Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  The People’s Will was headed by an Executive Committee, including such famous figures as Andrei Zhelyabov and Sofia Perovskaya. Day-to-day activities were supervised by special subgroups in charge of propaganda and organization of three critical groups-workers, students, and military officers-and included underground printing operations; keeping an eye on police infiltration efforts; and planning and carrying out assassinations. In addition to well-organized groups in St. Petersburg and Moscow, there was a growing number of provincial organizations, mostly circles of students and workers. The participation of a small number of women represented a noteworthy development. While historians have tended to identify the People’s Will with its small but well-defined Executive Committee, the organization in fact encompassed a broad range of members and supporters, numbering in the thousands, as well as many sympathizers. More peaceful activities, however, were overshadowed by the aura of drama and violence surrounding the party’s daring struggle against the tsarist regime, culminating in the assassination of the tsar, Alexander II, on March 1, 1881. In the predictable aftermath, five members of the People’s Will were hanged and many more imprisoned.

  Contrary to the standard historiographical treatment, the People’s Will did not disappear from the scene following March 1, but rather continued to exist in a more widespread and decentralized form. Radicals calling themselves narodovoltsy (supporters of the People’s Will) continued to engage in propaganda and organizing activities among students and workers in provincial towns and industrial centers, as well as in St. Petersburg and Moscow, throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. By this time, narodovoltsy were taking second place in the revolutionary movement to radicals who identified themselves as social democrats (Marxists). The populist tradition experienced a revival with the formation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during the early twentieth century. In a sense, however, both revolutionary parties of the period leading up to the 1917 revolution, the Social Democrats as well as the Socialist Revolutionaries, can be considered the heirs of the People’s Will, whose banner, at a crucial stage, symbolized the revolutionary movement in Russia. See also: LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY; POPULISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Naimark, Norman M. (1983). Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement Under Alexander III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Offord, Derek. (1986). The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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  Pearl, Deborah. (1996). “From Worker to Revolutionary: The Making of Worker Narodovol’tsy.” Russian History 23(1-4):11-26. Venturi, Franco. (1966). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, tr. Francis Haskell. New York: Universal Library.

  DEBORAH PEARL

  PERESTROIKA

  Perestroika was the term given to the reform process launched in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Meaning “reconstruction” or “restructuring,” perestroika was a concept that was both ambiguous and malleable. Its ambiguity lay in the fact that it might convey no more than a reorganization of existing Soviet institutions and thus be a synonym for reform of a modest kind or, alternatively, it could signify reconstruction of the system from the foundations up, thus amounting to transformative change. The vagueness and ambiguity were initially an advantage, for even the term reform had become taboo during the conservative Leonid Brezhnev years after the Soviet leadership had been frightened by the Prague Spring reforms of 1968.

  Perestroika had the advantage of coming without political and ideological baggage. Everyone could-in the first two years, at least, of the Mikhail Gorbachev era-be in favor of it. Its malleability meant that under this rubric some urged modest change that in their view was enough to get the economy moving again while others who wished to transform the way the entire system worked were able to advance more daring arguments, taking cover under the umbrella of perestroika. Within Gorbachev’s own top leadership team, both Yegor Ligachev and Alexander Yakovlev expressed their commitment to perestroika, but for the latter this meant much more far-reaching political reform than for the former. Once political pluralism had by 1989 become an accepted norm, perestroika as a concept had largely outlived its political utility.

  For Gorbachev himself the term “perestroika” meant different things at different times. Initially, it was a euphemism for “reform,” but later it came to signify systemic change. Gorbachev’s views underwent a major evolution during the period he held the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and that included the meaning he imparted to perestroika. In an important December 1984 speech before he became Soviet leader, Gorbachev had said that one of the important things on the agenda was a “perestroika of the forms and methods of running the economy.” By 1987 the concept for Gorbachev was much broader and clearly embraced radical political reform and the transformation of Soviet foreign policy. Gorbachev’s thinking at that time was set out in a book, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World. While the ideas contained were far removed from traditional Soviet dogma, they by no means yet reflected the full evolution of Gorbachev’s own position (and, with it, his understanding of perestroika). In 1987 Gorbachev was talking about radical reform of the existing system. During the run-up to the Nineteenth Conference of the Communist Party, held in the summer of 1988, he came to the conclusion that the system had to be transformed so comprehensively as to become something different in kind. In 1987 he still spoke about “communism,” although he had redefined it to make freedom and the rule of law among its unfamiliar values; by the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev had given up speaking about “communism.” The “socialism,” of which he continued to speak, had become socialism of a social democratic type.

  Perestroika became an overarching conception, under which a great many new concepts were introduced into Soviet political discourse after 1985. These included such departures from the Marxist-Leninist lexicon as glasnost (openness, transparency), pravovoe gosudarstvo (a state based on the rule of law), checks and balances, and pluralism. One of the most remarkable innovations was Gorbachev’s breaking of the taboo on speaking positively about pluralism. Initially (in 1987) this was a “socialist pluralism” or a “pluralism of opinion.” That, however, opened the way for others in the Soviet Union to talk positively about “pluralism” without the socialist qualifier. By early 1990 Gorbachev himself had embraced the notion of “political pluralism,” doing so at the point at which he proposed to the Central Committee removing from the Soviet Constitution the guaranteed “leading role” of the Communist Party.

  Even perestroika as understood in the earliest years of Gorbachev’s leadership-not least because of its embrace of glasnost-opened the way for real political debate and political movement in a system which had undergone little fundamental political change for decades. In his 1987 book, Perestroika,

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  Mikhail Gorbachev reacts to the announcement of foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze’ planned resignation at a Congress of the People’s Deputies meeting held December 20, 1990. BORIS YURCHENKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. Gorbachev wrote: “Glasnost, criticism and self-criticism are not just a new campaign. They have been proclaimed and must become a norm in the Soviet way of life . . . . There is no democracy, nor can there be, without glasnost. And there is no present-day socialism, nor can there be, without democracy.” Such exhortation was alarming to those who wished to preserve the Soviet status quo or to revert to the status quo ante. It was, though, music to the ears of people who wished to promote the more rapid democratization of the Soviet system, even to advocate moving further and faster than Gorbachev at the time was prepared to endorse.

  If perestroika is considered as an epoch in Soviet and Russian history, rather than a concept (though conceptual change in a hitherto ideocratic system was crucially important), it can be seen as one in which a P
andora’s box was opened. The system, whatever its failings, had been highly effective in controlling and suppressing dissent, and it was far from being on the point of collapse in 1985. Perestroika produced both intended and unintended consequences. From the outset Gorbachev’s aims included a liberalization of the Soviet system and the ending of the Cold War. Liberalization, in fact, developed into democratization (the latter term being one that Gorbachev used from the beginning, although its meaning, too, developed within the course of the next several years) and the Cold War was over by the end of the 1980s. A major aspect of perestroika in its initial conception was, however, to inject a new dynamism into the Soviet economy. In that respect it failed. Indeed, Gorbachev came to believe that the Soviet economic system, just like the political system, needed not reform but dismantling and to be rebuilt on different foundations.

  The ultimate unintended consequence of pere-stroika was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Liberalization and democratization turned what Gorbachev had called “pre-crisis phenomena” (most

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  notably, economic stagnation) during the early 1980s into a full-blown crisis of survival of the state by 1990-1991. Measuring such an outcome against the initial aims of perestroika suggests its failure. But the goals of the foremost proponents of perestroika, and of Mikhail Gorbachev personally, rapidly evolved, and democratization came to be given a higher priority than economic reform. At the end of this experiment in the peaceful transformation of a highly authoritarian system, there were fifteen newly independent states and Russia itself had become a freer country than at any point in its previous history. Taken in conjunction with the benign transformation of East-West relations, these results constitute major achievements that more than counterbalance the failures. They point also to the fact that there could be no blueprint for the democratization of a state that had been at worst totalitarian and at best highly authoritarian for some seven decades. Perestroika became a process of trial and error, but one that was underpinned by ideas and values radically different from those which constituted the ideological foundations of the unreformed Soviet system. See also: DEMOCRATIZATION; GLASNOST; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; NEW POLITICAL THINKING

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. New York: Oxford University Press. English, Robert D. (2000). Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1987). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. London: Collins. Gorbachev, Mikhail, and Mlynar, Zdenek. (2002). Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Matlock, Jack F., Jr. (1995). Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House.

  ARCHIE BROWN

  occur in an industrially backward Russia. According to classical Marxism, only a society of advanced capitalism with a large working class was ripe for communist revolution. Russia met neither prerequisite. Further, Karl Marx conceived of a two-stage revolution: first the bourgeois revolution, then in sequence the proletarian revolution establishing a dictatorship for transition to communism. Trotsky argued that the two-stage theory did not apply. Rather, he said, Russia was in a stage of uneven development where both bourgeois and proletarian revolutions were developing together under the impact of the advanced West.

  Trotsky predicted that once revolution broke out in Russia it would be in permanence as the result of an East-West dynamic. The bourgeois majority revolution would be overthrown by a conscious proletarian minority that would carry forward the torch of revolution. However, a second phase was necessary: namely, the proletarian revolution in Western Europe ignited by the Russian proletariat’s initiative; the West European proletariat now in power rescues the beleaguered proletarian minority in Russia; and the path is opened to the international communist revolution.

  Trotsky’s theory seemed corroborated in the 1917 Russian revolution. Tsarism was overthrown by a bourgeois Provisional Government in February which the Bolsheviks then overthrew in October. However, the second phase posited by Trotsky’s theory, the West European revolution, did not materialize. The Bolsheviks faced the dilemma of how to sustain power where an advanced industrial economy did not exist. Was not Bolshevik rule doomed to failure without Western aid?

  Usurping power, Josef Stalin answered Trotsky’s theory with his “socialism in one country.” Curiously, his recipe was similar to a strategy Trotsky earlier proposed, namely, command economy, forced industrialization, and collectivization. With the communist collapse in Russia in 1991 both Trotsky’s and Stalin’s theories became moot. See also: BOLSHEVISM; MARXISM; SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH

  PERMANENT REVOLUTION

  “Permanent Revolution” was Leon Trotsky’s explanation of how a communist revolution could

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Trotsky, Leon. (1969). The Permanent Revolution. New York: Pathfinder Press.

  CARL A. LINDEN

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  PEROVSKAYA, SOFIA LVOVNA

  PEROVSKAYA, SOFIA LVOVNA

  (1853-1881), Russian revolutionary populist, a member of the Executive committee of “Narodnaya Volya” (“People’s Will”), and a direct supervisor of the murder of emperor Alexander II.

  Sofia Perovskaya was born in St. Petersburg to a noble family; her father was the governor of St. Petersburg. In 1869 she attended the Alarchin Women’s Courses in St. Petersburg, where she founded the self-education study group. At age seventeen, she left home. From 1871 to 1872 she was one of the organizers of the Tchaikovsky circle. Her remarkable organizational skills and willpower never failed to gain her leading positions in various revolutionary societies. To prepare for “going to the people,” she passed a public teacher’s exam and completed her studies as a doctor’s assistant. In January 1874 she was arrested and detained for several months in the Peter and Paul Fortress and faced the Trial of 193 (1877-1878), but was proven innocent. She joined the populist organization Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) and took part in an unsuccessful armed attempt to free Ippolit Myshkin, who was proven guilty at the Trial of 193. During the summer of 1878 she was once again arrested, and exiled to Olonetskaya province, but on the way there she fled and assumed an illegal status. In June 1879 Perovskaya took part in the Voronezh assembly of Zemlya i Volya, soon after which the organization split into Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) and Cherny Peredel (The Black Repartition). From the autumn of 1879, she was a member of the executive committee of Narodnaya Volya. In November 1879 she took part in the organization of the attempt to blow up the tsar’s train near Moscow. She played the role of the wife of railroad inspector Sukhorukov (Narodnaya Volya member Lev Gartman): The underground tunnel that led to the railroad tracks where the bomb was planted came from his house. By mistake, however, it was the train of the tsar’s entourage that got blown up. During the spring of 1880, Perovskaya took part in another attempt to kill the tsar in Odessa. In the preparation of the successful attempt on March 13, 1881, on the Yekaterininsky channel in St. Petersburg, she headed a watching squad, and after the party leader Andrei Zhelyabov (Perovskaya’s lover) was arrested, she headed the operation until it was completed, having personally drawn the plan of the positions of the grenade throwers and given the signal to attack. Hoping to free her arrested comrades, after the murder Perovskaya did not leave St. Petersburg and was herself arrested. At the trial of pervomartovtsy (participants of the murder of the tsar), Perovskaya was sentenced to death and hanged on April 15, 1881, on the Semenovsky parade ground in St. Petersburg, becoming the first woman in Russia to be executed for a political crime. See also: ALEXANDER II; LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY; PEOPLE’S WILL, THE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Figner, Vera. (1927). Memoirs
of a Revolutionist. New York: International Publishers. Footman, David. (1968). Red Prelude: A Life of A.I. Zhelyabov. London: Barrie amp; Rockliff . Venturi, Franco. (1983). Roots of revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  OLEG BUDNITSKII

  PERSIAN GULF WAR

  The Persian Gulf War of 1990 and 1991 began as the high point of Soviet-American cooperation in the postwar period. However, by late December 1990, a chilling of Soviet-American relations had set in as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sought to play both sides of the conflict, only to have the USSR suffer a major political defeat once the war came to an end.

  Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze joined U.S. secretary of state James Baker in severely condemning the Iraqi action, and the United States and USSR jointly supported numerous U.N. Security Council Resolutions demanding an Iraqi withdrawal and imposing sanctions on Iraq for its behavior.

  Nonetheless, while supporting the United States (although not committing Soviet forces to battle), Gorbachev also sought to play a mediating role between Iraq and the United States, in part to salvage Moscow’s important economic interests in that country (oil drilling, oil exploration, hydroelectric projects, and grain elevator construction, as well as lucrative arms sales), and in part to bolster his political flank against those on the right of the Soviet

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  political spectrum (many of whom were later to stage an abortive coup against him in August 1991), who were complaining that Moscow had “sold out” Iraq, a traditional ally of the USSR and one with which Moscow had been linked by a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation since 1972.