to grant peasants some concessions, such as the right for each family to retain one cow. See also: BOLSHEVISM; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; KULAKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Viola, Lynne. (1992). “Bab’i bunty and Peasant Women’s Protest during Collectivization.” In Russian Peasant Women, eds. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Viola, Lynne. (1996). Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A set of actions used by peasant women to resist collectivization between 1928 and 1932.
It derives from the words baba, a pejorative term describing uncultured peasant women, and bunt, a spontaneous demonstration or protest. Babi bunty encompassed a range of actions intended to disrupt collectivization, including interrupting village meetings, harassing Soviet officials, and reclaiming seed, livestock, or household goods that previously had been seized by the collective farm. These actions were among the more effective means BABI YAR MASSACRE See WORLD WAR II.
Traversing eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the Baikal-Amur Magistral Railway (BAM) runs north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway. The “BAM Zone,” the term used to describe the territory crossed by the railroad, includes regions within the watersheds of Lake Baikal and the Amur River, the latter of which forms a major part of the Russian border with China. An area crisscrossed by
110
a number of formidable rivers, the BAM Zone presented seismic, climatic, and epidemiological challenges to builders from the 1930s until the early 1990s.
The Soviet government conceived of BAM as a second railway link (the Trans-Siberian Railway being the first) to the Pacific Ocean that would improve transportation and communications between the European and Asian sectors of the USSR. The initial BAM project was built from Komsomolsk on the Amur River to Sovetskaya (now known as Im-peratorskaya) Gavan on the Pacific coast by labor camp and prisoner-of-war labor from 1932 to 1941 and again from 1945 to 1953, when it was abandoned in March of that year after Stalin’s death.
In March 1974, Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed that the construction of a new and much longer BAM project would fall to the Young Communist League, known as the Komsomol. In Brezhnev’s mind, experience on what the state heralded as the “Path to the Future” would instill a sense of inclusion among the Soviet Union’s younger generations. In addition, the USSR undertook the new BAM to bolster Soviet trade with the dynamic economies of East Asia and to secure an alternative route between the nation’s European and Asian sectors in the event that the Trans-Siberian Railway was seized by China. At its height, BAM involved more than 500,000 Komsomol members who severely damaged the ecology of the BAM Zone while expending some 15 to 20 billion dollars in a highly wasteful and inefficient endeavor that reinforced the inadequacies of Soviet-style state socialism among BAM’s young constructors.
In October 1984, a golden spike was hammered into place in a ceremony that marked the official completion of the “Project of the Century.” In reality, however, only one-third of BAM’s 2,305-mile-long track was fully operational by the early 1990s, although the railroad was declared complete in 1991. BAM remains one of the Russian Federation’s least profitable railways. See also: COMMUNIST YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS; RAILWAYS; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asia Trade Hub. (2001). “Russia Watch.” «http://www .asiatradehub.com/russia/railway.asp». Josephson, Paul R. (1992). “Science and Technology as Panacea in Gorbachev’s Russia.” In Technology, Culture, and Development: The Experience of the Soviet Model, ed. James P. Scanlan. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Mote, Victor L. (1977). “The Baykal-Amur Mainline.” In Gateway to Siberian Resources (The BAM), ed. Theodore Shabad and Victor L. Mote. New York: Scripta.
(b. 1937), Russian and Soviet political and Communist Party figure, Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs, 1988- 1990; last chairman of KGB, 1991; first chairman of Inter-Republic Security Service from 1991.
Vadim Bakatin was born in Kemerovo Oblast. Educated at the Novosibirsk Construction Engineering Institute, he worked as an engineer in construction in Kemerovo from the early 1960s until the early 1970s. He joined the Communist Party in 1964 and in the mid-1970s served as a local party official, rising to the position of Secretary of the Kemerovo Oblast Committee in 1977. Bakatin attended the High Party School and in 1985 joined the Inspectorate of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In 1986 he served on the Central Committee. After brief service as First Secretary of the Kemerovo Oblast Committee, Bakatin was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in 1988, and he served in that post until 1990. In 1991 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of Russia, warning about the dangers of overly rapid reform. Campaigning in May 1991 he stated that “Making capitalism out of socialism is like making eggs out of an omelette.” Bakatin opposed the August 1991 coup attempt and then was appointed director of the KGB. He undertook the purge of the KGB senior leadership that had supported Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former director and coup plotter. With the collapse of Soviet power in the fall of 1991, Bakatin oversaw the breakup of the KGB and then briefly served as the first chairman of the Inter-Republic Security Service. In 1992 he published a personal memoir of his role in the break-up of the KGB under the title, Izbavlenie ot KGB: Vremya - sobytiya -lyudi (Deliverance from the KGB: The time, the events, the people). Later he went into business and became the director of the Baring Vostok Capital Partners, a direct investment company. He remained loyal to Mikhail Gorbachev and has spoken favorably of his efforts at reform. See also: STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
111
Gevorkian, Natalia. (1993). “The KGB: ‘They Still Need Us’.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 49(1):36-38. Knight, Amy. (1996). Spies without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Waller, J. Michael, and Yasmann, Viktor J. (1995). “Russia’s Great Criminal Revolution: The Role of the Security Services,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 11(4): 276-297.
(1895-1975), considered to be Russia’s greatest literary theoreticians, whose work has had an important influence, in Russia and abroad, on several other fields in the social sciences and humanities.
Born in Orel into a cultured bourgeois family, Bakhtin earned a degree in classics and philology. During the Civil War, he moved to Nevel, where he worked as a schoolteacher and participated in study circles, and later moved to Vitebsk. In 1924 Bakhtin and his wife moved back to Leningrad, but he found it difficult to obtain steady employment. He was arrested in 1929 and charged with participation in the underground Russian church, but managed nevertheless to live most of the 1930s and 1940s in productive obscurity, publishing regularly. He and his work were rediscovered during the 1950s, and over the years his writings have continued to influence the development of philology, linguistics, sociology, and social anthropology, to name just a few related disciplines.
Many of Bakhtin’s contemporary systematiz-ers of Russian thought sought to discover laws of society or history and to formulate models designed to explain everything. Bakhtin, however, sought to show that there could be no such comprehensive system. In this sense he set himself against the main currents of European social thought since the seventeenth century, and especially against the traditional Russian intelligentsia. Drawing upon literary sources, he tried to create pictures of self and society that contained, as an intrinsic element, what he called surprisingness. In his view, no matter how much one knows of a person, one does not know everything and cannot unfailingly predict the future (even in theory). Instead, he argued, there is always a surplus of humanness,
