Encyclopedia of Russian History
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TOMSKY, MIKHAIL PAVLOVICH
Orwin, Donna Tussing, ed. (2002). Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wasiolek, Edward. (1978). Tolstoy’s Major Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, A. N. (1988). Tolstoy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
MICHAEL A. DENNER
Wynn, Charters. (1996). From the Factory to the Kremlin: Mikhail Tomsky and the Russian Worker. Washington, DC: National Council for Soviet and East European Research.
ALISON ROWLEY
TOMSKY, MIKHAIL PAVLOVICH
(1880-1936), Russian union activist.
Tomsky was a leading Old Bolshevik and trade union activist who committed suicide before he could be tried during Josef Stalin’s purges. Tom-sky was born Mikhail Efremov into a working-class environment. He began to work in a factory in adolescence and eventually became a printer. He joined the Social Democrats in 1904 and soon turned to union organizing. Between 1906 and 1909 his activities led to a series of arrests that was interspersed with party work whenever he was free. During this period he adopted the pseudonym Tomsky. In 1911 he began a five-year term of hard labor that was followed by exile to Siberia. After the collapse of the monarchy, Tomsky returned to Petrograd and his union work. In 1919 he was elected to the Central Committee and chosen to head the Central Trade Union Council. Three years later he became a member of the Politburo. He was one of the eight pallbearers at Vladimir Lenin’s funeral in 1924. The next year he sided against Leon Trotsky and his followers in the party struggles that followed Lenin’s death. In 1928 he joined with Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov to protest the pace and methods of collectivization. After this opposition group was defeated, Tomsky was expelled from the Politburo and removed from his position as trade union leader. In 1931 he was appointed head of the State Publishing House. Tomsky shot himself after learning that he had been implicated in one of Stalin’s show trials. At Bukharin’s trial two years later fabricated evidence named Tomsky as the link between members of the Right Opposition and an oppositional group in the Red Army. See also: BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH; POLITBURO; RYKOV, ALEXEI IVANOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sorenson, Jay B. (1969). The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917-1928. New York: Atherton Press.
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TORKY
The nomadic Torky (known as Torky in Rus and Oghuz in Eastern sources) spoke a Turkic language and probably practiced shamanist-T?ri religion. They formed into a tribal confederation in the eighth century in the Syr Darya-Aral Sea steppe region. In the late ninth century, joined by the Khazars, they expelled the Pechenegs from the Volga-Ural area and forced them to migrate to the South-Russian steppe. In 965, joined by the Rus, the Torky destroyed the Khazar state, and in 985 the two allies attacked Volga Bulgharia. The migration of the Polovtsy, Torky’s eastern neighbors, forced the latter into the South-Russian steppe by 1054 or 1055. In 1060, the Rus staged a major offensive and scored a victory over the Torky. While many Torky fled west, some remained in the South-Russian steppe zone and joined other nomadic peoples to later develop into Rus border guards known as Chernye Klobuky or Black Hoods. From around 1060 to 1140, Chernye Klobuky remained outside the formal political boundaries of the Rus state and maintained a largely nomadic lifestyle. During this period, they were often involved in the military affairs of the Rus princes and, at times, came to settle within the Rus borders in return for their services. After 1140 the institution of Chernye Klobuky became formalized, and they came to be viewed as mercenaries and vassals of the Kievan Grand Princes. As vassals, the Chernye Klobuky maintained allegiance not to any particular branch of the royal Rus family, but to the holder of the title of Grand Prince of Kiev. See also: KHAZARS; KIEVAN RUS; POLOVTSY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Golden, Peter B. (1990). “The Peoples of the South Russian Steppe.” In The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. Denis Sinor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Golden, Peter B. (1992). An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
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Golden, Peter B. (1996). “Chernii Klobouci.” In Symbolae Turcologicae: Studies in Honour of Lars Johanson on his Sixtieth Birthday, 8 March 1996, eds. ?. Berta; B. Brendemoen; and C. Sch?nig (Transactions / Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, v. 6). Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul.
ROMAN K. KOVALEV
TOTALITARIANISM
The concept of totalitarianism was used to describe the more extreme forms of the hypertrophic states of the twentieth century, with their ideologies, elaborate mechanisms of control, and uniquely invasive efforts to diminish or even obliterate the distinction between public and private. The term was coined in the early 1920s, in Fascist Italy, by Mussolini’s opponents and was expanded in the early 1930s to include National Socialist Germany. Although the term was coined by opponents of Fascism and early usages were largely hostile, it was also episodically employed by supporters of the Italian and German regimes, such as Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini himself, to differentiate their governments from the allegedly decadent liberal regimes they so detested. The very early Italian usages connoted extreme violence, but as Italian Fascism evolved from its movement phase and became an ideology of government, the term increasingly suggested the intent of the state to absorb every aspect of human life into itself. This notion was in harmony with the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile. The term was most systematically and positively used in Germany by Carl Schmitt, but Hitler eventually forbade its positive use, since it evoked an Italian comparison, which he disliked.
Even in the 1920s and early 1930s, there were a number of people who suggested that the Soviet Union bore certain similarities to both Italy and Germany. After Hitler’s blood purge in 1934, the similarities between the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy became the subject of frequent and systematic comparison; after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), such comparisons became widespread. Only in strongly pro-communist circles was there an understandable reluctance to conclude that the Soviet Union had degenerated so badly that it could be compared with Nazi Germany.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, this comparison came to dominate the term’s usage, right up to the end of the Cold War. The Truman administration suddenly began discussing the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime when it had to justify the strongly anti-Soviet turn in American foreign policy that began in 1947, expressed most vividly in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
Prewar usages in the 1920s and 1930s had been unsystematic and largely journalistic, though such dedicated students of Russia as William Henry Chamberlin had compared the Soviet Union and Germany more systematically as early as 1935. But World War II and the development of the Cold War created a community of Russian experts in acade-mia, where the term became thoroughly institutionalized in the early 1950s. The first systematic and grand-scale comparison, however, was not by an American academic, but by a German-Jewish ?migr?, Hannah Arendt, whose brilliant but uneven Origins of Totalitarianism was a sensation when it appeared in 1951. The most influential academic treatment of the term was Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, which appeared in 1956 and had a long and controversial life. Brzezinski and Friedrich’s account provided what was variously called a syndrome and a model to classify states as totalitarian. To be accounted, a state had to exhibit six features: an all-encompassing ideology; a single mass party, typically led by one man; a system of terror; a near-monopoly on all means of mass communication; a similar near-monopoly of instruments of force; and a centrally controlled economy.
Although Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy achieved wide acceptance in the 1950s, the restricted nature of its comparison, as well as the changing political times, made it highly controversial in the following two decades, with most of the academic community turning agai
nst it. Its fate was intimately bound up with the Cold War, which lost its broad base of popular support among Western academics and intellectuals during the 1960s. The viability of a term as value-laden as totalitarianism, in light of the demand for analytical rigor in the social sciences, was now considered highly debatable. In addition, as American historians of Russia became more and more enamored of social history, the focus of the totalitarian point of view on the politics of the center seemed far too restrictive for their research agenda, which was more focused on the experiences of ordinary people and everyday life, especially in the provinces.
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During the Reagan years, the term was revived by neoconservatives interested in a more aggressive political and military challenge to the Soviet Union and also in distinguishing the Soviet Union and its satellites from the (allegedly less radical) rightist states whom the Reagan administration regarded as allies against Communism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the term has become less politically charged and seems to be evolving in a more diffuse fashion to suggest closed or antidemocratic states in general, particularly those with strong ideological or religious coloration. See also: AUTOCRACY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Friedrich, Carl J., and Brzezinski, Zbigniew. (1965). Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gleason, Abbott. (1995). Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press. Halberstam, Michael. (2000). Totalitarianism and the Modern Concept of Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Havel, Vaclav. (1985). “The Power of the Powerless.” In The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Lifka, Thomas E. (1988). The Concept “Totalitarianism” and American Foreign Policy, 1933-1949. New York: Garland. Orwell, George. (1949). 1984. New York: New American Library.
ABBOTT GLEASON
TOURISM
Though tourism was not a product of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik emphasis on raising the cultural level of the masses and educating through practical experience made tourism one of the concerns of the new regime. The government created a number of institutions to encourage development in this field. Within Narkompros and Glavprolit-prosvet, excursion sectors were established as early as 1919 to organize educational trips throughout
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the country; a number of these bureaus later developed into scientific-research bodies such as the Central Museum-Excursion Institute in Moscow. The two major organizations for Soviet tourism- the Society for Proletarian Tourism (OPT RFSFR, created by decree of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and the joint-stock society Soviet Tourist (created by Narkompros in 1928)-merged in 1930 under the name of the All-Union Society of Proletarian Tourism and Excursions (OPTE) under the direction of N. V. Krylenko. It was also at this time that mass tourism began to develop as a movement among Soviet youth, marked by the establishment of a separate bureau within the Komsomol in 1928. Students, pioneers, and other young Soviets went on tours of the country organized under themes such as “My Motherland-the USSR.” Excursions were designed to acquaint citizens with national monuments, the history of the revolutionary movement, and the life of Vladimir Lenin. This so-called sphere of proletarian tourism was thus intended as an integral aspect of the construction of socialism within the Soviet Union.
The importance of travel was not limited, however, to shaping Soviet ideology within the country. The state recognized that foreigners visiting the Soviet Union also represented a significant means through which socialism might gain expression and adherents throughout the world; additional consideration was given to the inflow of capital from international tourists. Though certain privileged groups of udarniki, fine arts performers, musicians, students, and government officials traveled beyond Soviet borders in the country’s initial years, millions of visitors ultimately toured the Soviet Union throughout its roughly seventy-year history.
To aid in the maintenance of foreign tours and international travel to the Soviet Union, on April 12, 1929, the Council for the Labor and Defense of the USSR adopted the decree “On the organization of the All-Union Joint-Stock Company for Foreign Tourism in the USSR.” Otherwise known as In-tourist (an acronym of Gosudarstvennoe aksion-ernoe obshchestvo po innostrannomu turizmu v SSSR and an abbreviated form of Inostrannyi tur-ist), the company was supported by a number of Soviet organizations such as the People’s Commissariat of Trade, Sovtorgflot, the People’s Commissariat of Rail Transport, and the All-Union Joint-Stock Company Otel’. A. S. Svanidze was its first chairman. Though Intourist was occasionally responsible for organizing the visits of more
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prominent foreigners such as Bernard Shaw and Theodore Dreiser, in its initial years it played host primarily to international labor delegations as part of the movement to acquire foreign technical assistance. Only in the post-World War II period did Intourist experience rapid growth and an expansion of its services. This was the result, first, of the general postwar spirit of internationalism and faith in international organizations and, second, of the new friendships between the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Intourist became a member of numerous national and international bodies such as the World Tourism Organization and participated in various conferences on tourism such as those hosted by the United Nations. More importantly, however, was the creation of a unified commercial organization for international tourism and satellite travel bureaus in each of the socialist Eastern Europe nations. This network facilitated exchanges among worker delegations, students, theater troupes, trade unions, kolkhozes, and other social groups. It was also during this time that Intourist constructed the basic infrastructure of hotels, autoparks, and restaurants used by foreign visitors until 1989, when the organization was withdrawn from the control of the central state apparatus and restructured as an independent enterprise.
Intourist’s operations raise numerous questions about the meaning of leisure and privilege in a socialist society. Its advertisements and exhibit materials throughout the Soviet period spur consideration of the various messages the state promoted about itself to the outside world. And its list of itineraries that, at one point, covered 150 cities of the Union republics-with cruises along the Dniepr from Kiev to Kherson, along the Black Sea to Odessa, along the Dunau to Rus in Bulgaria or to Dzurduz in Romania-give credence to the geopolitical power of the entity that was the Soviet Union.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Margulies, S. (1968). The Pilgrimage to Russia: the Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924-1937. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ostrovskii, I., and Pavlenko, M. (1998). Intourist 1929-1999. VAO Inturist. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) Fond 9612, opis 1, delo 2 and 123; opis 3, delo 557.
SHAWN SOLOMON
TRADE ROUTES
Three-fourths of Russia is more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) away from seas and oceans; Russia is the world’s most continental country. Even though Russia’s coastline is the second longest (after Canada), the presence of sea ice hampers traffic in and out of the country’s few ports during much of the winter. Murmansk, for example, Russia’s only warm-water port, is plagued by shorefast ice for two months out of the year. These and other factors hampered the development of a Russian navy until the eighteenth century, when Peter the Great built St. Petersburg, his famed “Window on the West.” Accordingly, Russian historic trade routes have been negotiated largely within its vast interior.
EARLY ROUTES
Commerce in the Black Sea Basin may be traced to intercourse between the Scythians and Greeks circa 250 B.C.E. Scythian nomads extracted grain, fish, and slaves from their sedentary subjects and traded them in the Greek ports for wine, cloth, metalware, and luxury items
. Before the Hun invasion (375 C.E.), Persian Alans and Germanic Goths established a commercial confederation between the Baltic and Black Seas.
International trade in Eastern Europe after 850 C.E. literally created Kievan Rus. Using the interlocking system of rivers and portages on the Russian plain, Varangian (Viking) traders and soldiers sought the markets of the lower Volga and Don rivers, where they traded fur, slaves, and wood items for silver coins and spices from Central Asia, Arabia, and Byzantium. Originally traversing the Saracen Route between the Gulf of Finland, Lakes Ladoga and Onega, down the Volga River to the Caspian Sea and beyond, the Vikings eventually preferred trade with Byzantium, which was in its heyday. After the founding of Kievan Rus in 879, the Dnieper (Dnipro) trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks carried flax, hemp, hides, slaves, honey, wax, grain, and furs from the north in exchange for silks, naval equipment, wine, jewelry, glassware, and art items (particularly icons after the introduction of Orthodox Christianity in 988).
The collapse of the Khazar Empire (600-900 C.E.) opened the steppes to menacing Kypchak Turks, who eventually cut off Kievan Rus from the all-important salt deposits (virtually the only food preservative) of the Crimea; thus, the major trade routes shifted from a north-south orientation to
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