Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kartchner, Kerry M. (1992). Negotiating START: Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and the Quest for Strategic Stability. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Mazarr, Michael J. (1991). START and the Future of Deterrence. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

  MATTHEW O’GARA

  STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE

  The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a United States military research program that President Ronald Reagan first proposed in March 1983, shortly after branding the USSR an “evil empire.” Its goal was to intercept incoming missiles in mid-course, high above the earth, hence making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Nicknamed “Star Wars” by the media, the program entailed the use of space- and ground-based nuclear X-ray lasers, subatomic particle beams, and computer-guided projectiles fired by electromagnetic rail guns-all under the central control of a supercomputer system.

  The Reagan administration peddled the program energetically within the United States and among NATO allies. In April 1984 a Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established within the Department of Defense. The program’s futuristic weapons technologies, several of which were only in a preliminary research stage in the mid-1980s, were projected to cost anywhere from $100 billion to $1 trillion.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  After Reagan’s SDI speech, General Secretary Yuri Andropov denounced the program, telling a Pravda reporter that if Washington implemented SDI, the “floodgates of a runaway race of all types of strategic arms, both offensive and defensive” would open. Painfully aware of U.S. scientific and engineering skills, the Soviet leadership sought to eschew a costly technological arms race in which the United States was stronger.

  With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR, signing of the START I and II treaties, and the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, the SDI received lower budgetary priority (like many other weapons programs). In 1993 Defense Secretary Les Aspin announced the abandonment of SDI and its replacement by a less costly program that would make use of ground-based antimissile systems. The SDIO was then replaced by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO).

  In contrast to the actual expenditures on SDI (about $30 billion), spending on BMDO programs exceeded $4 billion annually in the late 1990s. See also: ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY; ARMS CONTROL; D?TENTE; STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anzovin, Steven. (1986). The Star Wars Debate. New York: Wilson. Boffey, Philip M. (1988). Claiming the Heavens: The New York Times Complete Guide to the Star Wars Debate. New York: Times Books. FitzGerald, Frances. (2000). Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon amp; Schuster. FitzGerald, Mary C. (1987). Soviet Views on SDI. Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh. Teller, Edward. (1987). Better a Shield than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology. New York: Free Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  STRAVINSKY, IGOR FYODOROVICH

  (1882-1971), Russian composer.

  Among the most influential composers of the twentieth century, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky epitomized the new prominence of Russian emigr?

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  STRELTSY

  creative artists and their presence on the international scene in the years following the 1917 Revolution. Like the contributions of his emigr? colleague writer Vladimir Nabokov and choreographer George Balanchine-Stravinsky’s enormous contribution to his art significantly altered the course of twentieth-century music. Stravinsky’s compositions encompass every important musical trend of the period (neonationalism, neoclassicism, and serialism, to name a few) and include examples of all the major Western concert genres (opera, ballet, symphony, choral works, solo works, and numerous incidental works, including a polka for circus elephants).

  The son of a St. Petersburg opera singer, Stravinsky attained international fame with his early ballet, The Firebird (1910), composed for Sergei Di-agilev’s Ballets Russes (with choreography by Michel Fokine). Several important ballets followed, including Petrushka (1911, also with Fokine) and the seminal Rite of Spring (1913, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky), among the most famous works of art of the twentieth century. Stravinsky’s compositions for the theater continued to trace a path through the most significant musical and theatrical idioms of his century, and include Les Noces (1923, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska), Apol-lon musag?te (1928), and Agon (1957, both choreographed by Balanchine). Although Stravinsky was a supremely cosmopolitan figure, his music nonetheless retained traces of its Russian origins throughout his long career. See also: DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH; FIREBIRD; MUSIC; PETRUSHKA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Stravinsky, Vera, and Craft, Robert. (1978). Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon and Schuster. Taruskin, R. (1996). Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Eric Walter. (1979). Stravinsky: the Composer and His Works. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  TIM SCHOLL

  STRELTSY

  The musketeers, or streltsy (literally “shooters”), were organized as part of Ivan IV’s effort to reform Russia’s military during the sixteenth century. In 1550 he recruited six companies of foot soldiers

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  armed with firearms, organized into tactical units of five hundred, commanded and trained by officers from the nobility. These units were based from the beginning in towns, and eventually took on the character of garrison forces. Over time their numbers grew from three thousand in 1550 to fifty thousand in 1680.

  Militarily, they were ineffectual, mainly because of their economic character. The musketeers were a hereditary class not subject to taxation, but to state service requirements, including battlefield service, escort, and guard duties. During the seventeenth century, the state provided them with grain and cash, but economic privileges, including permission to act as merchants, artisans, or farmers, became their principal support. One particular plum was permission to produce alcoholic beverages for their own consumption. They also bore civic duties (fire fighting and police) in the towns where they lived. Pursuing economic interests reduced their fighting edge.

  Throughout the seventeenth century the musketeers proved to be fractious, regularly threatening, even killing, officers who mistreated them or represented modernizing elements within the military. By 1648 it was apparent that they were unreliable, especially when compared with the new-formation regiments appearing prior to the Thirteen Years War (1654-1667) under leadership of European mercenary officers. Rather than disband the musketeers entirely, the state made attempts to westernize them. Many units were placed under the command of foreigners and retrained. Administrative changes were made during and after the war, including placing certain units under the jurisdiction of the tsar’s Privy Chancery, which appointed officers and collected operations reports. The Privy Chancery, and by extension, the tsar, was at the center of the attempt to transform the musketeers into more thoroughly trained western-style infantry.

  Further pressure to reform included official neglect, even to the point of refusing to give the musketeers weapons. Later decrees (1681, 1682) replaced cash payments with grants of unsettled lands as compensation for service. This change in support reduced their status, without improving their overall military effectiveness, and the musketeers vehemently opposed it. By 1680, many regiments had been retrained and officered by foreigners, but the conservative musketeers were anxious to be rid of the hated foreigners and regain their eroded

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  STROIBANK

  prestige. Thus, in 1682, they were willing to believe rumors that Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich had been poisoned, and were anxious to punish those responsible with death.

  Peter I’s (the Great) reign was marred by an uprising in 1698 of military units stationed in Moscow called musketeers or streltsy (literally, “shooters”). The musketeers disliked the tsar’s wes
ternizing policies and governing style. Peter rejected traditional behaviors and practices, including standards of dress, grooming, comportment, and faith, but more importantly, he sought to reform Russia’s military institutions, which threatened the musketeers’ historical prerogatives.

  Peter crushed the rebellion with great severity, executing nearly twelve hundred musketeers, and flogging and exiling another six hundred. The Moscow regiments were abolished and survivors sent to serve in provincial units, losing privileges, homes, and lands. They carried with them seeds of defiance that eventually bore fruit in Astrakhan in 1705-1706, and among the Cossacks in 1707-1708. Although the last Moscow regiments of musketeers disappeared before 1713, the musketeers continued to exist in the provinces until after Peter’s death.

  Peter’s response to the 1698-1699 uprising may have arisen from his memories of the 1682 musketeer revolt. The musketeers suspected the Naryshkins (Peter’s mother, Natalia’s family) of having poisoned Tsar Fyodor and of planning to kill the Tsarevich Ivan, both sons of Tsar Alexei’s first wife, Maria Mloslavskaya. The Miloslavskys encouraged these suspicions in order to use their regiments against the Naryshkins. On May 25, 1682, the musketeers attacked the Kremlin. Natalia Naryshkina showed Ivan and Peter to the rioting musketeers to prove they were still alive. Nonetheless, the rebellion was bloody, and the government was powerless because it had no forces capable of stopping the musketeers. From this rebellion came the joint reign of Ivan and Peter with their sister and half-sister, Sophia, who issued decrees in their names, and who was a favorite of the musketeers.

  In 1698 the streltsy were unable to see that Peter I was implacable in his rejection of conservatism and that the musketeers represented for him a dangerous and disloyal element. In the final clash, the musketeers were unable to reshape their world, and eventually disappeared. See also: FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; IVAN IV; PETER I; SOPHIA; WESTERNIZERS

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia, Regent of Russia 1657-1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  W. M. REGER IV STRIKES See WORKERS.

  STROIBANK

  Stroibank USSR (the All-Union Bank for Investment Financing) managed and financed government investment in the Soviet period. Founded as Prombank (the Industrial Bank) in October 1922, it merged with several smaller banks and became Stroibank during the April 1959 banking reform. The USSR Council of Ministers appointed its board of directors, and it was officially part of the Gos-bank (State Bank of the USSR) network. It supported government investment both through direct (nonrepayable) financing and through short- and long-term credits. In 1972 Stroibank had over 1,200 subsidiary components throughout the USSR.

  In 1988 a series of economic reforms created a two-tiered banking system in Russia. Gosbank became a central bank, while three specialized banks split from Gosbank. During this process, Stroibank USSR became Promstroibank USSR (the Industrial-Construction Bank). During the battle for sovereignty between Russian and Soviet leaders in 1990 and 1991, Promstroibank USSR was commercialized and individual branches given the opportunity to strike out on their own or form smaller networks with other Promstroibank branches. The largest remnant of the Promstroibank network, Promstroibank Russia, remained under the control of former Promstroibank USSR director Yakov Dubnetsky. Promstroibank Russia remained a large and powerful bank throughout the 1990s, while many reorganized Promstroibank USSR branches retained strong positions in Russia’s regions and continued to serve their traditional clients. In the late 1990s, the state-owned energy giant Gazprom acquired a controlling interest in Promstroibank Russia. See also: BANKING SYSTEM, SOVIET; ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; GOSBANK; SBERBANK

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  STRUMILIN, STANISLAV GUSTAVOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Johnson, Juliet. (2000). A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kuschp?ta, Olga. (1978). The Banking and Credit System of the USSR. Leiden, Netherlands: Nijhoff Social Sciences Division.

  JULIET JOHNSON

  STRUMILIN, STANISLAV GUSTAVOVICH

  (1877-1974), economist, statistician, and demographer.

  Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilo-Petrashkevich was a Social Democrat (Menshevik) before 1917. Involved in revolutionary activities, he was arrested several times.

  In the Soviet period, Strumilin held various high positions in the State Planning Board Gosplan (deputy chairman several times, chairman of the economic-statistical section during the 1920s) and in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1931 full membership and doctor of economics honoris causa). For decades he also worked as a professor.

  Strumilin published on economic planning, the economics of labor, industrial statistics, and economic history, and he took sides in all important economic debates. He combined theoretical argumentation with empirical statistics and also incorporated sociological perspectives (e.g., in his pioneering time-budget studies). During the politicized economic debates of the 1920s, he was a radical advocate of a planned economy and responsible for the drawing up of the First Five-Year-Plan. He opted for the teleological method of planning, which takes the final (production) targets as a starting point. His demographic works, among them a prediction regarding the number and age-sex composition of the population of Russia for 1921-1941, were influential in the Soviet Union and gained international attention.

  Strumilin managed to survive the purges of the Josef Stalin period and benefited from the rehabilitation of the economists after World War II. He then concentrated on labor issues and the impact of education on wage differentials, participated actively in the economic debates of the 1950s and 1960s, and published until 1973. He represented the first generation of Soviet Marxist economists. See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; GOSPLAN; MENSHEVIKS

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  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Nove, Alec. (1969). The Soviet Economy. An Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: Praeger.

  JULIA OBERTREIS

  STRUVE, PETER BERNARDOVICH

  (1870-1944), liberal political leader, economist, and author.

  As a young man Peter Bernardovich Struve rose to prominence on the liberal left. In the 1890s he joined the Social Democratic party and authored its manifesto. He was then a proponent of a moderate legal Marxism. Struve, however, was not a doctrinaire. He was dedicated to learning and loved literature and poetry. By contrast, the Russian militants saw such a pursuit as a distraction from the task of revolution.

  As Russia moved toward revolution Struve moved toward a liberal conservatism. From 1902 to 1905 he edited the journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), a liberal publication. He eventually joined the Constitutional Democratic party (Cadet). In 1906 he won election as a deputy to the second Duma. In 1909 he contributed to Vekhi (Landmarks) as one of a group of prominent intellectuals who broke sharply with the militant leftists, seeing them as a threat to Russia’s liberation from despotism and its transformation into a liberal and democratic constitutional state. He was deeply patriotic as well as liberal in orientation. In 1911 he wrote a series entitled Patriotica. From 1907 to 1917 he engaged in scholarship as well as politics as a professor at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. After the 1917 October Revolution Struve briefly joined an anti-Bolshevik government in southern Russia and then was forced to emigrate to the West where he spent the remainder of his life as a scholar and writer on economics and politics. See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; VEKHI

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Pipes, Richard. (1970). Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905. Russian Research Center Studies, no. 64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pipes, Richard. (1980). Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944. Russian Research Center Studies, no. 80. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  CARL A.
LINDEN

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  ST?RMER, BORIS VLADIMIROVICH

  STUKACH

  From the common slang word stukachestvo, stukach was widely used in the Soviet period to describe “squealing,” or informing on people to the government authorities. The word is evidently derived from stuk, Russian for the sound of a hammer blow.

  The government, and especially the security police, in all communist-ruled or authoritarian countries, depended on informers in order to keep tabs on the loyalty of the populace. In the Politics, Aristotle had observed that tyrannical regimes must employ informers hidden within the population in order to keep their hold on absolute power.

  In such countries as the USSR, Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Cuba, and so forth, informers were sometimes made heroes by the regime. Thus, in the Soviet Union, Pavlik Morozov, a twelve-year-old boy living in the Don farming region when Stalin was enforcing collectivization of the peasants’ farms in the early 1930s, became a stukach. He informed on his parents when they allegedly concealed grain and other produce from the authorities. The boy was killed by vengeful farmers. He was thereupon iconized as a martyr by the communist authorities. Statues of Pavlik sprang up throughout the country.

  The Soviet writer Maxim Gorky urged fellow writers to glorify the boy who had exposed his father as a kulak and who “had overcome blood kinship in discovering spiritual kinship.” Another well-known Soviet novelist, Leonid Leonov, depicted a fictitious scientist of the old generation who as a stukach had nobly betrayed his son to the authorities.

  Stukachestvo was expected of any and all family members, schoolchildren, concentration-camp prisoners, factory workers-in short, every Soviet citizen, all of whom were expected to place loyalty to the State above all other linkages. See also: GORKY, MAXIM; MOROZOV, PAVEL TROFIMOVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF