RUSSIA
The third volume of the Cambridge History of Russia provides an authoritative political, intellectual, social and cultural history of the trials and triumphs of Russia and the Soviet Union during the twentieth century. It encompasses not only the ethnically Russian part of the country but also the non-Russian peoples of the tsarist and Soviet multinational states and of the post-Soviet republics. Beginning with the revolutions of the early twentieth century, chapters move through the 1920s to the Stalinist 1930s, the Second World War, the post-Stalin years and the decline and collapse of the USSR. The contributors attempt to go beyond the divisions that marred the historiography of the USSR during the Cold War to look for new syntheses and understandings. The volume is also the first major undertaking by historians and political scientists to use the new primary and archival sources that have become available since the break-up of the USSR.
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. His many publications on Russian history include Looking Toward Ararat: Armenian Modern History (1993), and >The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (1998).
RUSSIA
This is a definitive new history of Russia from early Rus’ to the successor states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Volume I encompasses developments before the reign of Peter I; volume II covers the ‘imperial era’, from Peter’s time to the fall of the monarchy in March 1917; and volume III continues the story through to the end of the twentieth century. At the core of all three volumes are the Russians, the lands which they have inhabited and the polities that ruled them while other peoples and territories have also been given generous coverage for the periods when they came under Riurikid, Romanov and Soviet rule. The distinct voices of individual contributors provide a multitude of perspectives on Russia’s diverse and controversial millennial history.
Volumes in the series
Volume I
From Early Rus’ to 1 689
Edited by Maureen Perrie
Volume II
Imperial Russia, 1 689–1 917
Edited by Dominic Lieven
Volume III
The Twentieth Century
Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny
*
VOLUME III
The Twentieth Century
*
Edited by
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
University of Michigan and University of Chicago
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© Cambridge University Press 2006
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First published 2006
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
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ISBN-13 978-0-521-81144-6 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-81144-9 hardback
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| List of illustrations viii | |
| List of maps | |
| Notes on contributors | |
| Acknowledgements | |
| Note on transliteration and dates page xv | |
| Chronology | |
| List of abbreviations | |
| Introduction 1 | |
| 1. Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century: how the ‘West’ wrote its history of the USSR 5 |
|
| ronald grigor suny | |
| PART I RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION: THE STORY THROUGH TIME |
|
| 2 Russia’s fin de siècle, 1900–1914 67 | |
| MARK D. STEINBERG | |
| 3 The First World War, 1914–1918 94 | |
| MARK VON HAGEN | |
| 4 The revolutions of 1917–1918 114 | |
| S. A. SMITH | |
| 5 The Russian civil war, 1917–1922 140 | |
| DONALD J. RALEIGH | |
| 6 Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928 168 | |
| ALAN BALL | |
| 7 Stalinism, 1928–1940 192 | |
| david r. shearer | |
| 8 Patriotic war, 1941–1945 217 | |
| john barber and mark harrison | |
| 9 Stalin and his circle 243 | |
| yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk | |
| 10 The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964 268 | |
| william taubman | |
| 11 The Brezhnev era 292 | |
| stephen e. hanson | |
| 12 The Gorbachev era 316 | |
| archie brown | |
| 13 The Russian Federation 352 | |
| michael mcfaul | |
| PART II RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION: THEMES AND TRENDS |
|
| 14 Economic and demographic change: Russia’s age of economic extremes 383 |
|
| peter gatrell | |
| 15 Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development411 |
|
| esther kingston-mann | |
| 16 Workers and industrialisation 440 | |
| Lewis h. siegelbaum | |
| 17 Women and the state 468 | |
| barbara alpern engel | |
| 18 Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after 495 | |
| jeremy smith | |
| 19 The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics 522 | |
| serhy yekelchyk | |
| 20 Science, technology and modernity 549 | |
| david holloway | |
| 21 Culture, 1900–1945 579 | |
| james von geldern | |
| 22 The politics of culture, 1945–2000 605 | |
| josephine woll | |
| 23 Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941 636 | |
| jonathan haslam | |
| 24 Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests 662 | |
| ted hopf | |
| 25 The Soviet Union and the road to communism 706 | |
| Lars t. lih | |
| Bibliography 732 | |
| Index 793 |
The plates will be found between pages 344–345
1 The last emperor of Russia, Nicholas II. Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
2 Poster Le Spectre de la Rose, 1911. The New York Public Library
3 Metropolitan Sergei. Credit Novosti (London)
4 Demonstration of soldiers’ wives, 1917. New York Public Library
5 Trotsky, Lenin, Kamenev, May 1920. Slavic and Baltic Division, New Y ork Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
6 Baroness Ol’ga Wrangel’s visit to the Emperor Nicholas M ilitary School in Gallipoli, c.1921. Gallipoli album. Militaria (uncatalogued), André Savine Collection, Wilson Library, Universit y of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
7 May Day demonstration, Leningrad, 1924
8 Soviet poster by I. Nivinskii: ‘Women join the co-operativ es!’, Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
9 Anti-religious poster ‘Religion is poison. Safeguard the c hildren’ (1930). From the Hoover Institution Archives, Poster Col lection, RU/SU650
10 Soviet poster ‘Every collective farm peasant . . . has the opportunity to live like a human being’ (1934)
11 P. Filonov, Portrait of Stalin. Reproduced by permission of the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
12 Aleksei Stakhanov with car (1936). From: Leah Bendavid-Val (ed. ), Propaganda & Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US (Zurich and New York: Stemmle Publishers GmbH, 1999)
13 Two posters celebrating the multinational character of the Soviet U nion
14 Muscovites listen as Prime Minister Viacheslav Molotov announces th e outbreak of the war, 22 June 1941
15 Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad, winter 1942–February 1943. C redit Novosti (London)
16 Soviet poster ‘Who receives the national income?’ (1950 )
17 Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. © AP/EMPICS
18 Soviet space capsule Vostok Bettmann/CORBIS
19 Russian tanks in the streets of Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1968. Credi t Novosti (London)
20 Parade float of the factory named ‘Comintern’, 1968. Da niel C. Waugh
21 Brezhnev and Ford, 1974. Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library
22 Still from Ballad of a Soldier (1959). BFI stills, posters a nd designs
23 Soviet poster from the early years of Perestroika (1986) sho wing General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev meeting with energy workers in Tiumen’. From the Hoover Institution Archive, Poster Collection, RU/SU 2318
24 Groznyi in ruins, 1996. Credit Novosti (London)
25 Yeltsin and Putin, Moscow, 2001. Credit Novosti (London)
| ¢ | 5.1 European Russia during the civil war, 1918–21. From Soviet Experiment: Russia, the U.S.S.R., and the Successor States by Ronald Grigor Suny, copyright © 1997 by Ronald Suny. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. | 141 | |
| ¢ | 8.1 The USSR and Europe at the end of the Second World War. From Soviet Experiment: Russia, the U.S.S.R., and the Successor States by Ronald Grigor Suny, copyright 1997 by Ronald Suny. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. | 218 | |
| ¢ | 12.1 Commonwealth of Independent States | 350 | |
| ¢ | 13.1 Ethnic republics in 1994 | 353 |
| ALAN BALL is Professor of History at Marquette University and the author of Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–1929 (1987) and And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 (1994). | |
| JOHN BARBER is Senior Lecturer in History at King’s College, Cambridge University and the author of Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928–32 (1981), and, with Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (1991). | |
| ARCHIE BROWN is Professor of Politics at St Antony’s, Oxford, and the author of The Gorbachev Factor (1996) and the editor of Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (2001). | |
| BARBARA ALPERN ENGEL is Professor of History at the University of Colorado and the author of Between Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (1995) and A History of Russia’s Women: 1700–2000 (2003). | |
| PETER GATRELL is Professor of History at the University of Manchester and the author of The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (1986) and A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War (1999). | |
| YORAM GORLIZKI is Senior Lecturer in Government at the University of Manchester and the author, with Oleg Khlevniuk, of Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (2004). | |
| STEPHEN E. HANSON is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and the author of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (1997) and co-author, with Richard Anderson, Jr., M. Steven Fish and Philip Roeder, of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (2001). | |
| MARK HARRISON is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and the author of Soviet Planning in Peace and War 1938–1945 (1985) and Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945 (1996). | |
| JONATHAN HASLAM is Professor of the History of International Relations, Cambridge University, and the author of The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39 (1984) and The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (2000). | |
| DAVID HOLLOWAY is Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and the author of The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (1994). | |
| TED HOPFis Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University and the author of Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965–1990 (1994) and Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow 1955 and 1999 (2002). | |
| OLEG KHLEVNIUK is a Senior Research Fellow in the Russian State Archives and the author of In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze (1995) and, with Yoram Gorlizki, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (2004). | |
| ESTHER KINGSTON-MANN is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (1983) and In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics and Problems of Russian Development (1999). | |
| LARS T. LIH is an independent researcher based in Montreal and the author of Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (1990) and co-editor, with Oleg V. Naumov, Oleg Khlevniuk and Catherine Fitzpatrick, of Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936: Revelations from the Russian Archives (1995). | |
| MICHAEL MCFAUL is Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University, and the author of Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (2001) and, with James Goldgeier, Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (2003). | |
| DONALD J. RALEIGH is the Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (1986) and Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (2002). | |
| DAVID R. SHEARER is Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware and the author of Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926–1934 (1996). | |
| LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM is Professor of History at Michigan State University and the author of Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR 1935–1941 (1988) and Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (1992). | |
| JEREMY R. SMITH is Lecturer in Twentieth Century Russian History at the University of Birmingham and the author of The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923 (1999) and editor of Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture (1999). | |
| S. A. SMITH is Professor of History at the University of Essex and the author of Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18 (1983) and Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (2002) | |
| MARK D. STEINBERG is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the author of Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867–1907 (1992) and Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (2002). | |
| RONALD GRIGOR SUNY is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago and the author of The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1993) and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (1998). | |
| WILLIAM TAUBMANis the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and the author of Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War (1982) and Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (2003). | |
| JAMES VON GELDERN is Professor of German and Russian Studies at Macalester College and the author of Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (1993) and the co-editor, with Richard Stites, of Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953 (1995). | |
| MARK VON HAGEN is Professor of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian History at Columbia University and the author of Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (1990) and co-editor, with Karen Barkey, of After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires (1997). | |
| JOSEPHINE WOLL is Professor of German and Russian at Howard University and author of Invented Truth: Soviet Reality and the Literary Imagination of Iurii Trifonov (1991) and Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (2000). | |
| SERHY YEKELCHYK is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Victoria and the author of The Awakening of a Nation: Toward a Theory of the Ukrainian National Movement in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (1994) and Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in Soviet Historical Imagination (2004). |
Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgements on reprinting.
The system of transliteration from Cyrillic used in this volume is that of the Library of Congress, without diacritics. The soft sign is denoted by an apostrophe but is omitted from the most common place names, which are given in their English forms (such as Moscow, St Petersburg, Archangel). For those countries that changed their official names with the collapse of the Soviet Union – Belorussia/Belarus, Kirgizia/Kyrgyzstan, Moldavia/Moldova, Turkmenia/Turkmenistan – we have used the first form up to August 1991 and the second form afterwards. Anglicised name-forms are used for the most well-known political, literary and artistic figures (e.g. Leon Trotsky, Boris Yeltsin, Maxim Gorky), even though this may lead to inconsistency at times. Translations within the text are those of the individual contributors to this volume unless otherwise specified in the footnotes. Dates pre-1918 are given according to the ‘new-style’ Gregorian calendar, although in the Chronology the ‘old-style’ Julian calendar dates are also given in brackets.
| 1894 | ¢ | Tsar Nicholas II came to the throne |
| 1902 | ¢ | Vladimir Lenin published What Is To Be Done? |
| 1903 | ¢ | Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks |
| 1904 | ¢ | Outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war |
| 1905 | ¢ | 9 January: Bloody Sunday |
| ¢ | 30 October: Nicholas II issued the October manifesto | |
| 1911 | ¢ | Assassination of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin. |
| 1914 | ¢ | 1 August: Germany declared war on Russia; outbreak of First World War |
| 1917 | ¢ | 8–13 March (23–8 February ) – the ‘February Revolution’ |
| ¢ | 15 (2) March: Nicholas II abdicated | |
| ¢ | 17 April: Lenin announced his ‘April Theses’ calling for all power to the soviets | |
| ¢ | 14 (1) May: After the ‘April Crisis’, the coalition government was formed | |
| ¢ | 1 July (18 June): ‘Kerensky Offensive’ began | |
| ¢ | 16–18 (3–5) July: the ‘July Days’ led to a reaction against the Bolsheviks | |
| ¢ | 6–13 September (24–31 August): the ‘mutiny’ of General Lavr Kornilov | |
| ¢ | 7 November (25 October): The ‘October Revolution’ established ‘Soviet power’ | |
| ¢ | 15 (2) December: Soviet Russia signed an armistice with Germany | |
| 1918 | ¢ | 18 (5) January: First (and last) session of the Constituent Assembly |
| ¢ | 3 March: Soviet government signed Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Central Powers | |
| ¢ | 19 March: the Left SRs resigned from the Sovnarkom | |
| ¢ | May: revolt of the Czechoslovak legions, which seized the Trans-Siberian Railway | |
| ¢ | 26–8 May: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan declared independence from Russia | |
| ¢ | 16–17 July: murder by local Bolsheviks of Nicholas II and his family in Ekaterinburg | |
| ¢ | 31 July: fall of the Baku Commune | |
| ¢ | July: First Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic adopted | |
| ¢ | 2 September: systematic terror launched by the government against their enemies | |
| 1919 | ¢ | March: Eighth Congress of the RKP (b) decided to form a Political Bureau (Politburo), an Organisational Bureau (Orgburo) and a Secretariat with a principal responsible secretary |
| ¢ | 2–6 March: First Congress of the Third International (Comintern) | |
| 1920 | ¢ | 25 April: Pilsudski’s Poland invaded Ukraine, beginning the Russo-Polish war |
| ¢ | 1–7 September: First Congress of the Peoples of the East was held in Baku | |
| 1921 | ¢ | 28 February–18 March: revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt |
| ¢ | 8–16 March: Tenth Congress of the RKP (b); defeat of the Workers’ Opposition and the passing of the resolution against organised factions within the party; introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) | |
| 1922 | ¢ | 16 April: Treaty of Rapallo signed with Germany |
| ¢ | May: Soviet government arrested Patriarch Tikhon, head of the Russian Orthodox Church | |
| ¢ | June: trial of the Right SRs | |
| ¢ | 8 June: Glavlit, the censorship authority, established | |
| ¢ | August: Soviet government decided to deport over 160 intellectuals | |
| ¢ | 4 August: Red cavalry killed Enver Pasha and put down the Basmachi rebellion | |
| ¢ | 30 December: the USSR was formally inaugurated | |
| 1923 | ¢ | 9 March: a stroke incapacitated Lenin, removing him from politics. Triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev |
| 1924 | ¢ | 21 January: death of Lenin |
| ¢ | 31 January: Constitution of the USSR was ratified | |
| ¢ | April–May: Stalin’s lectures on Foundations of Leninism | |
| ¢ | December: Stalin promoted idea of ‘Socialism in One Country’, along with Bukharin | |
| 1925 | ¢ | January: Trotsky replaced as Commissar of War by Mikhail Frunze |
| ¢ | 18–31 December: the Stalin–Bukharin ‘centrist’ position triumphed over the Opposition at the Fourteenth Congress of the RKP (b) | |
| 1926 | ¢ | April: united opposition formed by Trotsky and Zinoviev |
| ¢ | November: the Code on Marriage, Family, and Guardianship was adopted | |
| 1927 | ¢ | May: Great Britain broke off relations with the Soviet Union and set off a ‘war scare’ |
| ¢ | Autumn: peasants began reducing grain sales to the state authorities Eisenstein’s film October (Ten Days that Shook the World) released | |
| ¢ | 12–19 December: Fifteenth Congress of the VKP (b) called for a Five-Year Plan of economic development and voluntary collectivisation | |
| 1928 | ¢ | 18 May–5 July: Shakhty trial |
| ¢ | 17 July–1 September: Sixth Congress of the Comintern adopted the ‘social fascist’ line | |
| ¢ | 30 September: Bukharin’s ‘Notes of an Economist’ published in Pravda | |
| 1929 | ¢ | 9–10 February: the Politburo condemned Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii |
| ¢ | 21 December: Stalin’s fiftieth birthday, the beginning of the ‘Stalin Cult’ | |
| 1930 | ¢ | 2 March: Stalin’s article ‘Dizzy with Success’ reversed the collectivisation drive |
| ¢ | 14 April: Suicide of Mayakovsky | |
| ¢ | July: Litvinov replaced Chicherin as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs | |
| ¢ | November: Molotov replaced Rykov as chairman of Sovnarkom; Ordzhonikidze became the head of the industrialisation drive | |
| ¢ | November–December: trial of the ‘Industrial Party’ | |
| 1931 | ¢ | 21 June: Stalin spoke against equalisation of wages and attacks on ‘specialists’; end of the ‘Cultural Revolution’; beginning of the ‘Great Retreat’ |
| ¢ | October: Stalin published his letter to Proletarian Revolution on writing party history | |
| 1932 | ¢ | November: Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, committed suicide |
| ¢ | December: introduction of the internal passport system for urban population Famine in Ukraine (1932–3) | |
| 1933 | ¢ | May: suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk as a result of attacks on Ukrainian ‘nationalists’ |
| ¢ | 16 November: United States and Soviet Union established diplomatic relations | |
| 1934 | ¢ | 26 January–10 February: Seventeenth Congress of the VKP (b), the ‘Congress of the Victors’ |
| ¢ | August: First Congress of Soviet Writers adopted ‘Socialist Realism’ as official style | |
| ¢ | 18 September: USSR entered the League of Nations | |
| ¢ | 1 December: the assassination of Kirov | |
| ¢ | Vasil’ev brothers’ film, Chapaev, released | |
| 1935 | ¢ | 2 May: Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance |
| ¢ | July–August: Seventh Congress of the Comintern adopted ‘Popular Front’ line | |
| ¢ | 30 August: beginning of the Stakhanovite campaign | |
| 1936 | ¢ | 27 June: New laws on prohibiting abortion and tightening the structure of the family |
| ¢ | 19–24 August: Moscow ‘show trial’ of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were convicted and shot | |
| ¢ | 5 December: Constitution of the USSR adopted | |
| 1937 | ¢ | 28 January: attack on Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk |
| ¢ | 23–30 January: Moscow ‘show trial’ of Radek, Piatakov, Sokol’nikov and Serebriakov | |
| ¢ | 18 February: Ordzhonikidze committed suicide | |
| ¢ | May–June: purge of army officers; secret trial and execution of Tukhachevskii and other top military commanders. Height of the Great Purges, the ‘Ezhovshchina’ | |
| 1938 | ¢ | Eisenstein’s film Aleksandr Nevskii released; Meyerhold’s theatre closed |
| ¢ | 2–13 March: Moscow ‘show trial’ of Bukharin and Radek | |
| ¢ | 13 March: Russian language was made compulsory in all Soviet schools | |
| ¢ | September: the Short Course of the History of the Communist Party published | |
| ¢ | December: Beria replaced Ezhov as head of the NKVD | |
| 1939 | ¢ | 23 August: Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of Non-Aggression between the USSR and Germany |
| ¢ | 17 September: Soviet forces invaded Poland | |
| ¢ | 30 November–12 March 1940 – Russo-Finnish war | |
| ¢ | 14 December: USSR expelled from the League of Nations | |
| 1940 | ¢ | 8–11 April: Soviet secret police murder thousands of Polish officers at Katyn |
| ¢ | 3–6 August: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined the Soviet Union | |
| ¢ | 20 August: the assassination of Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico | |
| 1941 | ¢ | 22 June: Germany invaded the Soviet Union |
| ¢ | 8 September: Leningrad surrounded; beginning of the 900-day ‘Siege of Leningrad’ | |
| ¢ | 30 September–spring 1942: the Battle of Moscow | |
| 1942 | ¢ | 17 July–2 February 1943: Battle of Stalingrad |
| 1943 | ¢ | 23 May: dissolution of the Comintern |
| ¢ | 5 July–23 August: Battle of Kursk | |
| ¢ | 28 November–1 December: the Tehran Conference | |
| ¢ | November–December: deportation of the Karachais and Kalmyks; later (February–March 1944) the Chechens, Ingushi and Balkars; and (May) the Crimean Tatars | |
| 1944 | ¢ | 1 January: a new Soviet anthem replaced the ‘Internationale’ |
| ¢ | October: Stalin and Churchill concluded the ‘percentages agreement’ | |
| 1945 | ¢ | 4–11 February: Yalta Conference |
| ¢ | 8–9 May: the war in Europe ended | |
| ¢ | 17 July–2 August: Potsdam Conference | |
| ¢ | 8 August: USSR declared war on Japan | |
| ¢ | 24 October: founding of the United Nations | |
| 1946 | ¢ | 9 February: Stalin’s ‘Pre-election Speech’ |
| ¢ | 14 August: attack on Zoshchenko and Akhmatova; beginning of the Zhdanovshchina | |
| 1947 | ¢ | September: founding of the Cominform |
| 1948 | ¢ | 13 January: murder of the Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels |
| ¢ | 27 March: rupture of relations between Stalin and Tito’s Yugoslavia | |
| ¢ | 24 June–5 May 1949: Berlin Blockade | |
| ¢ | 13 July–7 August: Academy of Agricultural Sciences forced to adopt Lysenkoism | |
| 1949 | ¢ | The ‘Leningrad Affair’ |
| ¢ | 29 August: USSR exploded its first atomic bomb | ¢ | 1 October: founding of the People’s Republic of China |
| 1950 | ¢ | 26 June: North Korea invaded the south and began the Korean war |
| ¢ | ||
| 1952 | ¢ | 5–14 October: Nineteenth Congress of the VKP (b) |
| ¢ | October: Stalin published Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR | |
| 1953 | ¢ | 13 January: announcement of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ |
| ¢ | 5 March: death of Stalin. Malenkov became chairman of Council of Ministers | |
| ¢ | June: workers’ uprising in East Germany | |
| ¢ | 26 June: arrest of Beria | |
| ¢ | September: Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party | |
| 1955 | ¢ | 8 February: Bulganin replaced Malenkov as chairman of the Council of Ministers |
| ¢ | 14 May: formation of the Warsaw Pact | |
| ¢ | July: Geneva Summit Conference | |
| 1956 | ¢ | 14–25 February: Twentieth Congress of the CPSU; Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ |
| ¢ | April: dissolution of the Cominform | |
| ¢ | 23 October–4 November: Soviet army put down revolution in Hungary | |
| 1957 | ¢ | 17–29 June: ‘Anti-party Group’ (Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich) acted against Khrushchev |
| ¢ | 4 October: Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite of the Earth | |
| 1958 | ¢ | 27 March: Khrushchev replaced Bulganin as chairman of the Council of Ministers |
| ¢ | October–November: campaign against Nobel Prize winner, Boris Pasternak | |
| ¢ | 27 November: Khrushchev initiated the Berlin Crisis | |
| 1959 | ¢ | September: Khrushchev visited the United States; ‘Spirit of Camp David’ |
| 1960 | ¢ | 1 May: American U-2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union |
| 1961 | ¢ | 12 April: Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space |
| ¢ | June: Khrushchev and Kennedy met in Vienna | |
| ¢ | August: the Berlin Wall was built | |
| ¢ | 17–31 October: Twenty-Second Congress of the CPSU. Stalin’s body removed from the Lenin Mausoleum | |
| 1962 | ¢ | 2 June: riots in Novocherkassk |
| ¢ | 22–8 October: Cuban Missile Crisis | |
| 1963 | ¢ | 5 August: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed |
| 1964 | ¢ | 14 October: Khrushchev removed as first secretary by the Central Committee and replaced by Brezhnev |
| 1965 | ¢ | Kosygin attempted to introduce economic reforms |
| ¢ | 24 April: Armenians marched in Erevan to mark fiftieth anniversary of genocide | |
| 1966 | ¢ | 10–14 February: Trial of Siniavskii and Daniel’ |
| 1968 | ¢ | 20–1 August: Soviet army invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia |
| 1969 | ¢ | October: Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature |
| 1971 | ¢ | 3 September: Four-Power agreement signed on status of Berlin |
| 1972 | ¢ | 22–30 May: Brezhnev and Nixon signed SALT I in Moscow. Period of détente |
| 1975 | ¢ | 1 August: Helsinki Accords signed |
| ¢ | December: Sakharov won the Nobel Prize for Peace | |
| 1977 | ¢ | 7 October: adoption of new Constitution of the USSR |
| 1979 | ¢ | 24–6 December: Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan to back Marxist government |
| 1982 | ¢ | 10 November: Brezhnev died and was succeeded by Andropov |
| 1983 | ¢ | 1 September: Soviet jet shot down Korean airliner 007 |
| 1984 | ¢ | 9 February: Andropov died and was succeeded by Chernenko |
| 1985 | ¢ | 10 March: Chernenko died and was succeeded by Gorbachev |
| 1986 | ¢ | 26 April: Chernobyl’, nuclear accident |
| ¢ | October: Gorbachev and Reagan met in Reykjavik, Iceland | |
| ¢ | December: Gorbachev invited Sakharov to return to Moscow from exile | |
| ¢ | December: Kazakhs demonstrated in protest against appointment of a Russian party chief | |
| 1987 | ¢ | October–November: Yeltsin demoted after he criticised the party leadership |
| 1988 | ¢ | February: crisis over Nagorno-Karabakh erupted |
| ¢ | 28 June: Nineteenth Conference of the CPSU opened | |
| 1989 | ¢ | 9 April: violent suppression of demonstrators in Tbilisi, Georgia |
| ¢ | 25 May: Congress of People’s Deputies convened | |
| ¢ | 9 November: the Berlin Wall was torn down | |
| 1990 | ¢ | January: Soviet troops moved into Azerbaijan to quell riots and restore order |
| ¢ | 6 March: Article Six of the Soviet Constitution removed | |
| ¢ | 15 October: Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize | |
| 1991 | ¢ | 17 March: referendum on the future structure of the USSR |
| ¢ | 12 June: Yeltsin elected president of the Russian Federation | |
| ¢ | 18–21 August: attempted coup against Gorbachev failed | |
| ¢ | 25 December: Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union | |
| ¢ | 31 December: end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics | |
| 1992 | ¢ | 2 January: Gaidar launched ‘shock therapy’ economic policy |
| ¢ | March: Shevardnadze returned to power in Georgia | |
| ¢ | 14 December: Gaidar was replaced by Chernomyrdin as prime minister | |
| 1993 | ¢ | 25 April: referendum supported Yeltsin’s reform policies |
| ¢ | June: Aliev returned to power in Azerbaijan, overthrowing the Popular Front | |
| ¢ | 21 September: Yeltsin dissolved the Russian parliament and called elections to a State Duma | |
| ¢ | 3–4 October: clashes between forces backing the parliament and those backing the president | |
| ¢ | 12 December: elections to the State Duma rejected the radical reformers and supported nationalists and former Communists; ratification of the new Constitution | |
| 1994 | ¢ | May: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Karabakh and Russia agreed to a ceasefire in the Karabakh war |
| ¢ | 11 December: Russian troops invaded Chechnya | |
| 1996 | ¢ | June–July: Yeltsin won re-election as president of the Russian Federation |
| ¢ | 31 August: peace agreement signed between Moscow and Chechnya | |
| 1999 | ¢ | 31 December: Yeltsin resigned, and Putin became acting president |
| 2000 | ¢ | 26 March: Vladimir Putin elected president of the Russian Federation |
| 2004 | ¢ | 14 March: Putin re-elected president of the Russian Federation |
| APRF | Arkhiv prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Archive of the President of the Russian Federation) |
| ASR | Avtonomnaia sovetskaia respublika (Autonomous Soviet Republic) |
| Basmachestvo | Pan-Turkic movement in Central Asia, 1918–28 |
| BPF | Belorussian Popular Front |
| Cheka | Chrezvychainaia komissiia (Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage) |
| CIS | Commonwealth of Independent States |
| COMECON | Council for Mutual Economic Assistance |
| Comintern | Kommunisticheskii internatsional (an organisation based in Moscow that devised strategies for Communist Parties around the world) |
| CP(b)U | Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine |
| CPRF | Communist Party of the Russian Federation |
| CPSU | Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
| Dashnaks | members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun) |
| DCs | Democratic Centralists |
| GASO | Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Saratovskoi oblasti (State Archive of Saratov Region) |
| GIAgM | Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv goroda Moskvy (State Historical Archive of the City of Moscow) |
| GKO (alternatively | Gosudarstvennyi komitet oborony – the Soviet war cabinet |
| GOKO) | (1941–5) |
| glasnost’ | ‘Openness;’ policies ending censorship under Mikhail Gorbachev, 1985–91 |
| glavki | chief industrial branch administrations |
| Gosplan | Gosudarstvennaia planovaia komissiia (State Planning Commission) |
| Gulag | Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie lagerei (State Administration of Camps) |
| Hummet | ‘Energy’; early Muslim socialist party in Transcaucasia |
| ILWCH | International Labor and Working-Class History |
| IMEMO | Institute of World Economics and International Relations |
| Ittifak | ‘Independence’; a post-Soviet Tatar political movement |
| JAC | Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee |
| Kadets | Constitutional Democratic Party |
| KGB | Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopastnosti (Committee for State Security), the Soviet political police in the late Soviet period, successor to Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD and other organisations |
| khozraschet | khoziaistvennyi raschet (cost-accounting basis) |
| kombedy | committees of poor peasants |
| Komsomol | Kommunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi (Communist Youth League) |
| Komuch | Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly |
| Korenizatsiia | ‘Rooting’ or ‘indigenisation’; Soviet nationality policies, 1920s |
| Narkomnats | Commissariat of Nationalities |
| Narkomprod | Food Supply Commissariat |
| Narkompros | Commissariat of Enlightenment |
| NATO | North Atlantic Treaty Organisation |
| NEP | Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika (New Economic Policy) |
| NKVD | Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennykh del (People’s Commissarist of Internal Affairs) |
| NOT | Nauchnaia organizatsiia truda (Scientific Organisation of Labour) |
| NTR | Nauchno-tekhnologicheskaia revoliutsiia (Scientific-Technological Revolution) |
| OGPU | United Main Political Administration (political police, successor to the ChEKA and GPU, predecessor of the NKVD) |
| OUN | Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) |
| perestroika | ‘restructuring’; the reformist policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, 1985–91 |
| Politburo | Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU |
| politruk | politicheskii rukovoditel’ (political adviser to military officers in the Red Army) |
| Proletkul’t | proletarian cultural-educational organisations |
| PSS | Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works) |
| Rabfak | Worker faculties |
| Rabkrin | Workers’–Peasants’ Inspectorate |
| RAPM | Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians |
| RAPP | Russian Association of Proletarian Writers |
| RCs | Revolutionary Communists |
| RGANI | Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istor (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History) |
| RGASPI | Rossiiskii gosudartvennyi arkhiv sotsial’noi-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History), the former archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, TsPA |
| RSDRP | Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia (Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party) |
| RSFSR | Rossiiskaia Sovetskaia Federativnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) |
| samizdat | ‘self-published;’ the underground dissident publications in the Soviet Union |
| Sovnarkhoz | Supreme Economic Council |
| Sovnarkom | Council of People’s Commissars |
| SR | Socialist Revolutionary |
| SSR | Sovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Soviet Socialist Republic) |
| STKs | Sovety trudovykh kollektivov (Councils of Labour Collectives) |
| Transcaucasian Sejm | Representative assembly in Transcaucasia, April 1918 |
| TsDNISO | Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Saratovskoi oblasti (Centre for the Documentation of the Recent History of the Saratov Region) |
| Ukrainian Central | Ukrainian national government, formed 1917 |
| Rada | |
| USA | United States of America |
| USSR | Union of Soviet Socialist Republics |
| VTsIK | Central Executive Committee of the Soviets |
| VTsIOM | All-Soviet (later All-Russian) Institute for Public Opinion |