contribution to military reform is immeasurable. Nonetheless the state distributed a translation of Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen’s Kriegskunst zu Fuss (Military Art of Infantry) to the colonels for use in training, and the state also received input from European officers-in the form of reports and letters-about the training and equipment needs of the regiments. See also: SMOLENSK WAR; THIRTEEN YEARS’ WAR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Reger, W. M., IV. (1997). “In the Service of the Tsars: European Mercenary Officers and the Reception of Military Reform in Russia, 1654-1667.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Stevens, Carol. (1995). Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
The phrase “New Political Thinking” (or, simply, “New Thinking”) was introduced in the Soviet Union early in the Gorbachev era. While to some observers it seemed no more than a new twist to Soviet propaganda, in fact it represented an increasingly radical break with fundamentals of Soviet ideology.
The New Thinking linked Soviet domestic political reform with innovation in foreign policy. Gorbachev was in a minority within the Soviet leadership in espousing ideas that were radically new in the Soviet context. However, he was able to draw on intellectual support from research institutes in which fresh ideas had surfaced but had hitherto lacked political support where it mattered-at the top of the Communist Party hierarchy. With the institutional resources of the general secretaryship at his disposal, Gorbachev was able to give decisive support to innovative thinkers and to legitimize new concepts. Initially, as in Gorbachev’s 1987 book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, the new ideas were already revising previous Soviet ideology in significant ways; but a year or two later they had gone much fur1042
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ther, amounting to a conceptual revolution that shook the Soviet system to its foundations.
It was in 1987 that Gorbachev first used the term “pluralism” in a positive sense, albeit in a qualified form as “socialist pluralism” or a “pluralism of opinion.” Hitherto, “pluralism” had always been a pejorative term in the Soviet lexicon, condemned as an alien and bourgeois notion. Once the taboo on praising pluralism had been broken, articles on the need to develop pluralism within the Soviet Union began to appear, often without the “socialist” qualifier. By 1990 Gorbachev himself was advocating “political pluralism.” Another concept on which an anathema had been pronounced for many years was “market,” but again-for example, in his 1987 book-Gorbachev embraced the idea of a “socialist market.” Before long other contributors to the growing debates in the Soviet Union were advocating a market economy, some of them explicitly differentiating this from socialism as they understood it.
The New Political Thinking could, in its earliest manifestations, be seen as a new Soviet ideology, a codified, albeit genuinely innovative, body of correct thinking. It gave way, however, to a growing freedom of speech and of debate both within the Communist Party and in the broader society-a new political reality that partly resulted from the boldness of the intellectual breakthrough.
Among the new concepts that were given Gorbachev’s official imprimatur between 1985 and 1988 were the principle of a state based on the rule of law, the idea of checks and balances, glasnost (openness or transparency), perestroika (literally reconstruction, but a term that became a synonym for the radical reform of the Soviet system), democratization (which initially meant freer discussion within the Communist Party but by 1988-at the Nineteenth Party Conference-had come to embrace the principle of contested elections for a new legislature), and civil society.
The New Political Thinking represented no less of a break with the Soviet past in its foreign policy dimension. A class approach to international relations was explicitly discarded in favor of the idea of all-human interests and universal values. The idea of global interdependence superseded the zero-sum-game philosophy of kto kogo (who will crush whom). Whereas in the past the “struggle for peace” had often been a thin disguise for the pursuit of Soviet great-power interests, the new thinking endorsed by Gorbachev stressed that in the nuclear age peace was the only rational option if humankind was to survive. This provided justification for a new and genuinely cooperative approach to international relations. See also: DEMOCRATIZATION; GLASNOST; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PERESTROIKA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie (ed.). (2004). The Demise of Marxism- Leninism in Russia. London: Palgrave. Chernyaev, Anatoly. (2000). My Six Years with Gorbachev. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1987). Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World. London: Collins. Nove, Alec. (1989). Glasnost in Action. London: Unwin Hyman. Palazchenko, Pavel. (1997). My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Yakovlev, Alexander. (1993). The Fate of Marxism in Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
The first news sheet issued with some regularity in Russia was Sankt Peterburgskie vedemosti (St. Petersburg Herald), a biweekly published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, beginning in 1727. Until the Great Reforms of 1861-1874, nearly all newspapers in Russia were official bulletins issued by various government institutions. To the extent that there was a print-based public sphere in pre-Reform Russia, it was dominated by the “thick journals” that published literary criticism and philosophical speculation.
The relaxing of censorship and limits on private publications during the Great Reforms, advances in printing technology, and the spread of literacy in Russian cities led to the development of a mass-market, commercial press by the 1880s. Daily papers targeting various markets covered stock-market news and foreign affairs, as well as the more sensational topics of crime, sex scandals, and natural disasters. As Louise McReynolds has demonstrated, Russian commercial mass newspapers resembled their counterparts in North America and Western Europe in appealing to and fostering nationalist sentiment.
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By World War I “copeck” (penny) newspapers in Moscow and St. Petersburg achieved circulations comparable to those of mass circulation organs in the United States and Western Europe. The most popular newspaper in the Russian Empire in 1914 was Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), with a circulation of 619,500.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they created an entirely new kind of mass press. By the summer of 1918 the Soviet government had shut down all non-Bolshevik newspapers on their territory. Bolshevik newspapers during the years of revolution and civil war (1917-1921) aimed to mobilize the populace in general and Party members in particular for war. Resources were scarce, and typical civil war newspaper editions were only two pages long. The state funded the press throughout the Soviet era.
The Bolsheviks shared with most Russian intellectuals of the revolutionary era a profound contempt for the sensationalistic urban copeck newspapers that aimed to entertain a mass audience. They created a mass press that was supposed to educate, guide, and mobilize readers, not entertain them. Other important functions of Soviet newspapers were the gathering of intelligence on popular moods and the monitoring of corruption in the Party or state apparatus. To fulfill these tasks, the newspapers solicited and received literally millions of readers’ letters, some of which were published. The editorial staff also forwarded letters denouncing crime and corruption to the appropriate police or prosecutorial organs. They used letters to compose reports on popular attitudes that were sent to all levels of party officialdom.
The role of direct censorship in Soviet newspaper production has been overemphasized. Agenda-setting by party and state organs was more important. The role of official censors in controlling press content was negligible. Soviet journalists were generally self-censoring, and they followed agendas set by the Communist Party’s Central Committee and other official institutions.
Illegal newspapers were central to Bolshevik Party organization in the prerevolutionary years. This heritage of underground political culture contributed to a Soviet fetishization of newspapers as the mass medium par
