standard ballet steps.
Fokine and his famed collaborators, Vaslav Ni-jinsky and Anna Pavlova, achieved their greatest fame in Europe as charter members of Sergei Di-agilev’s Ballets Russes, which debuted in Paris in 1909. Fokine’s ballets (Les Sylphides, Petrushka, Spectre de la Rose) were the sensations of the early Diagilev season. The Diagilev ballet not only announced the Russian ballet’s arrival to the European avant-garde, but also the beginning of a rift that would widen during the Soviet period: the rise of a Russian ?migr? ballet community that included many important choreographers, dancers, composers, and visual artists, working outside Russia.
The 1917 revolution posed serious problems for the former Imperial Theaters, and not least to the ballet, which was widely perceived as the bauble of the nation’s theater bureaucracy and former rulers. Nonetheless, the foment that surrounded attempts to revolutionize Russian theater in the years following the October Revolution had limited impact on the ballet. With most important Russian
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choreographers, dancers, and pedagogues already working outside of Russia in the 1920s (Fokine, George Balanchine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Ni-jinska, Anna Pavlova, and Tamara Karsavina, to name a few), experimentation in the young Soviet ballet was borne of necessity.
The October Revolution and the subsequent shift of power, both political and cultural, to Moscow, led to the emergence of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. The company that had long occupied a distinct second place to the Petersburg troupe now took center stage-a position it would hold until the breakup of the Soviet Union. The creative leadership of the company had traditionally been imported from Petersburg, but in the Soviet period, so would many of its star dancers (Marina Semy-onova, Galina Ulanova).
A new genre of realistic ballets was born in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and dominated Soviet dance theater well into the 1950s. The drambalet, shorthand for dramatic ballet, reconciled the ballet’s tendency to abstraction (and resulting lack of ideological content) to the new need for easily understandable narrative. The creative impotence of Soviet ballet in the post-Stalin era reflected the general malaise of the so-called period of stagnation of the Brezhnev years. When Russian companies dramatically increased the pace of moneymaking Western tours in the 1980s, it became clear that the treasure-chest of Russian classic ballets had long ago been plundered, with little new choreography of interest to refill it. As the history of the two companies would suggest, the loss of Soviet power resulted in the speedy demotion of the Moscow troupe and the rise of a post-Soviet Petersburg ballet. See also: BOLSHOI THEATER; DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVL-OVICH; NIJINSKY, VASLAV FOMICH; PAVLOVA, ANNA MATVEYEVNA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roslavleva, Natalia. (1956). Era of the Russian Ballet. London: Gollancz. Scholl, Tim. (1994). From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet. London: Routledge. Slonimsky, Yuri. (1960). The Bolshoi Ballet: Notes. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Souritz, Elizabeth. (1990). Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, tr. Lynn Visson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Swift, Mary Grace. (1968). The Art of the Dance in the USSR. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Wiley, Roland John, ed. and tr. (1990). A Century of Russian Ballet: Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1810-1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Baltic Fleet, which controls the Kronstadt and Baltiysk naval bases, is headquartered in Kaliningrad Oblast (formerly called K?nigsberg), a region that once formed part of East Prussia. Today Kaliningrad is a Russian enclave completely cut off from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Poland (now a NATO member). Thus, although the fleet is defended by a naval infantry brigade, its location is potentially the most vulnerable of the major Russian naval fleets. While the Baltiysk naval base is located on Kaliningrad’s Baltic Sea coast to the west, the Kronstadt base is situated on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, about 29 kilometers (18 miles) northwest of St. Petersburg. The naval base occupies one half of the island, which is about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) long and 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) wide. Mutinies at Kronstadt took place in 1825 and 1882 and played a part in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. In March 1921, a revolt of the sailors, steadfastly loyal to the Bolsheviks during the revolution, precipitated Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Kronstadt sailors also played a major role in World War II in the defense of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) against the Germans.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania deprived the new Russian state of key bases on the Baltic Sea. The 15,000-square-kilometer (5,800-square-mile) Kaliningrad Oblast between Poland and Lithuania remained as the fleet’s only ice-free naval outlet to the Baltic Sea. One of the first steps taken in the late 1990s to reform the Baltic Fleet was to incorporate air defense units into the Baltic Fleet structure. A second step was to restructure ground and coastal troops on the Baltic Fleet units. As of 2000, these forces consisted of the Moscow-Minsk Proletarian Division, a Marine Brigade, Coastal Rocket Units, and a number of bases at which arms and equipment were kept. The Baltic Fleet did not include any strategic-missile submarines, but as of mid-1997 it included thirty-two major surface
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combatants (three cruisers, three destroyers, and twenty-six frigates), more than 230 other surface vessels, roughly two hundred naval aircraft, nine tactical submarines, and a brigade of naval infantry.
As of mid-2000 the Baltic Fleet included about one humdred combat ships of various types, and the fleet’s Sea Aviation Group units were equipped with a total of 112 aircraft. Operational forces as of 1996 included nine submarines, twenty-three principal surface combatants (three cruisers, two destroyers, and eighteen frigates), and approximately sixty-five smaller vessels. The Baltic Fleet included one brigade of naval infantry and two regiments of coastal defense artillery. The air arm of the Baltic Fleet included 195 combat aircraft organized into five regiments and a number of other fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Generally, armed forces comparable in size to the entire Polish army have been stationed in Kaliningrad Oblast.
In 1993 pressure for autonomy from the Russian Federation increased. Seventy-eight percent of the population (about 900,000) is Russian. Some claimed that, although K?nigsberg was awarded to the Soviet Union under the Potsdam Accord in 1945, the Russian Federation held no legal title to the enclave. Polish critics and others claimed that the garrison should be reduced to a level of reasonable sufficiency. Since Poland was admitted to NATO in 1999, however, Russian nationalists have argued that Kaliningrad is a vital outpost at a time when Russia is menaced by Poland or even Lithuania, if that country is also admitted to NATO. See also: KRONSTADT UPRISING; MILITARY, POST-SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Getzler, Israel. (2002). Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hathaway, Jane. (2001). Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective. Westport, CT: Praeger. Hughes, Lindsey. (2001). Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives. New York: Palgrave. Kipp, Jacob W. (1998). Confronting the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia. Fort Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies Office. Saul, Norman E. (1978). Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas.
In the Soviet economy, the role of money was basically passive: Planning was primarily in physical quantities. Therefore, the banking system lacked most of the tasks it has in market economy.
Money circulation was strictly divided into two separate spheres. Households lived in a cash economy, facing mostly fixed-price markets for consumer goods and labor. Inside the state sector, enterprises could legally use only noncash, monetary transfers through a banking system closely controlled by the planners, for transactions with other enterprises. Wages were paid out by a bank representative, and retail outlets were tightly supervised.
The banking system basically consisted of a single state bank (Gosbank), which combined the roles of a central bank and a commercial bank. Such an arrangement is often called a monobank. Gos-bank had no autonomy,
