HULTON ARCHIVE See also: ARMAND, INESSA; BOLSHEVISM; FEMINISM; KRUPSKAYA, NADEZHDA; SAMOILOVA, KONKORDIA; ZHENOTDEL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clements, Barbara Evans. (1979). Bolshevik Feminist: the Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farnsworth, Beatrice. (1980). Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Holt, Alix, ed. (1977). Selected Writings of Alexandra Kol-lontai. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill. Kollontai, Alexandra. (1978) The Love of Worker Bees, tr. Cathy Porter. Chicago: Academy Press Limited.
KOMBEDY See COMMITTEES OF THE VILLAGE POOR.
The Komi are an indigenous Arctic people. Of the 497,000 Komi (1989 census), the majority (292,000) live in the Komi Republic, which extends to the Arctic Circle, and in the contiguous Permian Komi Autonomous okrug within the Perm oblast (Komi population 95,000). Their language belongs to the Finno-Ugric family and is mutually semi-intelligible with Udmurt, farther south. In the 1300s the Komi were the merchants of the Far North and had a unique alphabet. Most Komis have Caucasian features. Distinguished U.S. sociologist Pitrim Sorokin (1889-1968) was a Komi cultural activist in his youth.
The northern Komi partly converted to Greek Orthodoxy in the late 1300s, prior to the Novgorod conquest, and maintained Komi-language liturgies up to 1700. The Permian Komi Duchy of Great Perm converted under duress just before Novgorod was seized (1472) by Moscow, which allowed the duke to stay as a vassal but dismissed his son. Cultural renaissance was strong by 1900.
Despite Komi pleas, Moscow excluded the Permian Komi from the Komi Autonomous oblast, formed in 1921 and upgraded to Autonomous Republic in 1936. The Permian Komi National okrug (district), formed in 1925, remains a “periphery of a periphery” within the Perm oblast. Two separate literary languages were developed. Numerous slave labor camps were located in Komi lands. Russian immigration has reduced the Komi from 92 percent of the population in 1926 to 23 percent in 1989. In the okrug the drop has been from 77 percent to 60 percent.
The huge and flat Komi Republic (population 1.3 million) produces 10 percent of Russia’s paper, 7 percent of its coal, and also oil and gas. Indigenous Komi live mainly in the southern agricultural zone. Those who have shifted to Russian as their main language (25%) participate actively in the economic life. The Permian Komi okrug is a depressed area where the only resource, lumber, has been depleted.
In 1989 the First Komi National Congress established a Komi National Revival Committee, which succeeded in having Komi and Russian declared coequal state languages in the Republic. The impact has been real but limited, leading to the creation of a more activist organization, Doriam As-n?m?s (Let’s Defend Ourselves). See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lallukka, Seppo. (1995). “Territorial and Demographic Foundations of Komi-Permiak Nationality.” Nationalities Papers 23:353-371. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
The Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komitet Uchreditelnogo Sobraniya) or KOMUCH the first constitutional alternative to the Soviet rule in Russia, emerged during the spring of 1918. The alternative derived its legitimacy from the Constituent Assembly, whose nine hundred deputies had been elected in late 1917 to draft a new constitution for the Russian Republic, proclaimed by the Provisional Government on September 9. The electoral victory of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR or SRs)-which won 58 percent of the popular vote and 440 seats in the assembly, compared to the Bolsheviks’ 25 percent of the vote and 175 seats-augured well for the possibility of a constitutional and peaceful evolution of Russia into a modern democratic republic.
This possibility was thwarted, however, when Lenin dissolved the Assembly on January 6. However, the SRs convened a secret conclave in Petro-grad at the end of January and decided to organize an armed uprising on behalf of the Assembly to divest the Bolsheviks of power. They aimed to reconvene the Assembly as the only source of legitimate authority in the country on the territories liberated from the Bolsheviks; to renew the Assembly’s work on drafting a new constitution; and to enact land and other reforms. To implement these policies the party decided to shift the center of its activities from Petrograd to Samara, Saratov, and other strongholds in the Volga region. In Samara the party established a Revolutionary Center early in February 1918, to organize the uprising as soon as twenty of its deputies from that region returned to their home constituencies. The center entrusted B. K. Fortunatov with organizing
KONDRATIEV, NIKOLAI DMITRIEVICH
the military forces, while P. D. Klimushkin and I. M. Brushvit engaged in political work to secure cooperation with the deputies of other political parties and other anti-Bolshevik forces in the region.
When the Czechoslovak Legion captured Samara on June 8, 1918, the Revolutionary Center assumed power in the name of the KOMUCH, in order to govern, on behalf of the Constituent Assembly, not only that city but also other cities liberated by the joint forces of the Legion and the KOMUCH. These joint operations captured Nikolayevsk on July 20, Khvalinsk on July 11, Kunzetsk on July 15, Syzran on July 10, Simbirsk on July 22, Sterlitamak on July 15, and Kazan on August 6. As a result, a beachhead more than 300 miles long was established on the western bank of the Volga. The objective was to hold it until the arrival of the Allied forces from Vladivostok to reestablish the Eastern Front in Russia, according to the decision of the Allied Supreme War Council of July 2. While this was a feasible project-the entire Trans-Siberian Railway from the Volga to that port was under the control of the Czechs-the Allied forces never came, because of President Woodrow Wilson’s opposition.
Although by the beginning of October the Legion and the KOMUCH deployed on this beachhead 62,370 men, they were outnumbered by Trotsky’s 93,500 troops, a large number of them composed of former German, Hungarian, and Austrian prisoners of war serving now in the Bolshevik ranks. Samara was evacuated on October 8. The evacuation of the administrative and political activities of KOMUCH from Samara to Ufa terminated its four- month-long effort to establish the constitutional alternative to the Soviet rule in the Volga region. And in Ufa, by accepting the authority, although grudgingly, of the All Russia Provisional Government established there on September 23, 1918, the Komuch ceased to exist. See also: ALLIED INTERVENTION; CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
KONDRATIEV, NIKOLAI DMITRIEVICH
(1892-1938), agricultural economist and business cycle analyst.
Internationally renowned for his work on long-run economic cycles, Nikolai Kondratiev was born in 1892 in Ivanovskaya region. He studied economics under Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky and became an important member of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party. His first major work was a detailed study of the Russian grain market, and in 1921 he created the world-famous Conjuncture Institute in Moscow. In 1922 he published his first account of long cycles. These were approximately fifty-year economic cycles, revealed in price levels and trade statistics, which appeared to provoke (or be provoked by) technological innovations and social upheavals, and which were caused by the periodic renewal of basic capital goods. This idea, subsequently called the Kondratiev cycle, has been very influential among non-mainstream economists and is even employed by historians and stock market analysts, but it is fundamentally questioned by more orthodox economists.
From within the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, Kondratiev also wrote insightful commentary on the economic development of Russia, particularly on agriculture and planning methodology, and advocated a market-led industrialization strategy for the USSR. This involved specializing in the export of agricultural produce in the short term in order to fund industrial development in the medium term, in line with the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage. This approach received impetus from Kondratiev’s trip overseas in 1924 and 1925, and was crystallized in Kondratiev’s plan for agriculture and forestry from 1924 to 1928. Such thinking was anathema to Josef Stalin, who had Kondratiev arrested in 1930, jailed for eight years, and finally shot. While in jail, Kondratiev wrote a book on
