(1886-1937), Russian revolutionary, oppositionist, and Marxist theorist.
Born in Bolkhov, Orel province, Yevgeny Pre-obrazhensky began his political activism at age fifteen as a Social Democrat and later became a Bolshevik and a regional leader. Together with Nikolai Bukharin, Preobrazhensky led the Left Communist opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany (1918). In 1920 he became one of three secretaries of the Bolshevik Party, together with Nikolai Krestinsky and Leonid Serebryakov, all later active in the Trotskyist Opposition. The three were removed from these posts in 1922, when Josef Stalin was made General Secretary of the Party Central Committee.
In 1923 Preobrazhensky authored the “Platform of the Forty-Six,” which attacked the growing bureaucratization and authoritarianism of the Party apparatus. Also in 1923 he published On Morality and Class Norms, in which he attacked the apparatus’s growing privileges. From this point Preobrazhensky became a close ally of Leon Trotsky and a leader of the various Trotskyist oppositions. Following the suppression of the 1927 Joint Opposition, he was expelled from the Party in 1928, but in 1929 became one of the first Trot-skyists to recant his views and return to the Party fold. He was arrested in 1935 and testified against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev at the first Moscow show trial in 1936. He was scheduled to be a defendant in the second trial in 1937, but refused to confess and was shot in secret in that same year. He was rehabilitated during Gorbachev’s per-estroika.
Preobrazhensky was a major theorist and one of the Soviet Union’s leading economists of the 1920s. He opposed Stalin’s and Bukharin’s policy of “Socialism in One Country” and the slow pace of industrialization. In his major work, The New Economics, he put forward the theory of primary socialist accumulation, in which he argued that successful industrial development had to extract resources from the peasant economy. However, he resolutely opposed the use of force to achieve this, and by 1927 had concluded that only a revolution in the advanced countries of Western Europe could save the Soviet Union from a political and economic impasse. While he purported to welcome Stalin’s solution to this dilemma (forced collectivization and industrialization), in 1932 he published his second theoretical masterpiece, The Decline of Capitalism. This was a serious analysis in its own right of the Great Depression, but it contained a less-than-veiled attack on Stalin’s five-year plans and the policy of developing heavy industry at the expense of consumption. See also: BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Day, Richard B. (1981). The “Crisis” and the “Crash”: Soviet Studies of the West (1917-1939). London: NLB.
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Erlich, Alexander. (1960). The Soviet Industrialization Debate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1965). The New Economics. Oxford: Clarendon. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1973). From NEP to Socialism. London: New Park. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1980). The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization, ed. Donald A. Filtzer. London: Macmil-lan. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1985). The Decline of Capitalism, ed. Richard B. Day. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
The presidency is the most powerful formal political institution in post-communist Russia. Except for the ceremonial title given to the head of the USSR Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union did not have a presidency until its waning years, although the adoption of one was discussed under Josef Stalin and again under Nikita Khrushchev. New proposals resurfaced in the late 1980s, prompting intense debate among Communist Party elites about the efficacy of introducing an institution that could challenge the party’s authority. Despite concerns about the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies approved the Soviet presidency in 1990. The first presidential election was to be held by the legislature, with subsequent popular elections. Mikhail Gorbachev became president in March 1990, receiving 71 percent of the votes in the Congress of People’s Deputies.
The union republics began electing presidents before the dissolution of the USSR. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was chosen as Russia’s first president in an election that pitted him against five competitors. In his first term, following the breakup of the USSR, Yeltsin faced a recalcitrant parliament that opposed many of his initiatives. The conflict between the executive and legislative branches culminated in Yeltsin’s issuing a decree that dissolved parliament on September 21, 1993. Parliament rejected the decree and declared Vice President Alexander Rutskoi to be acting president. The forces opposing Yeltsin assembled armed supporters, occupied the Russian White House, and attempted to take control of the main television network. ProYeltsin forces attacked the White House and crushed the parliamentary rebellion in early October 1993.
The constitutional crisis led to the formal strengthening of the presidency, codified in the 1993 constitution. Rather than a pure presidential system, the Russian Federation adopted a semi-presidential system in which the president is the popularly elected head of state, and the prime minister, nominated by the president, is the head of government. The president is elected to a four-year term using a majority-runoff system that requires a majority vote to win in the first round of competition. If no candidate gains a majority, a runoff is held between the top two candidates from the first round. The president wields substantial formal powers and thus has more authority than the leaders in parliamentary and many other semipresidential systems. Among other things, the president can veto laws, make decrees, initiate legislation, call for referenda, and suspend local laws that contravene the constitution. The president is limited to two consecutive terms in office.
Yeltsin was reelected president in July 1996, after defeating the candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov, in the second round of competition. Yeltsin resigned from the presidency on December 31, 1999. Vladimir Putin served briefly as acting president and then was elected in March 2000. Putin reasserted presidential authority, strengthening central control over the regions, challenging powerful business interests, and extending control over the press. See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Huskey, Eugene. (1999). Presidential Power in Russia. Ar-monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Nichols, Thomas M. (2001). The Russian Presidency. New York: St. Martin’s.
In March 1990, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost its political monopoly and Mikhail Gorbachev was elected president of the
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USSR, he created a new Presidential Council to replace the Politburo as the major policy-making body in the Soviet Union. The council’s task, according to the newly revised Soviet constitution, was to determine the USSR’s foreign and domestic policy. This was a major institutional innovation. The Presidential Council was to be independent of the Communist Party, which at this stage was viewed as incapable of reform, and was intended to challenge the power of the Defense Council (subsequently abolished) and to increase and reinforce Gorbachev’s new presidential power. Gorbachev’s choice of members to compose the Council was very controversial. The sixteen members, only five of whom were Politburo members, included Chin-giz Aitmatov, a Kyrghiz writer; Vadim Bakatin, minister of the interior; Valery Boldin, head of the Central Committee General Department; KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov; Anatoly Lukyanov, chair of the Supreme Soviet; Yuri Maslyukov, chairman of the state planning commission; Yevgeny Primakov, chairman of the Soviet of the Union; Valentin Rasputin, the nationalist writer and only non-communist; Prime Minister Nikolay Ryzhkov; Stanislav Shatalin, economist; Eduard Shevardnadze, the foreign minister; Alexander Yakovlev, a senior secretary of the Central Committee and minister without portfolio; Venyamin Yarin, leader of the United Workers Front; and Marshal Dmitry Yazov, minister of defense. Depending upon which source one consults, the council also included two of the following: Yuri Osipian, physicist; Georgy Revenkov, chair of the Council of the Union of the Supreme Soviet; and Vadim Medvedev. The council experiment
