocracy. They basically indicated he would share power with no one and that he was 'Tsar of all the Russias'. This showed he did not mean to stick to the October Manifesto 1905 and that he could not be trusted.

Sovkhoz

A state-owned farm. Peasants who worked on this farm were paid a regular wage. Its form developed from private estates taken over in the 1920s as an ideological example of "socialist agriculture of the highest order". The number of sovkhozy increased during the period of collectivisation beginning in 1929.

Vyshinsky

He is known as a state prosecutor of Stalin's Moscow show trials. In 1935 he became Procurator General of the USSR, the legal mastermind behind Stalin's purges. Although he acted as a judge, he encouraged investigators to get confessions from the accused. In some cases, he prepared the indictments before the 'investigation' was concluded. He is said to have stated that "confession of the accused is the queen of evidence".

White Sea Canal

It connects the White Sea with Lake Onega, which is further connected to the Baltic Sea. The Soviet Union presented the canal as an example of the success of the First Five-Year Plan. Its construction was completed four months ahead of schedule. The entire canal was constructed in twenty months, between 1931 and 1933, almost entirely by manual labour. The canal was the first major project constructed in the Soviet Union using forced labor. There was a workforce of an estimated 126,000 convicts, at the cost of huge casualties (25,000 deaths) Prison labor camp projects were not usually publicized, but the work on the Belomor canal was an exception, as the convicts were thought to not only construct the canal but reforge themselves in the process. The canal was a triumph of publicity however, politics and public relations ruined the usefulness of the canal: Stalin seems to have been so intent on creating a highly visible symbol of development that he pushed and squeezed the project in ways that only retarded the reality of development. Thus the workers and engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a canal that would be deep enough and safe enough to carry twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never played any significant role in Soviet commerce or industry.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili

Joseph Stalin (man of steel). Born December 1879 in Gori, Georgia, and died March 1953, Moscow. General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941-53), who for a quarter of a century dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union and transformed it into a major world power. From very humble origins in Georgia, he rose to power largely because he was underestimated by his opponents ('Comrade Card Index', 'the Grey Blur'). He was a committed Bolshevik with a long association with Lenin and the party whom he had funded through robberies as Koba (a Georgian Robin Hood). His opportunity for personal self aggrandisement arose when he was made General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. Controlling party membership gave him significant influence and he did not waste it in his skilful out-manoeuvring of his rivals like Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history and created a phenomenal cult of personality. Stalin industrialised the USSR, introduced Socialism in One Country, forcibly collectivised its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941-45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Chief architect of Soviet totalitarianism and a skilled but phenomenally ruthless organiser, he destroyed the remnants of individual freedom and failed to promote individual prosperity, yet he created a mighty military-industrial complex and led the Soviet Union into the nuclear age. Stalin was a great political manipulator who created an immensely complex bureaucratic state where fear ensured compliance by the ordinary people. Industrialisation and the success in the Great Patriotic War (World War II) came at the huge expense of the Soviet people; he wasted millions of lives but was remembered with staggering affection on his death. History has judged him much more harshly.

Nicholas II

Last Romanov Tsar of Russia 1894-1917. He was a weak and indecisive leader who was catastrophically out of touch with the ordinary people. He was a kind and loving father and husband, but his unpalatable right wing attitudes and mistaken view that he should not share power because God had appointed him to rule caused his and his family's downfall. His marriage to Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt (Queen Victoria's grand daughter) was a very loving one, but a political disaster. They had four daughters and then their son, the Tsarevich Alexei, born in 1904, had haemophilia. This was a state secret which complicated the way in which events unfolded with the Siberian peasant, Rasputin, who appeared able to calm Alexei. Nicholas made several crucial errors during his reign: 1) Khodynka Field Tragedy 1896 - was a human stampede that occurred in May during the festivities following the coronation of Nicholas II, which resulted in the deaths of 1,389 people. Russo-Japanese War 1904-5 2) Bloody Sunday Jan 1905 3) Not sticking to the October Manifesto Oct 1905 & then re-issuing the Fundamental Laws 1906. 4) Not valuing the real abilities of either Witte or Stolypin. The Tsar felt threatened by capable, decisive ministers and listened instead to sycophants. 5) Lena Goldfields massacre 1912 6) Sept 1915 Taking over as Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army in WWI = fatal mistake for two reasons: i) he would be personally blamed for defeats and ii) it took him over 500 miles away to the Eastern Front, so he chose his German wife to rule in his absence. She was too influenced by Rasputin and this fatally compromised the Romanov dynasty. 7) He was so out of touch that he lost the support of the army and the workers and peasants, so he was forced to abdicate in March 1917. In July 1918, Nicholas and all his family were shot by the Reds in Ekaterinburg to prevent any of them being able to re-claim the throne. The Romanov family ruled as autocratic tsars of Russia from 1613-1917.

Whites

Name given to the disparate group of people who opposed the Reds during the Russian Civil War 1918-21. The Whites were made up of all those who opposed the Reds including monarchists, capitalists, liberals, SRs, Mensheviks & Foreign Interventionists. Leaders included Yudenich, Wrangel, Kolchak, Kornilov & Deniken. Their biggest problem was that they could not co-ordinate attacks on the Reds because they were all leading separate forces around the Red controlled centre of Russia and they lacked the same cohesion and railway advantages.

NEP

New Economic Policy (NEP), the economic policy of the government of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928, representing a temporary retreat from its previous policy of extreme centralisation and textbook socialism. Lenin forced through change by threatening to resign if his ideas were not adopted. He argued that the only way the revolution could be saved was with the support and agreement of the peasants. He wanted SMYCHKA i.e. union of the peasantry and workers as symbolised by the hammer and sickle. The policy of War Communism, in effect since 1918, had by 1921 brought the national economy to the point of total breakdown. The Kronshtadt Rebellion of March 1921 convinced the Lenin of the need to retreat from socialist policies in order to maintain the party's hold on power. Accordingly, the 10th Party Congress in March 1921 introduced the measures of the New Economic Policy. These measures included the return of most agriculture, retail trade, and small-scale light industry to private ownership and management while the state retained control of heavy industry, transport, banking, and foreign trade. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was based around a tax called prodnalog, which was a tax on food. By introducing a tax, Lenin was essentially admitting that he was taxing something people owned. Requisition had forcibly taken food under War Communism. Prodnalog taxed people at a lower level than the level set for requisition and allowed them to keep the rest of what they produced. Food that was left could be sold - hence, the peasants had an incentive to grow as much as they could knowing that they could keep what was not taxed. The amount of grain taxed in 1922 was half of the grain taken by force in 1920-21. The same was true for the tax on potatoes. The tax on food allowed the cities to be fed and gave the farmers an incentive to produce as much as was humanly possibly. In 1924, the food tax prodnalog was replaced by a tax on money. This was a natural move. The peasants still had a very good incentive to grow as much as was possible. They were allowed to travel to the towns/cities to sell their produce. The process needed a middle man and as a result private enterprise developed. Money was reintroduced into the economy in 1922 (it had been abolished under War Communism). The peasantry were allowed to own and cultivate their own land, while paying taxes to the state. The New Economic Policy reintroduced a measure of stability to the economy and allowed the Soviet people to recover from years of WWI, the Civil War and governmental mismanagement. The small businessmen and managers who flourished in this period became known as NEP men. But the NEP was viewed by the Soviet government as merely a temporary expedient to allow the economy to recover while the Communists solidified their hold on power. By 1925 Nikolay Bukharin had become the foremost supporter of the NEP, while Leon Trotsky was opposed to it and Joseph Stalin was noncommittal. By 1923, agricultural production was at a healthy 75% of the 1913 level. Light industry also benefited from the more positive situation found in agriculture. They had to produce goods for the peasants and the success of the peasants stimulated production in light industry. However, heavy industry did not benefit from the success in agriculture. In 1922, 500,000 were unemployed in the heavy industry sector. Ultimately the NEP was a successful temporary answer to Russia's problems in 1921 and it helped the Bolsheviks to remain in power. However, it was also dogged by the government's chronic inability to procure enough consistent grain supplies from the peasantry to feed its urban work force. In 1928-29 these grain shortages prompted Joseph Stalin, by then the leader emerging from the struggle for power, to forcibly eliminate the private ownership of farmland and to collectivise agriculture under the state's control, thus ensuring the procurement of adequate food supplies for the cities in the future. This abrupt policy change, which was accompanied by the destruction of several million of the country's most prosperous private farmers, marked the end of the NEP. It was followed by the reimposition of state control over all industry and commerce in the country by 1931.

Yezhov

Nikolai Yezhov,1895-1940 was a Soviet secret police official under Stalin. He was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the most deadly period of Stalin's Great Purge. His time in office is known as the 'Yezhovshchina'. Physically, Yezhov was short in stature, standing five feet, and that, combined with his sadistic personality, led to his nickname 'The Poison Dwarf' or 'The Bloody Dwarf'. After presiding over mass arrests and executions during the Great Purge, Yezhov became a victim of it himself. He was arrested, confessed under torture to a range of anti-Soviet activity, and was executed in 1940. By the beginning of World War II, his status within the Soviet Union became that of a political un-person.

Stolypin

Pyotr Stolypin 1862-1911), Chairman of the Council of Ministers, served as Prime Minister, and Minister of Internal Affairs from 1906 to 1911. He made ruthless efforts (the stick) to round up revolutionary groups (the noose was renamed Stolypin's necktie), he changed the voting laws of the Duma to attempt to make it more supportive of the Tsar and he tried to implement noteworthy agrarian reforms (the carrot) with his 'wager on the strong'. Stolypin was a monarchist and hoped to strengthen the throne. He is considered one of the last major statesmen of Imperial Russia with clearly defined public policies and the determination to undertake major reforms. He was assassinated by a revolutionary in 1911, at the opera in Kiev, after ten previous attempts had failed.

Autocracy

Rule by a single person who has total power over everybody and everything in the country. An autocrat's word is law. In Russia this was an inherited position for the Romanov Family since 1613. It was believed that Russian Tsars were appointed by God.

Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov

Radical Marxist revolutionary leader of Russia Oct/Nov 1917-Jan 1924. Also known since 1901 as Lenin = Man of the Lena (a river near where he was born). He was born on April 22 1870, in Simbirsk, one of six children in an educated middle-class family. When he died on January 21 1924, he was acclaimed as "the greatest genius of mankind, creator of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the leader and teacher of the peoples of the whole world." Interesting details: His brother Alexander was executed for plotting to assassinate Alexander III in 1887. In 1891 Lenin was awarded a diploma in law from St Petersburg University. 1897 exiled to Siberia & married Krupskaya. 1900-1917 mainly lived in exile in Western Europe. 1903 led the formation of the Bolshevik faction against the Mensheviks thereby splitting the RSDLP in two (ironic given his later Ban on Factions!) No notable contributions to the 1905 Revolution or February 1917, which took him by surprise, because of his exile in Europe. Arrived back in Russia in December 1905 and remained for a couple of years. Continued to write very influentially and mix with European radicals. Party funded through robberies. He was the architect of the Great October Socialist Revolution 1917 in line with his April Theses: 'Peace, Bread & Land', 'All Power to the Soviets'. Perpetrator of Marxism-Leninism, the party as Vanguard of the Proletariat, Revolutionary Justice, the Red Terror, Treaty of Brest Litovsk, War Communism, NEP, nationalisation of land, centrally planned economy, dictatorship of the proletariat, smychka, one party state, Ban on Factions, and the USSR. The attempted assassination of Lenin by SR Fanny Kaplan on 30 August 1918 heightened the Red Terror and significantly shortened his life. From 1922 onwards Lenin struggled with his health as strokes eventually deprived him of his speech, a situation exploited by Stalin. Lenin's Testament should have been published on his death but instead it did not become public until 1956 because some people had too much to lose. Lenin became the subject of a personality cult which has yet to recede. He currently lies mummified in Red Square on public view.

Masurian Lakes

The First Battle of the Masurian Lakes was a German offensive in the Eastern Front during September 1914 at the beginning of World War I. It pushed the Russian First Army back across its entire front, eventually ejecting it from Germany. The Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes, also known as the Winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes, was the northern part of the Central Powers' offensive on the Eastern Front 7-21 February 1915. Defeat for the Russians and a huge number of casualties in appalling conditions was extremely bad for morale.

Five Year Plans

The Five-Year Plans for the development of the national economy of the Soviet Union were a series of nationwide centralised economic plans in the Soviet Union. The plans were developed by a state planning committee (Gosplan) to facilitate rapid industrialisation. Fulfilling the plan became the watchword of Soviet bureaucracy and the first was declared complete in four years and the second several months early! The improvements in production between 1928 and 1937 were phenomenal: Coal - from 36 million tonnes to 130 million tonnes Iron - from 3 million tonnes to 15 million tonnes Oil - from 2 million tonnes to 29 million tonnes Electricity - from 5,000 million to 36,000 million kilowatts The First Five Year Plan 1928-1932, concentrated on the development of iron, steel and coal, machine-tools and electric power. Joseph Stalin set the workers high targets. He demanded a 110% increase in coal production, 200% increase in iron production and 335% increase in electric power. He justified these demands by claiming that if rapid industrialisation did not take place, the Soviet Union would not be able to defend itself against an invasion from capitalist countries in the west. Every factory had large display boards erected that showed the output of workers. Repressive measures were introduced. Records were kept of workers' lateness, absenteeism and bad workmanship. If the worker's record was poor, he was accused of trying to sabotage the Five Year Plan and if found guilty could be shot or sent to work as forced labour. The Second Five-Year Plan—from January 1933 to December 1937—also gave priority to heavy industry. One of the weaknesses revealed during the First Five-Year Plan was that of the Soviet infrastructure, especially roads, railways, and canals, so these were targeted too. The first two Five-Year Plans increased the industrial capacity of the USSR dramatically in all major fields - steel, coal, and electric power- and created new manufacturing sectors indispensable to any great power -automobiles, aviation, chemicals, and plastics. Consequently, the first two Five-Year Plans laid the foundation of the industrial might of the Soviet Union, especially in the military field. Cities like Magnitogorsk were built from scratch and the Moscow Metro, with its 'people's palaces' was constructed. Coercion alone did not produce these massive improvements, Stalin used incentives too like the Stakhanovite movement and those who joined the Nomenklatura had higher pay scales and different shops, schools etc. The Third Five Year Plan was to focus on consumer goods like radios, bicycles and household goods but it swiftly became a military plan as tension with Germany heightened. The Five Year Plans were a success in terms of Stalin's famous speech of 1931 'We are fifty to one hundred years behind the West, we must catch up in ten years or perish'. However, there was a lot of short term gain but long term shoddy workmanship which would take its toll on the USSR after the Second World War. The social costs were immense too; collectivisation, famine, dekulakisation, the purges, show trials and the whole gulag system. Millions died and millions suffered. The USSR was ruled by terror and fear, but it had modernised enough to win the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 which would have been unthinkable in 1928 and which many feel justifies Stalin's extreme actions. The question really is could he have accomplished this without such coercive and wasteful methods?

Politburo

The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, abbreviated as Politburo, was the highest policy-making government authority under the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was founded in October 1917 and was designed as a small group who would report to the Central Committee of the party. Under Lenin it met once a week, under Stalin, less frequently.

Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War ( February 1904 - September 1905) was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. Nicholas held the Japanese in contempt as "yellow monkeys", and he took for granted that the Japanese would simply yield in the face of Russia's superior power. Russia lost Port Arthur in 1904 and there followed humiliating defeats at Mukden and Tsushima in 1905. Witte negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905 after it had become clear that the war was very unpopular and that it had badly dislocated the Russian economy. Although popular support for the war had existed following the Japanese attack on Port Arthur in 1904, discontent occurred following continued defeats at the hands of Japan. For many Russians, the immediate shock of unexpected humiliation at the hands of Japan, caused the conflict to be viewed as a metaphor for the shortcomings of the Romanov autocracy.

Russian Orthodox Church

The centre of Eastern Christianity and a primary supporter of tsarism and the autocracy. The Orthodox Church ensured Nicholas II's laws reached his people through services and it supported his divine right to rule as well as his role as the 'little father' to the extensive peasantry. It was a highly powerful organisation that was extremely wealthy, influential and very mystical. Moscow was known as the 'Third Rome'.

Battleship Aurora

The cruiser was stationed in Petrograd for a re-fit when part of her crew joined the 1917 February Revolution. A revolutionary committee was created on the ship. Most of the crew joined the Bolsheviks, who were preparing for a Communist revolution. At 9.45 p.m on 25 October (November 1917 NS) a blank shot from the Aurora's forecastle gun signalled the start of the assault on the Winter Palace signalling the culmination of the October Revolution and the end of rule by the Provisional Government.

October Manifesto

The document designed by Sergei Witte and signed by Nicholas II to divide opposition and end the situation in 1905 caused by the failure in the Russo-Japanese War, widespread dissent and economic dislocation and the General Strike. It promised a Duma, civil liberties like freedom of speech, press and association. Technically it meant that Russia had moved towards becoming a Constitutional Monarchy but in practice it remained an Autocracy.

Proletariat

The industrial workers. This is a Marxist term that was widely used after the October Revolution. Lenin's primary problem was that Russia was not that industrialised and so did not have a very large or well developed proletariat. That which did exist was primarily made up of illiterate peasants who went to the cities seeking work (often seasonal). Lenin wanted to establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and this explains Stalin's preoccupation with modernisation, industrialisation and the elimination of the kulaks and collectivisation of the peasantry.

Reds

The term used during the Russian Civil War 1918-21 to represent the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and their supporters. Red is historically the colour of revolution and was used by the Bolsheviks in their flags, banners & the stars on their hats. The word red in Russian also shares meaning with the term 'beautiful', as in Red Square, which has nothing to do with the Soviets at all. The Reds primarily won because they were ruthlessly and effectively organised by Trotsky, they were supported by Lenin's policy of War Communism, they controlled the core of the railway network around Moscow and they could claim they were fighting for Mother Russia because of the Interventionists fighting with the Whites.

De-kulakisation

This aimed to liquidate the kulaks as a class & it is the name given to the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929-1932. The richer peasants were labeled kulaks and considered class enemies. More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930-1931. The stated purpose of the campaign was to fight the counter-revolution and build socialism in the countryside. This policy was accomplished simultaneously with Collectivisation and effectively brought all agriculture and peasants in Soviet Russia under state control.

Aristocracy

This was a small group of Russians who inherited titles and immense wealth under the tsars. They were important supporters of the Tsar, for their lifestyle depended upon his continued existence and they served him in a variety of roles. Many were out of touch with the reality of life for over 80% of the Russian population.

25 Thousanders

Twenty five thousanders was a collective name for the frontline workers from the major industrial cities of the USSR, who voluntarily left their homes for rural areas to improve the performance of kolkhozes during collectivisation in the USSR in early 1930. In November 1929, the Communist Party issued a decree sending 25,000 workers with sufficient organisational and political experience to the rural areas to work in kolkhozy and Machine and Tractor Stations (MTS). In order to prepare the twenty-five-thousanders for work in the rural areas, the Soviets organized special courses. Some of them were sent to sovkhozy for two or three months as interns. Most of the twenty-five-thousanders were sent directly to kolkhozy in the principal cereal regions of the country, such as Ukraine, North Caucasus, Lower and Middle Volga, Black Earth Region and others. However, the twenty-five-thousanders encountered fierce resistance from the so-called kulaks, who had been opposed to the socialist re-organisation of agriculture.

Haemophilia

A blood clotting disorder that in the case of the Tsarevich Alexei was kept a state secret and therefore led to the false rumours surrounding Rasputin's presence at court which did so much damage to the Romanov family. Alexei inherited haemophilia from his mother Alexandra, a condition that could be traced back to her maternal grandmother Queen Victoria. He had to be careful not to injure himself because he lacked one of the proteins, necessary for blood-clotting. His haemophilia was so severe that trivial injuries such as a bruise, a nosebleed or a cut were potentially life-threatening. Rasputin had great influence over the Romanov family because he was able to help Alexei, possibly through hypnosis, when he was suffering most.

Progressive Bloc

A coalition of moderate conservatives and liberals in the Fourth Duma that tried to pressure the government into adopting a series of reforms aimed at inspiring public confidence in the government and at improving the management of Russia's effort in World War I. The bloc was formed in August 1915 under the leadership of Paul Miliukov. Nicholas II responded on Sept. 16, 1915, by suspending the session of the Duma. This was ill advised as the alternative he chose was to leave the Tsarina and Rasputin in charge of Petrograd once he decided to become Commander-in-Chief in September 1915 and move to the Eastern Front.

Kolkhoz

A collective farm in which peasants worked together to meet state quotas and to ensure they were financially successful. Kolkhozy were typically created by combining small individual farms together in a cooperative structure. Since all land was nationalised by the Bolsheviks in 1917 peasants never really owned it and they were forced to join during Collectivisation. Members of kolkhozy had the right to hold a small area of private land and some animals. The size of the private plot varied over the Soviet period, but was usually about 1 acre. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917 a peasant with less than 13.5 acres was considered too poor to maintain a family. However, the productivity of such plots is reflected in the fact that in 1938 3.9 percent of total sown land was in the form of private plots, but in 1937 those plots produced 21.5 percent of gross agriculture output. Kolkhozniki had to do a minimum number of days work per year both on the kolkhoz and on other government work (such as road building).

Cult of Personality

A cult of personality arises when an individual uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods to create an idealised, heroic, and at times worshipful image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. It involved the deliberate fixation of individual dedication and loyalty on the all-powerful leader, whose personality exemplified the challenge of creating socialist man and socialist woman In the absence of the useful unifying features of God and the Orthodox Church, Stalin created his own myths and a vast propaganda machine. He placed himself and Lenin at the centre of this in a very conspicuous way. Lenin was even mummified and placed in a mausoleum in Red Square, where he still lies to this day. St Petersburg was renamed Leningrad. Lenin and Stalin dominated through mass produced images, statues and publications. Stalin's cult of personality became a prominent part of Soviet culture in December 1929, after a lavish celebration for Stalin's 50th birthday. For the rest of Stalin's rule, the Soviet press presented Stalin as an all-powerful, all-knowing leader, and Stalin's name and image became omnipresent.

Show Trial

A show trial is a public trial in which the legal authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning to other would-be dissidents or law breakers. Show trials tend to be retributive (under Stalin they generally ended in death) and they were designed to fulfil propaganda purposes. First used by Lenin, notably in 1922, the Moscow Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries was one of the earliest show trials in the USSR. The trial was part of a process that entailed eliminating all opposition in the new Bolshevik state. More infamous, the Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held at the instigation of Stalin between 1936 and 1938. The Moscow Trials included the Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial,1936, the Pyatakov-Radek Trial, 1937, and the Bukharin-Rykov Trial, 1938. The defendants of these were Old Bolshevik party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism. The Moscow Trials led to the execution of many of the defendants. They are generally seen as part of Stalin's Great Purge, an attempt to rid the party of current or prior opponents, especially but not exclusively Trotskyites, and any leading Bolsheviks from the time of the Russian Revolution or earlier, who might even potentially become a figurehead for the growing discontent amongst the people resulting from Stalin's harsh management of the economy.

Totalitarian Dictatorship

Absolute rule by one party which controls every aspect of the nation's life. In Russia this was established after 1917 by Lenin and further developed by Stalin 1928-53. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only party tolerated in Russia from 1921-1991.

Agitprop

Agitprop is a term derived from agitation and propaganda and it includes stage plays, pamphlets, newspapers, text books, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message. The term came from a shortening of the Department for Agitation and Propaganda, which played a significant role in promoting the October Revolution and the cause of the Reds whilst Lenin was in power. The department was later renamed the Ideological Department. Agitprop trains were used with great effect by Trotsky in the Civil War 1918-21. Lenin's great literacy drive was also directed through agitprop and it aimed to indoctrinate the population.

Abdication of the Tsar

As a consequence of the spontaneous February Revolution of 1917 on 2 March (OS) / 15 March (NS) 1917, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate or step down from power. He first abdicated in favour of Alexei, but swiftly changed his mind after advice from doctors that the Tsarevich would not live long separated from his parents, who would be forced into exile. Nicholas thus drew up a new manifesto naming his brother, Grand Duke Michael, as the next Emperor of all the Russias. Grand Duke Michael declined to accept the throne until the people were allowed to vote through a Constituent Assembly for the continuance of the monarchy or a republic. The abdication of Nicholas II brought three centuries of the Romanov dynasty's rule to an end.

Industrialisation

At the First Conference of Workers in 1931, Stalin delivered a passionate speech, commanding workers to play a crucial role in industrialisation. He said: "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this gap in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us." Essentially, Russia's infrastructure was under-developed, yet there was the potential for massive resources to be exploited. Stalin perceived that Communist Russia would be a target for Western powers who were concerned about their ideology spreading, so decided to industrialise rapidly to protect Russia. He also wanted to break the peasant stranglehold on the economy so that the proletariat could flourish as a class for the first time and in accordance with Marxist principles. Russia had a period of rapid industrialisation under Witte in the 1890s, but the Russo-Japanese War, The First World War and the Civil War had all taken their toll. Stalin introduced a series of Five Year Plans to target first heavy industry, then heavy industry and communications, then lighter industry and consumer goods between 1928-37. The Third Five Year Plan was then taken over for military purposes as Europe prepared for war. Stalin's successful industrialisation of Russia facilitated victory in The Great Patriotic War (1941-5) and as a consequence the USSR emerged as a super power.

Julian Calendar

Beginning in 1582, the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian in Catholic countries. This change was also implemented in Protestant and Orthodox countries some time later. Old Style (OS) and New Style (NS) are sometimes used with dates to indicate whether the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (NS) The Gregorian Calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world today. Its predecessor, the Julian Calendar (introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC), was replaced because it did not properly reflect the actual time it takes the Earth to circle once around the Sun, known as a tropical year. It produced too many leap years and by 1900 Russia was thirteen days behind the West as a consequence. However, the Russian Orthodox Church favoured the Julian Calendar. Lenin, who hated Russian Orthodoxy and saw it as ridiculously mystical and backward, changed Russia to the Gregorian Calendar in February 1918. It was implemented in Soviet Russia on 14 February 1918 by dropping the Julian dates of 1-13 February 1918.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein

Born in Ukraine in 1879, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, known as Trotsky, was a charismatic Jewish Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founding leader of the Red Army. Trotsky was a key figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, second only to Vladimir Lenin in the early stages of Soviet communist rule. He was a brilliant orator and a spectacularly efficient organiser and commander. But he lost out to Stalin in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death, and was assassinated in 1940 while in exile. Trotsky became involved in underground activities as a teenager. He was soon arrested, jailed and exiled to Siberia where he joined the Social Democratic Party. Eventually, he escaped Siberia and spent the majority of the next 15 years abroad, including a spell in London and America. In 1903, the Social Democrats split. While Lenin assumed leadership of the 'Bolshevik' (majority) faction, Trotsky became a member of the 'Menshevik' (minority) faction and developed his theory of 'permanent revolution'. Importantly, he chaired the first St Petersburg Soviet in 1905. After the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd in February 1917, he made his way back to Russia. Despite previous disagreements with Lenin, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917 because Lenin had changed his views with the April Theses 'All Power to the Soviets'. Trotsky, as in 1905, became chair of the Petrograd Soviet in September 1917 which gave the Bolsheviks access to the Military Revolutionary Committee and the weapons Kerensky had given them to fend off Kornilov. Trotsky used these weapons to seize power in October 1917. He played a decisive role in the Bolshevik take-over. His first post in the new government was as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, where he found himself negotiating the Treaty of Brest Litovsk March 1918 with Germany. He was then made War Commissar and in this capacity, built up the Red Army which prevailed against the White Russian forces in the Civil War 1918-21. Thus Trotsky played a crucial role in keeping the Bolshevik regime alive; he was the person who decisively and ruthlessly ensured Lenin's plans were followed. He saw himself as Lenin's heir-apparent, but his intellectual arrogance made him few friends, and his Jewish heritage may also have worked against him. When Lenin fell ill and died, Trotsky was easily outmanoeuvred by Stalin. In 1927, he was thrown out of the party. Internal and then foreign exile followed, but Trotsky continued to write and to criticise Stalin. Trotsky settled in Mexico in 1936. On 20 August 1940, an assassin called Ramon Mercader, acting on Stalin's orders, stabbed Trotsky with an ice pick, fatally wounding him. He died the next day.

Constructivism

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes which therefore made it ideal for use as propaganda too (see 'Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge' - Lazar Lissitzky). It was the only avant-garde design movement in history to be co-opted as an instrument of government policy, it sought to build shining new socialist cities on the devastated landscape of a Russia that had been ravaged by political chaos, economic collapse and the fallout from the First World War.

Bloody Sunday

Events of 9 January 1905 (OS)/ 22 January (NS) in which at least 200 innocent protesters were shot by the army in St Petersburg. Led by Father Gapon thousands of lower class men, women and children were taking a petition to their 'Little Father' - the Tsar - to ask for better living and working conditions. The Tsar had been advised to leave St Petersburg and instead the army took the decision to fire on the peaceful crowd, (who were carrying icons and playing music), in various locations around the city to stop them all getting to Palace Square. The incident at the Narva Gate was particularly awful. This incident fatally damaged Nicholas II's relationship with his people and it led to a demystification of tsarism.

Dzerzhinsky

Felix Dzerzhinsky 1877-1926, nicknamed 'Iron Felix', was a Soviet statesman of Polish descent. Lenin regarded Felix Dzerzhinsky as a revolutionary hero and appointed him to organize a force to combat internal threats. On 20 December 1917, the Council of People's Commissars officially established the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage -usually known as the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky became its director. The Cheka received a large number of resources, and became known for ruthlessly pursuing any perceived counterrevolutionary elements. The Cheka soon became notorious for mass summary executions, performed especially during the Red Terror and the Russian Civil War. Dzerzhinsky said: "The Cheka represent organised terror - this must be said very clearly." and "[The Red Terror involves] the terrorisation, arrests and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles."

League of the Militant Godless

Formed in the early 1920s, this was an atheistic and anti-religious organisation of workers and intelligentsia that developed in Soviet Russia under the influence of the ideological and cultural views and policies of the Soviet Communist Party from 1925 to 1947. It consisted of Party members, members of the Komsomol youth movement, those without specific political affiliation, workers and military veterans. The League's slogan was "Struggle against religion is a struggle for socialism", which was meant to tie in their atheist views with economy, politics, and culture. It led a concerted effort telling Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were 'wrong' and 'harmful', and that 'good' citizens ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic worldview.

Gulag

GULAG was the acronym of the official body for 'Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Labour Settlements'. It was administered first by the Cheka and later by the NKVD. The first corrective labour camps after the revolution were established in 1918 (Solovki) and legalised by a decree. In the west we use the term Gulag to denote a labour camp in the USSR. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union, based on Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code). In effect, Article 58 was carte blanche for the secret police to arrest and imprison anyone deemed suspicious, making for its use as a political weapon. The article was used for the imprisonment and execution of many prominent people, as well as multitudes of non-notable innocents. Sentences were long, generally 5-10 years but up to 25 years, and frequently extended indefinitely without trial or consultation. Life was extremely harsh in the camps (read 'A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.) A person could be framed: The latter would arrange an "anti-Soviet" incident in the person's presence and then try the person for it. If the person pleaded innocence, not having reported the incident would also make them liable to imprisonment.

Yagoda

Genrikh Yagoda 1891-15 March 1938 was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Yagoda is held responsible, through his authority as a Soviet official, for the implementation of Stalin's policies that caused the deaths of more than 7 million Ukrainians during the famine. Yagoda, as an NKVD official, would have been involved with the seizures or blockades of food, tools, etc., and the movement of inhabitants. Though people elsewhere in the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933, the authorities in Ukraine went much further by quarantining and starving the population. On the basis of performances in that famine he was promoted in 1934 to a full-fledged member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Appointed by Stalin, Yagoda supervised the arrest, show trial, and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, events that initiated the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised the construction of the Belomor Canal using slave labor from the GULAG system, during which many labourers died. Like many Soviet secret policemen of the 1930s, Yagoda himself was ultimately a victim of the Purge. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with the crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, Yagoda was a defendant at the last of the major Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Following his confession at the trial, Yagoda was found guilty and shot.

Rasputin

Grigory Rasputin, original name Grigory Novykh (born 1872?, Pokrovskoye, Siberia - murdered December 30 [December 17, OS], 1916. He was a Siberian peasant and mystic whose ability to improve the condition of Tsarevich Alexei, the haemophiliac heir to the Russian throne, made him an influential favourite at the court of Tsar Nicholas II. Although he attended school, the peasant Grigory remained illiterate, and his reputation for licentiousness earned him the surname Rasputin, Russian for "debauched one." He dabbled with the views of the Khlysty and believed that sexual exertion brought one divine grace. He married, had four children but left home and wandered to Mount Athos, Greece, and Jerusalem, gaining a reputation as a starets (self-proclaimed holy man) with the ability to heal the sick and predict the future. In 1905 Rasputin was introduced to the royal family, and in 1908 he was summoned to the palace of Nicholas and Alexandra during one of their haemophiliac son's bleeding episodes. Rasputin succeeded in easing the boy's suffering (probably by his hypnotic powers). In the presence of the royal family, Rasputin consistently maintained the posture of a humble and holy peasant. Outside court, however, he soon fell into his former bad habits. Preaching that physical contact with his own person had a purifying and healing effect, he acquired mistresses and attempted to seduce many other women. By 1911 Rasputin's behaviour had become a general scandal and rumours about his relationship with the Tsarina were rife. The prime minister, Stolypin, sent the Tsar a report on Rasputin's misdeeds. As a result, the Tsar exiled Rasputin back to his home town, but Alexandra had him returned within a matter of months. Nicholas, anxious not to displease his wife or endanger his son, upon whom Rasputin had an obviously beneficial effect, chose to ignore further allegations of wrongdoing. Rasputin reached the pinnacle of his power at the Russian court after 1915. During World War I, Nicholas II took personal command of his forces (September 1915) and went to the troops on the front, leaving Alexandra in charge of Russia's internal affairs, while Rasputin served as her personal advisor. Rasputin's influence ranged from the appointment of church officials to the selection of cabinet ministers (often incompetent opportunists), and he occasionally intervened in military matters to Russia's detriment. In December 1916, Prince Felix Yusupov, Vladimir Purishkevich (a member of the Duma), and Grand Duke Dmitri (the tsar's cousin), formed a conspiracy to eliminate Rasputin and save the monarchy from further scandal. On the night of December 29-30 (December 16-17, OS), Rasputin was invited to visit Yusupov's home and, once there, was given poisoned wine and tea cakes. When he did not die, the frantic Yusupov shot him. Rasputin collapsed but was able to run out into the courtyard, where Purishkevich shot him again. The conspirators then bound him and threw him through a hole in the ice into the Neva River, where he finally died by drowning. The murder merely strengthened Alexandra's resolve to uphold the principle of autocracy, but a few weeks later the whole imperial regime was swept away by revolution.

Zinoviev

Grigory Zinoviev 1883 - 1936), was a Jewish Old Bolshevik and a Soviet Communist politician. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution. Close friends with Kamenev he was also dubious about the wisdom of seizing power in October 1917. He was not ever forgiven fully by Lenin, but he did defend Petrograd successfully during the Civil War. Zinoviev is best remembered as the longtime head of the Communist International (Comintern) and the architect of several failed attempts to transform Germany into a communist country during the early 1920s. He was in competition against Joseph Stalin who eliminated him from the Soviet political leadership in 1926. He was expelled from the party several times and humiliated. In 1934 he was tried in secret for crimes relating to Kirov's assassination. He was the chief defendant in the 1936 show trial, that marked the start of the so-called Great Terror in the USSR and resulted in his execution the day after his conviction in August 1936.

Shakhty Trial

In 1928, the local OGPU arrested a group of engineers in the North Caucasus town of Shakhty, accusing them of conspiring with former owners of coal mines (living abroad and barred from the Soviet Union since the Revolution) to sabotage the Soviet economy. The Shakhty trials marked the beginning of a long series of accusations against class enemies within the Soviet Union, which was to become a hallmark of the Great Purge of the 1930s. The trial resulted in five of the fifty-three accused engineers being sentenced to death and another forty-four sent to prison. On March 10, 1928, in response to the arrests, Pravda announced that the bourgeoisie were using sabotage as a method of class struggle. Joseph Stalin mentioned a month later that the Shakhty arrests proved that class struggle was intensifying as the Soviet Union moved closer to socialism.

Kronstadt Mutiny/Uprising/Rebellion

In March 1921 occurred a major unsuccessful uprising against the Bolsheviks. Led by Russian sailors, soldiers, and civilians who had previously been supporters of the Bolsheviks, the rebellion was one of the reasons for Vladimir Lenin's decision to loosen its control of the Russian economy by implementing the New Economic Policy (NEP). The rebellion was a clear reaction to the harsh years of the Civil War, economic collapse, the huge famine caused by War Communism and widespread discontent with the lack of power being given to the soviets. Lenin called this 'the lightning flash that lit up reality'. It was ruthlessly suppressed by Trotsky and Marshal Tukhachevsky. This was a major turning point for the Bolsheviks.

July Days

July Days, (July 3-7 OS/ July 16-20 NS), a period in the Russian Revolution during which workers and soldiers of Petrograd staged armed demonstrations against the Provisional Government that resulted in a temporary decline of Bolshevik influence and in the formation of a new Provisional Government, headed by Alexander Kerensky. In June dissatisfied Petrograd workers and soldiers, using Bolshevik slogans, staged a demonstration and adopted resolutions against the government. On July 3 protestors marched through Petrograd to demand that the Petrograd Soviet assume formal power. The Bolsheviks attempted to prevent the demonstration but subsequently decided to support it after being persuaded by the Kronstadt sailors. On July 4 the Bolsheviks planned a peaceful demonstration; but armed clashes broke out, injuring about 400. The Petrograd Soviet refused to take power, and the Bolshevik Party did not try to either. By nightfall the crowds had dispersed. To undermine Bolshevik popularity and reduce the threat of a coup d'etat, the government produced evidence that the Bolshevik leader Lenin had close political and financial ties with the German government. A public reaction set in against the Bolsheviks; they were beaten and arrested, their property destroyed, their leaders persecuted. Lenin fled to Finland; but others, including Trotsky, were jailed.

Beria

Lavrenty Beria 1899-23 December 1953 was a Soviet politician from Georgia. He led the NKVD after Yezhov and rose to a position of great power in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War and beyond. He used his position to rape and abuse thousands of women the details of whom will not be made public until 2028. He was executed after Stalin's death in 1953 as a result of a plot by Khrushchev and the Politburo. In June 1937 he said in a speech, "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed."

Lenin's Testament

Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document written by Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. Sensing his impending death, he also commented on the leading members of the Soviet Union to ensure its future. He suggested Joseph Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party's Central Committee. Lenin wanted the testament to be read out at the XII Party Congress to be held in April 1923. However, after Lenin's third stroke in March 1923 left him paralysed and unable to speak, the testament was kept secret by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in hopes of Lenin's eventual recovery. Only after Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, did she turn the document over to the Communist Party Central Committee Secretariat and ask that it be made available to the delegates of the XIII Party Congress in May 1924. Since others like Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky were also criticised, but to a lesser extent, they had a vested interest in preventing its publication (which only occurred in 1956 at Khrushchev's insistence). This was critical to Stalin's ability to rise to power.

Revolutionary Justice

Lenin's concept that the ends justified the means and that any action which preserved and protected the revolution was perfectly acceptable. This was the guiding principal behind the Cheka and the Red Terror and it meant all civil liberties were suspended. Revolutionary Justice resulted in the deaths of thousands if not millions and essentially laid down a moral framework for response to threats (internal, external, imagined) which can still be seen in Russia today.

Kamenev

Lev Kamenev, born 1883, Moscow, - died 1936. Jewish Old Bolshevik and prominent member of the Communist Party and Soviet government during the decade after the October Revolution in Russia). Kamenev maintained a cautious approach to the February Revolution, opposing, with his close friend and colleague Grigory Zinoviev, Lenin's decision to seize power. Despite his dissident views, he was elected to the Bolsheviks' first Politburo (October 1917), and, after the insurrection, he served as the first chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All Russian Congress of Soviets. In 1919 he became a member of the re-established Politburo and Chairman of the Moscow Soviet (i.e., Moscow party boss). When Lenin became seriously ill (1922), Kamenev joined Stalin and Zinoviev to form the ruling triumvirate, which politically attacked the Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky, thus eliminating him from contention for power. Stalin then shifted his attack to Kamenev and Zinoviev (1925). Stalin succeeded in demoting Kamenev's status in the Politburo and removing him as head of the Moscow party organization. Kamenev later held other posts, but, after he, Zinoviev, and Trotsky formed a united opposition against Stalin (1926), he was removed entirely from the Politburo (October 1926) and from the party's Central Committee (November 1927) and was expelled from the party three times. After the party leader Sergei Kirov was assassinated on Dec. 1, 1934, Kamenev was secretly tried and sentenced, with Zinoviev, for having indirectly contributed to the crime. In August 1936, however, he and Zinoviev were tried again in the first public-show trial of the Great Terror. Accused of conspiring to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, Kamenev confessed to the fabricated charges in the vain hope of saving his family. He was shot, and his wife perished in the Gulag. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev were cleared of charges by the Soviet Supreme Court in 1988.

Alexander Kerensky

Like Lenin, Kerensky was born in Simbirsk (1881) and their families bizarrely knew each other, as his father was the local school teacher. Charismatic 'first love of the revolution', Alexander Kerensky was the man who held the fate of the February Revolution in his hands. Leader of the Trudoviks (affiliated to the SRs) in the Fourth Duma, Kerensky earned a reputation as a radical lawyer who was prepared to represent the repressed left wing radicals post-1905 and the striking Lena miners from the government massacre of 1912. In February 1917 he was uniquely placed to shape the future of Russia from the Tauride Palace; he was the only socialist in the newly formed Provisional Government and at the same time he was elected Vice Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Technically he should not have been able to hold key positions in both bodies, but an exemption was made for him, which speaks volumes about his popularity at the time. He alone could cross the corridor of the Tauride Palace between meetings of the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet; he was the embodiment of 'dual power'. He served as Minister for Justice, then after May 1917 as Minister of War and then in July as Prime Minister. He oversaw major political changes to civil liberties, he launched the Kerensky Offensive, he combatted the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt sailors during the July Days, he appointed the respected general, Lavr Kornilov, to command the Russian Army, he moved the seat of government to the Winter Palace and he became embroiled in the Kornilov Affair which saw him arm the Petrograd Soviet to face the supposed military revolt. By September he was discredited but, having locked Kornilov up, he took on the mantle of Commander in Chief himself (!) and began organising much over-due elections for the Constituent Assembly. Kerensky's government was over thrown by the Bolsheviks in a very well organised and virtually bloodless seizure of power 25-26 October 1917 (OS). He tried to rally troops outside Petrograd but eventually fled into exile in France, allegedly dressed as a woman. He died in America in 1970 having spent the rest of his life re-writing the events of 1917 and trying to justify his actions. Essentially the Kornilov Affair directly facilitated the Bolshevik coup and he had to live with that uncomfortable fact. The Orthodox Church refused to bury Kerensky as he had dishonoured Russia by allowing the Communists to come to power, so he was buried in a non-denominational grave in Putney UK.

Smychka

Literally means 'alliance' or 'union' and was used by Lenin during NEP to describe the positive relationship he wanted to develop between the peasantry and the proletariat, the towns and the countryside. Best symbolised by the hammer and sickle. Later used by Stalin too.

Magnitogorsk

Located beyond the Urals. It was named 'city by the magnetic mountain' as Magnitnaya Mountain is almost pure iron, a geological anomaly. The largest iron and steel works in the country, Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, is located here. The rapid development of Magnitogorsk stood at the forefront of Stalin's Five-Year Plans in the 1930s. It was a showpiece of Soviet achievement. Huge reserves of iron ore in the area made it a prime location to build a steel plant capable of challenging its Western rivals. However, a large proportion of the workforce, as ex-peasants, typically had few industrial skills and little industrial experience. To solve these issues, several hundred foreign specialists arrived to direct the work. In 1937 foreigners were told to exit and Magnitogorsk was declared a closed city.

Ryutin Platform

Martemyan Ryutin was an Old Bolshevik and a secretary of the Moscow City Communist Party Committee in the 1920s. He was a supporter of the moderate ("Rightist") wing within the party led by Nikolai Bukharin and prime minister Alexei Rykov. In June 1932, he wrote a pamphlet entitled "Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party" and a nearly 200-page document entitled "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship," which is more commonly known as Ryutin's Platform. In these documents Ryutin called for an end to forced collectivisation ("peace with the peasants"), slowing down of the industrialisation, a reinstatement of all previously expelled Party members on the left and on the right (including Leon Trotsky), and a "fresh start". Four of the Platform's thirteen chapters were devoted to examining the character of Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the gravedigger of the Revolution" and "the evil genius of the Party and the revolution". "Appeal" was even more inflammatory, arguing Stalin "must be removed by force" and urging its readers "to everywhere organise cells of the 'Union' to be joined under the banner of Leninism for the liquidation of the Stalin leadership."

Bukharin

Nikolai Bukharin, born 1888, Moscow - died March 14, 1938. Bolshevik and Marxist theoretician and economist, who was a prominent leader of the Communist International (Comintern). As a young man, he spent six years in exile, working closely with fellow exiles Lenin and Trotsky. After the revolution of February 1917, he returned to Moscow, where his Bolshevik credentials earned him a high rank in the party, and after the October Revolution, he became editor of the party newspaper Pravda. After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo. He continued to be a principal supporter of Lenin's New Economic Policy which promoted gradual economic change, and opposed the policy of initiating rapid industrialisation and collectivisation in agriculture. For a time Bukharin was thus allied with Stalin, who used this issue to undermine his chief rivals—Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev. In 1926 Bukharin succeeded Zinoviev as Chairman of the Comintern's Executive Committee. Nevertheless, in 1928 Stalin reversed himself, espoused the program of enforced collectivisation advocated by his defeated opponents, and denounced Bukharin for opposing it. Bukharin lost his Comintern post in April 1929 and was expelled from the Politburo in November. He recanted his views under pressure and was partially reinstated in the party by Stalin. But though he was made editor of Izvestia, the official government newspaper, in 1934 and participated in writing the 1936 Soviet constitution, he never regained his earlier influence and power. Bukharin was secretly arrested in January 1937 and was expelled from the Communist Party for being a "Trotskyite." In March 1938 he was a defendant in the last public purge trial, falsely accused of counterrevolutionary activities and of espionage, found guilty, and executed. He was posthumously reinstated as a party member in 1988.

Moscow Metro

Opened in 1935 with one 6.8 mile line line and 13 stations, it was the first underground railway system in the Soviet Union. It became famous for its highly decorated stations which were called 'the people's palaces'. Soviet workers did the labour and the art work, but the main engineering designs, routes, and construction plans were handled by specialists recruited from the London Underground. The paranoia of the NKVD was evident when the secret police arrested numerous British engineers for espionage because they gained an in-depth knowledge of the city's physical layout. Engineers for the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company (Metrovick) were given a show trial and deported in 1933, ending the role of British business in the USSR.

Storming of the Winter Palace

Part of the Great October Socialist Revolution 24-26 October OS (6-8 November 1917 NS). The capture of the Winter Palace occurred with the Red Guards storming the Winter Palace at 2:10 a.m. on 26 October OS (8 November 1917). The insurrection was mostly bloodless, with a final assault being launched against the Winter Palace, poorly defended by 3,000 cadets, officers, cossacks and female soldiers from the 1st Petrograd Women's Battalion. The assault was delayed throughout the day of 7 Nov, both because functioning artillery could not be found, and because the Bolsheviks feared violence when the insurrection had so far been peaceful. At 6:15 p.m a large group of artillery cadets abandoned the palace, taking their artillery with them; at 8:00 p.m 200 cossacks also left the palace and returned to their barracks. While the cabinet of the Provisional Government within the palace debated what action to take, the Bolsheviks issued an ultimatum to surrender. At that time, the cabinet's communications with loyal military forces outside the city broke down, when workers and soldiers occupied the last of the telegraph stations. As the night wore on and crowds of insurgents surrounded the palace, many were able to infiltrate it. While soviet historians and officials tended to depict the event in heroic terms, the insurrection and even the seizure of the Winter Palace almost without resistance. At 9:45 p.m, the Aurora fired a blank shot from the harbour. By 2:00 a.m on the morning of 8 November 1917 Bolshevik forces entered the palace, and after sporadic gunfire throughout the building, the cabinet of the Provisional Government surrendered. In fact the effectively unoccupied Winter Palace fell not because of acts of courage or a military barrage, but because the back door was left open, allowing the Red Guard to enter. A small group broke in, got lost in the cavernous interior, and accidentally happened upon the remnants of Kerensky's Provisional Government in the imperial family's breakfast room. The stories of the 'defence of the Winter Palace' and the heroic 'Storming of the Winter Palace' came later as the creative propaganda product of Bolshevik publicists. Grandiose paintings depicting the 'Women's Battalion' and photo stills taken from Sergei Eisenstein's staged film depicting the 'politically correct' version of the October events in Petrograd came to be taken as truth.

Peasantry

Serfdom was only abolished in Russia in 1861. At least 80% of the 125 million population were peasants in 1900. Russia was therefore a semi-feudal society. Sergei Witte had begun the process of industrialisation in the 1890s but living and working conditions in the Russian cities were very poor and there was the constant issue of food shortages as the peasants struggled to farm effectively. Stolypin tried to encourage evolutionary development, but Lenin under War Communism and then Stalin with Collectivisation brutalised the peasantry (The Second Serfdom). The brief respite of NEP was more like Stolypin's approach. The peasants were treated as cannon fodder by the tsars and as an ideological embarrassment by the communists to be bent to their will.

Kirov

Sergei Kirov 1886 - 1 December 1934), was a prominent early Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union. Kirov rose through the Communist Party ranks to become head of the party organization in Leningrad. Kirov drew the unwelcome attention of Stalin, particularly after the 1934 Party Congress, where delegates voting for new Central Committee membership elected Kirov with just three votes against. Supposedly, Stalin received far more negative votes than Kirov, although the historical records are not entirely clear. Although Kirov had been a strong supporter of Stalin, including the leader's sharp swing to the left during the period of enforced collectivisation and dekulakisation (which had seen millions die in a famine), Kirov's speech to the congress suggested he wanted to see a more relaxed approach in the future. Kirov, a lover of the good life and a hardened drinker was also highly popular with party members who saw this style as a welcome alternative to the increasingly (in public, at least) austere regime promoted by Stalin. After the party congress, Stalin asked Kirov to work for him in Moscow, assisting the Politburo, but then repeatedly postponed Kirov's transfer. Kirov's influence continued to grow, and at a session of the Central Committee in November 1934 Kirov urged the adoption of further conciliatory measures by the party in favour of party dissidents, which won enthusiastic applause and approval among the delegates. On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by a gunman at his offices in the Smolny Institute. Some historians place the blame for his assassination at the hands of Stalin and believe the NKVD organized his execution, but any evidence for this claim remains confused. Kirov's death served as one of the pretexts for Stalin's escalation of repression against dissident elements of the Party, culminating in the Great Terror of the late 1930s in which many of the Old Bolsheviks were arrested, expelled from the party, and executed.

Socialism in One Country

Socialism in One Country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin in 1924, developed by Nikolai Bukharin in 1925 and finally adopted by the Soviet Union as state policy. The theory held that given the defeat of all the communist revolutions in Europe in 1917-1921 except Russia's, the Soviet Union should begin to strengthen itself internally. That turn toward national communism was a shift from the previously held Marxist position that socialism must be established globally (world communism), and it was in opposition to Leon Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution.

Socialist Realism

Socialist realism is a style of realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and lasted until the 1960s. Socialist realism is characterised by the glorified depiction of communist values, such as the workers, in a realistic, idealised manner. Stalin insisted all art should be of public value and that it could be understood by all. Effectively art became a propaganda tool and artists were not free to paint from the imagination or in different styles; Socialist Realism greatly contributed to the cults of personality of Lenin and Stalin and it affected all the arts, not just painting.

Mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin

Summer 1905 - the crew of this ship overthrew their superiors after being made to eat rotten meat. Famously captured in the Sergei Eisenstein film 'Potemkin", this was a serious moment because it showed growing frustration with Tsarist rule and the disastrous impact of the Russo-Japanese War on morale in the armed forces.

Ban on Factions

The 10th Bolshevik Party Congress passed a 'ban on factions' to eliminate splits within the party in 1921. In 1920 Lenin became concerned about diverging views within the Communist Party. For example, the Democratic Centralists had been set up in March 1919 and by 1921 Alexander Shlyapnikov had set up the Workers' Opposition. Lenin regarded these as distractions within the party when unity was needed in order to neutralise the major crises of 1921, such as the famine and Kronstadt Rebellion. As Lenin stated: "all members of the Russian Communist Party who are in the slightest degree suspicious or unreliable ... should be got rid of" Factions were also commencing to criticize Lenin's leadership. Purges of the Party followed in the autumn of 1921. Those who did not toe the party line would be expelled. The Ban on Factions directly facilitated dictatorship and was anti-democratic. It helped Stalin rise to power too.

1936 Constitution

The 1936 Soviet constitution was adopted on December 5, 1936, and was also known as the Stalin Constitution; it redesigned the government of the Soviet Union. The constitution repealed restrictions on voting and added universal direct suffrage and the right to work to rights guaranteed by the previous constitution. In addition, the Constitution recognised collective social and economic rights including the rights to work, rest and leisure, health protection, care in old age and sickness, housing, education, and cultural benefits. The constitution also provided for the direct election of all government bodies and their reorganisation into a single, uniform system. The constitution was presented as a personal triumph for Stalin, who on this occasion was described by Pravda as "genius of the new world, the wisest man of the epoch, the great leader of communism." Beginning in 1936, December 5 was celebrated as Soviet Constitution day in the USSR until 1977.

Gosplan

The State Planning Committee, commonly known as Gosplan, was the agency responsible for central economic planning in the Soviet Union. Established in 1921 and remaining in existence until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the main task of Gosplan involved the creation and administration of a series of five-year plans governing the economy of the USSR.

Komsomol

The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League usually known as Komsomol was a political youth organisation in the Soviet Union. It is sometimes described as the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), although it was officially independent and referred to as "the helper and the reserve of the CPSU". The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban centers in 1918. It was the preferred path for making it into the nomenklatura. It was the final stage of three youth organisations with members up to age 28, having graduated at 14 from the Young Pioneers, and at 9 from the Little Octobrists.

April Theses

The April Theses were a series of ten directives issued by Vladimir Lenin upon his return to Petrograd from exile in Europe via Germany in a sealed train. He called for 'Peace, Bread and Land', for the soviets (workers' councils) to take power (as seen in the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets'), denounced liberals and socialists in the Provisional Government, called for Bolsheviks not to cooperate with the government, and called for an end to the war. The April Theses influenced the July Days and October Revolution in the next months and are identified with Leninism. They were a surprise to his fellow Bolsheviks because this was not an orthodox Marxist approach. Lenin was an opportunist however and did not wish to waste the chance to lead the revolution, even if it was via the soviets.

Tannenberg

The Battle of Tannenberg was fought between Russia and Germany from 26-30 August 1914, during the first month of World War I. The battle resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Russian Second Army and the suicide of its commanding general, Alexander Samsonov. The battle is particularly notable for fast rail movements by the Germans, enabling them to concentrate against each of the two Russian armies in turn, and also for the failure of the Russians to encode their radio messages.

Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks, derived from 'majority' were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903. Led by Lenin, they believed the party was the Vanguard of the Proletariat i.e. it had to be a closely knit, totally dedicated professional revolutionary group who led Russian workers to the desired revolution. Bolsheviks, directed firmly by Lenin, also adhered to Democratic Centralism i.e. Lenin argued that free discussion within the party should be tolerated and even encouraged up to a point, but, once a vote was taken, all discussion had to end. The decision of the majority should constitute the current party 'line' and be binding upon all members. This led directly to the Ban on Factions in 1921. Marxism-Leninism held that if the revolution needed to be forced it should be so, unlike the Mensheviks who were waiting for a series of spontaneous organic Marxist revolutions. Lenin understood Russia lacked the fundamental group required for revolution - a dominant proletariat or working class - because of its backwardness industrially. He would use state central planning of the economy to direct the growth of the working class which was in disarray when he came to power in Oct/Nov 1917. When he returned to Russia in April 1917, Lenin promised the people 'Peace, Bread and Land' and 'All Power to the Soviets'. This was a radical agenda, it was a surprise to his party and it wasn't wholly Marxist, but it did become increasingly popular because the Bolsheviks refused to compromise and did not contaminate their message by working with the Provisional Government like all the other groups. Earlier the Bolsheviks had not participated in the Duma as they hated tsarism. They were anti-WWI because it was an imperialistic war and workers of the world were brothers/comrades and needed to unite across national boundaries. So up until Oct/Nov 1917 they had been a minority party with no practical, official political experience. To Lenin, practical issues were more important than the development of ideological theories and he believed that the ends justified the means, so he was a pragmatic (realistic) politician. It also meant that he endorsed the Red Terror, founded his own secret police - the Cheka - he nationalised all land and industry, he resented people challenging his direct authority, he purged the party and he set up gulags and show trials. He ruled far more ruthlessly than the tsars had done, his party dominated the state and there was massive loss of life in the Red Terror, the Civil War, the forced famine of 1921 and the Kronstadt Rebellion as a consequence. The Bolsheviks officially became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1952, but had been termed Communist from about 1922.

CHEKA

The Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organisations incorporating the secret police. It was created on December 20, 1917, and was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat turned communist. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had been created in various cities, at multiple levels. Many thousands of dissidents, deserters, or other people were arrested, tortured or executed by various Cheka groups. After 1922, Cheka groups underwent reorganisation, with the OGPU/NKVD, into bodies whose members continued to be referred to as "Chekisty" (Chekists) into the late 1980s. From its founding, being the military and security arm of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Cheka was instrumental in the Red Terror. In 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defence of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered at least 200,000. These troops policed labour camps; ran the early Gulag system; conducted requisitions of food; subjected political opponents to secret arrest, detention, torture and summary execution; and put down rebellions and riots by workers or peasants, and mutinies in the desertion-plagued Red Army.

Okhrana

The Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, known as Okhrana in Russia. It was the infamous secret police force of the Russian Empire. It used many seemingly unusual methods in the pursuit of its mission to defend the autocracy; indeed, some of the Okhrana's activities even contributed to the wave of domestic unrest and revolutionary terror that they were intended to quell. The exposure of Yevno Azef (who had organised many assassinations, including that of Plehve) and Dmitri Bogrov (who assassinated Stolypin in 1911) as Okhrana double agents put the agency's methods under great suspicion; they were further compromised by the discovery of many similar double agents-provocateur. The Okhrana was identified by the revolutionaries as one of the main symbols of Tsarist repression, and its headquarters at Fontana 16 in Petrograd were sacked and burned on 27 February 1917 (OS). The newly formed Provisional Government then disbanded the whole organisation and released most of the political prisoners who had been held by the Tsarist regime. Revelations of the Okhrana's earlier abuses heightened public hostility towards the secret police after the February Revolution and made it very dangerous to be a political policeman.

February Revolution

The February Revolution was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. It was centered on Petrograd, then Russian capital, and spontaneously began with strikers in the streets on 22 February (OS). On International Women's Day 23 February (OS) protesting women were joined on the streets by strikers from the Putilov factory in response to the dire economic situation created by the First World War (food shortages, inflation etc.) and the Tsar's mismanagement of the government. The revolution was confined to the capital and its vicinity, and lasted less than a week. It involved mass demonstrations and armed clashes with police and gendarmes, the last loyal forces of the Russian monarchy. Mutinous Russian Army forces sided with the revolutionaries. The immediate result of the revolution was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the end of the Russian Empire. The Tsar was replaced by a Russian Provisional Government under Prince Lvov on 2 March 1917 (OS).

Provisional Government

The First Provisional Government was formed from 12 ex-duma members when the Tsar abdicated on 2 March (15 March NS) & was led by Prince Lvov. It contained just one socialist, the Minister of Justice, Alexander Kerensky. It met in the Tauride Palace until Kerensky took over as PM in July when it moved to the Winter Palace. It lasted from 2 March until 25 October 1917 when it was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. It saw itself as a wartime government of national confidence and salvation, above class or party interests, whose purpose was to see the country through to the election of a Constituent Assembly. Controversially it did not feel it had the right to pull Russia out of World War One, so instead it continued despite the problems caused by the Petrograd Soviet's Order Number One and the economic crisis. It was arguably the most democratic government Russia had ever had and it immediately allowed the full and immediate amnesty for all political prisoners and exiles; freedom of speech, press, assembly, and strikes; the abolition of all class, group and religious restrictions; the plan to elect a Constituent Assembly by universal secret ballot; the substitution of the Okhrana by a national militia and democratic elections of officials for municipalities and townships.

The Great Terror

The Great Terror (or Great Purge) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials (show trials), repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, and widespread police surveillance, suspicion of 'saboteurs', imprisonment, and arbitrary executions.' In Russia, the period of the most intense purge, 1937-1938, is called Yezhovshchina after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. It has been estimated between 600,000 and 1.2 million people, many of whom were innocent, were murdered by the Soviet government.

Greens

The Green Army or Greens were armed peasant groups which fought against all governments in the Russian Civil War of 1918-21. The Green movement formed as a popular reaction after the Bolshevik government implemented War Communism (1918-21), sending officials through the peasant lands of central Russia to collect supplies that the state needed in order to sustain the military and to begin building a socialist economy. Common targets for official requisitioning included recruits for the Red Army, horses, and grain. Requisitioning units and agricultural overseers often overstepped their official duties, plundering households indiscriminately and harming innocent villagers. Bolshevik excesses encouraged peasants to devote themselves to anti-Communist activities.

OGPU

The Joint State Political Directorate (also translated as the All-Union State Political Administration) was the secret police of the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1934. It was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. The OGPU was theoretically supposed to operate with more restraint than the original Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. The OGPU's powers were greatly increased in 1926, when the Soviet criminal code was amended to include a section on anti-state terrorism. The provisions were vaguely written and very broadly interpreted. Even before then, it set up tribunals to try the most exceptional cases of terrorism, usually without calling any witnesses. In time, the OGPU's powers grew even greater than those of the Cheka. The OGPU was responsible for running the Gulag system. It also became the Soviet government's arm for the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious organisations. The OGPU was also the principal secret police agency responsible for the detection, arrest, and liquidation of anarchists and other dissident left-wing factions in the early Soviet Union.

Kadets

The Kadets, or the 'Constitutional Democrats' / 'Party of the People's Freedom', was a liberal political party created in Russia after the October Manifesto 1905. They were the largest of Russia's liberal groups, and wanted the existing Tsarist autocracy modified into a full constitutional monarchy in which the ruling Tsar would be restricted by an elected assembly. The Kadets believed this structure would solve many of Russia's problems, social and economic, as well as being much needed political reform. Their leader was Paul Miliukov. They were very involved in the Provisional Government in 1917.

Kornilov Affair

The Kornilov Affair was an alleged attempted military coup d'état by the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, General Lavr Kornilov, in August 1917 against the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky. The incident is confusing since Kerensky's role can be construed as 'ambiguous' at best and Kornilov did not personally leave the Eastern Front, but instead sent Krymov and the Cossack Savage Division who stopped on the outskirts of Petrograd. The significance of this fiasco is that Kerensky armed the Petrograd Soviet in anticipation of the attack; they later formed the Military Revolutionary Committee, with these same weapons, and then overthrew Kerensky's Provisional Government i.e. Kerensky had alienated the army through his betrayal of Kornilov and armed his enemy. This directly facilitated the October Revolution.

Lena Goldfields Massacre

The Lena Massacre or Lena Execution refers to the shooting of striking goldfield workers by soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army on 4 April (17 April NS) 1912 in northeast Siberia near the Lena River. 270 dead and 250 wounded. The Duma commission on the Lena massacre was headed by Alexander Kerensky. His colourful reports of the incident greatly promoted widespread knowledge of the event, and also advanced his career. Stalin declared: "The Lena shots broke the ice of silence, and the river of popular resentment is flowing again. The ice has broken. It has started!"

Permanent Revolution

The Marxist idea that the working classes or proletariat around the world should be working together to overthrow the existing status quo in their national states without compromise. Revolutions around the world could feed off one another and unite the development of the proletariat as a dynamic class. Primarily associated with Trotsky who put forward his conception of 'Permanent Revolution' as an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism and how the proletariat can and must, therefore, seize social, economic and political power, leading an alliance with the peasantry. This was rejected as the path for the USSR in the 1920s which chose Socialism in One Country or national communism instead because it was so isolated politically and feared military attack.

Mensheviks

The Mensheviks formed the minority of the Russian Socialial Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) when they split in 1903. Lenin had called for a small tightly knit elite who would lead the revolution on behalf of the people. The majority of Socialist Democrats went with Lenin and were called the Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks wanted to make their movement less elitist than the Bolsheviks in the belief that it would attract the support of the uneducated workers and peasants. How could a movement appeal to the workers and peasants if it was elitist, they argued? One of the Socialist Democrats most associated with the party's early days, Plekhanov, joined the Mensheviks. Its first leader was Julius Martov. The Mensheviks had a far less disciplined approach to the revolution, but it was this more open approach that initially got the Mensheviks far more support than the Bolsheviks, along with such slogans as "eight hours work, eight hours play, eight hours sleep and eight bob pay." The Mensheviks also had a major internal weakness. Their openness allowed Mensheviks to hold differing views to other Mensheviks within the party. Therefore there was open disagreement in the party that was not only tolerated but, in the spirit of democracy, encouraged. If the Mensheviks had one belief, it was the support of pure Marxism as laid down by Karl Marx in his publications. They also made the mistake of working with Kerensky from May 1917 and supporting the war to 'defend the revolution'. In November 1917 they won only 17 seats in the Constituent Assembly = 3.2% of the vote. Menshevism was finally made illegal after the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921.

NKVD

The NKVD was a law enforcement agency of the Soviet Union that directly executed the will of the Communist Party. It was closely associated with the Soviet secret police, which at times was part of the agency, and is known for its political repression during the era of Stalin. The OGPU was reincorporated into the newly created All Union People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in July 1934. The NKVD contained the regular, public police force of the USSR, including traffic police, firefighting, border guards and archives. It is best known for the activities of the Gulag and the Main Directorate for State Security (GUGB), the predecessor of the KGB. The NKVD conducted mass extrajudicial executions, ran the Gulag system of forced labour camps and suppressed underground resistance, and was responsible for mass deportations of entire nationalities and Kulaks to unpopulated regions of the country. It was also tasked with protection of Soviet borders and espionage (which included political assassinations abroad), influencing foreign governments and enforcing Stalinist policy within communist movements in other countries.

October Revolution

The October Revolution, officially known in the Soviet literature as the Great October Socialist Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a seizure of state power by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in the name of the soviets. It took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd on 25 October 1917 (7 November 1917 NS). The revolution was led by the Bolsheviks, who used their influence in the Petrograd Soviet, which Trotsky led, to organise the armed forces. Bolshevik Red Guards, forces under the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, began the takeover of strategic points in the capital (post office, railway stations) and government buildings on 24 October 1917 (6 November NS) The following day, the Winter Palace (the seat of the Provisional Government located in Petrograd, then capital of Russia), was captured. The Communists, as the Bolsheviks later called themselves, ruled Russia as a one party state until 1991.

Red Terror

The Red Terror was a campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression conducted by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in Petrograd and Moscow in 1917. It intensified in the summer of 1918 after the failed assassination attempt on Lenin and with the onset of the Civil War. The term was frequently applied to political repression during the whole period of the Russian Civil War up to 1922. The Cheka conducted the mass repressions. Estimates for the total number of people killed in the Red Terror range from 50,000 to 140,000 to over one and a half million.

SRs

The Socialist Revolutionary Party was founded in 1901/2 . The main policy of the SRs was the confiscation of all land. This would then be distributed among the peasants according to need. The party was also in favour of the establishment of a democratically elected constituent assembly and a maximum 8-hour day for factory workers. The SRs played an important role during the 1905 Revolution & were very active under Victor Chernov's leadership in 1917. The controversial SR Combat Organisation was a secret terrorist group that acted independently of the party assassinating key government officials e.g. Grand Duke Sergei. Although the party officially boycotted the First Duma in 1906, 34 SRs were elected, while 37 were elected to the Second Duma in 1907; the party boycotted both the Third and Fourth Dumas in 1907-1917. The Trudovik Party instead represented the SRs in the dumas e.g. Alexander Kerensky.

Collectivisation

The Soviet Union enforced the collectivisation of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 under Stalin. The policy aimed to consolidate individual landholdings and labour into collective farms: mainly kolkhozy and sovkhozy. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Stalin used this as a way to assert his authority in the countryside, stop grain hoarding and the peasant domination of the economy and eliminate the kulaks. Peasant resistance was widespread because they resented the forced end to their traditional existences; livestock were slaughtered and eaten, rather than being given to the new farms, passive resistance was common in the early years and so sowing was haphazard. It was so brutal that it became known as 'the Second Serfdom' and a devastating man-made famine in 1932 killed 7-10 million. Russia's agricultural output was at the same level in 1939 as in 1928 with a 40 million increased population, but livestock figures were still recovering from the mass slaughter by the peasants. Stalin's agricultural policies broke the peasantry's stranglehold on the economy and they did also facilitate industrialisation, however there was a huge human cost and they were never a great agricultural success. Russia still suffered from famines in later years e.g. 1946 and grain shortages at times of bad harvest e.g. 1962-3.

Stakhanovites

The Stakhanovite movement began during the Second Five Year Plan in 1935 as a new stage of socialist competition with incentives for those who over-fulfilled their quotas. The Stakhanovite movement took its name from Aleksei Stakhanov, who had mined 102 tons of coal in less than 6 hours (14 times his quota) on 31 August 1935. The press, literature and films praised Stakhanov and other "model workers", urging other workers to emulate their heroic examples. The achievements of Stakhanovites served as an argument in favor of increasing work quotas. The Soviet authorities claimed that the Stakhanovite movement had caused a significant increase in labour productivity; during the Second Five Year Plan (1933-1937) it reportedly increased 82%. Opposition to the movement merited the label 'wrecker'.

Treaty of Brest Litovsk

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a peace treaty signed on 3 March 1918 between the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ottoman Empire), that ended Russia's participation in World War I. Aware that the Bolsheviks possessed no financial resources to pay indemnities/reparations, the German government decided to extract its pound of flesh in the form of territorial annexations. The Germans demanded that the Soviets cede the following territories to Germany (and Austria in some cases): Finland, Russian Poland, Estonia, Livonia, Courland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus (and some other territory to the Ottoman Empire). Russia lost huge areas of prime agricultural land, eighty per cent of her coal mines and half her other industries. A follow-up agreement in August committed Russia to pay six billion marks in reparations. It was a very harsh treaty. Trotsky did not want to accept it, but Lenin argued that it had to be signed to allow the Bolsheviks to focus on saving the revolution.

USSR

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was abbreviated to USSR (Russian: СССР) and was often shortened to the Soviet Union. It was set up on 29 December 1922 following the Bolshevik or Reds' success in the Civil War. It was a union that was a confederation of Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralised. The Soviet Union fast emerged as a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital and Russian as its main language.

The Vesenkha

The Vesenkha was launched on December 5, 1917 through a decree of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) and All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Its stated purpose was to "plan for the organisation of the economic life of the country and the financial resources of the government". It was subordinated to the Sovnarkom. It had rights of confiscation and expropriation. The Vesenkha 1917-32 was the supreme organ of the management of the economy, mainly of the industry.

Motor Tractor Stations (MTS)

The machine and tractor station (MTS) or motor tractor station was a state enterprise for ownership and maintenance of agricultural machinery that were used in collective farms. MTSs were introduced in 1928 as a shared resource of scarce agricultural machinery and technical personnel. As the name implies, the MTSs were rural agencies that supplied collective farms with agricultural machinery and people to run it. They were set up in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the collective farms were too weak and disorganized to manage their own equipment. Politically, the new collective farms, into which so many peasants were dragooned, were unreliable. So the MTS also served as a party (and police) stronghold in the countryside.

The Red Corner

The name given to the special corner of a peasant's hut (izba) which housed the family icon and also the name given to the literary/reading corner in Stalinist schools.

Nomenklatura

The new Soviet aristocracy or elite. Essentially the Communist Party only appointed people to key positions of government who were recommended members of their party. In return they expected these people to follow their policies because they owed their positions to the Party. It was a way of securing support for the Communists and yet it also provided incentives for motivated individuals because the nomenklatura had better flats, education, clothes and food. A good example of the corruption of absolute power!

Dizzy with Success 1930

The price of collectivisation was so high that the March 2, 1930 issue of Pravda contained Stalin's article 'Dizzy with Success', in which he called for a temporary halt to the process: "It is a fact that by February 20 of this year 50 percent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivised. That means that by February 20, 1930, we had overfulfilled the five-year plan of collectivisation by more than 100 per cent.... some of our comrades have become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision." After the publication of the article, the pressure for collectivisation temporarily stopped and peasants started leaving collective farms. The number of members of collective farms may have dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivisation was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivised.

Soviet Gigantism

The term describes the efforts by the Soviet Union to industrialise and modernise in a bigger and better way than the west. It can be used when referring to projects like the White Sea Canal, the Moscow Metro & Magnitogorsk. It was a product of the Stalinist state's desire to show that socialism was superior to capitalism.

Opposition

There was no tradition of a legal opposition in Russia. It did not exist 1900-1905 & 1918-1991. Russia has a long history of intolerance towards any form of opposition, which is generally ruthlessly repressed by the army of the secret police. Briefly between 1905-1917 political parties formed and participated in the Duma, but in October 1917 with the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks the flirtation with more democratic practices ceased. When the Constituent Assembly was closed in January 1918 opposition became anybody who opposed the Bolsheviks/Communists.

Duma

There were 4 dumas between 1906-1917. It was a form of parliament, like the House of Commons, but it did not have the right to pass laws only to recommend them to the Tsar and the upper house - the State Council. Since the Tsar saw it as being too radical, because of the number of Kadets and Trudoviks elected to the First Duma, Stolypin was charged with changing the voting laws until a duma the Tsar liked more was created. The Third & Fourth Dumas broadly matched these criteria, but even then the Tsar was reluctant to accept their advice and always treated the duma with contempt e.g. the Progressive Bloc in 1915.

Petrograd Soviet

This council began to form on the evening of 27 February OS in response to the events on the streets of Petrograd. That evening, between 50 and 300 people attended the meeting at the Tauride Palace. A provisional executive committee (Ispolkom), was chosen. Izvestia became the official newspaper of the group. The following day, February 28, representatives were elected from factories and the military joined the soviet. The Petrograd Soviet had almost 3,000 deputies in two weeks, of which the majority were soldiers. The meetings were chaotic, confused and unruly, little more than a stage for speechmakers. The party-based Ispolkom quickly took charge of actual decision-making. The Executive Committee/Ispolkom members came only from political groups, with every socialist party given three seats. This created an intellectual and radical head to the peasant, worker, and soldier-dominated body. The Executive Committee meetings were more intense and almost as disorderly as the public meetings, and were often extremely long. The Petrograd Soviet developed into an alternate source of authority to the Provisional Government under Prince Lvov. They both met at the Tauride Palace across the hall from each other. Only Alexander Kerensky was initially a member of both bodies. This created a situation described as dual power, in which the Petrograd Soviet competed for legitimacy with the Provisional Government until the October Revolution. Moreover, the Soviet undermined the Provisional Government by issuing its own orders, beginning with Order Number 1. Between February and October 1917 the Petrograd Soviet was a very influential, increasingly radical body. It found itself armed by Kerensky on behalf of the the Provisional Government at the end of August, as a result of the Kornilov Affair. These arms would then be used to overthrow that same Provisional Government a few months later. The Bolsheviks seized power in the name of all the soviets which had sprung up across Russia in October 1917 and by that time the Petrograd Soviet's chairman was Trotsky and the Bolsheviks had control there, but not across the country.

Quotas

Under Stalin there was a piece-rate system of payment for work i.e. workers were paid for what they had achieved set against pre-established quotas from Gosplan and other authorities. Quotas or levels were set for everybody even the NKVD. If a worker exceeded their quota (Stakhanovite) others would inevitably be paid less because there were also quotas imposed upon the amount of money available in each setting! Wages were very low in the 1930s and working and living conditions declined too. During the early years of Stalinist industrialisation there was a Quicksand Society i.e. workers moved repeatedly from job to job in an effort to secure the best position because there was so much need for labour. Quotas were raised during the Third Year Plan to impossible levels and passport controls and books recording attendance and absenteeism were enforced more rigorously. This whole excessively bureaucratic system was designed to squeeze the workers to ensure rapid progress was made with industrialisation.

War Communism

War Communism was the name given to the economic system that existed in Russia from 1918 to 1921. War Communism was introduced by Lenin to combat the economic problems brought on by the civil war in Russia. It was a combination of emergency measures and the plan to introduce socialism to the countryside. On June 28th, 1918, a decree was passed that ended all forms of private capitalism. Many large factories were taken over by the state and on November 29th, 1920, any factory/industry that employed over 10 workers was nationalised. War Communism also took control of the distribution of food. The Food Commissariat was set up to carry out this task. All co-operatives were fused together under this Commissariat. War Communism had six principles: 1) Production should be run by the state. Private ownership should be kept to the minimum. Private houses were to be confiscated by the state. 2) State control was to be granted over the labour of every citizen. Once a military army had served its purpose, it would become a labour army. 3) The state should produce everything in its own undertakings. The state tried to control the activities of millions of peasants. 4) Extreme centralisation was introduced. The economic life of the area controlled by the Bolsheviks was put into the hands of just a few organisations. The most important one was the Supreme Economic Council (Vesenkha). This had the right to confiscate and requisition. The speciality of Vesenkha was the management of industry. Over 40 head departments were set up to accomplish this. One head could be responsible for thousands of factories. This frequently resulted in chronic inefficiency. The Commissariat of Transport controlled the railways. The Commissariat of Agriculture controlled what the peasants did. 5) The state attempted to become the soul distributor as well as the sole producer. The Commissariats took what they needed to meet demands. The people were divided into four categories - manual workers in harmful trades, workers who performed hard physical labour, workers in light tasks/housewives and professional people. Food was distributed on a 4:3:2:1 ratio. Though the manual class was the favoured class, it still received little food. Many in the professional class simply starved. On July 20th 1918, the Bolsheviks decided that all surplus food had to be surrendered to the state to feed the Red Army and the city workers. Requisition squads caused huge resentment in the countryside, especially as Lenin had promised "all land to the people" pre-November 1917. It led to a huge famine in 1921 where 5 million died. 6) War Communism attempted to abolish money as a means of exchange. The Bolsheviks wanted to go over to a system of a natural economy in which all transactions were carried out in kind. Effectively, bartering would be introduced. By 1921, the value of the rouble had dropped massively and inflation had markedly increased. The government's revenue raising ability was chronically poor, as it had abolished most taxes. The only tax allowed was the 'Extraordinary Revolutionary Tax', which was targeted at the rich and not the workers. War Communism was an economic disaster. In all areas, the economic strength of Russia fell below the 1914 level. The industrial cities were starved of food despite the introduction of the 4:3:2:1 ratio. A bad harvest could be disastrous for the countryside - and even worse for cities. Malnutrition was common, as was disease. Those in the cities believed that their only hope was to move out to the countryside and grow food for themselves. Between 1916 and 1920, the cities of northern and central Russia lost 33% of their population to the countryside. Under War Communism, the number of those working in the factories and mines dropped by 50%. Large factories became paralysed through lack of fuel and skilled labour. Small factories were in 1920 producing just 43% of their 1913 total. Large factories were producing 18% of their 1913 figure. Coal production was at 27% of its 1913 figure in 1920. With little food to nourish them, it could not be expected that the workers could work effectively. By 1920, the average worker had a productivity rate that was 44% less than the 1913 figure. Even if anything of value could be produced, the ability to move it around Russia was limited. By the end of 1918, Russia's rail system was in chaos. In the countryside, most land was used for the growth of food. Crops such as flax and cotton simply were not grown. Between 1913 and 1920, there was an 87% drop in the number of acres given over to cotton production. Therefore, those factories producing cotton related products were starved of the most basic commodity they needed. The Bolshevik hierarchy could blame a lot of Russia's troubles on the Whites as they controlled the areas, which would have supplied the factories with produce. The Urals provided Petrograd and Tula with coal and iron for their factories. The Urals was completely separated from Bolshevik Russia from the spring of 1918 to November 1919. Oil fields were in the hands of the Whites. Also the Bolshevik's Red Army took up the majority of whatever supplies there were in their fight against the Whites. No foreign country was prepared to trade with the Russia controlled by the Bolsheviks, so foreign trade ceased to exist. Between 1918 and November 1920, the Allies formally blockaded Russia. The harshness of War Communism could be justified whilst the Civil War was going on. When it had finished, there could be no such justification. There were violent rebellions in Tambov and in Siberia. The sailors in Kronstadt mutinied. Lenin faced the very real risk of an uprising of workers and peasants and he needed to show the type of approach to the problem that the tsarist regime was incapable of doing. In February 1921, Lenin had decided to do away with War Communism and replace it with a completely different system - the New Economic Policy.