Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Politically, there was also continuity at the time of independence. In 1991 the president of the Uzbek S.S.R., Islam Karimov, was elected President of Uzbekistan. In 1999 and 2000 the militant Islamic Movement for Uzbekistan (IMU) unsuccessfully attempted to destabilize the country. The government since considers Islamic extremism to be a major security concern for the country, whether it is in the guise of the IMU or the broader, internationally-based group Hezb-ut Tahrir.

  Throughout the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, Uzbekistan has tried to assert itself as a leading state in Central Asia. Of great importance was the desire to reduce the influence of Russia and remove the notion of an elder brother in the region. Consequently, Uzbekistan has diplomatic and economic ties with a number of important powers, such as China, India, the United States, the European Union, Turkey, and Iran. Since the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent U.S. led actions in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan has been

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  UZBEKISTAN AND UZBEKS

  more active in NATO Partnership for Peace programs and bilateral security relations with the United States. Ultimately, Uzbekistan would prefer to see a greater emphasis on a Central Asian regional security arrangement, with itself as the key member. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Allworth, Edward. (1990). The Modern Uzbeks: From The Fourteenth Century To The Present: A Cultural History. Stanford, CA: Hoover University Press. Babushkin, L. N., ed. (1973). Soviet Uzbekistan. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Bohr, Annette. (1998). Uzbekistan: Politics and Foreign Policy. London: RIIA. Gleason, Gregory. (1997). The Central Asian States: Discovering Independence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kangas, Roger. (2002). Uzbekistan in the Twentieth Century: Political Development and the Evolution of Power. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Karimov, Islam. (1997). Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century. Surrey, UK: Curzon Press. Levitin, Leonid, with Carlisle, Donald S. (1995). Islam Karimov: President of the New Uzbekistan. Vienna: Agrotec. MacLeod, Calum, and Mayhew, Bradley. (1999). Uzbekistan: The Golden Road to Samarkand. London: Odyssey. Melvin, Neil. (2000). Uzbekistan: Transition to Authoritarianism on the Silk Road. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

  ROGER KANGAS

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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  VALUE SUBTRACTION

  Value subtraction, or negative value added, occurs when resources and other inputs used in the production process generate output with a lower value than that of the original resources and inputs. The management of Soviet state-owned enterprises, focusing on fulfilling plan targets in order to receive a bonus, tended to fulfill the main plan target, quantity of output, with little regard for cost or efficiency considerations. At the same time, enterprises faced centrally determined prices for both the input used and the output produced. Soviet centrally determined prices were not based upon supply and demand conditions in either the domestic or global market, nor were they adjusted in response to obvious surplus or shortage conditions. Consequently, neither the prices nor the corresponding profits or losses generated in the planning process provided meaningful information to Soviet firms in terms of whether to expand or contract their operations. The primary obligation of each firm was to fulfill annual output plan targets.

  Value subtraction characterized the operation and performance of Soviet firms when their inputs and output were valued at world market prices. World market prices were more accurate reflections of the economic cost of producing an item than Soviet centrally determined prices, because they incorporated marginal rather than average costs of production, and because they adjusted to surplus and shortage conditions generated by ever-changing actions of buyers and sellers. Typically, Soviet prices were well below world market prices for the majority of resources and other inputs used in the production process. Consequently, when world market prices were applied by Western researchers and analysts to the actual resources and inputs used in the Soviet production process, the newly calculated costs of production were much higher. These higher costs were not offset by applying world market prices to the produced output, however, because the technological level of Soviet enterprises and abject quality assessments kept Soviet output valuations low in comparison to world standards. The existence of value subtraction, or negative value added, was confirmed by Soviet economists and analysts when glasnost and pere-stroika in the late 1980s allowed more frank and detailed discussions of actual conditions in the Soviet economy.

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  VARANGIAN

  See also: HARD BUDGET CONSTRAINTS; RATCHET EFFECT; VIRTUAL ECONOMY

  SUSAN J. LINZ VARANGIAN See VIKINGS.

  VARENNIKOV, VALENTIN IVANOVICH

  (b.1923), commander-in-chief of the Soviet Ground Forces; deputy minister of defense; General of the Army; Hero of the Soviet Union; member of the State Duma.

  Valentin Krasnodar was born on December 13, 1923, in Krasnodar in the Kuban region of South Russia. He joined the Red Army in 1941 as an officer cadet and was commissioned in 1942. He took part in the defense of Stalingrad as an artillery officer and served in that capacity through the war to the assault on Berlin. Varennikov was a stand-bearer at the Victory Parade in Red Square in 1945. After the war he commanded artillery and infantry units. In 1954 he graduated from the Frunze Military Academy.

  Varennikov advanced in the army leadership and graduated from the Voroshilov Military Academy of the General Staff in 1967. During the late 1960s and early 1970s he commanded an army and served as deputy commander of the Soviet Group of Forces in Germany and as commander of the Carpathian Military District. In 1979 he was head of the Operations Directorate of the General Staff, which planned the military intervention in Afghanistan. In 1984 he assumed the post of deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff with responsibility for direct oversight of operations in Afghanistan; he later oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet forces.

  In January 1989 Varennikov was made com-mandor of Soviet Ground Forces. In August 1991 he was an active participant in the conspiracy to remove Mikhail Gorbachev and prevent the proclamation of a new union treaty. During the attempted coup Varennikov was in Kiev. Arrested and jailed when the coup collapsed, Varennikov refused to accept an amnesty when it was offered in March 1994. Later that year, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court ruled that he was not guilty of treason. In December 1995 he ran for election to the State Duma as a candidate from the Communist Party and won. He won re-election in 2000 and serves as chairman of the parliamentary Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1991). The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons. New York: Harper Collins. Kipp, Jacob W. (1989). “A Biographical Sketch on General of the Army Valentin Ivanovich Varennikov.” Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies Office. Odom, William E. (1998). The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  JACOB W. KIPP

  VARGA, EUGENE SAMUILOVICH

  (1879-1964), major figure in the Soviet economics establishment and expert on the world capitalist system who fell afoul of Stalinist dogma.

  Eugene Varga was educated at the universities of Paris, Berlin, and Budapest, receiving a doctoral degree from the last in 1909. He joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in 1906 and was a writer and editor on economic matters for its central organ. When the communists came to power in Hungary in 1919, he served as commissar of finance and then as chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. After the regime fell he moved to the USSR.

  Varga’s specialty was capitalist political economy and economic conditions in the capitalist world, on which he was an influential and authoritative spokesman during the interwar period. He was elected a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1939 and was director of its Institute of World Economics and Politics until 1947, when the institute was shu
t down because of the views he expounded in Changes in the Capitalist Economy as a Result of the Second World War. Varga defended himself vigorously at a conference of economists held to attack him, but was forced to recant. In the post-Stalin period Varga was ultimately restored to a position of honor, and in 1959 his eightieth birthday was celebrated as a notable jubilee presided over by Academician Konstantin Ostrovitianov, who had orchestrated the attack on him in 1947. In 1963 he was awarded the Lenin

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  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  VAVILOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

  Prize for “scientific treatment of the problems of modern capitalism.”

  Despite his independence in analyzing economic developments in the capitalist world, and his courage in fighting Stalinist dogmatism, Varga was a thoroughly orthodox Marxist, and a critic of the ideas of Soviet econometricians and mathematical economists. See also: MARXISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Domar, Evsey. (1950). “The Varga Controversy.” American Economic Review 40:132-151.

  ROBERT W. CAMPBELL

  VASILEVSKY, ALEXANDER MIKHAILOVICH

  (1895-1977), Soviet military hero of World War II.

  A member of the Communist Party from 1938, Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky was born in the village of Novo-Pokrovka, now Ivanovo Oblast. He graduated from military school in 1914. He served as a junior officer in the tsarist army during World War I. From 1918 to 1931 he commanded a company, then a battalion, then an infantry regiment in the Red Army. From 1931 to 1936 Vasilevsky held executive posts in combat training organs within the People’s Commissariat of Defense and Volga Military District. From 1937 to 1941 he served on the General Staff, from 1941 to 1942 as deputy chief, and from 1942 to 1945 (during World War II or the Great Patriotic War) as Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces and concurrently, deputy people’s commissar of defense of the USSR.

  Upon instructions from the Supreme Command Headquarters, Vasilevsky helped to elaborate many major strategic plans. In particular, Vasilevsky was among the architects (and participants) of the 1943 Stalingrad offensive. He coordinated actions of several fronts in the Battle of Kursk and the Belorussian and Eastern-Prussian offensive operations. Under Vasilevsky’s leadership, a strategic operation aimed at routing the Japanese Kwan-tung army was successfully carried out between August and September of 1945.

  Increasingly, after the German invasion of June 1941, officers with world-class military skills, who

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  either emerged unscathed by Stalin’s purges or were retrieved from Stalin’s prisons and camps, came to the fore. Vasilevsky was among these men. Although Stalin was loath to trust anyone fully, this innate distrust did not prevent him from tapping the resources of his most talented military strategists during World War II. In the first year of the war, when the USSR was on the defensive, Stalin often made unilateral decisions. However, by the second year, he depended increasingly on his subordinates. As Marshal Vasilevsky has recalled,

  He came to have a different attitude toward the General Staff apparatus and front commanders. He was forced to rely constantly on the collective experience of the military. Before deciding on an operational question, Stalin listened to advice and discussed it with his deputy [Zhukov], with leading officers of the General Staff, with the main directorates of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, with the commanders of the fronts, and also with the executives in charge of defense production. His most astute generals, Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov included, learned how to nudge Stalin toward a decision without talking back to him.

  While serving as a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party between 1952 and 1961, Vasilevsky also held the post of first deputy minister of defense from 1953 to 1957. Twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, he was also twice awarded the military honor, the Order of Victory, and was presented with many other orders, medals, and ceremonial weapons. He retired the following year and died fifteen years later. See also: MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beevor, Antony. (1999). Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943. New York: Penguin Books. Colton, Timothy. (1990). Soldiers and the Soviet State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  VAVILOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

  (1887-1943), internationally famous biologist.

  Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov achieved international fame as a plant scientist, geographer, and geneticist before he was arrested and sentenced to death

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  VECHE

  on false charges of espionage in 1940. Born into a wealthy merchant family in pre-revolutionary Russia, Vavilov was renowned for his personal charm, integrity, and international scientific prestige. He graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1911, continued his studies of genetics and horticulture in Europe the following year, and in 1916 led an expedition to Iran and the Pamir Mountains to search for ancestral forms of modern agricultural plant species. “The Law of Homologous Series in Hereditary Variation,” his first major theoretical contribution, published in Russia in 1920 and then in the Journal of Genetics, argued that related species can be expected to vary genetically in similar ways.

  Vavilov spoke many languages and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe to meet with colleagues and study scientific innovations in agriculture. He is best known for The Centers of Origin of Cultivated Plants (1926), in which he established that the greatest genetic diversity of wild plant species would be found near the origins of modern cultivated species. Until 1935 he organized expeditions to remote corners of the world in order to collect, catalog, and preserve specimens of plant biodiversity. In the Soviet Union Vavilov was a powerful advocate and organizer of scientific institutions, and he tirelessly promoted research in genetics and plant breeding as a means of improving Soviet agriculture. Vavilov was director of the Institute of Applied Botany (1924-1929), a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, director of the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding (1930-1940) and the Institute of Genetics (1933-1940), president and vice-president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1929-1938), and president of the All-Union Geographical Society (1931-1940).

  Vavilov’s increasingly vocal and uncompromising opposition to the falsification of genetic science propagated by Trofim Lysenko and his followers culminated in his arrest in 1940. His death sentence was commuted to a twenty-year prison term in 1942; he died of malnutrition in a Saratov prison one year later. Vavilov is considered a founding father in contemporary studies of plant biodiversity. He left an important legacy as one of the great Russian scientific and intellectual figures of the early twentieth century.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Graham, Loren R. (1993). Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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  Krementsov, Nikolai. (1997). Stalinist Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Popovskii, Mark Aleksandrovich. (1984). The Vavilov Affair. Hamdon, CT: Archon Books.

  YVONNE HOWELL

  VECHE

  The veche was a popular assembly in medieval Russian towns from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. Veches became particularly active at the turn of the twelfth century, before falling into decline except in the towns of Novgorod, Pskov, and Viatka. At times, the veche in Novgorod participated in selecting or dismissing the posadniks (mayors) and tysiatskiis (thousandmen). Originally, one tysiatskii was head of the town militia but over time, several were chosen and became judicial and civil officials. The veche also chose the archbishop, and the heads of the major monasteries. It also tried cases, ratified treaties, and addressed other public matters. Meetings sometimes turned violent. In Imperial and Soviet historiography, the veche was often used as an example to demonstrate whether Russia had any democratic tradition or had always been autocratic.

  The veche remains an enigmatic phenomenon. The word is rooted in the words v
e and veshchati, the latter meaning: to pontificate, play the oracle, or to lay down the law. However, medieval chroniclers used the term not only to mean popular assemblies, but also to speak of crowds or mobs. Primary sources are often silent as to the origin or demise of the veche, the scope of its authority, its specific membership, or the rules and procedures governing its activities.

  Primary sources indicate that, at least in the cities of Novgorod and Pskov, the veche may have had a broad social base. In the case of the veche that confirmed the Novgorod Judicial Charter in 1471, its members included the Archbishop-elect, the posadniks, the tysiatskiis, the boyars, the zhi-tye liudi (the ranking or middle class citizens), the merchants, the chernye liudi (lit. black men, referring to the lower class or tax-paying citizens), and “all the five ends (boroughs), and all Sovereign Novgorod the Great.” Other documents show veches of narrower membership. For example, a 1439 treaty signed between Novgorod and the Livonian city of Kolyvan (Tallinn) lists only the posadniks and tysiatskiis as being members of the veche. A commercial document signed the same

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  VEKHI

  year between Novgorod and the German merchants lists only one posadnik, one tysiatskii, and “all Lord Novgorod the Great” as constituting the veche. The different composition of these veches indicate that there probably was no set membership, or that veches were perhaps more democratic when the entire city needed to reach consensus, as when the city’s Judicial Charter needed ratification, but were smaller and more oligarchic (or republican rather than democratic) in nature when the entire city did not need to ratify a decision, such as with commercial treaties or peace treaties.