by James Millar
Nuclear weapons changed everything. The Kremlin, under Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, recognized that nuclear war could wipe out communist as well as noncommunist countries. Whereas Lenin and Stalin derided “bourgeois pacifists” in the West, the Soviet government under Khrushchev believed it must avoid nuclear war at all costs. Sobered by the 1962 Cuban missile confrontation, Khrushchev’s regime
ARMS CONTROL
admonished the Chinese Communists in 1963: “The atomic bomb does not respect the class principle.”
Nuclear weapons also gave Moscow confidence that it could deter an attack. The USSR tested a nuclear bomb in 1953, and a thermonuclear device in 1953. By 1954, the Kremlin had planes capable of delivering Soviet bombs to America. In 1957 the USSR tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), leading Khrushchev to claim the Soviet factories were producing ICBMs “like sausages.” He tried to exploit the apparent Soviet lead in missiles to extract Western concessions in Germany.
By 1962, increased production in the United States had reversed the so-called missile gap. By 1972 the United States had also produced a warhead gap, as it placed multiple warheads on ICBMs and submarine missiles. Still, by 1972 each nuclear superpower had overkill capability: more than enough weapons to absorb a first-strike and still destroy the attacker. Having ousted Khrushchev in 1964, Soviet Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT I) with President Richard Nixon in 1972 and a second accord (SALT II) with President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Each treaty essentially sought to freeze the Soviet-U.S. competition in strategic weapons-meaning weapons that could reach the other country. SALT I was ratified by both sides, but SALT II was not. The United States balked because the treaty enshrined some Soviet advantages in “heavy” missiles and because the USSR had just invaded Afghanistan.
The 1972 accords included severe limits on an-tiballistic missile (ABM) defenses. Both Moscow and Washington recognized that each was hostage to the other’s restraint. Displeased by this situation, President Ronald Reagan sponsored a Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI, also called Star Wars) research program meant to give the United States a shield against incoming missiles. If the United States had such a shield, however, this would weaken the deterrent value of Soviet armaments. The Soviets protested Reagan’s program, but at the same time it secretly tried to expand the small ABM system it was allowed by the 1972 treaty.
NEW TIMES, NEW THINKING
When Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as top Soviet leader in 1985, he advocated “new thinking” premised on the need for mutual security in an interdependent world. Between the two great powers, he said, security could only be “mutual.” Gorbachev said Soviet policy should proceed not from a class perspective, but from an “all-human” one.
Gorbachev’s commitments to arms control were less tactical and more strategic than his predecessors-more dedicated to balanced solutions that accommodated the interests of both sides of the debate. In contrast, Khrushchev often portrayed his “peaceful coexistence” policy as a tool in the struggle to defeat capitalist imperialism, and Brezhnev demanded “coequal security” with the United States. Gorbachev, on the other hand, initiated or agreed to a series of moves to slow or reverse the arms competition: • a unilateral moratorium on underground nuclear testing from 1985 to 1987, with acceptance of U.S. scientists and seismic equipment near Soviet nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan • agreement in 1987 to the INF treaty, requiring the USSR to remove more warheads and to destroy more intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles than the United States (after which Reagan reiterated “veriat no proveriat”) • opening to U.S. visitors in September 1987 a partially completed Soviet radar station that, had it become operational, would probably have violated the 1972 limitations on ABM defenses • a pledge in December 1988 to cut unilaterally Soviet armed forces by 500,000 men, 10,000 tanks, and 800 aircraft • withdrawing Soviet forces from Afghanistan by February 15, 1989 • supporting arrangements to end regional conflicts in Cambodia, southern Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East • acceptance in 1990 of a Final Settlement with Respect to Germany setting 1994 as the deadline for Soviet troop withdrawal from Germany • in 1990 a Soviet-U.S. agreement to reduce their chemical weapons stocks to no more than 5,000 tons each.
All members of NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization signed the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty in 1990. It limited each alliance to 20,000 battle tanks and artillery pieces, 30,000 armored combat vehicles, 6,800 combat aircraft, and 2,000 attack helicopters. In 1991, however, members of the Warsaw Pact agreed to abolish their alliance. Soon, Soviet troops withdrew from Poland,
ARMS CONTROL
U.S. president Richard Nixon and Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT I Treaty in Moscow, 1972. © WALLY MCNAMEE/CORBIS Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Trying to compensate for unexpected weaknesses, the USSR tried to reclassify some military units to exempt them from the CFE limits. NATO objected, but Soviet power was shrinking and minor exemptions such as these mattered little.
In 1991 Gorbachev and U.S. president George Herbert Walker Bush signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). It obliged Washington and Moscow within seven years to cut their forces by more than one-third to sixteen hundred strategic delivery vehicles (ICBMs, submarine missiles, heavy bombers) and six thousand warheads. When the USSR dissolved later that year, the Russian Federation (RF) took the Soviet Union’s place in START and other arms control regimes. START I became legally binding in 1994, and each party began steps to meet the ceilings set for seven years hence, in 2001.
In September 1991, after an attempted coup against Gorbachev in the previous August, President Bush announced the unilateral elimination of some 24,000 U.S. nuclear warheads and asked the USSR to respond in kind. Gorbachev announced unilateral cuts in Soviet weapons that matched or exceeded the U.S. initiative. He also took Soviet strategic bombers off alert, announced the deac-tivization of 503 ICBMs covered by START, and made preparations to remove all short-range nuclear weapons from Soviet ships, submarines, and land-based naval aircraft.
POST-SOVIET COMPLICATIONS
In November 1990 the U.S. Senate had voted $500 million of the Pentagon budget to help the USSR dismantle its nuclear weapons. In December 1991, however, the USSR ceased to exist. Its treaty rights and duties were then inherited by the Russian Federation (RF). However, Soviet-era weapons remained not just in Russia but also in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. These three governments agreed, however, to return the nuclear warheads to Russia. The United States helped fund and reward disarmament in all four republics.
President Bush and RF President Boris Yeltsin in 1993 signed another treaty, START II, requiring each side to cut its arsenal by 2003 to no more than 3,500 strategic nuclear warheads. The parties also agreed that ICBMs could have only one warhead each, and that no more than half the allowed warheads could be deployed on submarines. START II was approved by the U.S. Senate in 1996, but
ARTEK
the RF legislature ratified it only on condition that the United States stand by the ABM treaty. As a results, START II never became law. Confronted by the expansion of NATO eastward and by deteriorating Russian conventional forces, Russian military doctrine changed in the mid-1990s to allow Moscow “first use of nuclear arms” even against a conventional attack.
Ignoring RF objections, NATO invited three former Soviet allies to join NATO in 1999 and three more in 2002, plus three former Soviet republics, plus Slovenia. The Western governments argued that this expansion was aimed at promoting democracy and posed no threat to Russia. The RF received a consultative voice in NATO. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush found themselves aligned against terrorism. Putin focused on improving Russia’s ties with the West and said little about NATO.
The RF and U.S. presidents signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SO
RT) in May 2002. Bush wanted to reduce U.S. strategic weapons to the level needed for a “credible deterrent,” but preferred to do so without a binding treaty. Putin also wanted to cut these forces but demanded a formal contract. Bush agreed to sign a treaty, but it was just three pages long, with extremely flexible commitments. START I, by contrast, ran to more than seven hundred pages.
SORT required each side to reduce its operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade, with a target date of December 31, 2012. At the insistence of the United States, the warheads did not have to be destroyed and could be stored for possible reassembly. Nor did SORT ban multiple war-heads-an option that had been left open because START II had never become law. SORT established no verification procedures, but could piggyback on the START I verification regime until December 2009, when the START inspection system would shut down. Putin signed SORT even though Moscow objected to Bush’s decision, announced in 2001, to abrogate the ABM treaty. Bush wanted to build a national defense system, and Putin could not stop him. See also: COLD WAR; REYKJAVIK SUMMIT; STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES; STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berman, Harold J., and Maggs, Peter B. (1967). Disarmament Inspection and Soviet Law. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana. Bloomfield, Lincoln P., et al. (1966). Khrushchev and the Arms Race: Soviet Interests in Arms Control and Disar-mamen The Soviet Union and Disarmament,1954-1964. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. Clemens, Walter C., Jr. (1968). The Arms Race and Sino-Soviet Relations. Stanford, CA: The Hoover Institution. Clemens, Walter C., Jr. (1973). The Superpowers and Arms Control: From Cold War to Interdependence. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Dallin, Alexander. (1965). The Soviet Union and Disarmament. New York: Praeger. Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Kolkowicz, Roman. (1970). The Soviet Union and Arms Control: A Superpower Dilemma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spanier, John W., and Nogee, Joseph L. (1962). The Politics of Disarmament: A Study in Soviet-American Gamesmanship. New York: Praeger.
WALTER C. CLEMENS JR.
ARTEK
The first, largest, and most prestigious Soviet Young Pioneer camp, Artek began life in 1925 as a children’s sanatorium, created on the Black Sea’s Crimean shore near Suuk-Su on the initiative of Old Bolshevik Zinovy Soloviev, vice-commissar for public health. Most of the early campers came for medical treatment. Soon, however, a trip to Artek became a reward for Pioneers who played an exemplary role in various Stalinist campaigns. In 1930 the camp became a year-round facility; in 1936 the government gave it the buildings of a nearby tsarist-era sanatorium. During World War II, the camp was evacuated to the Altai. In 1952 Artek instituted an international session each summer, in which children from socialist countries, as well as “democratic children’s movements” elsewhere, mingled with Soviet campers. In 1958, during Khrushchev’s campaign to rationalize the bureaucracy, Artek was transferred from the health ministry to the Komsomol and officially became a school of Pioneering. The next year, architects and
ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND
engineers began redesigning the camp, replacing the old buildings with prefabricated structures based on an innovative combinatory system. The largest resort complex ever built exclusively for children, this New Artek, nearly the size of New York City’s Central Park and with a staff of about 3,000, hosted tens of thousands of children annually. It was a workshop for teachers and adult Pioneer leaders, a training ground for the country’s future elite, and a font of propaganda about the USSR’s solicitous-ness for children. After 1991, Artek, now in Ukraine, became a private facility. See also: COMMUNIST YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Thorez, Paul. (1991). Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves, tr. Nancy Cadet. New York: Autono-media. Weaver, Kitty. (1981). Russia’s Future: The Communist Education of Soviet Youth. New York: Praeger.
JONATHAN D. WALLACE
ARTICLE 6 OF 1977 CONSTITUTION
Article 6 of the 1977 Brezhnev Constitution established the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the sole legitimate political party in the country. The Party was declared to be the “leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations,” and it imparted a “planned, systematic, and theoretically substantiated character” to the struggle for the victory of communism.
As Gorbachev’s reforms of glasnost, pere-stroika, and demokratizatsiya unfolded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest groups became increasing active, and proto-political parties began to organize. Pressures built to revoke Article 6. Bowing to these pressures and with Gorbachev’s acquiescence, the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies voted in February 1990 to amend Article 6 to remove the reference to the Party’s “leading role” and prohibitions against forming competing parties. The amended Article 6 read: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union [and] other political parties, as well as trade union, youth, and other public organizations and mass movements, participate in shaping the policies of the Soviet state and in running state and public affairs through their representatives elected to the soviets of people’s deputies and in other ways.” Article 7 was also amended to specify that all parties must operate according to the law, while Article 51 was altered to insure all citizens the right to unite in political parties and public organizations.
Within months of the Congress’s action amending Article 6, fledgling political parties began to register themselves. Within one year, more than one hundred political parties had gained official recognition. The proliferation of political parties itself became problematic as reformers sought to establish stable democratic governing institutions and voters were presented with a bewildering array of choices of parties and candidates in national, regional, and local elections. See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1977; DEMOCRATIZATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sakwa, Richard. (2001). “Parties and Organised Interests.” In Developments in Russian Politics 5, eds. Stephen White, Alex Pravda, and Avi Gitelman. Bas-ingstoke, UK: Palgrave. White, Stephen. (2000). Russia’s New Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
GORDON B. SMITH
ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND
Assembly of the Land is the usual translation of the Russian Zemsky sobor, a nineteenth-century term for a proto-parliamentary institution that was summoned irregularly between 1564 and 1653. One of the problems of studying the Assembly of the Land is defining it. The contemporary definition was sobor, which means “assembly” and could refer to any group of people anywhere, such as a church council or even an assembly of military people. Loosely defined, sobor could include almost any street-corner gathering in Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it will be defined more strictly here as an assemblage called by the tsar and having both an upper and a lower chamber.
Some Soviet scholars, such as Lev Cherepnin, advocated the loose definition of sobor, by which he discussed fifty-seven assemblies between 1549 and 1683, thereby supporting the claim that Muscovy
ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND
was an “estate-representative monarchy” not much different from contemporary central and western European states.
The great Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky initiated the view that the Assembly of the Land should be seen in terms of a sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century reality. In the former period the Assembly of the Land was definitely a consultative body called by the tsar when he needed advice. Delegates were rounded up from men who happened to be in Moscow for some reason, such as the start of a military campaign. After the collapse of the country in the Time of Troubles, the Assembly of the Land retained its former advisory functions, but delegates (especially to the lower chamber) sometimes were directly elected to voice the concerns of their constituents.
The earliest ancestor of the Assembly o
f the Land was an assemblage (sobor) of military figures convoked on the eve of Moscow’s invasion of Novgorod in 1471. The purpose was presumably to advise Grand Prince Ivan III about tactics for the campaign. No one claims that this was a real Assembly of the Land, but it was a sobor and had military linkages, as did many of the later real Assemblies of the Land.
Advice was one of the major functions of the Assembly of the Land. This role became critical after the abolition of the feeding system of provincial administration in 1556. The feeding system’s governors (namestniki, kormlenshchiki) served on rotation in the provinces for terms of three years. While in the provinces, they represented Moscow in matters such as tax collection and the holding of trials. While in the countryside “feeding,” these officials were expected to skim enough off from their receipts to support them when they returned to Moscow. When they were not on duty in the provinces, they were in the capital Moscow and could be summoned by the tsar and his officials to gain relatively fresh information about the condition of the provinces: for instance, whether the country could afford to go to war, whether the army was willing to fight, and so forth. With the abolition of the feeding system, this source of information was lost. Thus it is not accidental that in 1566 (June 25-July 5), during the period of the Livonian War (1558-1583) when the fighting had begun to go badly for the Muscovites, the government rounded up and sought the advice of people who happened to be in Moscow. They were grouped into two chambers: The upper chamber typically consisted of members of the upper service class (the Moscow military elite cavalrymen) and the top members of the church, while the lower chamber consisted of members of the middle service class (the provincial cavalry) and the townsmen. The government presumed that these people understood the fundamentals of the country: whether sufficient wealth and income existed to continue the war and whether the cavalry was able to continue fighting.
