by James Millar
A second view, shared by a minority of his contemporaries but a majority of historians, accepted that Stolypin never entirely could have escaped the authoritarian impulses widespread in tsarist culture and especially pronounced among those upon whom Stolypin’s own influence most depended- moderate public opinion; the hereditary nobility, the imperial court; and ultimately the tsar, Nicholas II. Given such circumstances, without order the far-reaching “renovation” (obnovlenie) of the economic, cultural, and political institutions of the Empire envisioned by Stolypin would have been politically impossible. Of central importance to this interpretation was the Stolypin land reform, first issued by administrative decree in 1906 and approved by the State Duma in 1911. This major legislative accomplishment aimed to transform what was deemed to be an economically unproductive, politically destabilizing peasant repartitional land commune (obshchina) and eventually replace it with family based hereditary smallholdings. Yet, the reform initiatives of these years were not limited only to this “wager on the strong,” but extended into every important arena of national life: local, rural, and urban government; insurance for industrial workers; religious toleration; the income tax; universal primary education; university autonomy; and the conduct of foreign policy.
In September 1911, Stolypin’s career was cut short when Dmitry Bogrov assassinated him in Kiev. Once a secret police informant, Bogrov’s background spawned persistent rumors of right-wing complicity in the murder of Russia’s last great reformer, but by all authoritative accounts the assassin acted alone. Some scholars argue that Stolypin’s political influence, and especially his personal relationship with Nicholas II, was waning well before his death, in large measure as a result of the western zemstvo crisis of March 1911. Yet, Abraham Ascher, Stolypin’s most authoritative biographer, credits the claims of Alexander Zenkovsky that Stoylpin was contemplating further substanENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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tive reforms of the empire’s administrative and territorial structures in the last months of his life. Stolypin’s historical reputation continues to be the subject of scholarly debate, the character and consequences of his policies intertwined with larger debates about the stability and longevity of the tsarist regime. See also: AGRARIAN REFORMS; DUMA; ECONOMY, TSARIST; NICHOLAS II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, Abraham. (2001). P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Conroy, Mary Schaeffer. (1976). Peter Arkad’evich Stolypin: Practical Politics in Late Imperial Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Macey, David A. J. (1987). Government and Peasant in Russia, 1881-1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Von Bock, Maria Petrovna. (1970). Reminiscences of My Father Peter A. Stolypin, tr. and ed. Margaret Patoski. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Waldron, Peter. (1998). Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia. London: UCL. Wcislo, Francis W. (1990). Reforming Rural Russia. State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zenkovsky, Alexander. (1986). Stolypin: Russia’s Last Great Reformer, tr. Margaret Patoski. Princeton, NJ: Kingston Press.
FRANCIS W. WCISLO
ST. PETERSBURG
From 1712 until 1918, St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire. Peter I (the Great) began the construction of the city as his “Window on the West” in 1703. During the subsequent three centuries, St. Petersburg was identified with the three major forces shaping Russian history: Westernization, industrialization, and revolution. The city was renamed Petrograd in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, because it sounded less German, was then named Leningrad after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and again became St. Petersburg in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Confusingly, the surrounding region (oblast) is still known as Leningrad. In the early twenty-first century, with a metropolitan population of 4.8 million people, St. Petersburg is the second-largest city in Russia and the fourth-largest in Europe (behind Moscow, London, and Berlin). It is also Russia’s second-most important industrial center, having benefited from Soviet investment in heavy industry, research and development, military-industrial production, and military basing and training. The city is a major international port and tourist destination, with tourists flocking there in May and June for the legendary “White Nights,” during which the sun seems to never set.
CAPITAL OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Peter the Great seized control over the confluence of the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland from Sweden in 1703. Inspired by a visit to Amsterdam, he decided to build a major city on this barren marshland to better integrate Russia into Western Europe and secure a Baltic port. Thousands of peasants and prisoners-of-war were pressed into service to build the city’s numerous canals and palaces. When the harsh climate combined with malaria to kill tens of thousands of them, their bodies were dumped into the construction sites, leading to St. Petersburg’s nickname as the “city built on bones.” Construction was hampered by floods, which also ravaged the city in 1777, 1824, 1924, and 1955.
Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, improved upon her father’s vision by commissioning European architects such as Bartolomeo Rastrelli to construct baroque landmarks, including Winter Palace, the Smolny Institute, and the palaces of Tsarskoe Selo. Catherine II (the Great) subsequently purchased the paintings, drawings, and other priceless artworks that are now the core of the Hermitage Museum’s holdings. She also established the Russian Academy of Arts to further aesthetic production, and she commissioned the Pavlovsk Palace, the Hermitage, and the Tauride Palace, later the meeting place of the first Duma and the Provisional Government.
The city’s remarkable transformation from swamp to showcase paralleled the emergence of Russia as a major European power, from Peter’s 1709 victory over the Swedes at Poltava to Alexander I’s 1814 arrival in Paris. The city came to represent precisely this change from isolation to European integration. Petersburg’s growing symbolic dominance preoccupied the country’s intelligentsia and nobility alike, with Tsar Nicholas I
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An eighteenth-century engraving of Peter the Great supervising the construction of St. Petersburg. © BETTMANN/CORBIS complaining that “Petersburg is Russian but it is not Russia.”
During the imperial era, Russia’s leading politicians, intellectuals, and cultural figures were brought together by the major institutions based in St. Petersburg to generate events that vitally affected the life of every member of Russian society. The Decembrist uprising of 1825 culminated in Senate (now Decembrist) Square. In January 1905, Father Gapon led a peaceful march of workers and their families to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar; the resulting slaughter is remembered as Bloody Sunday. Following that tragedy, the workers of St. Petersburg became increasingly militant. Forced to live and work in squalor due to Russia’s rapid forced industrialization, they began to protest and strike for improved conditions.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, the city was the fifth-largest in Europe, behind London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, and was widely viewed as representative of imperial Russia’s new military and industrial might. But with industrialization there also emerged a surging revolutionary movement, and “Red Petrograd” soon became the “cradle of the Revolution.”
UNDER THE SOVIETS
With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Nicholas II russified the capital city’s name to Petrograd. In the early days of the war, the streets of Petrograd were filled with young men volunteering for military service. But as Russian losses mounted and the economy declined still further, Petrograd became the focus of anti-tsarist sentiment. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, founded in 1917 and modeled on a 1905 organization, was the most active. In March (February O.S.) 1917, workers struck and soldiers mutinied, leading to the eventual abdication of Nicholas II. A Provisional Government w
as in
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stalled, but constantly battled the Petrograd Soviet for control of the city. During the “July Days,” the Soviet nearly succeeded in gaining power. On November 7 (October 25, O.S.), members of Trotsky’s Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace, and the Provisional Government fled. For the next seventy-four years, the communists would control Russia.
The Soviet regime’s shift of its seat of government to Moscow in March 1918 stripped Petrograd of many of its most creative and powerful institutions and prominent individuals. The city was renamed Leningrad after the death of Lenin in 1924. Its standing was further undermined by the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in his office at the Smolny Institute, which precipitated Josef Stalin’s mass purges. Mass graves containing the victims were still being discovered outside the city as recently as 2002.
World War II took a particularly heavy toll on Leningrad. For nine hundred days the Germans laid siege to the city, and there were anywhere from 700,000 to more than 1 million civilian deaths from attack and starvation. Although the Nazis never entered the city proper, they looted and burned many of the palaces in the environs, including Pe-terhof and the Catherine Palace.
During the post-Stalin era Leningrad was an important economic and intellectual center, though still trailing Moscow. Aside from Kirov, one of Leningrad’s best-known political leaders was the rather ironically named Grigory Romanov. As first secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee from 1970 to 1983, Romanov encouraged production and scientific associations, as well as links among such groups to innovate and implement new technologies. As a result, Leningrad achieved enviable production levels. Romanov also made use of the city’s extensive scientific establishment, linking the research and production sectors to improve production.
THE POST-SOVIET ERA
Although Romanov eschewed Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, other Leningrad leaders embraced the changes. Anatoly Sobchak was elected to the first USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 and in 1991 became the city’s first elected mayor. A major figure in Russia’s democratic movement, Sobchak oversaw a difficult transition in his city. His resistance to the hardline August 1991 putsch was critical to its defeat. Following the coup’s collapse,
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Sobchak immediately renamed the city St. Petersburg. As the city’s economy suffered under the national shift to capitalism, St. Petersburg experienced a severe rise in organized crime. Sobchak was unable to eradicate corruption, and in 1996 lost his bid for reelection to Vladmir Yakovlev.
St. Petersburg is the cultural capital of Russia. Among its most famous residents were the painters Marc Chagall and Ilya Repin; the writers Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the composers Peter Tchaikovsky and Dmitry Shoshtakovich; and the choreographers Marius Petipa and Sergei Diaghilev. Among its many art galleries, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, and the Stieglitz boast collections unparalleled in the world. St. Petersburg is the home of the renowned Mariinsky ballet company (known as the Kirov in Soviet times). Shostakovich named his Seventh Symphony Leningrad. Falconet’s Bronze Horseman sculpture of Peter the Great, located in Decembrist Square, was commissioned by Catherine the Great and immortalized by Pushkin in a poem of the same name. Many palaces and Orthodox churches have been restored, including the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and the Kazan Cathedral. On the north bank of the Neva, the Peter and Paul Fortress has a long history as both a prison and, in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the burial site of all the Romanov tsars from Peter I to Nicholas II.
St. Petersburg had begun to recapture some its lost splendor by 2003. UNESCO designated the city a World Heritage site. Extensive renovation, funded in part by a $31 million loan from the World Bank, took place in preparation for the city’s tercentennial celebration in May 2003. Partly contributing to the city’s renaissance was the fact that President Vladimir Putin was born in St. Petersburg. In addition to promoting the tercentennial commemoration, Putin oversaw the renovation of the Peterhof Palace into a world-class conference center. There was also talk of creating a presidential residence in St. Petersburg and even some sentiment to move the capital from Moscow. Whether or not St. Petersburg regains the political eminence of a century ago, it remains a vibrant, culturally rich European city, much as Peter envisioned. See also: ACADEMY OF ARTS; ADMIRALTY; BLOODY SUNDAY; CATHERINE II; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; ELIZABETH; MUSEUM, HERMITAGE; PETER I; PETER AND PAUL FORTRESS; WINTER PALACE
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Glantz, David M. (2002). The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. McAuley, Mary. (1991). Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917-1922. New York: Oxford University Press. McKean, Robert B. (1990). St. Petersburg between the Revolutions, June 1907-February 1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ruble, Blair A. (1989). Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sablinsky, Walter. (1976). The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper amp; Row.
ANN E. ROBERTSON BLAIR A. RUBLE
Carter withdrew his support after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
While the SALT agreements represent important progress in terms of quantitative arms limitation, a significant flaw was that they failed to address the issue of qualitative advancements in weapons systems-which threatened the utility of the MAD regime. This qualitative problem was addressed in the subsequent Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. See also: ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY; ARMS CONTROL; D?TENTE; STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Payne, Samuel B., Jr. (1980). The Soviet Union and SALT. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolfe, Thomas W. (1979). The SALT Experience. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
MATTHEW O’GARA
STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES
Coming on the heels of the 1968 nuclear Non-Pro-liferation Treaty (NPT), the two components of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) represented a willingness by the United States and the Soviet Union to constrain an arms race that both recognized was costly and potentially destabilizing. Soviet nuclear advantage in the early 1970s concerned the United States, and the Soviets recognized that American fears would likely translate into a massive weapons program aimed at regaining nuclear superiority. Thus the Soviet Union chose to forsake short-term advantage in favor of guaranteed parity over the long term. Both sides agreed that strategic parity would significantly contribute to stability.
The chief products of SALT I were the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, and an interim agreement which set limits on the total number of offensive missiles allowable (further addressed in SALT II). The ABM Treaty limited the number of defensive weapons, indicating that both the United States and the Soviet Union accepted the idea that mutual vulnerability would increase stability- thereby institutionalizing mutual assured destruction (MAD). SALT II limited the total number of all types of strategic nuclear weapons. However, although agreed upon by both countries, SALT II was never ratified because American President Jimmy
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The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) were predicated on the concept of “minimum deterrence”-a regime in which both the United States and the Soviet Union would reduce nuclear arsenals to the minimum level needed to deter the other from attempting a first strike. As with previous bilateral nuclear weapons treaties between the United States and the USSR, the goal of START was to reduce the costs associated with a gratuitous arms buildup, while simultaneously increasing system stability by ensuring mutual vulnerability.
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p; Prior agreements limited the number of weapons each nation possessed, but advancements in technology made these previously agreed upon levels untenable to the United States; in the early 1980s it was perceived that the Soviet Union was close to a first strike capability-the ability to attack enough targets in the United States so as to prevent a retaliatory strike.
This perception of a “window of vulnerability” prompted the Reagan Administration to undertake a massive weapons modernization program, in addition to pursuing the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The Soviets believed that SDI was destabilizing and therefore were willing to make cuts in offensive nuclear arms in exchange for reENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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strictions on American research and development of space-based defensive systems. As with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT), the Soviet Union was once again forsaking short-term superiority in favor of long-term stability.
START mandated cuts in the number of nuclear delivery systems by about 40 percent, reduced the number of warheads by roughly 30 percent, and also established more complete verification procedures.
The treaty was signed by President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on July 31, 1991 in Moscow. See also: ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY; ARMS CONTROL; D?TENTE; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE
