land. It may have emerged in Russia in the Kievan period, but most Western scholars maintain it developed in the late fifteenth century, as similar labor forms emerged in most east European countries. Associated with direct production for markets by large, especially lay, estates, it first became important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It survived in somewhat modified form at least into the 1880s.
Barshchina varied according to location and time period. By the last third of the eighteenth century, it was increasingly associated with the rich black soils of the seven Central Agricultural provinces south of Moscow. Only 45 percent of the serfs were subject to labor service in the thirteen nonblack soil provinces, where soils were poor and the climate harsh, but the rate was 74 percent in the Central Agricultural Region. By the middle of the nineteenth century, labor dues were at their highest in Ukraine and New Russia, where 97 to 99.9 percent of the male serfs owed barshchina to produce grain for the European market.
In the nineteenth century, the typical obligation apparently slowly rose to three or four days per week in regions where the dues were heaviest, although during the harvest six-day weeks could be required. Viewed as an inefficient form of labor, landlords began to attempt to require specific labor tasks instead of days worked. Peasants considered it far more onerous than obrok (rents in kind or in money), because it put them directly under the control of the steward or landlord. See also: OBROK; PEASANTRY; SERFDOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bulygin, I. A. (1973). “Corv?e: Russia.” Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan.
(1921-1991), Soviet economist.
Alexander Alexandrovich Barsov (b. Shparlinsky) served in World War II in frontline intelligence as a military interpreter and translator and was awarded a number of decorations. From 1965 to 1989 he was a senior researcher at the Institute of
124
Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Author of a number of publications, he was best known for his 1969 book Balans stoimostnykh ob-menov mezhdu gorodom i derevnei (The Balance of Payments between the Town and the Countryside), in which he argues against the assumption, widespread in the West, that the huge increase in investment in the USSR in the First Five-Year Plan had been financed by an increase in unequal exchange between town and countryside. The underlying statistical basis for his argument was the Soviet national accounts for the period from 1928 to 1930-a landmark in the history of national income accounting. These were then unpublished archival documents.
According to Barsov, there was unequal exchange between agriculture and industry during the First Five-Year Plan, but this unequal exchange did not increase. Hence the resources for the huge increase in investment in the First Five-Year Plan were not provided by an increase in the agricultural surplus. Barsov’s work directed attention to the fall in urban real wages as a source of investment resources. In addition, it led to increased recognition of the interdependence of the agricultural and industrial sectors. It also led to a lively debate in the West about the economics of collectivization. See also: AGRICULTURE; FIVE-YEAR PLANS; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ellman, Michael. (1975). “Did the Agricultural Surplus Provide the Resources for the Increase in Investment in the USSR during the First Five Year Plan?” Economic Journal 85:844-863. Reprinted in Ellman, Michael. (1984). Collectivisation, Convergence, and Capitalism. London: Academic Press. Hunter, Holland, and Szyrmer, Janusz M. (1992). Faulty Foundations: Soviet Economic Policies, 1928-1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Karshenas, Massoud. (1995). Industrialization and Agricultural Surplus: A Comparative Study of Economic Development in Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Millar, James, R. (1974). “Mass Collectivization and the Contribution of Soviet Agriculture to the First Five Year Plan.” Slavic Review 33:750-766. Wheatcroft, Stephen G., and Davies, Robert W., eds. (1985). Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy, 1928-1930. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(1815-1879), Viceroy of the Caucasus.
Prince Alexander Ivanovich Baryatinsky, a close friend of Tsar Alexander II (1855-1881) from childhood, was appointed Viceroy (namestnik) of the Caucasus in August 1856. This exalted office gave him military and political command of both the mountainous North Caucasus and the lands to the south bordering on Iran and the Ottoman Empire. A courageous veteran of Caucasian wars and former chief of staff to a previous viceroy, Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, Baryatinsky had grandiose ambitions for the Caucasus. He wrote to the tsar, “Russia had become for Asia what Western Europe had represented for so long in Russia-the source and bearer of the world’s most advanced civilization. A model administration in the Caucasus would serve as a showcase of Russian colonial policy.”
Baryatinsky saw himself as a pacifier (the war with the rebel Shamil still raged in the north) and a modernizer, continuing the civilizing mission of Vorontsov. He was a supporter of the tsar’s program for peasant emancipation and negotiated skillfully with the Georgian nobility to convince them to arrange for the liberation of their serfs. But the program of reforms met resistance, not only from Georgian nobles, but from peasants as well, who wanted greater freedom, and Baryatinsky resorted to military repression.
During his years in office the Caucasian wars were brought to an end, and the relations between Georgian nobles and peasants were brought into line with Russian norms. He corresponded with the tsar on military and civilian matters and enjoyed close relations with his sovereign. His health suffered in the next few years, and he asked to be relieved of his post. In 1863 the Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaye-vich became Viceroy. The legacy of the first three viceroys was peace and security in the Caucasus and the effective binding of the Georgian nobility to the Russian autocracy as loyal, privileged servants. See also: CAUCAUS; COLONIALISM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rieber, Alfred J., ed. (1966). The Politics of Autocracy. Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinsky 1857-1864. Paris: Mouton. Suny, Ronald Grigor, (1988, 1994). The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
125
Bashkortostan is a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, located between the Middle Volga and the Ural mountains, with its capital at Ufa. The Bashkirs are the official indigenous nationality of the republic, although they made up only 21.9 percent of its population in 1989 (compared to 39.3 percent Russians and 28.4 percent Tatars). There were 1,449,157 Bashkirs in the former Soviet Union in 1989, with close to 60 percent (863,808) living in Bashkortostan proper and most of the remainder in neighboring provinces. The Bashkir language belongs to the Kipchak group of the Turkic language family. Despite some modest efforts around the turn of the twentieth century, Bashkir was developed as a literary language only after 1917. The Arabic script was used until Latinization in 1929, followed by adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet in 1939. Most Bashkirs are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi legal school.
Throughout history the hills and plains of Bashkortostan have been closely linked to the great Eurasian steppe to the south. Successive settlement by Finns, Ugrians, Sarmatians, Alans, Magyars, and Turkic Bulgars had already created a complex situation before the arrival of the Turkic badzhgard and burdzhan nomadic unions of Pechenegs in the ninth century C.E. At this point these groups began to coalesce into a nomadic tribal confederation headed by
