militia and the Cheka’s successor, the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate), were combined, and in 1932 the NKVD was formally subordinated to the OGPU. Two years later, the roles were technically reversed, with the OGPU absorbed into the NKVD, but in practice this actually reflected the colonization of the NKVD by the political police.
The concentration of law enforcement in the hands of the political police well suited the needs of Josef V. Stalin during the era of purges and collectivization, but in 1941 the regular and political police were once again divided. Regular policing again became the responsibility of the NKVD, while the political police became the NKGB, the People’s Commissariat of State Security. After the war, the NKVD regained the old title of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the NKGB became the MGB, Ministry of State Security. The political police remained very much the senior service, and for a short time (1953-1954) the MVD was reabsorbed into the MGB (which then became the Committee of State Security, KGB), but from this point the regular and political police became increasingly distinct agencies, each with a sense of its own role, history, and identity.
The police and security forces remained a key element of the Communist Party’s apparatus of political control and thus the subject of successive reforms, generally intended to strengthen both their subordination to the leadership and their authority over the masses. In 1956, reflecting concerns among the elite about the power of the security forces, the MVD was decentralized. In 1960, the USSR MVD was dissolved, and day-to-day control of the police passed to the MVDs of the constituent Union republics. In practice, though, the law codes of the republics mirrored their Russian counterpart, and the republican ministries were essentially local agencies for the central government. In 1968 the USSR MVD was reorganized in name as well as practice, after yet one more name change (Ministry for the Defense of Public Order, MOOP, 1962-1968).
The structure of the Ministry for Internal Affairs has not significantly changed, and thus the post-Soviet Russian MVD is similar in essence and organization, if not in scale. In 1991, Boris Yeltsin tried to merge the MVD and the security agencies into a new “super-ministry,” but this was blocked by the Constitutional Court and the idea was dropped. Other reforms were relatively minor, such as the transfer of responsibility for prisons to the Justice Ministry.
As guarantor of the Kremlin’s authority, the MVD controls a sizea ble militarized security force, the Interior Troops (VV). At its peak, in the early 1980s, this force numbered 300,000 officers and men, and its strength of 193,000 in 2003 actually reflected an increase in its size in proportion to the regular army. In the post-Soviet era, most VV units are local garrison forces, largely made up of conscripts, but there are also small commando forces as well as the elite Dzerzhinsky Division, based on the outskirts of Moscow, which has its own armored elements and artillery. See also: STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Galeotti, Mark. (1993). “Perestroika, Perestrelka, Pere-borka: Policing Russia in a Time of Change.” Europe- Asia Studies 45:769-786. Orlovsky, Daniel. (1981). The Limits of Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shelley, Louise. (1996). Policing Soviet Society. London: Routledge. Weissman, Neil. (1985). “Regular Police in Tsarist Russia, 1990-1914.” Russian Review 44:45-68.
The word mir in Russian has several meanings. In addition to “community” and “assembly,” it also means “world” and “peace.” These seemingly diverse meanings had a common historical origin. The village community formed the world for the peasants,
where they tried to keep a peaceful society. Thus mir was, in all probability, a peasant-given name for a spontaneously generated peasant organization in early Kievan or pre-Kievan times. It was mentioned in the eleventh century in the first codification of Russian law, Pravda Russkaya, as a body of liability in cases of criminal offense.
Over time, the meaning of mir changed, depending on the political structure of the empire, and came to mean different things to different people. For peasants and others, mir presumably was always a generic term for peasant village-type communities with a variety of structures and functions. The term also denoted those members of a peasant community who were eligible to discuss and decide on communal affairs. At the top of a mir stood an elected elder.
Contrary to the belief of the Slavophiles, communal land redistribution had no long tradition as a function of the mir. Until the end of the seventeenth century, individual land ownership was common among Russian peasants, and only special land holdings were used jointly. All modern characteristics, such as egalitarian landholding and land redistribution, developed only as results of changes in taxation, as the poll tax was introduced in 1722 and forced upon the peasants by the landowners, who sought to distribute the allotments more equally and thus get more return from their serfs.
In the nineteenth century, mir referred to any and all of the following: a peasant village group as the cooperative owner of communal land property; the gathering of all peasant households of a village or a volost to distribute responsibility for taxes and to redistribute land; a peasant community as the smallest cell of the state’s administration; and, most importantly, the entire system of a peasant community with communal property and land tenure subject to repartitioning. The peasant land was referred to as mirskaya zemlia.
Only at the end of the 1830s did a second term, obshchina, come into use for the village community. Unlike the old folk word mir, the term ob-shchina was invented by the Slavophiles with the special myth of the commune in mind. This term specifically designated the part of the mir’s land that was cultivated individually but that was also redistributable. The relation between both terms is that an obshchina thus coincided with some aspects of a mir but did not encompass all of the mir’s functions. The land of an obshchina either coincided with that of a mir or comprised a part of mir holdings. Every obshchina was perforce related to a mir, but not every mir was connected with an obshchina, because some peasants held their land in hereditary household tenure and did not redistribute it. With increasing confusion between both terms, most educated Russians probably equated mir and obshchina from the 1860s onward. Ob-shchina was also used for peasant groups lacking repartitional land.
Although the mir was an ancient form of peasant self-administration, it was also the lowest link in a chain of authorities extending from the individual peasant to the highest levels of state control. It was responsible to the state and later to the landowners for providing taxes, military recruits, and services. The mir preserved order in the village, regulated the use of communal arable lands and pastures, and until 1903 was collectively responsible for paying government taxes. Physically, the mir usually coincided with one particular settlement or village. However, in some cases it might comprise part of a village or more than one village. As its meaning no longer differed from obshchina, the term mir came out of use at the beginning of the twentieth century. See also: OBSHCHINA; PEASANT ECONOMY; PEASANTRY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grant, Steven A. (1976). “Obshchina and Mir.” Slavic Review 35:636-651. Moon, David. (1999). The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World the Russian Peasants Made. London: Longman. Robinson, Geroid T. (1967). Rural Russia under the Old Regime. Berkeley: University of California Press.
The Mir (“world”) space station was a modular space facility providing living and working accommodations for cosmonauts and astronauts during its fifteen-plus years in orbit around the Earth. The core module of Mir was launched on February 20, 1986, and the station complex was commanded to a controlled re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean on March 23, 2001, where its parts either burned up or sank in the ocean.
The Russian Space Station MIR, photographed from the cargo bay of the U.S. Space Shuttle Atlantis. © AFP/CORBIS
The core module provided basic services-living quarters, life support, and power-for those staying aboard Mir. In subsequent years, five additional modules were launched and attached to the core to add to the research and crew support capabilities of the space station; the last module was attached in 1996.
More than one hundred cosmonauts and astronauts visited Mir during its fifteen years in orbit. One, Soviet cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, stayed in orbit for 438 days, the longest human space flight in history. Beginning in
