The same standard was used in Soviet sculpture and art. Huge monuments of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin were erected in every sizable city. Many Soviet artists created paintings showing gigantic images of the communist leaders with tiny figures of the common people in the background.
Gigantomania began in Stalin’s time, but continued after his death. During the 1960s to the 1980s two huge sculptures depicting the warrior “Motherland-Mother” were erected by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich near Kiev and Volgograd. According to Soviet doctrine, art should show the super-human accomplishments of the new socialist man, who was depicted as a huge muscular and overpowering human being. Even women were sculpted as enormous figures with rugged masculine physiques.
These works are now generally thought to be the vulgar creations of dilettante artists; showing the exceedingly poor taste of the all-powerful Soviet leaders who commanded their creation. See also: ARCHITECTURE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bown, Matthew Cullerne, and Taylor, Brandon, eds. (1993). Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-party State, 1917-1992. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (2001). Russia and the Russians. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
London, Kurt. (1938). The Seven Soviet Arts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicolas V. (2000). A History of Russia, 6th ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryabushin, Alexander and Smolina, Nadia. (1992). Landmarks of Soviet Architecture 1917-1991. New York: Rizzoli.
(1904-1977), Stalin-era memoirist.
Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg was one of the most well-known and respected memoirists of Josef Stalin’s purges and life in the Soviet Gulag. She was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moscow. She became a teacher and party activist in Kazan. She married Pavel Aksenov, a high-ranking party official in Kazan, and the couple had two sons. The eldest, Alyosha, would die during the Siege of Leningrad; the younger, Vasily, became a noted writer in his own right. In 1937 both Ginzburg and her husband were arrested. Ginzburg spent the next two years in solitary confinement before being sent to a labor camp in Kolyma. While in the camps, she undertook a variety of work, including nursing, and she met Anton Walter, a fellow prisoner who worked as a doctor. He became her second husband. In 1947 Ginzburg was released from captivity but chose to stay in the Magadan area to wait for Walter to finish his allotted prison sentence. She began teaching Russian language and literature. Ironically many of her students at the time worked for the security services. Ginzburg was re-arrested in 1949. In 1955 she was released again. This time Ginzburg was allowed to return to Moscow and was officially rehabilitated. She began to write pieces for such Soviet periodicals as Youth (Yunost), the Teacher’s Newspaper (Uchitelskaya gazeta), and the News (Izvestiya). Despite her rehabilitation, Ginzburg’s background still made her a bit suspect in the eyes of the authorities, so she never joined the Soviet Writers’ Union. In 1967 the first volume of her memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind, was published in Italy. The book covers the 1934-1939 period of her life. In it, she describes how her mentality as a devoted party member changed once she realized the extent of the Purges, and she notes the kinds of things people had to do to survive their imprisonment. In Ginzburg’s case, for instance, she took great solace from her vast knowledge of Russian poetry, and she would recite it at length for her fellow prisoners. The second volume of her memoirs, Within the Whirlwind, was published abroad in 1979 and describes her remaining years in prison as well as her life in Magadan and her eventual return to Moscow. There is a distinct difference in tone between the two volumes, with the second book being much harsher and honest in its criticisms. Many scholars have speculated that Ginzburg knew by then that her memoirs would not legally be published in the Soviet Union during her lifetime and that she chose not to temper her language in the hopes of publication. Both volumes of memoirs have been translated into an array of languages, and they remain among the best, most widely read accounts of Soviet prison life. In the Soviet Union, the books circulated widely in samizdat form among the dissident community and, finally, in 1989 they were published officially. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GULAG; PURGES, THE GREAT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heldt, Barbara. (1987). Terrible Perfection. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kelly, Catriona. (1994). A History of Russian Women’s Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kolchevska, Natasha. (1998). “A Difficult Journey: Evgeniia Ginzburg and Women’s Writing of Camp Memoirs.” In Women and Russia: Projections and Self- Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh. New York: Berghahn Books. Kolchevska, Natasha. (2003). “The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Writing of the Gulag.” In The Russian Memoir: History and Literature, ed. Beth Holmgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
GKOs, Gosudarstvennye Kratkosrochnye Obyazatel-stva, are short-term ruble-denominated treasury bills issued since 1993. They played a major role in Russia’s August 1998 economic crisis.
In the 1990s Russia was unable to balance its budget. The general government budget deficit
varied from 5 to as much as 25 percent of GDP without any declining trend. First the deficit was covered by money emission, which contributed to very high and variable inflation. The Russian government started in May 1993 to issue short-term zero-coupon bonds known as GKOs. This was meant as a non-inflationary method of financing the deficit. The GKO maturity is less than a year. Sometimes the average maturity has been as short as half a year. There are also ruble-denominated medium-term federal bonds known as OFZs (since 1995). Other government debt instruments were also issued, but GKOs remained the most important ones.
Russian inflation came down after 1995. The root problem, the budget deficit, was not addressed. It was believed that deficits could be financed by increasing debt. The government debt market was the fastest-growing market in 1996 and 1997. Domestic ruble-denominated debt remained very small until 1996 but rose to 13 percent of GDP in January 1997. This is still not an internationally high figure. But the high yields, short maturities, and large foreign ownership shares of GKOs made the situation explosive.
The GKO real interest rates were first highly negative due to unexpectedly high inflation. As inflation subsided but GKO nominal yields remained high-due to high inflation expectations, political uncertainty or other reasons-real interest rates shot up. They were 30-60 percent in 1996-1997. Later they decreased, only to reach new highs in early 1998, as the danger of default became evident. Interest payments rose to 27.6 percent of federal government revenue in 1995 and more than half in early 1998. Most GKOs were consequently issued to service earlier debt. By 1997 the GKO contribution to financing the deficit was actually negative. On the other hand, they had become the main revenue source for the larger Russian banks.
Access for foreigners to the GKO market was quite restricted until 1996. Due to the small size of the market relative to international capital flows and very high real interest rates, access was only liberalized gradually. Measures were used to keep the non-residents’ earnings within limits. Still, by the end of 1997 their share in GKO stock was at least a third, perhaps more. The rest was basically owned by the Central Bank and the state-owned Sberbank. The risk of sudden exit of nonresident GKO holders was real. Nonresident behavior soon became a major source of the GKO market crisis in the spring of 1998. After the crisis of August 1998, the government chose to restructure the GKOs and OFZs, which were to a large part frozen. Afterward, Russian government debt market has remained quite illiquid. With budget surpluses, the government has not needed new debt. Investors remain wary. GKO stock is less than 1 percent of GDP. However, debt instruments would be useful for liquidity control and protection from inflation. See also: ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; SBERBANK
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gobbin, Niko, and Merleverde, Bruno. (2000). “The Russian Crisis: A Debt Perspective.” Post-Communist Economies 12(2):141-163. Malleret, Thierry, Orlova, Natalia, and Romanov, Vladimir. (1999). “What Loaded and Triggered the Russian Crisis?” Post-Soviet Affairs 15(2):107-129. Willer, Dirk. (2001). “Financial Markets.” In
