Slutsky, Boris. (1999). Things That Happened, ed. and tr. G. S. Smith. Glas (Moscow, Russia), English; v. 19. Moscow, GLAS; Chicago: Ivan Dee.
(1880-1948), mathematical statistician and economist.
The most profoundly original of all Russian contributors to economic theory, Yevgeny Slutsky was born in Yaroslavl and studied mathematics in Ukraine. His first major publications were in the field of statistics and on the importance of cooperatives. In 1915 he published a seminal article on the theory of consumer behavior. This demonstrated how the consequence of a price change on the quantity of a good demanded could lead to a residual variation in demand, even with a compensating increase in income. John Hicks rediscovered this work in the West in the 1930s, naming the Slutsky equation the “Fundamental Equation of Value Theory.” After 1917 Slutsky worked on analyzing the effects of paper currency emission, on the axiomatic foundations of probability theory, and on the theory of stochastic processes. This yielded a new conception of the stochastic limit.
As a consequence, in 1925 Nikolai Kondratiev asked Slutsky to join the Conjuncture Institute in Moscow, for which he wrote his groundbreaking paper on the random generation of business cycles. This opened up a new avenue of cycle research by hypothesizing that the summation of mutually independent chance factors could generate the appearance of periodicity in a random series. In the 1920s Slutsky also worked on the praxeological foundations of economics, but with the closure of the Conjuncture Institute in 1930, he turned back to statistics. He subsequently worked in the Central
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Institute of Meteorology, in Moscow University, and in the Steklov Mathematical Institute. Here Slutsky computed the functions of variables, which led to the posthumous publication of tables for the incomplete Gamma- function and the chi-squared probability distribution. He died of natural causes in 1948. See also: KONDRATIEV, NIKOLAI DMITRIEVICH
Allen, R. G. D. (1950). “The Work of Eugen Slutsky.” Econometrica. 18:209-216. Slutsky, E. E. (1937). “The Summation of Random Causes as the Source of Cyclic Processes.” Economet-rica 5:105-146. Slutsky, E. E. (1953). “On the Theory of the Budget of the Consumer.” In American Economic Association, Readings in Price Theory. London: Allen amp; Unwin.
The Smolensk Archive comprises the Smolensk regional records of the All-Union Communist Party from the October Revolution in 1917 to the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. The German Army captured the Smolensk Archive when it invaded Russia in 1941 and in 1943 moved the contents to Vilnius. They were subsequently recovered by the Soviet authorities in Silesia in March 1946. American intelligence officers removed the files to a restitution center near Frankfurt am Main in 1946.
The archive contains the incomplete and fragmentary records of the Smolensk and Western Oblast (regional) committees (obkom). These include the minutes of meetings, resolutions, decisions, and directives made by Communist Party officials, as well as details on Party work relating to agriculture, especially collectivization policy, machine tractor stations, trade unions, industry, armed forces, censorship, education, women, the control commission, and the purges. The archive also contains secret police, procuracy, court, and militia reports as well as private and personal files and the miscellaneous records of the city (gorkom) and district (raikom) committees. Between 5 and 10 percent of the archive does not pertain to Smolensk, but comprises material seized by the Germans in other parts
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of the USSR. The originals of these documents were presented to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Pursuant to an agreement made at the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era assets, the United States returned most of the archive to Russia on in December 2002. The archives were especially important to Western scholars because they provided an insider’s perspective on many historical developments that would otherwise have been unavailable in the era before Mikhail Gorbachev raised the restrictions on access to Soviet archival materials. See also: ARCHIVES; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION
Fainsod, Merle. (1958). Smolensk under Soviet Rule. London: Macmillan. Getty, J. Arch. (1999). Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. (1995). “The Odyssey of the ‘Smolensk Archive’: Plundered Communist Records for the Service of Communism.” In Carl Beck Occasional Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 1201. Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh. National Archives and Records Service. (1980). Guide to the Records of the Smolensk Oblast of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1917-41. Washington, DC: Author.
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
This unsuccessful campaign to recover the western border regions lost to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the Time Of Troubles marked Muscovy’s first major experiment with the new Western European infantry organization and line tactics.
The Treaty of Deulino (1618) ended the Polish military intervention exploiting Muscovy’s Time Of Troubles and established a fourteen-year armistice between Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But it came at a high price for the Muscovites: the cession to the Commonwealth of most of the western border regions of Smolensk, Chernigov, and Seversk. This was a vast territory, running from the southeastern border of Livonia to just beyond the Desna River in northeastern
Ukraine. It held more than thirty fortress towns, the most strategic of which was Smolensk, the largest and most formidable of all Muscovite fortresses and guardian of the principal western roads to Moscow. Upon his return from Polish captivity in 1619, Patriarch Filaret, father of Tsar Mikhail, made a new campaign to recover Smolensk, Chernigov, and Seversk from the Poles the primary objective of Muscovite foreign policy.
Most of the diplomatic preconditions for such a revanche appeared to be in place by 1630, and by this point the Muscovite government had succeeded in restoring its central chancellery apparatus and fiscal system. It was now able to undertake a massive reorganization and modernization of its army for the approaching war with the Commonwealth. It imported Swedish, Dutch, and English arms to the cost of at least 50,000 rubles; it offered large bounties to recruit Western European mercenary officers experienced in the new infantry organization and line tactics; and it set these mercenary officers to work forming and training New-Formation Regiments-six regiments of Western style infantrymen (soldaty), a regiment of heavy cavalry (reitary), and a regiment of dragoons (draguny). These regiments were drilled in the new European tactics and outfitted and salaried at treasury expense, unlike the old Pomestie-based cavalry army. The New Formation infantry and cavalry would comprise a little more than half of the 33,000-man expeditionary army on the upcoming Smolensk campaign. Muscovy had never before experimented with New Formation units on such a scale.
The death of Polish King Sigismund III in April 1632 led to an interregnum in the Commonwealth and factional struggle in the Diet. Patriarch Filaret took advantage of this confusion to send generals M. B. Shein and A. V. Izmailov against Smolensk with the main corps of the Muscovite field army. By October, Shein and Izmailov had captured more than twenty towns and had placed the fortress of Smolensk under siege. The Polish-Lithuanian garrison holding Smolensk numbered only about two thousand men, and the nearest Commonwealth forces in the region (those of Radziwill and Gon-siewski) did not exceed six thousand. But the besieging Muscovite army suffered logistical problems and desertions; their earthworks did not completely encircle Smolensk and did not offer enough protection from attack from the rear. Meanwhile the international coalition against the Commonwealth began to
