shift of peasant support to the Left SRs, now a separate party.
By late 1918 the SR Party had once again become an underground resistance movement, in this case against the communists, a status that party leaders managed to sustain until 1922. Massive arrests and the famous SR trials of that year effectively ended the party’s existence inside Soviet Russia. Chernov and many leaders escaped and lived in the European and North American emigration but had no real influence from abroad. Although the SR approach had initially won the party a huge backENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SOKOLOVSKY, VASILY DANILOVICH
ing during 1917, its combined worker, peasant, and intelligentsia program proved too broad to exercise power. Likewise, Chernov’s post-October 1917 “third way,” which hoped to unite democratic elements of the population between the two extremes of Bolshevism and the reactionary Whites failed, to catch hold in the chaos of civil war. See also: BOLSHEVISM; CHERNOV, VIKTOR MIKHAILOVICH; CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; MENSHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; POPULISM; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; REVOLUTION OF 1905; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY
Hildermeier, Manfred. (2000). The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War New York: St. Martin’s Press. Melancon, Michael. (1990). The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914-1917. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1976). The Agrarian Policies of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party from its Origins through the Revolution of 1905-1907. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Radkey, Oliver. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February-October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press. Rice, Christopher. (1988). Russian Workers and the Socialist Revolutionary Party through the Revolution of 1905-1907. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.
MICHAEL MELANCON
(1897-1968), marshal of the Soviet Union (1946), military commander, and theoretician.
Native of the Hrodna region, from a peasant family, Vasily Sokolovky entered the Red Army in February 1918 and studied in a short course for commanders. During the Civil War, he served with cavalry units. He later was transferred to central Asia and was attached to the Turkestan Military District and commanded units in Samarkand and Fergana, which were engaged in fighting against the Basmashi guerrillas. In 1921 he graduated from the military academy. Between 1922 and 1930, he served as chief of staff of a division and corps, and from 1930 to 1935 as commander of a division and chief of staff of the Volga, Ural, and Moscow Military Districts. He joined the Communist Party in 1931. Sokolovsky was fortunate not to come under suspicion during the Great Terror. In May 1940 he received the rank of lieutenant general. In February 1941 he was appointed as deputy chief of staff of the Red Army. In the beginning of the war, after Stalin ordered the arrest and execution of the leadership of the shattered West Front, Sokolovsky was appointed chief of staff of this front (July 1941-January 1942 and May 1942- February 1943). Along with these appointments, he was also the chief of staff of the Western Theater (July-October 1941 and May 1942). After the Battle of Moscow, the West Front, under Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, failed in repeated attempts to break through the enemy lines, suffering massive losses for little gain, except for preventing the German units from being deployed elsewhere. Sokolovsky was involved in all these battles, and in February 1943, he was appointed commander of the West Front. His tenure in this position was marked by a lack of success even in sectors where the Red Army enjoyed a 10-1 superiority over the enemy. Sokolovsky was removed from command in April 1944 and replaced by Ivan Chernyakhovsky, and it was under his leadership that the West Front, now renamed the Third Be-lorussian Front, managed to roll over the enemy lines. During the great summer offensive of 1944, Sokolovsky returned to staff positions. He was attached to the First Ukrainian Front in April 1945 and took part in the Berlin Operation. Despite a rather undistinguished record during the war, Sokolovsky’s star rose in the postwar years. In 1945 he was Deputy Commander of the Soviet forces in Germany, and after Zhukov’s departure in 1946, the commander. In 1945 he also received the title of hero of the Soviet Union, a rarity for a staff officer. In 1946 Sokolovsky was elected to the Supreme Soviet. From 1946 to 1949 he was a member of the Allied Control Commission. In March 1946 he was the first deputy minister of the armed forces (from February 1950, war minister). In June 1952, he headed the General Staff and continued to hold the position after Stalin’s death until April 1960. He was also the first deputy war minister (from 1953, minister of defense). In 1952 he was elected to the Central Committee, but was demoted to candidate member in 1961. He was removed from active command in June 1960 and was attached to the Red Army inspectorate. He is buried at the Kremlin Wall. Sokolovsky’s fame rests mainly on his views on military strategy, published first in 1963, which have been studied in depth by Western strategists as the “Bible” of Soviet military doctrine.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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See also: MILITARY ART; MILITARY DOCTRINE; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR II
Sokolovskii, V. D. (1963). Soviet Military Strategy. En-glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
In the summer of 1980, Poland experienced labor unrest on an unprecedented scale. Faced with nationwide strikes, the ruling Communist Party was forced to sanction, for the first time in a Soviet-bloc country, the creation of independent trade unions, free of state control.
The emergence of the Solidarity trade union movement was viewed with acute anxiety by the leaders of Poland’s neighboring socialist states, the USSR in particular. How, given that the living and working conditions of Soviet workers were at least as bad as those of their Polish counterparts, could the development of similar labor unrest be forestalled in the USSR? The rise of Solidarity accordingly contributed to a far-reaching debate over political and economic reform in the USSR. The debate was even more significant since it occurred at a moment when the Soviet leadership was facing a major generational shift and concomitant power struggle. The aging leadership of Leonid Brezhnev had allowed social and economic problems to accumulate to such an extent that the USSR was experiencing stagnation in economic growth. This threatened the informal social contract between leaders and rank-and-file workers.
In the early months of the Polish crisis (late 1980 and early 1981), after deciding against an invasion, the Brezhnev leadership adopted a series of stopgap measures to ward off the danger of contagion. For example, the jamming of Western radio broadcasts was resumed, while government financial priorities were revised to put increased emphasis on consumption.
By the time martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981 it was clear that the danger of spillover to the USSR-if it ever existed-had been averted. Apart from a few isolated strikes and scattered leafleting in the USSR’s western republics, the Polish events evoked little sympathy among Soviet workers, who were inclined to believe that the USSR was subsidising its Warsaw Pact allies anyway.
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Faced with a continuing slowdown in the rate of economic growth, which was leading to stagnation, if not actual reduction, of popular living standards, the Soviet leadership abandoned carrots for sticks. This was exemplified by the brief leadership of Yuri Andropov (1982-1983), who launched a massive campaign to raise workplace discipline and crack down on crime, corruption, and alcoholism, with only limited results.
The Polish events continued to reverberate when, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet communist party. Gorbachev publicly identified himself with reformist Soviet academics who argued that the Polish crisis was attributable not simply to the mistakes of Poland’s leaders but to a general weakness afflicting all single-party, planned economies of the Soviet type. Members of the reformist camp used the Polish example to press for radical reforms of the Soviet political and economic system. The Polish experience can accordingly be said
