Mazour, Anatol. (1967). The First Russian Revolution, 1825: The Decembrist Movement, Its Origins, Development, and Significance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Raeff, Marc, ed. (1966). The Decembrist Movement. Engle-wood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1976). A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saunders, David. (1992). Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801-1881. London: Longman.
Upon seizing power from the Provisional Government in October 1917, the Bolsheviks immediately issued two decrees. The first decree served to withdraw Russia from World War I. The second decree issued by the new Bolshevik regime was entitled “On Land.” The decree abolished property rights of landlords and provided for the confiscation of estates with no compensation. More generally, the Decree on Land abolished private ownership of land and introduced the nationalization of land. Under the terms of the decree, about 150 million hectares of arable land, pasture land, and forest land were confiscated and distributed to 25 million communal households. The October 1917 land decree was followed by legislation in January 1918 that forbade the selling, renting, or mortgaging of land. Nationalized land became the possession of “all the people” and could be used only by those who cultivated it. Although all land was nationalized, individuals or families could obtain allotments of land for small-scale agricultural activities, assuming that they themselves used the land and did not employ hired labor. These land plots included collecDEFECTORS, SOVIET ERA tive garden plots, private plots, and dacha plots, the size of which was restricted by local norms.
The prohibition on leasing land remained until March 1990, when a USSR law on land came into effect. Legal restrictions on private ownership of land remained in effect until December 1990 when a law was passed in the RSFSR that permitted the ownership of land, subject to certain constraints. See also: BOLSHEVISM; OCTOBER REVOLUTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Danilov, Viktor. P. (1988). Rural Russia Under the New Regime. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Keep, John L. H. (1976). The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization. New York: Norton. Medvedev, Zhores A. (1987). Soviet Agriculture. New York: Norton. Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
necessary to head off such hazing, contributes significantly to the widespread nature of these abuses. The general lack of resources available to the Russian military in the 1990s, including the basic means of life, such as food, have also contributed to erosion of military morale, which many observers say has contributed to the high level of atrocities committed by Russian forces in the two campaigns in Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996, and from 1999 to the present. Lieven sees dedovshchina as a symbiosis between tyranny and anarchy in which rules and restraints are crippled “leaving only a veneer of autocratic but in fact powerless authority over a pit of chaos, corruption, and a host of private tyrannies.” See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lieven, Anatol. (1999). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weiler, Jonathan. (1999). “Human Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Progress or Regression?” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
A term used for “hazing” in the Russian military from the Russian word for grandfather.
This set of practices, a long-standing feature of Soviet army life, appears to have accelerated dramatically in the 1990s. Observers note that “hazing” is itself a problematic translation, because it fails to grasp the severity of the systematic violence, humiliation, and torture visited upon new conscripts by their elders. Official estimates place the number of conscripts murdered at the hands of their comrades-in-arms at perhaps a thousand per year. Independent organizations, including the well-known advocacy group for military conscripts, Soldiers’ Mothers, estimates that as many as three to four thousand conscripts are murdered each year by other soldiers and believes that a large number die as a result of the collective practices known as dedovshchina. The problem has also contributed significantly to the very high rate of suicide evident in the Russian armed forces. Anatol Lieven argues that nothing has done more to destroy morale and cohesion than the problem of de-dovshchina. The lack of an effective system of non-commissioned officers, capable of providing the disciplinary structure and rule- enforcement
DEFECTORS, SOVIET ERA
Defectors (perebezhchiki) during the Soviet era were people who left the Soviet Union without permission and in violation of Soviet law. Soviet authorities applied the term defection more broadly than in the West, where a defector is usually defined as an individual who has committed treason by cooperating with a hostile foreign intelligence service. Because Soviet citizens were prohibited by law from leaving the country to settle elsewhere, anyone who sought political asylum in another country was labeled a defector and a traitor. This included scientists, artists, film directors, dancers, writers, musicians, scholars, journalists, and seamen. (The term did not apply to writer Alexander Solzhenit-syn or cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who were forcibly exiled; the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who was brought to the West as part of an exchange; or former KGB general Oleg Kalygin, now residing in the United States, who criticized the KGB publicly but remained a Soviet citizen.)
Among well-known Soviet defectors who fall into the broader category were Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; ballet dancers Rudolph
DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Alexander Godunov; pianist Dmitry Shostakovich; theater director Yuri Lyubimov; and chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoy.
In addition many Soviet defectors betrayed their country by passing on secrets to Western intelligence. Often they wrote books about their experiences. Among the earliest such defectors was NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) officer Walter Krivitsky, who sought asylum in the United States in 1937, wrote the book I was Stalin’s Agent, and died under mysterious circumstances in 1941. Another NKVD officer, Viktor Kravchenko, the author of I Chose Freedom, defected to the United States in 1944 and died in 1966. Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk for Soviet military intelligence (GRU), turned himself over to Canadian authorities in Ottawa, Canada, in 1945. Gouzenko’s revelations about the Soviet spy network in the West, supported by documents he brought with him, helped to spark the Cold War. Intelligence officer Peter Deryabin sought American asylum in Vienna in 1953, later writing several books about his career in the Soviet secret services. In 1954 KGB agents Vladimir and Yevdokia Petrov defected in Australia and later settled in the United States, where they published Empire of Fear in 1956. KGB officer Ana-toly Golitsyn defected to the United States in 1961, reporting that the KGB had placed an agent at the highest levels of American intelligence, but unable to give details to identify the agent. Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer posing as a trade official, defected to Britain in 1971. Alexei Myagkov, a KGB captain serving in Germany, defected to West Berlin in 1974, later writing Inside the KGB: An Expose by an Officer of the Third Directorate. Arkady Shevchenko, a high-ranking Soviet diplomat serving at the United Nations, defected in New York in 1978. In 1985 he published a best-selling book entitled Breaking with Moscow. Stanislav Levchenko, a KGB officer posing as a journalist, defected in Japan in 1979 and now resides in the United States. Ilya Dzhirkvelov, a KGB officer now living in Britain, defected while working under cover for the Soviet news agency TASS in Switzerland in 1980. He later wrote Secret Servant: My Life with the KGB and the Soviet Elite. Among other KGB officers who defected to Britain in more recent years were Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB officer who was working in Iran before he sought asylum in 1982; and Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB colonel who had collaborated secretly with British intelligence since 1974 and escaped to the West in 1985. For Western intelligence services, one challenge was to establish that the Soviet defectors were genuine and were not acting as double agents for the KGB. When Yury Nosenko, a middle- level KGB officer, offered himself to the CIA in Geneva in 1962, a debate ensued over his bona fides that lasted for ten years and seriously impaired CIA operations against the Soviet Union. Another controversial case was that of Alexander Orlov, an agent of the Soviet NKVD, who defected to Spain in 1938 and ended up in the United States. Orlov, whose book The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes created a sensation when it appeared in 1953, passed on
