by James Millar
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kipp, Jacob W. (1996). “The Political Ballet of General Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed: Implications for Russia’s Presidential Elections.” Problems of Post-Communism 43:43-53. Kipp, Jacob W. (1999). “General-Lieutenant Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed: The Man, His Program and Political Prospects in 2000.” Problems of Post-Communism 46:55-63. Lebed, Alexander. (1997). General Alexander Lebed: My Life and My Country. Washington, DC: Regnery Pub. Petrov, Nikolai. (1999). Alexander Lebed in Krasnoyarsk Krai. Moscow: Carnegie Center.
JACOB W. KIPP
LEFORTOVO
Lefortovo is a historic area in the eastern part of Moscow, on the left bank of the Yauzy River, named for the Lefortovsky infantry regiment, commanded by Franc Yakovlevicz Lefort, a comrade of Peter the Great, which was quartered there toward the end of the seventeenth century. In the 1770s and 1780s the soldiers occupied sixteen wooden houses. Nearby were some slaughterhouses and a public courtyard, where in 1880 the Lefortovo military prison was constructed (architect P. N. Kozlov). At the time it was intended for low-ranking personnel convicted of minor infringements. St. Nikolai’s Church was built just above the entrance to the prison. Over the next hundred years several new buildings were added to the prison complex.
In tsarist times Lefortovo was under the jurisdiction of the Main Prison Administration of the Ministry of Justice. After the revolution it became part of the network of prisons run by the Special Department of the Cheka. In the 1920s Lefortovo was under the OGPU (United Main Political Administration). In the 1930s, together with the Lubyanka Internal Prison and the Butyrskoi and Sukhanovskoi prisons, it was under the GUGB (Central Administrative Board of State Security) of the NKVD (People`s Commissioner’s Office for Internal Affairs) of the USSR. Suspects were tortured and shot in the former church of the prison, and tractor motors were run to drown out the awful sounds. With the closing of the Lubyanka Internal Prison in the 1960s, Lefortovo attained its present status as the main prison of the state security apparatus. In October 1993, Alexander Rutskoi and
LEFT OPPOSITION
Roman Khasbulatov, the organizers of the abortive putsch against Boris Yeltsin, were held in the Lefor-tovo detention isolator (solitary confinement) of the Ministry of Safety (MB) of the Russian Federation. In December 1993 and January 1994 the Lefortovo isolator passed from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Safety to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). By the end of 1994 the FSB again created an investigatory administration, and in April 1997, after an eight-month struggle between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB, the isolator was again transferred to FSB jurisdiction.
The three-tier complex of the FSB’s Investigative Administration, unified with the prison, is located adjacent to the Lefortovo isolator. According to the testimony of former inmates, there are fifty cells on each floor of the four-story cellblock. As of 2003 there were about two hundred prisoners in Lefortovo. The exercise area is located on the roof of the prison. Most of the cells are about 10 meters square and hold two inmates; there are also some cells for three, and a few for one. Lefortovo differs from other Russian detention prisons not only in its relatively good conditions but also for its austere regime. The inmates held here have been arrested on matters that concern the FSB, such as espionage, serious economic offenses, and terrorism, rather than ordinary crimes. See also: GULAG; LUBYANKA; PRISONS; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Krakhmalnikova, Zoya. (1993). Listen, Prison! Lefortovo Notes: Letters from Exile. Redding, CA: Nikodemos Orthodox Publication Society.
GEORG WURZER
LEFT OPPOSITION
Headed by Leon Trotsky, the Left Opposition (1923-1927) rallied against Bolshevik Party discipline on a wide array of issues. It became one of the last serious manifestations of intra-Party debate before Josef Stalin consolidated power and silenced all opposition.
Following the illness and death of Vladimir Lenin, the formation of the Left Opposition centered on Trotsky and the role he played in the struggle for Party leadership and the debates over the future course of the Soviet economy. Throughout 1923, after three strokes left Lenin incapacitated, Stalin actively strengthened his position within the Party leadership and moved against several oppositionist tendencies. In October that same year, Trotsky struck back with a searing condemnation of the ruling triumvirate (Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin), publicly charging them with “secretarial bureaucratism” and demanding a restoration of Party democracy.
At the same time, proponents of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, including such luminaries as Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, Grigory Pyatakov, Timofey Sapronov, and V. V. Osinsky, coalesced around the Platform of the Forty-Six. Representing the position of the left, they attributed the Party’s ills to a progressive division of the Party into functionaries, chosen from above, and the rank-and-file Party members, who did not participate in Party affairs. Further, they accused the leadership of making economic mistakes and demanded that the dictatorship of the Party be replaced by a worker’s democracy.
Formulating a more comprehensive platform, Trotsky published a pamphlet entitled The New Course in January 1924. By this time, the Left Opposition had gained enough public support that the leadership made some concessions in the form of the Politburo’s adoption of the New Course Resolution in December. Nonetheless, at the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924, the Left Opposition was condemned for violating the Party’s ban on factions and for disrupting Party unity.
The Left Opposition’s economic platform focused on the goals of rapid industrialization and the struggle against the New Economic Policy (NEP). Left Oppositionists, also known as Trot-skyites because of Trotsky’s central role, argued that encouraging the growth of private and peasant sectors of the economy under the NEP was dangerous because it would create an investment crisis in the state’s industrial sector. Moreover, by favoring trade and private agriculture, the state would make itself vulnerable to the economic power of hostile social classes, such as peasants and private traders. In 1925, Preobrazhensky, the left’s leading theoretician, proposed an alternative course of action with his theory of primitive socialist accumulation. Arguing that the state should shift resources through price manipulations and other market mechanisms, he believed that peasant producers and consumers should bear the burden of
LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
capital accumulation for the state’s industrialization drive. According to his plan, the government could achieve this end by regulating prices and taxes.
In a polity where loyalty and opposition were deemed incompatible, the Left Opposition was doomed from the start. Following the Thirteenth Party Congress denunciation, Trotsky renewed his advocacy of permanent revolution as Stalin promoted his theory of socialism in one country. The result was Trotsky’s removal from the War Commissariat in January 1925 and his expulsion from the Politburo the following year. At the same time, Kamenev and Zinoviev broke with Stalin over the issue of socialism in one country and continuation of the NEP. In mid-1926, in an attempt to subvert Stalin’s growing influence, Trotsky joined with Kamenev and Zinoviev in the Platform of the Thirteen, forming the United Opposition.
By 1926, however, it was already too late to mount a strong challenge to Stalin’s growing power. Through skillful maneuvering, Stalin had been able increasingly to secure control over the party apparatus, eroding what little power base the oppositionists had. In 1927 Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were removed from the Central Committee. By the end of that year the trio and all of their prominent followers, including Preobrazhensky and Pyatakov, were purged from the Party. The next year, Trotsky and members of the Left Opposition were exiled to Siberia and Central Asia. In February 1929 Trotsky was deported from the country, thus beginning the odyssey that ended with his murder by an alleged Soviet agent in Mexico City in 1940. Despite recantations and pledges of loyalty to Stalin, the remaining so-called Trot-skyites could never free themselves of the stigma of their past associatio
n with the Left Opposition. Nearly all of them perished in the purges of the 1930s. See also: RIGHT OPPOSITION; TROTSKY, LEON DAVID-OVICH; UNITED OPPOSITION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carr, Edward Hallett, and Davies, R. W. (1971). Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, 2 vols., New York: Macmillan. Deutscher, Isaac. (1963). The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929. New York: Oxford University Press. Erlich, Alexander. (1960). The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Graziosi, Andrea. (1991). “‘Building the First System of State Industry in History’: Piatakov’s VSNKh and the Crisis of NEP, 1923-1926.” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique 32:539-581. Trotsky, Leon. (1975). The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-1925. New York: Pathfinder Press.
KATE TRANSCHEL
LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs) were an offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, a party that had arisen in 1900 as an outgrowth of nineteenth-century Russian populism. Both the SRs and their later Left SR branch espoused a socialist revolution for Russia carried out by and based upon the radical intelligentsia, the industrial workers, and the peasantry. After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, some party leaders in the emigration, such as Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, Andrei A. Argunov, and Nikolai D. Avksentiev, offered conditional, temporary support for the tsarist government’s war efforts. Meanwhile, under the guidance of Viktor Chernov and famous populist leader Mark Natan-son, the Left SRs or SR-Internationalists, as they were variously called, insisted that the party maintain an internationalist opposition to the world war. These developments, mirrored along Social Democrats, caused conflicts within and almost split the party inside Russia. By mid-1915, the antiwar forces began to predominate among SR organizations that were just beginning to recover from police attacks after the war’s outbreak. Much of the party’s worker, peasant, soldier, and student cadres turned toward leftist internationalism, whereas prowar (defensist) support came primarily from the party’s intelligentsia. By 1916, many SR (in effect Left SR) organizations poured out antigovern-ment and antiwar propaganda, took part in strikes, and agitated in garrisons and at the fronts. In all these activities, they cooperated closely with Bolsheviks, Left Mensheviks, and anarchists of similar outlook. This coalition and the mass movements it spurred wore down the incompetent tsarist state and overthrew it on March 12 (February 27, O.S.), 1917.
As SR leaders returned to the Russian capital, they reunified leftist and rightist factions and emphasized the party’s multi-class approach. Chernov, who in 1914-1915 had helped form the Left
LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
SR movement, now sided with the party moderates by approving SR participation in the Provisional Government and the Russian military offensive of June 1917. Until midsummer the party’s inclusive strategy seemed to work, as huge recruitments occurred everywhere. The SRs seemed poised to wield power in revolutionary Russia. Simultaneously, leftists such as Natanson, Boris Kamkov, and Maria Spiridonova, noting the growing worker-soldier uneasiness with the party’s policies, began to reshape the leftist movement and cooperated with other leftist parties such as the Bolsheviks and Left Mensheviks. In this respect, they helped recreate the wartime leftist coalition that had proved so effective against the tsarist regime. By late summer and fall, the Left SRs, acting as a de facto separate party within the SR party and working at odds with it, were doing as much as the Bolsheviks to popularize the idea of soviet and socialist power. During October-November, they opposed Bolshevik unilateralism in overthrowing the Provisional Government, instead of which they proposed a multiparty, democratic version of soviet power.
Even after the October Revolution, the Left SRs hoped for continued coexistence with other SRs within a single party, bereft, they hoped, only of the extreme right wing. When the Fourth Congress of the SR Party (November 1917) dashed those hopes by refusing any reconciliation with the leftists, the Left SRs responded by convening their own party congress and officially constituting themselves as a separate party. In pursuit of multiparty soviet power, during December 1917 they reaffirmed their block with the communists (the Bolsheviks used this term after October 1917) and entered the Soviet government, taking the commissariats of justice, land, and communications and entering the supreme military council and the secret police (Cheka). They favored the Constituent Assembly’s dismissal during January 1918 but sharply opposed other communist policies. Daily debates between communist and Left SR leaders characterized the high councils of government. When Lenin promulgated the Brest-Litovsk Peace with Germany in March 1918 against heavy opposition within the soviets and his own party, the Left SRs resigned from the government but remained as a force in the soviets and the all- Russian soviet executive committee.
Having failed to moderate communist policies by working within the government, the Left SRs now appealed directly to workers and peasants, combining radical social policy with democratic outlooks on the exercise of power. Dismayed by Leninist policy toward the peasantry, the economic hardships imposed by the German peace treaty, and blatant communist falsification of elections to the Fifth Congress of Soviets during early July 1918, the Left SR leadership decided to assassinate Count Mirbach, the German representative in Moscow. Often misinterpreted as an attempt to seize power, the successful but politically disastrous assassination had the goal of breaking the peace treaty. The Left SRs hoped that this act would garner wide enough support to counter-balance the communists’ hold on the organs of power. Regardless, Lenin managed to placate the Germans and propagate the idea that the Left SRs had attempted an antisoviet coup d’?tat. Just as SRs and Mensheviks had already been hounded from the soviets, now the Left SRs suffered the same fate and, like them, entered the anticommunist underground. In response, some Left SRs formed separate parties (the Popular Communists and the Revolutionary Communists) with the goal of continuing certain Left SR policies in cooperation with the communists, with whom both groups eventually merged. Throughout the civil war, the Left SRs charted a course between the Reds and Whites as staunch supporters of soviet rather than communist power. They maintained a surprising degree of activism, inspiring and often leading workers’ strikes, Red Army and Navy mutinies, and peasant uprisings. They helped create the conditions responsible for the introduction of the 1921 New Economic Policy, some of whose economic compromises they opposed. During the early 1920s they succumbed to the concerted attacks of the secret police. The Left SRs’ chief merit, their reliance on processes of direct democracy, turned out to be their downfall in the contest for power with communist leaders willing to use repressive methods. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; SOCIALISM; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Melancon, Michael. (1990). The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914-1917. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mstislavskii, Sergei. (1988). Five Days That Shook the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Radkey, Oliver. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February-October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press.
LEGAL SYSTEMS
Radkey, Oliver. (1963). The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule. New York: Columbia University Press. Steinberg, I.N. (1935). Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist. London: Methuen. Steinberg, I.N. (1953). In the Workshop of the Revolution. New York: Rinehart.
MICHAEL MELANCON
LEGAL SYSTEMS
The Russian legal system-the judicial institutions and laws-has been shaped by many different influences, domestic as well as foreign. It constitutes just one of several legal systems at work within Russia. As befits any large, multiethnic society, many different legal systems have coexisted in Russia at various points in history. Prior to the twentieth century especially, many of the non-Slavic peoples of the Russian empire as well as Russian peasants relied
on their religious or customary laws and institutions to regulate important aspects of life (e.g., family, marriage, property, inheritance).
