Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  CAROL GAYLE WILLIAM MOSKOFF

  SOBCHAK, ANATOLY ALEXANDROVICH

  (1937-2000), law professor; mayor of St. Petersburg.

  Anatoly Sobchak was one of the leading liberal politicians of the perestroika era. Born in Chita, he completed a law degree at Leningrad State University in 1959. He settled permanently in Leningrad in1962 and joined the faculty of Leningrad State University in 1973, heading the economic law institute and rising to be dean. Unusually for so senior an academic, Sobchak was for many years not a member of the Communist Party. He only joined during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, becoming a candidate member in May 1987, and a full member in June 1988. The next year he was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, where he became a leader of the Inter-Regional Deputies group and chaired the committee investigating the massacre of demonstrators by Soviet troops in Ti-flis in April 1989.

  A loyal supporter of Boris Yeltsin, Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad in June 1991, the same day that a referendum approved changing the city’s name to St. Petersburg. He opposed the August 1991 coup attempt and persuaded the army not to deploy troops in the city. Sobchak presided over the liberalization of the city’s economy, whose many defense plants had suffered greatly from the Soviet

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  Russian politician Anatoly Sobchak was a mentor to President Vladimir Putin. © VITTORIANO RASTELLI/CORBIS economic collapse. On the recommendation of the rector of Leningrad State University, Stanislav Merkouriev, Sobchak hired a young ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, to handle relations with foreign investors. Putin had been a student in one of Sobchak’s classes but they were not personally acquainted. Putin became Sobchak’s deputy in 1993 and ran his re-election campaign in July 1996. Sobchak, surprisingly, lost to a challenge from his former deputy, Vladimir Yakovlev.

  The next year Yakovlev (known as governor rather than mayor) filed a libel suit against Sobchak after the latter accused him of ties to organized crime in a newspaper interview. In October 1997 Sobchak suffered a heart attack while being questioned by police about corruption allegations, mainly pertaining to the distribution of city-owned apartments. Sobchak went to France for medical treatment and remained there in voluntary exile- beyond the reach of investigators.

  The rise of Putin (who became head of the Federal Security Service in July 1998) and the dismissal of Procurator Yuri Skuratov in April 1999 enabled

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  Sobchak to return to Russia in July 1999. The charges against him were dropped, but his public image was tarnished, and he failed to win a seat in the State Duma in the December 1999 elections. Sobchak died of a heart attack in February 2000 while on a trip to Kaliningrad as Putin’s envoy. An emotional Putin attended his funeral and pledged revenge on his enemies, blaming them for his death. Observers took this as referring to Vladimir Yakovlev, but Putin failed to prevent Yakovlev’s reelection as St. Petersburg governor in May 2000.

  Sobchak’s career, in which he evolved from a principled liberal to a defender of Russian capitalism and backer of Vladimir Putin, reflected the broader hopes and disappointments of the Russian transition from communism. Sobchak himself was aware of the contradictions, commenting just before his death that “We have not achieved a democratic, but rather a police state over the past ten years.” See also: PERESTROIKA; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; ST. PETERSBURG; YAKOVLEV, ALEXANDER NIKO-LAYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Holiman, Alan. (2000). “Remembering Anatoly Sobchak.” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 8(3):324-329.

  PETER RUTLAND

  SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY

  Social democracy was a product of capitalism in Imperial Russia around 1900. Until the 1890s, Russian socialism meant agrarian Populism, an illegal, conspiratorial, and terrorist movement of the educated intelligentsia that placed its faith in the peasant village commune. After state-funded railroad building inspired rapid industrial growth in Russia, many intellectuals became Marxist Social Democrats.

  Social Democrats believed that they could combine socialism with democracy, without any centralized state nationalization of property. Karl Marx had criticized capitalism as both inefficient and unjust, a cause of violent class struggle that would lead inevitably to a proletarian class seizure of power from the property-owning bourgeoisie, or capitalist class. Industrial capitalism would cause its own demise.

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  The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) originated in 1898 in Minsk. The party’s central organizer and later source of internal division was Vladimir Ilich Lenin (V. I. Ulyanov). The RSDWP modeled itself after the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD), whose Marxist orthodoxy was then challenged by revisionism. Revisionists argued that reform, not revolution, would best serve worker interests, and favored elections over strikes.

  The RSDWP split into Menshevik (minority) and Bolshevik (majority) factions in 1903. The Mensheviks believed that workers should lead the party and constitute its membership. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, believed that well-organized professional revolutionaries could better organize the party against the imperial police. Such revolutionaries would force revolutionary consciousness upon workers, who might otherwise turn to revisionism and reform.

  The RSDWP played a minimal role in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Tsar Nicholas II legalized labor unions and allowed a new freely elected parliament, or Duma. But as police cracked down on radical peasants, workers, and non-Russian nationalities seeking independence, party members went underground. Many emigrated to Europe. The Mensheviks broadened their base among factory workers inside Russia. The Bolsheviks robbed banks, fled to Europe, and disagreed over whether or not to participate in elections to the bourgeois Duma. The police succeeded in penetrating the party, arresting many members (including Josef Stalin) and recruiting police agents. By 1914 the RSDWP was divided and weak, competing for support with rival liberal (Constitutional Democrat), agrarian socialist (Social Revolutionaries), and national (Jewish Bund) parties.

  In February 1917, Imperial Russia collapsed under the pressures of World War I. A Provisional Government tried to continue the war and carry out democratic and agrarian reforms. But the army began to disintegrate, and the urban and rural masses, organized in soviets (councils), moved increasingly leftward, seizing factories and land. The Bolsheviks slowly developed into a mass party.

  In April 1917, Lenin returned to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) from Swiss exile. He immediately declared war on the bourgeois Provisional Government. In November, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, Moscow, and other towns. Lenin headed a new socialist government advocating workers

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  SOCIALISM

  control of factories, peasant land reform, and peace with the Central Powers.

  Russia then became the world’s first socialist state, led by a single party, the Bolsheviks, renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or (RKP (b)) in 1918, then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1924. Lenin quickly created his own police state and arrested, tried, and exiled old political enemies, especially Mensheviks, Kadets, and Social Revolutionaries. Many ordinary citizens died in war, civil war, famine, and terror as a new party ruled in their name.

  After the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the RSDWP became essentially two parties. The Bolsheviks led Russia down a separate path to civil war, industrial growth, collectivization of agriculture, and totalitarianism. The Mensheviks became exile critics of a revolution they helped create and barely survived. In 1991, the RSDWP’s greatest achievement, the Soviet Union, collapsed. See also: BOLSHEVISM; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLUTION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ascher, Abraham. (1972). Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liebich, Andre. (1997). From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921. Camb
ridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Service, Robert. (2000). Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, Robert C. (1986). The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  ROBERT C. WILLIAMS

  SOCIALISM

  Broadly speaking, socialism is the ideology of collective ownership of the means of production and the joint distribution of goods. There were two principal currents in Russian socialism. One held that the peasants, who comprised more than 80 percent of the population, would be the driving force in the creation of the new society; and the other assigned that role to the industrial proletariat. The first current was initially advocated by Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), who had been a supporter of the Decembrists and left Russia for the West in 1847 to escape persecution. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848, which he attributed to the conservatism and attachment to private property of most Europeans, disappointed him deeply. He concluded that the chances for socialism were much better in his native country because the peasant commune had accustomed the Russian people to communal life and egalitarianism. The Russian peasant, Herzen contended, “has no morality save that which flows instinctively, naturally, from his communism.” These ideas came to be known as narodnichestvo, which literally means “populism” but is perhaps better translated as “Russian socialism.” Taken up by such thinkers and activists as Mikhail A. Bakunin (a radical anarchist), Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky, and Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, the populists gained a substantial following among the intelligentsia by the 1860s and 1870s. Although all populists agreed that Russia could by-pass capitalism in its evolution toward socialism, there was considerable disagreement over the means to achieve the final goal. Toward the end of his life, Herzen believed that socialism could be attained by peaceful means. Peter I. Lavrov was another strong advocate of peaceful methods; from the 1860s until his death in 1900 he argued that it was the obligation of intellectuals to educate the people politically and thus prepare them to undertake their own liberation. Chernyshevsky, on the other hand, did not believe that force could be avoided.

  The failed attempt by the populist DmitryV. Karakozov to assassinate Alexander II in 1866 and the ensuring repression prompted many revolutionary intellectuals to opt for peaceful tactics. Early in the 1870s, idealistic young narodniki launched the Go to the People movement; hundreds of them moved to the countryside and lived with the peasants in order to teach them to read and write as well as the rudiments of modern technology. But the ultimate goal of the populists was to prepare the masses for the revolution. Many peasants were baffled by the visitors and feared they were trying to lead them astray. Some peasants even turned them in to the police, who in the mid-1870s arrested many of the populists, bringing the well-intentioned project to a close. But the ideas of the populists remained alive and were incorporated by the largest socialist movement in Russia, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), founded in 1902. The SRs advocated the transfer of all land to peasant communes or local associations, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to all who wished to earn their living by farming. Industry

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  would be similarly socialized. Although the Socialist Revolutionaries insisted that the final goal, socialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion, they tolerated the “Combat Organization,” an independent organ of the party that carried out dozens of political assassinations. Political terror, many believed, was necessary to bring about the dismantling of the autocratic regime.

  In the meantime, in the late 1870s, a small group of intellectuals led by Georgy V. Plekhanov founded a Marxist movement in the name of the industrial working class, and this represented the second major current in Russian socialism. The Marxists contended that Russia’s development would be similar to trends in Central and Western Europe. The country would be industrialized, and would undergo a bourgeois revolution during which the autocratic system would be replaced by a constitutional order dominated by a middle class committed to capitalism. Eventually, when industrialization had reached maturity and the proletariat had become a powerful force, it would stage a second, socialist revolution. In 1898, the Russian Marxists founded the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which five years later split into two factions.

  The split occurred over the seemingly minor question of how to define a party member, but it soon turned out that the differences between the Bolsheviks (majoritarians) led by Vladimir I. Lenin and the Mensheviks (minoritarians) led by Yuli O. Martov and Paul B. Axelrod touched on fundamental issues. Lenin, in keeping with views he had expressed in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?, favored a highly centralized, elitist, hierarchically organized political party, whereas the Mensheviks stressed the necessity and desirability of broad working-class participation in the movement’s affairs and in the coming revolutionary events. In short order, it also became evident that while both factions subscribed to a revolutionary course, the Mensheviks tended to adopt more moderate tactics than did the Bolsheviks.

  On November 7, 1917, after the country had endured three years of war that caused untold devastation and loss of life and eight months of revolutionary turbulence, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, which consisted of moderates committed to democracy and had been formed when the tsarist regime collapsed earlier that year, in March. Then, on November 8, one day after the Bolsheviks had formed a new government,

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  Lenin sought to placate the peasants, still the vast majority of the population, by adopting the SR land program. He ordered the abrogation of the property rights of the nobility and placed land in the rural regions at the disposal of land committees and district soviets of peasants’ deputies for distribution to the peasants. But the Bolsheviks also remained faithful to their own program by introducing workers’ control in industry and in commercial and agricultural enterprises, abolishing distinctions and special privileges based on class, eliminating titles in the army, and outlawing inequality in wages. Lenin was convinced that the economically more advanced countries of Europe with large proletarian populations would soon follow Russia’s example in adopting socialism.

  When this did not happen, his successor, Josef V. Stalin, in 1924 formulated the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” according to which Russia was strong enough economically to reach the final goal of socialism by itself. Four years later, the Soviet government launched a second revolution by forcing the peasants into collectives and speeding up the process of industrialization. Much more so than ever before, the major economic decisions were now made by officials in Moscow. Then, in 1936, Stalin formally declared that the goal of socialism had in fact been attained. This claim was disputed by Leon D. Trotsky, the man he had defeated in the struggle over the leadership of the country after Lenin’s death in 1924. Trotsky maintained that socialism could triumph only on a worldwide basis. Stalinist socialism remained the regnant ideology of the country until 1991, although many Stalinist methods of rule were gradually abandoned following Stalin’s death in 1953. See also: BOLSHEVIKS; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILLICH; MARXISM; MENSHEVIKS; POPULISM; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Baron, Samuel H. (1963). Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haimson, Leopold H. (1955). The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lampert, Evgenii. (1965). Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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  SOCIALIST REALISM

  Malia, Martin. (1961). Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russi
a. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Walicki, Andrzej. (1995). Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Woehrlin, William F. (1971). Chernishevskii: The Man and the Journalist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolfe, Bertram D. (1948). Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical Study. New York: Dial Press.

  ABRAHAM ASCHER

  SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY

  The question of whether socialism could be built in the USSR provoked a great ideological and political debate in the Soviet Union that lasted from 1924 to 1927. In response to Leon Trotsky, who, on the basis of his theory of “permanent revolution,” believed that “the genuine rise of socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries of Europe,” Josef Stalin first propounded his doctrine of “socialism in one country” in a newspaper article of December 1922. The difference between the two theories was based on a distinction between the processes of making a socialist revolution and a socialist economy. Every Bolshevik believed that the revolution that had proved victorious in October 1917 was a socialist revolution, but according to party doctrine it was impossible to build a socialist economy in a lone backward country, even though it was now clear that the foundations of a socialist economy were being laid. Stalin did not deny the importance of the international revolution or its likelihood in the near future because of the crisis in capitalism. But seizing on a few scattered passages of Lenin, including, from the last speech Lenin ever made, the quote, “NEP [New Economic Policy] Russia will become socialist Russia,” Stalin argued that because the “dictatorship of the proletariat” had been established in Russia through the peculiar conditions of the 1917 revolution-the alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry-the complete organization of a socialist economy in the USSR was possible, as part of the process of building socialENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY ism. He qualified this by saying that “for the final victory of socialism, for the organization of Socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient” (Problems of Leninism, 1926), and, moreover, that the victory of socialism could not be considered secure while the USSR was encircled by hostile capitalist powers.