by James Millar
Unfortunately for the conspirators, not all those officers and troops expected to participate in the revolt actually gathered. Trubetskoy seemed to lose nerve and did not lead the mutineers. About three thousand soldiers were lined up in combat readiness on the Senate Square with thirty officers as their leaders. The nearest streets were crowded with people. The troops loyal to Nicholas surrounded the square. For several hours the troops stood opposite each other. A few attempts to persuade the soldiers to return to their barracks were made, and General Governor Miloradovich was fatally wounded by retired lieutenant Pavel Kakhovsky. At last Nicholas gave an order to open fire, and the revolt was suppressed.
Despite the defeat in the capital, and despite Pes-tel’s arrest on December 13, the southern conspirators, including the members of the United Slavs, decided to act. Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin supervised the revolt. On December 29 the conspirators managed to persuade soldiers of the Chernigov regiment to start out for the capital. On January 3, 1826, the government troops stopped the mutineers and defeated them.
A special investigation committee was created to determine the circumstances of the conspiracy. The High Criminal Court condemned to death five Decembrists: Pestel, Ryleyev, Muraviev-Apostol, Kakhovsky, and Bestuzhev-Ryumin. They were hanged in St. Petersburg on July 13, 1826. Thirty-one officers were sentenced to lifelong hard labor. The other officers and soldiers were sentenced to different terms of hard labor, disciplinary battalions, and exile. By the amnesty declared in 1856 after Alexander II’s accession, Decembrists were allowed to reside in the central part of Russia and regained their nobility privileges. See also: FREEMASONRY; PANSLAVISM; SLAVOPHILES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mazour, Anatol. (1967). The First Russian Revolution, 1825: The Decembrist Movement, Its Origins, Development, and Significance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Raeff, Marc, ed. (1966). The Decembrist Movement. Engle-wood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1976). A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saunders, David. (1992). Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801-1881. London: Longman.
ELENA ZEMSKOVA
DECREE ON LAND
Upon seizing power from the Provisional Government in October 1917, the Bolsheviks immediately issued two decrees. The first decree served to withdraw Russia from World War I. The second decree issued by the new Bolshevik regime was entitled “On Land.” The decree abolished property rights of landlords and provided for the confiscation of estates with no compensation. More generally, the Decree on Land abolished private ownership of land and introduced the nationalization of land. Under the terms of the decree, about 150 million hectares of arable land, pasture land, and forest land were confiscated and distributed to 25 million communal households. The October 1917 land decree was followed by legislation in January 1918 that forbade the selling, renting, or mortgaging of land. Nationalized land became the possession of “all the people” and could be used only by those who cultivated it. Although all land was nationalized, individuals or families could obtain allotments of land for small-scale agricultural activities, assuming that they themselves used the land and did not employ hired labor. These land plots included collecDEFECTORS, SOVIET ERA tive garden plots, private plots, and dacha plots, the size of which was restricted by local norms.
The prohibition on leasing land remained until March 1990, when a USSR law on land came into effect. Legal restrictions on private ownership of land remained in effect until December 1990 when a law was passed in the RSFSR that permitted the ownership of land, subject to certain constraints. See also: BOLSHEVISM; OCTOBER REVOLUTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Danilov, Viktor. P. (1988). Rural Russia Under the New Regime. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Keep, John L. H. (1976). The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization. New York: Norton. Medvedev, Zhores A. (1987). Soviet Agriculture. New York: Norton. Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
STEPHEN K. WEGREN
necessary to head off such hazing, contributes significantly to the widespread nature of these abuses. The general lack of resources available to the Russian military in the 1990s, including the basic means of life, such as food, have also contributed to erosion of military morale, which many observers say has contributed to the high level of atrocities committed by Russian forces in the two campaigns in Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996, and from 1999 to the present. Lieven sees dedovshchina as a symbiosis between tyranny and anarchy in which rules and restraints are crippled “leaving only a veneer of autocratic but in fact powerless authority over a pit of chaos, corruption, and a host of private tyrannies.” See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lieven, Anatol. (1999). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weiler, Jonathan. (1999). “Human Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Progress or Regression?” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
JONATHAN WEILER
DEDOVSHCHINA
A term used for “hazing” in the Russian military from the Russian word for grandfather.
This set of practices, a long-standing feature of Soviet army life, appears to have accelerated dramatically in the 1990s. Observers note that “hazing” is itself a problematic translation, because it fails to grasp the severity of the systematic violence, humiliation, and torture visited upon new conscripts by their elders. Official estimates place the number of conscripts murdered at the hands of their comrades-in-arms at perhaps a thousand per year. Independent organizations, including the well-known advocacy group for military conscripts, Soldiers’ Mothers, estimates that as many as three to four thousand conscripts are murdered each year by other soldiers and believes that a large number die as a result of the collective practices known as dedovshchina. The problem has also contributed significantly to the very high rate of suicide evident in the Russian armed forces. Anatol Lieven argues that nothing has done more to destroy morale and cohesion than the problem of de-dovshchina. The lack of an effective system of non-commissioned officers, capable of providing the disciplinary structure and rule-enforcement
DEFECTORS, SOVIET ERA
Defectors (perebezhchiki) during the Soviet era were people who left the Soviet Union without permission and in violation of Soviet law. Soviet authorities applied the term defection more broadly than in the West, where a defector is usually defined as an individual who has committed treason by cooperating with a hostile foreign intelligence service. Because Soviet citizens were prohibited by law from leaving the country to settle elsewhere, anyone who sought political asylum in another country was labeled a defector and a traitor. This included scientists, artists, film directors, dancers, writers, musicians, scholars, journalists, and seamen. (The term did not apply to writer Alexander Solzhenit-syn or cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who were forcibly exiled; the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who was brought to the West as part of an exchange; or former KGB general Oleg Kalygin, now residing in the United States, who criticized the KGB publicly but remained a Soviet citizen.)
Among well-known Soviet defectors who fall into the broader category were Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; ballet dancers Rudolph
DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Alexander Godunov; pianist Dmitry Shostakovich; theater director Yuri Lyubimov; and chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoy.
In addition many Soviet defectors betrayed their country by passing on secrets to Western intelligence. Often they wrote books about their experiences. Among the earliest such defectors was NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) officer Walter Krivitsky, who sought asylum in the United States in 1937, wrote the book I was Stalin’s Agent, and died under mysterious circumstances in 1941. Another NKVD officer, Viktor Kravchenko, the author of I Chose Freedom, defected to the United States in 1944
and died in 1966. Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk for Soviet military intelligence (GRU), turned himself over to Canadian authorities in Ottawa, Canada, in 1945. Gouzenko’s revelations about the Soviet spy network in the West, supported by documents he brought with him, helped to spark the Cold War. Intelligence officer Peter Deryabin sought American asylum in Vienna in 1953, later writing several books about his career in the Soviet secret services. In 1954 KGB agents Vladimir and Yevdokia Petrov defected in Australia and later settled in the United States, where they published Empire of Fear in 1956. KGB officer Ana-toly Golitsyn defected to the United States in 1961, reporting that the KGB had placed an agent at the highest levels of American intelligence, but unable to give details to identify the agent. Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer posing as a trade official, defected to Britain in 1971. Alexei Myagkov, a KGB captain serving in Germany, defected to West Berlin in 1974, later writing Inside the KGB: An Expose by an Officer of the Third Directorate. Arkady Shevchenko, a high-ranking Soviet diplomat serving at the United Nations, defected in New York in 1978. In 1985 he published a best-selling book entitled Breaking with Moscow. Stanislav Levchenko, a KGB officer posing as a journalist, defected in Japan in 1979 and now resides in the United States. Ilya Dzhirkvelov, a KGB officer now living in Britain, defected while working under cover for the Soviet news agency TASS in Switzerland in 1980. He later wrote Secret Servant: My Life with the KGB and the Soviet Elite. Among other KGB officers who defected to Britain in more recent years were Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB officer who was working in Iran before he sought asylum in 1982; and Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB colonel who had collaborated secretly with British intelligence since 1974 and escaped to the West in 1985. For Western intelligence services, one challenge was to establish that the Soviet defectors were genuine and were not acting as double agents for the KGB. When Yury Nosenko, a middle-level KGB officer, offered himself to the CIA in Geneva in 1962, a debate ensued over his bona fides that lasted for ten years and seriously impaired CIA operations against the Soviet Union. Another controversial case was that of Alexander Orlov, an agent of the Soviet NKVD, who defected to Spain in 1938 and ended up in the United States. Orlov, whose book The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes created a sensation when it appeared in 1953, passed on information to the CIA and the FBI, but some historians have claimed that he remained loyal to the Soviets. When high-ranking KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko defected to the United States in 1985, it was an enormous blow to the KGB, because he passed on details of KGB secret agents and operations to the CIA. But when Yurchenko apparently became unhappy with his treatment by the CIA and, after a few months, slipped away and re-defected to the Soviet Union, the case was highly embarrassing to American authorities. See also: COLD WAR; IMMIGRATION AND EMIGRATION; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrew, Christopher, and Gordievsky, Oleg. (1990). KGB. The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. London: Hodder and Stroughton. Krasnov, Vladislav. (1985). Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.
AMY KNIGHT
DEMOCRATIC PARTY
The Democratic Party of Russia (DPR) since its founding in 1990 has changed its face radically at least three times. It was created by politicians, including radical anticommunists as well as “communists with a human face,” as a counterbalance to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The first split happened as early as the constituent assembly, and a number of well-known politicians left the party, unhappy with the selection of Nikolai Travkin, leader of the CPSU Democratic platform, as sole chair. In the 1993 elections, the DPR, whose list was headed by Travkin, film director Stanislav Govorukhin, and academicianDEMOCRATIC RUSSIA economist Oleg Bogomolov, received 3.0 million votes (5.5%, eighth place) and fourteen seats in the Duma. The second split happened in 1994, when Travkin entered the government; the majority of the fraction, charging him with compromise, elected a new leader, economist Sergei Glaziev, who had left Boris Yeltsin’s administration in 1993. The DPR changed from “Travkin’s party” into “the party of Glaziev-Govorukhin.” The DPR did not participate independently in the 1995 elections. Its leaders joined three ballots: Glaziev was third on the KRO list, Govorukhin headed the Stanislav Gov-orukhin Bloc, and Bogomolov was third on the “Social-Democrat” list. None of the three lists crossed the five-percent barrier. In 1996, with the departure first of Glaziev from the DPR (via the Congress of Russian Communities to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or KPRF), then Gov-orukhin (via the KPRF to Fatherland-All Russia, or OVR), the DPR came to be led by little-known functionaries. In the 1999 elections, the party first became a co-constituent of the bloc “Voice of Russia,” then moved into the bloc “All Russia,” and vanished completely with the formation of OVR.
When, in the fall of 2001, an attempt was made to restore the former popularity of the old brand, and the Novgorod governor Mikhail Prusak was elected leader of the DPR, many viewed this as an endeavor on the part of the Kremlin to create a tame right-centrist party to replace the Union of Right Forces (SPS), which was not sufficiently compliant. Prusak announced at the time that the “The DPR will most likely become a party of the center, with a clear structure in observance of the principle of single management. This will be a national party, whose tasks will include the construction of a democratic civil society, fortification of the government, preservation of its territorial integrity, formation of a middle class, and development of national product.” In 2002, having created forty-nine regional branches with a total of more than 10 million members, the DPR was able to register again as a political party with the Ministry of Justice.
Prusak was not sufficiently dedicated to party matters, and at the 2003 congress the DPR deposed its leader. It was announced that the party would enter federal elections for the first time in ten years but that the position of leader would probably be vacant. See also: POLITICAL PARTY SYSTEM; UNION OF RIGHT FORCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
NIKOLAI PETROV
DEMOCRATIC RUSSIA
The movement Democratic Russia (DR) is a relic of the end of the Soviet epoch, when opposition arose to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only party at the time. Founded in October 1990, it initially united practically all the anticom-munist opposition. Its predecessor was the bloc of candidates “Democratic Russia” in the March 1990 elections for people’s deputies to the RSFSR and local soviets. Numbering up to 205 delegates in congresses from 1990 to 1993, the group “Democratic Russia,” after the introduction of a prohibition against membership in more than one fraction, split into several fractions, two of which-“Democratic Russia” and “Radical Democrats”-composed the DR movement. In the 1991 presidential elections, DR and the parties belonging to it, including the DPR (Democratic Party of Russia), SDPR (Social-Democratic Party of Russia), Peasant Party of Russia, Russian Christian Democratic Movement, and the Republican Party of the Russian Federation, supported Boris Yeltsin, who won for his first term.
After the “victory over the communists,” two tendencies struggled within the movement: One favored turning it into a broad coalition of parties and organizations, the other favored making a single organization of it, allowing collective and individual membership. As a result, parties broke off from DR: first the Democratic Party of Russia, the Constitutional-Democratic Party-Party of People’s Freedom, and the Russian Christian-Democratic Movement (1991), then, in 1992 and 1993, the Social-Democratic Party of the RF, the Republican Party of the RF, the People’s Party of Russia, and the Free Democra
tic Party of Russia. In the 1993 elections, DR was one of four co-constituents of the bloc “Russia’s Choice,” but by the end of
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DEMOCRATIC UNION
1994, most of the members of the movement, entering the Duma on the lists “Russia’s Choice” and “Yabloko,” dissociated themselves from the movement, and its co-chairs, delegates Lev Ponomarev and Gleb Yakunin, left the fraction Russia’s Choice. At the outset of the 1995 campaign, the DR leaders created a federal party, DemRussia, and, alongside the Movement, established a bloc Democratic Russia and Free Trade Unions, which ultimately bowed out of participation in the elections, to the advantage of Russia’s Democratic Choice (DVR) and Yabloko. In 1996 the co-chair of DemRussia, Galina Starovoytova, tried to establish candidacy for the presidential elections; in 1998 she was murdered in St. Petersburg in hazy circumstances.
In 1999 the Movement became one of a number of constituents of the bloc “A Just Cause,” and in May 2001 it dissolved along with other democratic parties, becoming part of the Union of Right Forces (SPS). Up to the moment of its dissolution, according to the party’s president, Sergei Stanke-vich, the party had about six thousand members, including two thousand activists. Never having been a leadership-oriented, monolithic, disciplined structure, DemRussia retains its character in its afterlife. Not all regional branches of the movement and party agreed with the idea of dissolution; from time to time the name DemRussia is mentioned in connection with various pickets and meetings (against the war in Chechnya, concerning anniversaries of the founding of the movement, protection of the White House, and so forth), as well as in connection with routine unification initiatives of the democrats. See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; DEMOCRATIC PARTY; POLITICAL PARTY SYSTEM; UNION OF RIGHT FORCES; YABLOKO
