Russia, 1918-1922. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Figes, Orlando. (1997). A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Viking. Holquist, Peter. (2002). Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kenez, Peter. (1977). Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920: The Defeat of the Whites. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koenker, Diane P.; Rosenberg, William G.; and Suny, Ronald G., eds. (1989). Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mawdsely, Evan. (1987). The Russian Civil War. Boston: Allen amp; Unwin. McAuley, Mary. (1991). Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917- 1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patenaude, Bertrand M. (2002). Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pereira, G. O. (1996). White Siberia: The Politics of Civil War. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Raleigh, Donald J. (2002). Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roslof, Edward E. (2002). Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Smele, Jonathan. (1996). Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press. Swain, Geoffrey. (1996). The Origins of the Russian Civil War. London: Longman.
DONALD J. RALEIGH
When the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, they did so in the name of Russia’s proletariat and to a lesser extent the “toiling masses” of peasants who made up the vast majority of the population. The Bolsheviks’ aim-to overthrow the rule of capital (the bourgeoisie) and establish a socialist society-was to be achieved via a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The dictatorship was enshrined in the first Soviet Constitution of 1918, which disenfranchised large property owners, the clergy, and former tsarist officials and gave urban-based voters the advantage over peasants in elections to all-Russian soviet congresses. Ironically, during the civil war, much of Soviet society was declassed: the old privileged classes were expropriated, industrial workers returned to the countryside or were recruited into the Red Army, and millions of other citizens were uprooted and lost their social moorings.
In the course of the 1920s, during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), social structures began to resolidify as industrial production and trade expanded. Those whose occupation defined them as workers, and those who could authenticate their social origins in the working class, received privileged access to housing, higher education, health and pension benefits, and perhaps most important of all, party membership. But the upheavals of the First Five-Year Plan years (1928-1932) uprooted millions once again, as whole classes (so-called NEPmen, kulaks, and remnants of the urban bourgeoisie) were “liquidated.” Cities and construction sites were overwhelmed with peasant migrants fleeing collectivization, and hundreds of thousands of others were resettled in remote regions of the country or sent to labor camps.
The social structure that emerged from these upheavals was officially characterized as consisting of two classes: one of workers (essentially industrial wage earners and state farm workers) and collective farmers, the other a “stratum” consisting of the intelligentsia. This putative class system remained virtually unchanged throughout the remaining decades of the Soviet Union’s existence. In reality, a complex hierarchy, reminiscent of tsarist Russia’s estate (soslovie) system, developed,
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involving highly differentiated access to the state’s goods and services. At the top of the Soviet pecking order stood the party elite and other recipients of the Kremlin emolument (kremlovka). Next came those who appeared on the party’s nomenklatura: high military and state officials, People’s Artists, Stalin-prize-winning scientists, academicians, writers, and other members of the cultural, scientific-technical, and managerial elites. Lower-level officials-the police, teachers, junior military officers, engineers, and state and collective farm bureaucracies-enjoyed certain privileges, as did outstanding workers (Stakhanovites in the 1930s and 1940s, innovators, and “advanced workers” from the 1950s onward). Collective farmers, who were denied the right to internal passports until the mid-1970s, occupied perhaps the lowest rung in the class hierarchy, with the obvious exception of prisoners and inmates of labor camps and colonies.
Cutting across this system were such factors as political geography (capital cities vs. provincial towns; towns vs. villages) and the strategic significance of the enterprise or institute to which one was attached. Scientists living in such closed facilities as Dubna and Akademgorodok enjoyed a particularly high standard of living. The entire structure was mitigated by petitioning, but also by informal connections based on kinship or friendship, exchanges of favors, and other semi-legal transactions that were very much a part of quotidian reality during the Soviet Union’s “mature” stage. See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; INTELLIGENTSIA; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; SOSLOVIE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1999). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press. Matthews, Mervyn. (1972). Class and Society in Soviet Russia. London: Allen Lane.
There are five climates in Russia. The Polar climate hugs the Arctic coast and yields a 60-day growing season, with July and August averaging temperatures over freezing. Tundra vegetation prevails. South of the tundra, blanketing two-thirds of Russia, is the Subarctic climate with its brief cool summers and harsh cold, mostly dry, winters. With a growing season of sixty to ninety days, the dominant vegetation is taiga (northern coniferous forest), 90 percent of which is underlain by permafrost. In European Russia and Western Siberia, the Subarctic climate merges southward with the Humid Continental Warm-to-Cool Summer climate. Here the winters become less harsh, although much snowier, and the summers become longer and warmer. Growing seasons reach 90 to 120 days, and the vegetation is a temperate mixed forest that joins the broadleaf forests and grasslands to the south. Along the Lower Volga and in the North Caucasus, the climate becomes sub-humid. Here summers become equal to winters, a Semiarid Continental climate prevails, the growing season reaches 120 to 160 days, and grassland, or steppe, vegetation dominates. Particular to Russia’s “breadbasket,” a terrain with rich black loams, this climate suffers from insufficient precipitation. A tiny strip of Arid Continental climate fringes the Russian shoreline of the Caspian Sea. With hot, dry summers and rather cold, shorter winters, this climate yields a 160- to 200-day growing season. A true desert, it reflects a severe soil-moisture deficit.
Russia’s massive landmass, northerly location, and flat-to-rolling terrain dramatically influence these climates. Because three-fourths of Russia is more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) away from a largely frozen sea, the climates are continental, not maritime. Continental climates exhibit wide ranges of temperature (the difference between the warmest and coldest monthly averages) and low average annual precipitation that peaks in summer instead of spring. Climatic harshness increases from west to east as the moderating influence of the warm North Atlantic Ocean decreases. St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland has a 45° F (25° C) difference between the July and January mean temperatures and 19 inches (48 centimeters) of annual precipitation. Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia contrasts with a 112° F (65° C) range of temperature and only 4 inches (10 centimeters) of precipitation.
Russia’s high-latitude position enhances conti-nentality. Nine-tenths of the country is north of 50° N Latitude. Moscow is in the latitude of Edmonton, Alberta; St. Petersburg equates with Anchorage, Alaska. Russia thus resembles Canada in climate more than it does the United States. High-latitude countries like Russia and Canada suffer low-angle (less-intense) sunlight and short grow
SEMIARID CONTINENTAL CLIMATE
ing seasons that range from 60 days in the Arctic to 200 days along the Caspian shore.
Low relief also augments the negative effects on Russia’s climates. Three-fourths of Russia’s terrain lies at elevations lower than 1,500 feet (450 meters) above sea level. This further diminishes the opportunities for rain and
