December 1991, however, Russia’s Federation Treaty of 1992 made no reference to a right of secession for the republics. Nor did federal authorities agree that the republics had a right to refuse to join the federation. The Treaty also stipulated that the constitutions of the republics had to conform to the federal constitution.
The intent of the drafters of the April 1992 had been to include the Treaty’s provisions in a new constitution for the Russian Federation. However, the text of the Treaty was left out of the Russian Constitution of December 12, 1993, although Article 11.3 stated that the distribution of federal and regional powers is governed by “this Constitution, the Federation Treaty, and other treaties (dogovory) that delineate objects of jurisdiction and powers.” Article 1, Part 2, of the constitution added that “should the provisions of the Federation Treaty . . . contravene those of the Constitution of the Federation, the provisions of the Constitution of the Russian Federation shall apply.” In effect, the terms of the Federation Treaty were superseded by the federation provisions in the new constitution, which did not identify the republics as sovereign and was unequivocal in denying the subjects of the federation a unilateral right of secession.
While the Treaty had limited legal significance, its signing in early 1992 helped ameliorate some of the tension between the Russian federal government and the republics in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR. It also provided President Boris Yeltsin with an important political victory. But it left many critical issues unresolved, particularly the legal status of Chechnya and Tatarstan. In FebruFELDSHER ary 1994, Tatarstan agreed to become a constituent unit of the Russian Federation pursuant to the terms of a bilateral treaty. Chechnya would continue to refuse to join the federation, however, a position that led to war between the Russian federal government and supporters of Chechen independence later that year. See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; FEDERALISM; RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahdieh, Robert B. (1997). Russia’s Constitutional Revolution: Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Lapidus, Gail W., and Walker, Edward W. (1995). “Nationalism, Regionalism, and Federalism: Center-Periphery Relations in Post-Communist Russia.” In The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, ed. Gail W. Lapidus. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
had to be devoted to the producers’ goods sector. Net investment would have to be proportional to the existing allocation of capital. The greater the capacity to produce capital goods, the faster the economy could grow, according to the model. Capital-output ratios in the two sectors could be minimized by working several shifts. This early growth model, however, ignored likely scarcities of food, foreign exchange, and skilled labor that would result when growth accelerated. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; GOSPLAN
Domar, Evsey D. (1957). Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth. New York: Oxford University Press. Ellman, Michael. (1990). “Grigorii Alexandrovic Fel’d-man.” In Problems of the Planned Economy, eds. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. New York: Norton.
MARTIN C. SPECHLER
(1884-1958), a pioneer in the mathematical study of economic growth.
Grigory Alexandrovich Feldman, an electrical engineer by profession, worked in Gosplan from 1923 until 1931. His report to the committee for long-term planning of Gosplan, entitled “On the Theory of the Rates of Growth of the National Income,” was published in 1928 and became the basis for the committee’s preliminary draft of a long- term plan. However, Feldman soon came under attack for his ideas on the politically sensitive subject of socialist industrialization and use of mathematics in the heroic atmosphere of those times. His numerical targets, though supported by the head of the committee, proved too optimistic and could not be realized. After some tendentious criticism, Feldman’s career never recovered. Even his later work on growth in the United States, an early interest of his, could not be published. He apparently spent several years in labor camps before being released, quite sick, in 1953.
Feldman’s two-sector growth model was based on the macroeconomic concepts of Karl Marx. Feldman first demonstrated that the higher the aggregate growth of an economy, the more capital
FELDSHER
Medical assistant.
Feldshers first appeared in Russia during the eighteenth century, when they served as medical assistants in urban hospitals or as army corpspeo-ple. During the nineteenth century they played a major role in rural medical systems. The law restricted them to practice under a physician’s direct supervision; many were nevertheless assigned to run remote clinics on their own because of the dearth of physicians in the countryside. Forced by circumstances to tolerate such independent feldsher practice, known as “feldsherism,” leading physicians adamantly opposed granting it legal sanction. “Feldsherism” remained a contentious issue as well as a widespread practice well into the 1920s.
During the 1870s, many provincial zemstvos established feldsher schools in order to raise feldshers’ overall qualifications. Opening feldsher practice to women in 1871 brought growing numbers of urban women with gymnasium training into these schools. By the twentieth century, the qualifications of these newer feldshers and feldsher-midwives had improved dramatically. As of 1914 there were more than 20,000 civilian feldshers in Russia. Most served in rural areas, but one-third worked for urban hospitals, railroads, schools, and factories.
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The publication in 1891 of the newspaper Feld-sher sparked the appearance of a feldsher professional movement. In 1906, local feldsher societies formed a national Union of Societies of Physicians’ Assistants, which published the newspaper Feld-shersky vestnik (Feldsher Herald) and lobbied on feld-shers’ behalf. During the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, most feldshers identified with moderate socialist parties. In 1918 the Union was dissolved; its members entered the industrial medical union Vsemediksantrud.
The Soviet regime ceased training feldshers altogether in 1924, focusing instead on midwives and nurses. Feldsher training was resumed in 1937, and feldshers continue to serve as auxiliary medical personnel in Russia. See also: HEALTH CARE SERVICES, IMPERIAL; HEALTH CARE SERVICES, SOVIET
Ramer, Samuel C. (1976). “Who Was the Russian Feld-sher?” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50:213-225. Ramer, Samuel C. (1996). “Professionalism and Politics: The Russian Feldsher Movement, 1891-1918.” In Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History, ed. Harley D. Balzer. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
SAMUEL C. RAMER
Intellectuals sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause and later to the Soviet Union as a socialist state.
The term fellow traveler (poputchiki) was used by Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks to describe those who agreed with the principles of socialism but did not accept the entire Bolshevik program. Lenin attacked these “petty-bourgeois fellow travelers” for their weak understanding of theory and tactics, and for leading workers away from revolution. Leon Trotsky, in 1918, described the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in similar terms because of their vacillation on the October Revolution.
The pejorative sense of the term gave way in 1924, when Trotsky argued that fellow travelers in literature could be useful for the young Soviet state. He used the term to describe non-party writers who could serve the cause of revolution even though they were not proletarians. In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky argued that non- party intellectuals were no longer a serious threat and could be guided toward a proletarian view of the world. This was followed by a Central Committee resolution in 1925 refusing to prefer one faction or theory of literature over any other.
The groups and individuals defined as fellow travelers during the 1920s constituted a flourishing artistic and literary culture that produced the best Soviet literature of the decade. The most famous group was the Serapion Brotherhood, whose membership included Konstantin Fedin, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Vsevolod V. Ivanov. These
