Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  But d?tente started involving West-European governments as well. In 1966 the French President Charles de Gaulle visited the USSR to promote “d?-tente, entente, and cooperation” and give d?tente a broader content, extended to cultural and human questions. Three years later Chancellor Willy Brandt, previously mayor of West Berlin, engaged West Germany in the Ostpolitik, a policy of opening to the East which led to concrete achievements: in 1970, West Germany concluded two treaties, one with Poland and the other with the USSR, that recognized the current German frontiers, notably the Oder-Neisse border, gave up all claims to the lost lands, and implicitly recognized the existence of East Germany. In 1972, the USSR, the United States, Britain, and France signed an agreement on Berlin. These treaties paved the way to the official admission of the two Germanies to the United Nations in 1973.

  D?tente was also a truly multilateral process: In November 1972, thirty-five European countries, the United States, and Canada opened the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). In August 1975, the Helsinki Final Act recognized the post-World War II borders and adopted declarations encouraging Western-Eastern trade and cultural exchanges as well as promoting human rights and freedom of movement.

  Despite these successes, d?tente declined and faded in the second half of the seventies. The active support of the USSR to Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World, its repeated violations of the Helsinki Final Act, its intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, the euromissiles question, and the Polish crisis in 1980 all contributed to a revival of the Cold War. See also: ARMS CONTROL; BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; COLD WAR; CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). D?tente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Washington DC: Brookings Institution. Petro, Nicolai N., and Rubinstein, Alvin Z. (1997). Russian Foreign Policy, From Empire to Nation-State. New York: Longman.

  MARIE-PIERRE REY

  DEVELOPED SOCIALISM

  The concept of developed (“mature,” or “real”) socialism emerged in the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the late 1960s, soon after the establishment of Leonid Brezhnev’s regime, which reacted to the public ideology of Nikita Khrushchev’s regime. Almost immediately, it was accepted in all Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe as the leading doctrine. As a matter of fact, each new Soviet regime made considerable changes in the public ideology. With Brezhnev’s demise, the concept of developed socialism was almost immediately discarded. Already in the span of Yuri Andropov’s short regime skeptical attitudes toward the previous regime emerged. The new propaganda focused on social justice. Then, with the start of perestroika, this concept associated with Brezhnev’s stagnation was sent to the dustbin of history.

  Khrushchev, the most eclectic Soviet leader, who tried to combine the goal of developing military might (his son Sergei Khrushchev aptly named a book about his father Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, 2000) with a naive belief in communist ideals, and also with serious liberalization of society. Khrushchev wanted to reach the standard of living associated with communism without deflecting any resources from the defense of the motherland, the sacred cow of all Soviet leaders. It was Khrushchev who in 1961, just a few years before the coup against him, in the new program of the Communist Party, promised that “the next generations of the Soviet people will live under communism.”

  Khrushchev tried to implement this belief through his policy, which had some disastrous consequences. He castigated the personal ownership of cars and private country houses, as well as encouraged collective transportation and vacations. He initiated people’s teams for keeping order as an attempt to diminish the role of the professional police, an idea that goes back to Vladimir Lenin’s utopian vision of socialist society in “State and Revolution,” written before the October revolution. Moved by the same motivation, Khrushchev promoted amateur theaters with the same ridiculous fervor. More serious consequences rose from Khrushchev’s economic policy. He promised a radical jump forward in the production of food by the collective farms. However, he put a limit on the production of milk and meat from private plots. While Khrushchev’s program in collective agriculture failed, the curtailment of food production in

  DEVELOPED SOCIALISM

  the private sector led to big lines for food products in the state and even in the so-called free collective market.

  The leadership who ousted Khrushchev as a demagogue and adventurist (or voluntarist as he was cautiously and indirectly named in the press) who endangered the system searched for more realistic mass propaganda. Preoccupied with military competition with the United States, Brezhnev and his colleagues did not want to spread the illusion that paradise was right around the corner. Such illusions, it was thought, would generate discontent among the people in the near future.

  With a sober stance, the leadership looked for an ideological concept that would preserve the communist phraseology (“the building of the material-technological basis of communism”), but instead of waiting for the future, would proclaim that Soviet life could be enjoyed right now. This was the message of developed socialism, which commanded great fanfare in the early 1970s. The leadership’s appeal to the masses to be “satisfied”-a famous term, often used by Brezhnev-with life at present seemed all the more reasonable because they were indeed “deeply satisfied” with the military parity with the West in the 1970s, an achievement that had been dreamed about by all the Russian leaders since Peter the Great.

  The authors of the concept described the current Soviet society as having already accomplished many of the goals of socialism in the first stage of communism. They depicted Soviet society as based on highly developed productive forces, as a society that was close to eliminating class and ethnic distinctions, and as a new type of human community and socialist personality. Soviet ideologues also talked about the highly developed socialist democracy, and the scientific character of the political management. Most postulates of the concept had few links to reality. The pathetic statements about the technological revolution in the Soviet economy looked absurd against the backdrop of the growing economic gap between the Soviet and Western economies, particularly in the production of civil goods. The thesis about the flourishing of socialist democracy was ridiculous considering the system’s harsh persecution of dissidents.

  There was, however, one element of the new thinking-that is, the mode of life, or obraz zhizni- that held a special place in the concept of developed socialism. The “Soviet mode of life” was closer to reality than most other dogmas. While refusing to claim that Soviet society can in the foreseeable future surpass the level of material consumption and productivity in the West (which had been promised by Khrushchev) the sophisticated Soviet ideologues focused on other elements of everyday life. They used the concept of “quality of life” with its focus on the subjective evaluation of different components of life that had just emerged in the West in the early 1970s.

  While in some ways they followed the spirit of Western studies on the quality of life, the Soviet ideologues avoided the comparison of the material consumption in the USSR and the West. As the most important features of Soviet life, they concentrated on the free education and health care system (the quality of which was quite high by international standards) as well as the high level of science and culture, the relatively low social inequality, the importance of cultural activities in the lives of ordinary people, the big network of institutions for children, the vacations in resort institutions accessible to everybody, full employment, the absence of homeless people, and the impossibility of evicting people from their apartments. The Soviet ideologues also described, and not without reason for the significant part of the Soviet population, the Soviet people as patriots, internationalists, collectivists, and optimists. They depicted life in the West as full of various conflicts and deeply immoral. They also ascribed to the Soviet people mostly fictional
properties, such as high labor discipline, temperance, active participation in the management of their factories and offices, and a motivation to work that was not driven by material incentives, but by the general willingness to make their country strong and prosperous.

  Despite the permanent grumbling about the lines for consumer goods and services, the majority of the Soviet people accepted the propaganda about the superiority of the Soviet style of life compared to capitalist society. In a national survey, which the author conducted in 1976, the majority of the respondents evaluated the quality of life in the USSR as “four” on a five-point scale; they graded life in the USA as “three,” and in the German Democratic Republic as “five.”

  The concept of developed socialism, which underpinned the anti-Western propaganda, was used also as a tool against “the Great Chinese Proletarian Revolution.” Both countries since the late 1960s struggled for the leadership of the international communist movement as well as in the third world in the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet ideo391

  DEZHNEV, SEMEN IVANOVICH

  logues denounced the Maoist utopian leftist radicalism of the “Great Chinese Cultural Revolution,” opposing it to Soviet “real socialism.”

  The concept of developed socialism was concocted as an ideological trick by the Soviet propagandists for the justification of the new regime. It was a laughing stock for liberal intellectuals, and the subject of political jokes from the moment of its birth. However, ironically, it became a monument to the period that is considered by many Russians as the happiest time of their lives. In any case, ten years after the demise of the USSR, one-half to two-thirds of the Russians, according to various polls, believed that life during Brezhnev’s times was much better than in any other period of Russian history in the twentieth century, and definitely better than in post-Soviet Russia. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; SOCIALISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kelley, Donald. (1986). The Politics of Developed Socialism. New York: Greenwood Press. Shlapentokh, Vladimir. (1988). The Soviet Ideologies in the Period of Glasnost. New York: Praeger.

  VLADIMIR E. SHLAPENTOKH

  DEZHNEV, SEMEN IVANOVICH

  (c. 1605-1673), Cossack; explorer of northeastern Siberia.

  Originally from the Pomor region, on the North Dvina, Semen Dezhnev entered Siberian service with the Cossacks in 1630. His expeditions, particularly that of 1648-1649, were an important part of the great push eastward that Russia made into Siberia during the seventeenth century.

  Based in Yakutsk, Dezhnev helped to explore and survey the Alazeya and Kolyma rivers in northeastern Siberia. In 1647 he set out to find and map the Anadyr River, but this attempt proved abortive. Dezhnev began again in June 1648, at the head of ninety men. From Srednekolymsk, Dezh-nev’s party sailed north, then, upon reaching the Arctic Ocean, turned east, along Russia’s northern coast.

  During the next one hundred days, Dezhnev’s party lost six of seven boats. The surviving vessel sailed two thousand miles, rounding the Chukotsk Peninsula, Asia’s northeastern tip. Thus Dezhnev and his men became, albeit unwittingly, the first Europeans to navigate what later came to be known as the Bering Strait. Dezhnev also discovered the Diomede Islands. Dezhnev had sailed between Asia and North America, but not for another century, with Bering’s Great Northern Expedition, would it be proven conclusively that the two continents were not physically linked.

  In October 1648, Dezhnev’s boat was cast ashore on Russia’s Pacific coast, well south of the Anadyr. Before winter set in, the party marched north, locating the river’s mouth. Sixteen men, Dezhnev included, survived the winter encampment. In the spring of 1649, they traveled upriver and founded the outpost of Anadyrsk. In 1650 and 1651, Dezhnev consolidated his control over the river basin, aided by Mikhail Stadukhin and Se-myon Motora, who had reached the eastern Anadyr overland. Dezhnev was relieved in 1659 and returned to Yakutsk in 1662. In 1672, shortly before his death, he returned to Moscow. See also: ALASKA; BERING, VITUS JONASSEN; SIBERIA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1993). Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.

  JOHN MCCANNON

  DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH

  (1872-1929), famed Russian impresario.

  Sergei Pavlovich Diagilev founded and led the Ballets Russes, a touring ballet company that attained an unprecedented level of fame throughout Europe and the Americas from 1909 until 1929. Diagilev, his company, and his collaborators introduced Russian dancers, choreographers, painters, composers, and musicians to Western audiences that previously had scant knowledge of them. His Ballets Russes single-handedly established the cen-trality of dance to the artistic culture of the early twentieth century.

  A former law student, whose own attempts at musical composition proved a failure, Diagilev broDIALECTICAL MATERIALISM kered the collaborations of some of his century’s most celebrated creative artists, Russian and non-Russian (Stravinsky, Balanchine, Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Chaliapin, as well as Debussy, Ravel, Picasso, and Matisse). A series of art exhibits organized in Russian in 1897 marked the beginning of Diagilev’s career as an impresario. Those led to the founding of an ambitious art journal, Mir iskusstva (The World of Art, 1898-1904). As Diagilev’s attentions shifted to Western Europe, the nucleus of Diagilev’s World of Art group remained with him. His first European export was an exhibition of Russian paintings in Paris in 1906. A series of concerts of Russian music followed the next year, and in 1908 Diagilev brought Russian opera to Paris. With designers Alexandre Benois and L?on Bakst, the choreographer Michel Fokine, and dancers of such renown as Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, Di-agilev began to introduce European audiences to Russian ballet in 1909.

  The early Ballets Russes repertory included overwrought Orientalist fantasy ballets such as Sch?h?razade (1910), investigations of the antique (L’Apr?s-midi d’un Faune, 1912), and folkloric representations of Russian and Slavic culture (The Firebird, 1910). The company also introduced such masterworks as Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1911, with choreography by Fokine) and Rite of Spring (1913, choreographed by Nijinsky). Whatever the lasting value of these early collaborations (the original choreography of many of them has been lost), the Diagilev ballets were emblematic of Russian Silver Age culture in their synaesthesia (combining music, dance, and d?cors) and their engagement with the West.

  Diagilev’s company toured Europe and the Americas for two decades, until the impresario’s death in 1929. And while many of Diagilev’s original, Russian collaborators broke away from his organization in the years following World War I, Diagilev’s troupe became a more cosmopolitan enterprise and featured the work of a number of important French painters and composers in those years. Nonetheless, Diagilev continued to seek out ?migr? Soviet artists; the final years of his enterprise were crowned by the choreography of George Balanchine, then an unknown dancer and promising choreographer.

  Diagilev had long suffered from diabetes and died in Venice in 1929. His influence continued to be felt in the ballets presented, the companies established, and the new popularity of dance in the twentieth century. The relatively short, one-act work, typically choreographed to extant symphonic music, and the new prominence of the male dancer speak to Diagilev’s influence. An astonishing number of dance companies established around the world in the twentieth century owe their existence to Diagilev’s model; many of them boast a direct lineage. See also: BALLET; SILVER AGE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Buckle, Richard. (1979). Diaghilev. New York: Atheneum. Garafola, Lynn. (1989). Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press.

  TIM SCHOLL

  DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

  A concept in Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology.

  Dialectical materialism was the underlying approach to the interpretation of history and society in Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. According to G
eorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in the history of philosophy, the clash of contradictory ideas has generated constant movement toward higher levels. Karl Marx poured new content into the dialectic with his materialist interpretation of history, which asserted that the development of the forces of production was the source of the conflicts or contradictions that would demolish each stage of society and lead to its replacement with a higher stage. Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, systematized the three laws of the dialectic that were to figure prominently in the official Soviet ideology: (a) the transformation of quantity into quality; (b) the unity of opposites; and (c) the negation of the negation. According to the first of those laws, within any stage of development of society, changes accumulate gradually, until further change cannot be accommodated within the framework of that stage and must proceed by a leap of revolutionary transformation, like that from feudal society to capitalism. The second law signifies that within any stage, mutually antagonistic forces are built into to the character of the system; for instance, the capitalists and the proletariat are locked in a relationship of struggle, but as long as capitalism survives, the existence of each of those classes presumes the existence of the other. The third law of the dialectic supposedly reflects the reality

  DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

  that any new stage of society (i.e., capitalism) has replaced or negated a previous stage, but will itself eventually be replaced by still another stage of development (i.e., communism).

  In Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology under successive political leaders, though the insistence on the universal validity of the laws of the dialectic became highly dogmatic, the application of those laws was continually adapted, depending on the political objectives and calculations of the top leaders. Most crucial is the example of Josef Stalin, who insisted that the dialectic took the form of destructive struggle within capitalist societies, but tried to exempt Soviet socialism from the harshness of such internal conflict by arguing that in socialism, the conscious planning and control of change eliminated fundamental inconsistency between the material base and the political-administrative superstructure. Thus in socialism the interplay of nonantagonistic contradictions could open the way to gradual leaps of relatively painless qualitative transformation. Mikhail Gorbachev later repudiated that reasoning as having been the philosophical rationale for evading necessary reforms in political and administrative structures in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1980s. See also: HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MARXISM