multiplier effect diffused throughout the economy of the Russian Federation, and soon fewer goods and less output required circulation, and those needing it had to be sent it at burdensome rates. Spiraling inflation and underemployment brought many industries to the edge of bankruptcy. Those industries that survived often were deep in debt to the railroads, which carried the output simply because they had nothing else to carry. Soon the railroads, which were themselves in debt to their energy suppliers, began to demand payment from the indebted industries. This engendered a vicious cycle wherein everyone was living on IOUs: industries owed the railways, which owed the energy suppliers, who in turn owed the mining companies that owed the miners, who could not buy the products of industry.
By 1991, the Soviet rail network was 35 to 40 percent electrified, and much of this electricity came from coal-fired power plants. When the railways could not pay their energy bill, coal miners did not get paid. Since 1989, miners’ strikes over wages and perquisites have often crippled the electrified railways. At times the miners have blocked the track to protest their privations. Since the year 2000, this vicious cycle has been alleviated because of high international prices on petroleum and natural gas. The resultant increase in foreign exchange income
Vladivostok is the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. © WOLFGANG KAEHLER/CORBIS has brought some relief to the Russian economy. Wage arrears have been eliminated at least temporarily, and the economy, including the Russian railways, appears to have turned the corner. See also: BAIKAL-AMUR MAGISTRAL RAILWAY; INDUSTRIALIZATION; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ambler, John, et al. (1985). Soviet and East European Transport Problems. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hunter, Holland. (1957). Soviet Transportation Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lydolph, Paul E. (1990). Geography of the USSR. Elkhart Lake, WI: Misty Valley Publishing. Mote, Victor L. (1994). An Industrial Atlas of the Soviet Successor States. Houston, TX: Industrial Information Resources, Inc.
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Westwood, John N. (1964). A History of the Russian Railways. London: George Allen amp; Unwin Ltd.
Having inherited from the tsarist government a large number of territorial divisions and subdivisions, the Soviet leadership attempted to reduce their numbers and simplify their bureaucracies. Undertaken in the 1920s, this project to reorganize the internal administrative map of Soviet Russia was called raionirovanie, which can be translated as regionalization. Soviet planners implemented raionirovanie not only as a way of rationalizing administrative structures, but as an essential tool for the centralized planning of economic activity.
Before the reforms, Soviet central officials regarded the territorial divisions they inherited as cumbersome and archaic obstacles to economic growth. The basic divisions in tsarist administration were the province (guberniya), county (uezd), rural district (volost), and village (selo). Their number expanded quickly in the first five years of the new regime, fueling Bolshevik concerns about bu-reaucratism-the perils of an expanding, unruly, and unresponsive state administration. Specialists in Gosplan (the State Planning Commission) desired to reshape territorial administration to conform to their vision of the economic needs of the country. Its planners designed new territorial units that sought to follow the contours of regional agricultural and industrial economies, based on natural resources, culture, and patterns of production.
As a result of raionirovanie, the country’s provinces were replaced by regions (oblast or krai), which were divided into departments (okrugs replaced the counties), which were themselves divided into districts (raions, which replaced the old rural counties.) In light of a scarcity of trained administrators, each of these new units was larger than the old, and therefore had less contact with the population. The first areas subject to regionalization were the Urals, the Northern Caucasus, and Siberia, between 1924 and 1926. Raionirovanie continued in other areas of the country throughout the decade, and was largely complete by 1929. The process of creating regional economic planning agencies under the direct, centralized leadership of Moscow became a part of the essential infrastructure of the Five-Year plans, first adopted in 1928. Objections to regionalization were raised by the Commissariat of Nationalities and local leaders in the autonomous and national republics, especially in Ukraine, on the grounds that the centrally designed plans overlooked diversity in local culture and tradition as they sought to rationalize and centralize administration while maximizing economic growth. Indeed, regionalization sought to eliminate much of what remained of the tsarist administration in the countryside and the provinces. Beyond the reorganization of territorial subdivisions, names of cities, towns, and capitals were changed, as were traditional borders, and, so planners hoped, loyalties to the old ways. Similar to Napoleonic-era bureaucratic reforms in France, the ultimate aim was not only to rationalize administration and economy, but to reshape popular mentalities in line with conditions in a new, post-revolutionary era. See also: LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carr, Edward Hallett. (1964). Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926. London: Macmillan.
The Treaty of Rapallo was signed by Germany and the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic on April 16, 1922.
As part of a plan to encourage economic recovery after World War I, the Allies invited Germany and Soviet Russia to a European conference in Genoa, Italy, in April 1922. Lenin accepted the invitation and designated Foreign Minister Georgy Chicherin to lead the Soviet delegation. Accompanied by Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krasin, and others, Chicherin stopped in Berlin on his way to Italy and worked out a draft treaty. The German government, still hopeful for a favorable settlement at Genoa, refused to formalize the treaty immediately. In Genoa, the Allied delegations insisted that the Soviet government recognize the debts of the prerev-olutionary governments. The Soviets countered with an offer to repay the debts and compensate property owners if the Allies paid for the destruction caused by Allied intervention. While these negotiations remained deadlocked, the German delegation worried that an Allied-Soviet treaty would
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leave Germany further isolated. When the Soviet delegation proposed a private meeting, the Germans accepted, and the Russian-German treaty was signed by Chicherin and German foreign minister Walter Rathenau.
The two sides agreed to drop all wartime claims against each other, to cooperate economically, and to establish diplomatic relations. The Treaty of Ra-pallo surprised the Western powers. Germany ended its isolation with an apparent shift to an Eastern policy, while Soviet Russia found a trading partner and won normalization of relations without resolving the debt issue. This special relationship between Soviet Russia and Germany, including some military cooperation, lasted for ten years. See also: GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH; WORLD WAR I
League of Nations Treaty Series, Vol. 19. (1923). London: Harrison and Sons.
Grigory Rasputin, photographed in 1916. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUS?E
DES 2 GUERRES MONDIALES PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
RAPP See RUSSIAN ASSOCIATION OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS.
(1869-1916), mystic and holy man who befriended Nicholas II and attained considerable power in late Imperial Russia.
Born at Pokrovskoye, Siberia, January 10, 1869, Rasputin was the son of Yefim, a prosperous, literate peasant. Young Grigory was alternately moody and mystical, drunken and rakish. Marriage did not settle him, but a pilgrimage to Verkhoture Monastery, as punishment for vandalism (1885), was decisive. The hermit Makary
