Regional Deputies’ Group (MDG) with Boris Yeltsin, Yury Afanasiev, and Andrei Sakharov. The MDG advocated democratic reforms; Popov adopted a pragmatic stance relative to other leaders in the group. In March 1990, reformers won control of the Moscow City Council, and Popov was elected chairman. He resigned from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in July 1990.
In June 1991, Popov became the first popularly elected mayor of Moscow, with Yuri Luzhkov as his vice- mayor. After opposing the August coup attempt, he pursued reforms such as privatization of housing and retail establishments. He resigned from the post of mayor in June 1992, and subsequently formed electorally unsuccessful organizations. His Russian Movement for Democratic Reforms (RDDR) did not win enough votes to gain party-list seats in the 1993 Duma elections. He later joined with other politicians to form the Social Democrats, a party that participated in the 1995 and 1999 elections and likewise failed to gain seats. Popov founded Moscow International University and became its president. He continues to publish commentaries on public policy issues. See also: INTER-REGIONAL DEPUTIES’ GROUP; MOSCOW
POPOV, PAVEL ILICH
(1872-1950), author of the first “balance of the national economy,” the forerunner of the tool of economic analysis now known as input-output.
Pavel Popov went to St. Petersburg in 1895 to enter the university, but once there he was diverted to participation in the revolutionary movement. He was arrested and spent the years 1896 to 1897 in prison. Exiled to Ufa gubernia, he began to study statistics and in 1909-1917 worked in the Tula zemstvo as a statistician. After the February Revolution he became head of the department of the agricultural census in the Ministry of Agriculture in the provisional government. After the Bolsheviks came to power in 1918, he became the first chairman of the Central Statistical Administration. He was an able organizer and, among other things, oversaw development of the first “balance” of inputs and outputs. He continued as chairman of the Central Statistical Administration until 1926, and then had a long, apparently untroubled, career in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Gosplan until his death. During the early, statistical, stage of his career, he published some books and reports but apparently nothing after he became associated with Gosplan. Thus, apart from the input-output work, his contribution to Soviet economics was as an organizer rather than as an economic thinker or theorist. See also: CENTRAL STATISTICAL AGENCY; GOSPLAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spulber, Nicolas. (1964). Foundations of Soviet Strategy for Economic Growth: Selected Soviet Essays, 1924 -1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Comintern policy during the mid-1930s that encouraged cooperation between communist and
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non-communist parties in order to stop the spread of fascism.
During the 1930s, Soviet foreign policy changed several times in response to the evolving political situation in Europe. At the beginning of the decade, Josef Stalin would not allow cooperation between communist and noncommunist parties. This policy had particularly tragic results in Germany, where enmity between communists and socialists divided the opposition to the Nazis. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and his adoption of an aggressive anti-Soviet foreign policy, Stalin began to fear the spread of fascism to other European countries and the possible creation of an anti-Soviet bloc. In response to this potential threat, the Soviet Union changed policy and promoted collective security among non-fascist states. In 1934 the USSR joined the League of Nations and the following year signed a mutual defense treaty with France and Czechoslovakia. Stalin realized that the program of the Communist International had to be brought into line with the new Soviet foreign policy, and a Comintern congress was called for the summer of 1935 in order to accomplish this transformation.
The Seventh Comintern Congress met in Moscow in July-August 1935. Five hundred delegates representing sixty-five communist parties participated and elected Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian communist, as general secretary of the Comintern. In this capacity, Dimitrov delivered the keynote address and outlined the new policy. Declaring that “fascism has embarked upon a wide offensive,” Dimitrov called for the creation of a united anti-fascist front that included support for anti-fascist government coalitions. While maintaining that capitalism remained the ultimate enemy, Dimitrov argued that the immediate threat to the workers came from the fascists and that all communists should participate in the campaign to stop the spread of this dangerous movement. Whereas communists and communist parties previously had opposed all bourgeois and capitalist governments, and considered fascism simply a variant of capitalism, members of the Comintern were now being told to support bourgeois governments and to postpone the struggle against capitalism.
The Popular Front concept had its greatest impact in Spain, France, and China. In Spain, the election of a Popular Front coalition in February 1936 led to civil war. After three years the forces of the fascist General Francisco Franco took power. In France, where the prospect of a fascist victory frightened the Soviet Union, a Popular Front government came to power in June 1936. Like all French governments of the time, it remained weak, and it fell after only one year. In China, the prospect of cooperation between the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and the communist forces of Mao Zedong led the Japanese military to launch a preemptive strike during the summer of 1937.
In the end the Popular Front concept was not about an ideological shift in communist perceptions of the world, but a tactical Stalinist response to the specific threat of fascism as perceived during the mid-1930s. The defense of the Soviet Union took precedence over all other considerations, and in 1939 the Popular Front was abandoned with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. See also: LEAGUE OF NATIONS; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dimitrov, Georgi. (1935). United Front against Fascism and War; The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Fight for the Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism. New York: Workers Library Publishers. Haslam, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Tucker, Robert C. (1990). Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York: Norton. Ulam, Adam B. (1968). Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917- 1967. New York: Praeger.
Scholars differ on the question of when the tendency known as populism (narodnichestvo) was most significant in Russian social and political thought. Some suggest that populism was prominent from 1848 to 1881; others, that it was a revolutionary movement in the period between 1860 and 1895. Soviet scholars primarily focused on the 1870s and 1880s. There is also disagreement about what populism represented as an ideology. There are three ways of looking at it: as a reaction against Western capitalism and socialism, as agrarian socialism, and as a theory advocating the hegemony of the masses over the educated elite.
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As this should make evident, populism meant different things to different people; it was not a single coherent doctrine but a widespread movement in nineteenth-century Russia favoring such goals as social justice and equality. Populism in Russia is generally believed to have been strongly influenced by the thinking of Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who during the 1850s and 1860s argued that the peasant commune (mir) was crucial to Russia’s transition from capitalism to socialism via a peasant revolution.
There were three strands in the Russian populist movement. The first, classical populism, was associated with Peter Lavrovich Lavrov (1823-1900), a nobleman by birth who had received a military education and later became a professor of mathematics. Lavrov was an activist in the student and intellectual movement of the 1860s, and a consequence was forced to emigrate from Russia in 1870. His experience in the Paris Commune during the
