accepted the titles Great, Emperor, and Father of the Fatherland from the Senate, further arousing the belief in some European countries that Russian influence was to be feared “more than the Turks.” Except for the changes related to Finland, the treaty defined Russia’s Baltic presence for the rest of the imperial era. The acquisition of ports brought Russia both economic and strategic advantages as well as an influx of highly educated Baltic German personnel to work in the imperial civil service. See also: GREAT NORTHERN WAR; PETER I; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bagger, H. (1993). “The Role of the Baltic in Russian Foreign Policy 1721-1773.” In Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
1079
Rent in kind or money (quitrent).
Obrok was land rent paid by a peasant to his lord either in kind or in money. Although there is disagreement about its status prior to the Mongol conquest, scholars agree that from the mid 1200s to the end of the 1400s, rents in kind dominated the economy after the Mongol invasion destroyed the urban market and caused a precipitous population decline.
As a market reemerged in the late 1400s and 1500s, dues paid in money increased significantly. But by the end of the fifteenth century, the new money dues were forcibly converted into more profitable labor dues (barshchina). The latter became predominant on seigniorial estates into the early eighteenth century.
By the last third of the 1700s, market development and major agricultural expansion into the black soil region produced regional economic specialization. Rent in cash and in kind came to predominate in the non-black soil region, which extended north from Moscow. Fifty-five percent of the serfs in the region were on obrok. Increasingly the payments were in cash, which was earned largely from nonagricultural wages. This overall proportion remained relatively stable down to the emancipation, even though there was a strong shift from labor dues to cash payments near the capital as wages rose.
There has been a major controversy over what happened to the level of cash payments in the last hundred years of serfdom. Clearly, the nominal value of the payments increased rather sharply. But when adjustments are made for inflation and price increases, Western, Soviet, and post-Soviet scholars agree the increase was fairly moderate. See also: BARSHCHINA; SERFDOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moon, David. (1999). The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made. London: Longman.
1081
(1830-1904), imperial Russian general staff officer, military statistician, planner and chief of the Main Staff.
General-Adjutant Nikolai Obruchev was born in Warsaw, the son of an officer of modest means. He completed the First Cadet Corps in 1848 and the Nicholas Military Academy in 1854. Subsequently, as professor at the Academy, he was a founder of Russian military statistics. In 1858 he became the first editor of the military professional monthly Voyenny sbornik (Military Collection), but was soon removed for the printing of articles critical of Russian logistics in the Crimean War. In 1863, under War Minister Dmitry Milyutin’s tutelage, he became the secretary of the Military Academic Committee within the Main Staff. From this position he supported creation of an independent general staff and actively advanced Milyutin’s military reforms. Obruchev played a major role in planning for the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. His subsequent plans for the military preparation of Russian Poland in the event of war against the Dual Alliance were influential until 1914.
Although Obruchev’s scheme for a lightning war against Turkey was never realized, he was posted to the Caucasus theater in July 1877, where he successfully planned the rout of the Turkish army. Several months later in the Balkan theater, he devised a plan for winter operations across the Balkan divide that led to Turkish capitulation in early 1878. After Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, Obruchev became War Minister Peter Se-menovich Vannovsky’s chief of the Main Staff. In this capacity Obruchev oversaw the rearmament of the Russian Army, the fortification of the western military frontier, and preparations for a possible amphibious operation against the Bosporus. He assumed an especially important role in working out the Franco-Russian Military Convention of 1892. Despite Nicholas II’s inclinations, he opposed Russian military intervention in the Far East during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Obruchev retired from active service in 1897 and died in his wife’s native France in June 1904. An outstanding planner and an adroit soldier-diplomat, Obruchev left his stamp during the last quarter of the nineteenth century on virtually every important facet of Russian preparation for future war. See also: MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; MILYUTIN, DMITRY ALEXEYEVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kennan, George F. (1984). The Fateful Alliance. New York: Pantheon. Rich, David Alan. (1998). The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Usually translated as “community,” this term refers primarily to a landholding group of peasants in pre-1917 Russia.
Pre-emancipation serfs, in common with state and other nonbound peasants, still had a large degree of freedom to organize their own affairs within the limits of the village itself. The obshchina represents the village as it looked inward-an economic unit based on the land it worked. It differed from what might be called the peasant mir (literally, “world” or “society”), representing the village as it looked outward. The mir assembly carried out the administrative, legal, and fiscal affairs of the village.
While not modern in its outlook, for many, if not most peasants, the obshchina was fairly well suited to carry out the necessary, limited functions of distributing land (and thus taxes and other dues) among people whose society was based largely, though implicitly, on a labor theory of value. The common but not universal obshchina practice of periodic redistribution of land, based on manpower and thus taxpaying ability, gave rise to much discussion among Russian intellectuals. The subject of widespread Romantic, philosophical, religious, economic, and political theorizing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the real-life obshchina was never the idealized, optimally Christian body of the Slavophiles nor the proto-communist organization of the peasant- oriented revolutionaries known as narodniki (populists). It was often guilty (from majority self-interest) of stymieing rational agrarian practices, but not always the culprit that Marxists blamed for peasant immiserization, socioeconomic inequality, and the obstructed development of a progressive class mentality. Living in an institution with social strengths and some economic weaknesses, most obshchina peasants sought not to maximize earnings or prof-its-as liberal economists would have them-nor
1082
to escape Marx’s “idiocy of rural life,” but to “sat-isfise” their lives (in H. Simon’s concept), that is, to achieve and maintain a satisfactory standard of living. See also: MIR; PEASANT ECONOMY
