Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  In practice, planning was still rudimentary. There was no operational program for command allocations, as there would be during the 1930s, but the “balance of national economy,” patterned on German wartime experience, served as a kind of forecast for key sectors and basis for discussion of investment priorities.

  These policies were strikingly successful in allowing the Soviet economy to regain its prewar levels of agricultural and industrial production by 1926-1927. School enrollment exceeded the prewar numbers. But food marketings, both domestic and export, were down significantly, probably owing to the higher cost and relative unavailability of manufactured goods the peasants wanted to buy and also the breakup of larger commercial farms during the Revolution and civil war. Yet by 1927 reduced grain marketings convinced many in the Party (particularly the so-called left opposition) that administrative methods would be needed in addition to market incentives. Even though this was largely due to a mistaken price and tax policy by the government-comparable to the earlier Scissors Crisis- the authorities now began to use “extraordinary measures” to seize grain early in 1928. This policy and its consequences effectively ended the NEP, for once it was decided that industrialization and military preparedness required more investments than could be financed from voluntary savings in this largely peasant country, the way was open for Josef Stalin to pursue a radical course of action, once advanced by his enemies Leon Trotsky and his allies on the left. See also: COMMANDING HEIGHTS OF THE ECONOMY; GOODS FAMINE; GRAIN CRISIS OF 1928; SCISSORS CRISIS; TRUSTS, SOVIET; WAR COMMUNISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Carr, Edward Hallett. (1958). Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Davies, R. W. (1989). “Economic and Social Policy in the USSR, 1917-41.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, Vol. 8: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies, ed. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Erlich, Alexander. (1960). The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nove, Alec. (1969). An Economic History of the USSR. London: Allen Lane.

  MARTIN C. SPECHLER

  NEW-FORMATION REGIMENTS

  The term new-formation (“western-model,” “foreign-model,” or “western-formation”) regiment refers to military units organized in linear formations, utilizing gunpowder weapons and tactics developed in the West. These regiments consisted of eight to ten companies, each ideally numbering 100 (infantry) to 120 (cavalry and dragoons) soldiers, though few regiments were at full strength. The colonel and lieutenant colonel commanded the first and second companies of the regiment, though de facto command of the colonel’s company was given to a first (lieutenant) captain. Captains or lieutenants (either Russian or European) commanded the remaining companies. Other personnel included ensigns, sergeants, and corporals, at the company level, and administrative officers, such as captains of arms, quartermasters, camp masters, clerks, priests, drummers, and buglers. The regiments featured combined arms: muskets, pikes, artillery, grenadiers,

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  and engineers (sappers, miners). The predominant organizational features of the new-formation regiment were its hierarchical command structure and its relative tactical flexibility.

  New-formation regiments participated in the major campaigns of the seventeenth century. The first regiments were formed prior to the Smolensk War (1632-1634). The state employed European officers to train and arm Russians to fight in the Western manner, which represented a significant departure from the former practice of hiring entire regiments of foreign troops. The impact of these officers is reflected in the fact that the Treaty of Polyanovka (1634) ordered Russia’s foreign mercenary commanders to leave Muscovy after the war, though Alexander Leslie, Adam Gell-Seitz, and others returned to help reorganize Muscovy’s regiments again during the 1640s.

  Between 1630 and 1634 ten regiments were formed, comprising seventeen thousand men, nearly half of the Russian army at Smolensk. During the Thirteen Years’ War, new-formation regiments constituted a significant portion of Russia’s armed forces: fifty-five infantry and twenty cavalry regiments. The cost of these regiments was greater than traditional forces because the state supported their supply and salary needs.

  The regiments in the 1630s were formed from marginal groups, such as landless gentry, Cossacks, Tatars, and free people (volnye liudi, unattached to towns, estates, or communes). Increased income and status associated with state service motivated these groups to assimilate into the new-formation regiments. During the 1650s and 1660s the new-formation regiments included more and more peasants and townsmen, whom the Russians conscripted to offset heavy wartime losses. The nature of the soldiers serving in the new-formation regiments changed over time, though they continued to include marginal groups. Later in the century (1680s-1690s), the new-formation regiments continued to be a stage for retraining traditional forces.

  The state continued to hire European officers to command new-formation regiments throughout the seventeenth century. Russians also held command positions in the regiments, most predominantly in ranks below colonel. Tensions existed among the foreign and Russian officers, especially regarding administration and implementation of the regiments. The foreign officers brought with them their military experience and technical literature to train their regiments. Since few printed military manuals were available in Russian, the foreign officers’ contribution to military reform is immeasurable. Nonetheless the state distributed a translation of Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen’s Kriegskunst zu Fuss (Military Art of Infantry) to the colonels for use in training, and the state also received input from European officers-in the form of reports and letters-about the training and equipment needs of the regiments. See also: SMOLENSK WAR; THIRTEEN YEARS’ WAR

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Reger, W. M., IV. (1997). “In the Service of the Tsars: European Mercenary Officers and the Reception of Military Reform in Russia, 1654-1667.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Stevens, Carol. (1995). Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

  W. M. REGER IV

  NEW POLITICAL THINKING

  The phrase “New Political Thinking” (or, simply, “New Thinking”) was introduced in the Soviet Union early in the Gorbachev era. While to some observers it seemed no more than a new twist to Soviet propaganda, in fact it represented an increasingly radical break with fundamentals of Soviet ideology.

  The New Thinking linked Soviet domestic political reform with innovation in foreign policy. Gorbachev was in a minority within the Soviet leadership in espousing ideas that were radically new in the Soviet context. However, he was able to draw on intellectual support from research institutes in which fresh ideas had surfaced but had hitherto lacked political support where it mattered-at the top of the Communist Party hierarchy. With the institutional resources of the general secretaryship at his disposal, Gorbachev was able to give decisive support to innovative thinkers and to legitimize new concepts. Initially, as in Gorbachev’s 1987 book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, the new ideas were already revising previous Soviet ideology in significant ways; but a year or two later they had gone much fur1042

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  ther, amounting to a conceptual revolution that shook the Soviet system to its foundations.

  It was in 1987 that Gorbachev first used the term “pluralism” in a positive sense, albeit in a qualified form as “socialist pluralism” or a “pluralism of opinion.” Hitherto, “pluralism” had always been a pejorative term in the Soviet lexicon, condemned as an alien and bourgeois notion. Once the taboo on praising pluralism had been broken, articles on the need to develop pluralism within the Soviet Union began to appear, often without the “socialist” qualifier. By 1990 Go
rbachev himself was advocating “political pluralism.” Another concept on which an anathema had been pronounced for many years was “market,” but again-for example, in his 1987 book-Gorbachev embraced the idea of a “socialist market.” Before long other contributors to the growing debates in the Soviet Union were advocating a market economy, some of them explicitly differentiating this from socialism as they understood it.

  The New Political Thinking could, in its earliest manifestations, be seen as a new Soviet ideology, a codified, albeit genuinely innovative, body of correct thinking. It gave way, however, to a growing freedom of speech and of debate both within the Communist Party and in the broader society-a new political reality that partly resulted from the boldness of the intellectual breakthrough.

  Among the new concepts that were given Gorbachev’s official imprimatur between 1985 and 1988 were the principle of a state based on the rule of law, the idea of checks and balances, glasnost (openness or transparency), perestroika (literally reconstruction, but a term that became a synonym for the radical reform of the Soviet system), democratization (which initially meant freer discussion within the Communist Party but by 1988-at the Nineteenth Party Conference-had come to embrace the principle of contested elections for a new legislature), and civil society.

  The New Political Thinking represented no less of a break with the Soviet past in its foreign policy dimension. A class approach to international relations was explicitly discarded in favor of the idea of all-human interests and universal values. The idea of global interdependence superseded the zero-sum-game philosophy of kto kogo (who will crush whom). Whereas in the past the “struggle for peace” had often been a thin disguise for the pursuit of Soviet great-power interests, the new thinking endorsed by Gorbachev stressed that in the nuclear age peace was the only rational option if humankind was to survive. This provided justification for a new and genuinely cooperative approach to international relations. See also: DEMOCRATIZATION; GLASNOST; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PERESTROIKA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brown, Archie (ed.). (2004). The Demise of Marxism- Leninism in Russia. London: Palgrave. Chernyaev, Anatoly. (2000). My Six Years with Gorbachev. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1987). Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World. London: Collins. Nove, Alec. (1989). Glasnost in Action. London: Unwin Hyman. Palazchenko, Pavel. (1997). My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Yakovlev, Alexander. (1993). The Fate of Marxism in Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  ARCHIE BROWN

  NEWSPAPERS

  The first news sheet issued with some regularity in Russia was Sankt Peterburgskie vedemosti (St. Petersburg Herald), a biweekly published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, beginning in 1727. Until the Great Reforms of 1861-1874, nearly all newspapers in Russia were official bulletins issued by various government institutions. To the extent that there was a print-based public sphere in pre-Reform Russia, it was dominated by the “thick journals” that published literary criticism and philosophical speculation.

  The relaxing of censorship and limits on private publications during the Great Reforms, advances in printing technology, and the spread of literacy in Russian cities led to the development of a mass-market, commercial press by the 1880s. Daily papers targeting various markets covered stock-market news and foreign affairs, as well as the more sensational topics of crime, sex scandals, and natural disasters. As Louise McReynolds has demonstrated, Russian commercial mass newspapers resembled their counterparts in North America and Western Europe in appealing to and fostering nationalist sentiment.

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  By World War I “copeck” (penny) newspapers in Moscow and St. Petersburg achieved circulations comparable to those of mass circulation organs in the United States and Western Europe. The most popular newspaper in the Russian Empire in 1914 was Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), with a circulation of 619,500.

  After the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they created an entirely new kind of mass press. By the summer of 1918 the Soviet government had shut down all non-Bolshevik newspapers on their territory. Bolshevik newspapers during the years of revolution and civil war (1917-1921) aimed to mobilize the populace in general and Party members in particular for war. Resources were scarce, and typical civil war newspaper editions were only two pages long. The state funded the press throughout the Soviet era.

  The Bolsheviks shared with most Russian intellectuals of the revolutionary era a profound contempt for the sensationalistic urban copeck newspapers that aimed to entertain a mass audience. They created a mass press that was supposed to educate, guide, and mobilize readers, not entertain them. Other important functions of Soviet newspapers were the gathering of intelligence on popular moods and the monitoring of corruption in the Party or state apparatus. To fulfill these tasks, the newspapers solicited and received literally millions of readers’ letters, some of which were published. The editorial staff also forwarded letters denouncing crime and corruption to the appropriate police or prosecutorial organs. They used letters to compose reports on popular attitudes that were sent to all levels of party officialdom.

  The role of direct censorship in Soviet newspaper production has been overemphasized. Agenda-setting by party and state organs was more important. The role of official censors in controlling press content was negligible. Soviet journalists were generally self-censoring, and they followed agendas set by the Communist Party’s Central Committee and other official institutions.

  Illegal newspapers were central to Bolshevik Party organization in the prerevolutionary years. This heritage of underground political culture contributed to a Soviet fetishization of newspapers as the mass medium par excellance. As a result of this fetishization, Communist propaganda officials and journalists were slow to understand and effectively use the media of radio and television. By the 1970s, Soviet means and methods of mass persuasion and mobilization were far inferior to those developed by advertising agencies and governments in the wealthy liberal democracies. See also: CENSORSHIP; IZVESTIYA; JOURNALISM; PRAVDA; THICK JOURNALS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brooks, Jeffrey. (2000). Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hopkins, Mark. (1970). Mass Media in the Soviet Union. New York: Pegasus Books. Kenez, Peter. (1985). The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McReynolds, Louise. (1991). The News Under Russia’s Old Regime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  MATTHEW E. LENOE

  NEW STATUTE OF COMMERCE

  The New Commerce Statute (a translation of the Russian Novotorgovy ustav of April 22, 1667; ustav might also be translated as “regulations”) was the Russian expression of Western mercantilism and was sponsored by boyarin Afanasy Lavrentievich Ordin-Nashchokin (1605-1680), a former governor of Pskov, the westernmost of Russia’s major cities, who in 1667 was head of the Chancellery of Foreign Affairs. The 1667 document was an expansion of the Commerce Statute (or Regulations) of 1653, which introduced a unified tariff schedule while repealing petty transit duties and increasing protectionist duties against foreigners. The 1667 regulations remained in force until replaced by the Customs Statute of 1755.

  The 1667 document regulated both internal trade and trade relations with foreigners. In a 1649 petition to the government, the Russian merchants lamented that they could not compete with the foreign merchants, who were forbidden to engage in internal Russian trade (where they had been giving favorable credit terms to local, smaller Russian merchants) and were restricted to the port cities at times when fairs were being held. The foreigners were accused of selling shoddy goods, which was forbidden. Foreigners were forbidden to sell any goods retail in the provinces or in Moscow, or any Russian goods among themselves upon pain of confiscation of the merchandise. Internal customs du1044

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  ties of 5 percent were to be collected from Russians on sales of weighed goods (ad valorem sales) and 4 percent from unweighed goods. A duty of 10 percent was to be collected on salt and 15 percent on liquor. Excepting liquor, foreigners had to pay a 6 percent duty on their foreign goods sold to authorized Russian wholesalers. A foreigner had to pay a 10 percent export duty, except when he paid for the goods with gold and silver currency. The export of gold and silver from Muscovy was forbidden. Local officials (acknowledged by Moscow as likely to be corrupt) were ordered repeatedly in the statute not to interfere with commerce. Much paperwork was required to ensure compliance with the 1667 regulations. See also: FOREIGN TRADE; MERCHANTS; ORDIN-NASH-CHOKIN, AFANASY LAVRENTIEVICH.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hellie, Richard, ed. and tr. (1967). Readings for Introduction to Russian Civilization. Chicago: Syllabus Division, The College, University of Chicago.

  RICHARD HELLIE

  quickly established good relations with the San-dinista government. Soviet economic and military aid approached billions of rubles, far less than to Cuba. While offering political, economic, and military support, Moscow sought to limit Nicaragua as an economic and strategic burden. Cuba actively supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and abroad.

  Meanwhile, the Reagan administration was backing an armed paramilitary force, the contras, which sought to overthrow the Sandinistas. The United States also aided a right-wing regime in El Salvador besieged by revolutionary forces supposedly encouraged by the Sandinistas. Both U.S. efforts were inconclusive.