Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Elizabeth A. (1997). The Baba. and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.

  BARBARA EVANS CLEMENTS

  tion strategies to improve their operations and performance. Enterprise performance was to be gauged relative to long-run plans and norms. A system of state orders (goszakazy) was to replace compulsory output targets, although the distinction between state orders and plan targets was never clarified. Enterprises were granted the right to exchange goods, with contracts negotiated between firms to include output, delivery, and price components agreed upon by both firms. Enterprises were also allowed to retain a greater share of their planned profits to distribute as bonuses or to invest in additional capital. Samoupravlenie was an attempt to make Soviet managers responsible for the final results; that is, producing the quantity and quality of output desired by customers, whether firms or individual consumers. See also: PERESTROIKA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aganbegyan, Abel. (1988). The Economic Challenge of Perestroika. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gregory, Paul R. (1990). Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  SUSAN J. LINZ

  SAMOUPRAVLENIE

  Samoupravlenie, or self-management, was introduced during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika as a mechanism to induce enterprises to produce quality products desired by customers and as a way of extending democratization to the workplace. Soviet enterprises were placed on full economic accounting (polny khozraschet), which meant that current operations had to be self-financed from sales revenues rather than subsidized by central or ministerial authorities, and any change or expansion in operations had to be financed from retained earnings. Managers were to be elected by the employees and to work directly with a council selected from among the workers. The objective of samoupravlenie was to reduce “petty tutelage,” the phrase for interference in day-to-day enterprise operations by planning or other administrative officials.

  Samoupravlenie was part of a larger effort to promote initiative and responsibility in Soviet enterprises. For example, the number of compulsory plan targets given to enterprises was reduced, providing more flexibility for them to select producENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SAN STEFANO, TREATY OF

  The Treaty of San Stefano, signed March 3, 1878, ended the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878).

  On January 31, 1878, with Russian victory over Turkey a foregone conclusion, the belligerents agreed to an armistice at Adrianople, followed by peace negotiations at San Stefano, a village near Constantinople. There, Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ig-natiev, former ambassador to the Porte, and Savfet Pasha worked out final terms for signature on March 3, the anniversary date of Tsar Alexander II’s imperial accession.

  Accordingly, Turkey agreed to pay reparations of 1.41 billion rubles, of which 1.1 billion would be cancelled by cession to Russia in Asia Minor of Ardahan, Kars, Batumi, and Bayazid. In the Balkans, Turkey ceded northern Dobrudja and the Danube delta to Russia for ultimate transfer to Romania, in return for Romanian agreement to Russian occupation of southern Bessarabia. With a seaboard on the Mediterranean and an elected prince, Bulgaria remained under nominal Turkish control,

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  SARMATIANS

  while Bosnia and Herzegovina received autonomy. Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro received their independence, along with territorial enlargement. Turkey was obliged strictly to observe concessions for local participation in government that were inherent in the Organic Regulation of 1868 on Crete, while analogous regimes were to be implemented in Thessaly and Albania. The Porte was also to introduce reforms in Turkish Armenia.

  The San Stefano Treaty formally went into effect on March 16, 1878, but concerted opposition from Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, together with Russia’s growing diplomatic isolation, meant that the agreement remained only preliminary. Indeed, its main provisions subsequently underwent substantial revision at the Congress of Berlin in July 1878. See also: BERLIN, CONGRESS OF; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814-1974. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.

  OLEG R. AIRAPETOV

  SARMATIANS

  Between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C.E., the Sarmatians settled in what is today southern Russia, eventually replacing the Scythians as the dominant tribe in this region. They vanished from the historical record after their land was overrun by the Huns in the late fourth century C.E., and little is known about them.

  They rose again, however, in the realm of mythology. According to a legend which gained popularity in Poland in the fifteenth century, the ancient Sarmatians rode into the Polish lands and gave order and stability to the primitive local population. This myth helped justify serfdom, allowing the nobles to imagine that they were of a superior racial lineage. The Sarmatian story became enormously popular, leading some to call Copernicus the Sarmatian Ptolemy.

  Sarmatianism did not have any specific religious content at first, but during the Counter-Reformation, as Catholics worked to stamp out religious diversity in the Polish Republic and as the

  1350

  state fought against non-Catholic foes outside the country, the legend mutated to include the idea that the Sarmatians had a mission from God to spread and defend the True Faith.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, Sarmatianism had developed a xenophobic character, as many Polish nobles turned away from all “foreign” influences to glory in their indigenous Sarmatian heritage. This myth even influenced the style of clothing, art, and architecture of Poland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the nobles came to fancy pseudo-oriental designs that they felt evoked their racial heritage.

  The intellectuals of the Polish Enlightenment blamed Sarmatianism for the crises of the eighteenth century and for Poland’s eventual destruction and partition. Although some of the stylistic features lived on a bit longer, the broader ideology of Sarmatianism faded away in the nineteenth century or lived on as a trace element within new ideological formations. See also: HUNS; POLAND; SCYTHIANS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bogucka, Maria. (1996). The Lost World of the “Sarmatians”: Custom as the Regulator of Polish Social Life in Early Modern Times. Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences. Grabowska, Bozena. (1993). “Portraits after Life: The Baroque Legacy of Poland’s Nobles.” History Today 43:18.

  BRIAN PORTER

  SARTS

  Former term for Turkic-speaking Muslim residents of cities along the Syr Darya River, the Ferghana Valley, and Samarkand.

  According to Russian Imperial sources, Sarts exceeded 800,000 people and comprised 26 percent of the population of Turkestan and 44 percent of the urban population of Central Asia in 1880. The term was the subject of lively debate in the late-nineteenth century when Russians colonized Central Asia. Vasily Bartold described the Sarts as settled peoples in Central Asia, Turkicized Old Iranian population, emerging from a conglomeration of Saka, Sogdian, Kwarazmian, and Kush-Bactrians.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY

  The ancient Turkic word Sart, originally meaning “merchant,” was used by Mongols and Turks by the thirteenth century to identify the Iranian population of Central Asia. In the sixteenth century, Uzbeks who conquered Central Asia used “Sart” to distinguish the sedentary population of Central Asia from the nomadic Turkic groups settling in the region. By the nineteenth century, the urban Sart population had merged cultural, linguistic, and ethnic elements from their Persian and Turko-Mongolian lineage. They remained distinct from Uzbeks even though their language belongs to the Chagatay-Turkic group. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, “Sart” was a self-denomination distinguished from Uzbeks and Tajiks despite the cultural synthe
sis in Turkestan.

  Soviet nationality policies made the term obsolete. Following the first counting of the 1926 census, Sarts were listed as a questionable nationality. By the end of 1927, the majority of Sarts were designated as Uzbek and others were named Sart-Kalmyks. They were not considered Tajik because they were Turkic-speaking. Of the 2,880 Sart-Kalmyks listed in the 1926 census, there were 2,550 in Kirgiz ASSR, fewer than 250 in Uzbek SSR (all located in Andijan), and none in Tajik ASSR. By the 1937 census, the ethnic marker disappeared. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bregel, Yuri. (1978). “The Sarts in the Khanate of Khiva,” Journal of Asian History 12 (2):120-151. Schoeberlein, John. (1994). “Identity in Central Asia: Construction and contention in the conceptions of ‘?zbek,’ T?jik,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Samarqandi’ and other groups.” Ph.D. diss. Harvard University.

  MICHAEL ROULAND

  viet Union. The Ministry of Finance directly controlled this network until 1963, when it was incorporated into Gosbank (the state bank of the USSR). Sberbank’s main task was to collect the individual deposits and invest them with the state. In addition, Soviet citizens paid their bills and picked up their pension checks at their local Sberbank offices.

  After the breakup of the USSR, Sberbank Russia became a quasicommercial savings bank, with the Central Bank of Russia as its majority shareholder. Sberbank continued to invest a high percentage of its resources with the government (e.g., in government securities), giving it the nickname “the Ministry of Cash.” Although commercial banks began to compete with Sberbank for retail deposits, Sberbank’s share of the retail market never fell below 60 percent in the 1990s. This occurred for three reasons. First, no new bank could compete with Sberbank’s extensive branch network. Second, the government explicitly insured deposits in Sberbank, while commercial banks had no deposit insurance system. Third, repeated commercial banking crises made Sberbank appear to be a safer choice than other banks. However, it bears noting that the vast majority of Russians chose to keep their savings outside of the banking system entirely. See also: BANKING SYSTEM, SOVIET; GOSBANK; STROIBANK

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Johnson, Juliet. (2000). A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tompson, William. (1998). “Russia’s ‘Ministry of Cash’: Sberbank in Transition.” Communist Economies and Economic Transformation 10(2):133-155.

  JULIET JOHNSON

  SBERBANK

  Sberbank (the Savings Bank) was the monopoly, state-owned household savings bank of the USSR. It retained both its state ownership and its dominance of the retail banking market in the post-Soviet period, despite increasing competition from commercial banks. In the Soviet period, Sberbank’s retail banking network encompassed approximately 70,000 branches and smaller “cash offices” (sberkassy) on almost every corner across the SoSCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY Leading scientists and policy makers in the Soviet Union rapidly reached an accommodation after the revolution in October 1917. The scientific community was decimated by deaths and emigration that resulted from World War I, revolution, and civil war. Those scientists who remained recognized that the new regime, unlike the tsarist government, intended to support scientific research. They quickly established a number of research institutes and

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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  SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY

  A 1966 experiment in a chemistry laboratory at Akademgorodok-the Siberian “Academic City.” © DEAN CONGER/CORBIS received gold rubles to buy journal subscriptions, equipment, and reagents abroad. Government officials, for their part, believed that scientific and engineering expertise was critical to the establishment of communism. Hesitantly at first, they offered academic freedom as well as financial and administration support to the scientists. They remained skeptical about the value of fundamental research. Party officials also believed that scientists, most of whom were trained in the tsarist era, required close supervision by loyal communists.

  Several different bureaucracies were responsible for the administration and funding of science, and scientists were deft at playing them off against each other to increase their funding. The major ones were the Main Scientific Administration of the Commissariat of Education (Glavnauka) and the Scientific Technical Department of the Supreme Economic Council (NTO). Generally speaking, in1352 stitutes whose focus was basic research fell under the jurisdiction of Glavnauka, while those of an applied profile fell under NTO.

  When Josef Stalin rose to power in the late 1920s, fundamental changes in science policy occurred that largely held sway until the collapse of the USSR. The changes reflected crash programs in rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. First, officials intended that scientists emphasize applied research at the expense of basic research. This led to the removal of many of the institutes under the jurisdiction of the Glavnauka to the Commissariat of Heavy Industry and the establishment of a technical division within the Academy of Sciences. Second, the Communist Party began a concerted effort to place personnel loyal to it in research institutes. It forced the relatively independent Soviet Academy of Sciences to create many new positions, or chairs, for permanent members in such new fields as the social sciences, and insisted that party members be voted in during elections.

  Third, officials required that scientists produce detailed one-year and five-year plans of research activity. Since the Commissariat of Heavy Industry was relatively flush with funding, scientists found leeway in planning and financial documents to embark on research in several important new directions, for example, nuclear physics and cryogenics in the 1930s. Finally, officials insisted upon strict ideological control over the content of science and effectively established autarchy (international isolation) that persisted until the late 1980s.

  Party officials had indicated their intention to control scientists in a series of show trials in 1929 and 1930 where they used forced confessions of engineers to prove “wrecking” of plans. They punished wrecking with long prison terms and in some cases execution. During the Great Terror of the mid-1930s, scientists, no less than other members of society, also faced arrest, interrogation, internment in labor camps (there were several special labor camps for scientists and engineers), and execution. Scientists’ professional associations were subjugated to party organizations.

  Several fields of science suffered from ideological meddling. In the most notorious case, Trofim Lysenko, a biologist who rejected modern genetics, came to dominate the Soviet biology establishment from the 1940s until the early 1960s. The authorities ordered references to genetics removed from textbooks, and many geneticists lost their jobs.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SCIENCE FICTION

  World War II had a direct and long-term impact on Soviet science policy. First, it ensured continued emphasis on applied research, in particular military technology. Second, with the advent of the atomic bomb project and then rocket technology, it ensured large-scale approaches to research and development. The average size of programs and institutes in the USSR grew to several times larger than similar programs or institutes in other countries. Third, the evacuation of entire institutes and personnel from areas under the siege of German armies led to the dispersal of institutes to the Ural Mountains region and Siberia.

  Nikita Khrushchev, who followed Stalin, initiated a series of reforms in Soviet society, abandoning some aspects of Stalinism (although maintaining one-party rule). The reforms had an impact on science policy as well. The most significant impact was the growth of the scientific enterprise. The total number of scientists increased from 162,500 in 1950 to 665,000 in 1965, including an increase in the number of senior and junior specialists from 62,000 to 140,000.

  A second aspect of reform was decentralization of the scientific enterprise, in part because of the growth of the nuclear establishment. The most significant sign of
decentralization was the construction of Akademgorodok, a city of science built in the early 1960s with twenty-one institutes, library, and university, near Novosibirsk in Siberia. Another aspect of decentralization was the removal of the technical division of the Academy of Sciences and the placement of its institutes under the jurisdiction of industrial ministries.

  Under Leonid Brezhnev a number of the Khrushchev-era reforms were abandoned. While there had been such great achievements in science as the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) and successes in nuclear power, Soviet science performed poorly by such measures as scientific citation indices, Nobel prizes, and assimilation of discoveries in production. Rather than experiment with new forms of organization or new directions of research, however, the Brezhnev administration further centralized policy making in major bureaucracies, raised the level of ideological control, and established renewed vigilance toward contact with Western scientists. While the scientific enterprise grew to massive proportions-on the eve of its breakup the USSR had one-third of the world’s engineers and one-quarter of its physicists-it continued to perform poorly.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  Mikhail Gorbachev championed “acceleration” (uskorenie) of the achievements of research into the production process. Like leaders before him, he believed in the power of science to help solve the social, economic, and other problems facing the country. As part of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev’s policies encouraged rapid decentralization of science policy and increasingly open discussion of the poor performance of the sector. Scientists reorganized professional societies for the first time since the 1930s. They gained the opportunity to travel abroad to conferences. Only the collapse of the USSR facilitated significant reevaluation of science policy in Russia. At the same time, because of rapid inflation and decline in government revenues, the scientific establishment lost much of its funding and stability for the first time since the 1920s. Salaries were not paid for months at a time, and research monies disappeared. International organizations offered aid programs to discourage emigration. In general, however, the Russian scientific community has been slow to recover from the political and economic shocks of the 1990s. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH; SPACE PROGRAM