tax for their private serfs, and district administrators collected it for state or church serfs in their jurisdiction. Landowners collected the soul
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tax even though it would have been more in their interest to raise rents instead. Since some males were either too young or too old to have income, the head of household had to pay for everyone. While the soul tax appeared to be per head, the village commune often distributed the burden on an ability-to-pay basis. The rate of tax per male soul, however, was fixed, as increases were considered politically dangerous, so higher yields came mainly from population growth. Efforts were made at each census, or revisia, to reduce the tax-exempt population. All “idling” and “free” persons were included, as well as peasants of many kinds, including bondsmen (kholopi). The revenue from tax and rents, however, failed to cover the cost of the standing army during peacetime, not to mention the great expenditures of the Northern War, which may have actually reduced the taxable population. Owing to the tax and labor burdens imposed on them, then as well as later on, many peasants fled to the borderlands and across the frontier.
The soul tax had obvious administrative advantages over the previous household tax. Under the new system, young men could not avoid paying tax simply by postponing their departure from the ancestral home, as they could under the household tax. Nor could peasants combine nuclear families into one extended household for the purpose of avoiding tax.
Russian historians of an earlier era considered the poll tax an increased burden on peasant households, but this seems unlikely, since the apex of war expenses and innovative kinds of taxes was reached in the years 1705 to 1715. For most serfs the monetary liability (as distinct from taxes in kind) under the poll tax appears to have been slightly lower than under the household tax. Furthermore, because the poll tax was the same regardless of the amount of land cultivated, there was an incentive to increase arable land at the expense of waste, and, in fact, the amount of cultivated land did increase during this period. That the poll tax is remembered as harsh is explained by the poor grain harvests of the time, which required peasants to buy food at high prices. After Peter’s death in 1725 the poll tax rate was lowered to seventy-four, then seventy kopeks, but during Catherine II’s reign it was raised to one ruble. The highly destructive Napoleonic Wars saw a further increase to two, then three rubles. The poll tax was eliminated between 1883 and 1886, but land taxes and redemption payments continued to the end of the empire.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
See also: CATHERINE II; GREAT NORTHERN WAR; PEASANTRY; PETER I; TAXES
Kahan, Arcadius. (1985). The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyashchenko, Peter I. (1949). History of the National Economy of Russia to the 1917 Revolution, tr. Leon M. Herman. New York: Macmillan.
See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; REVOLUTION OF 1905
Anweiler, Oskar. (1974). The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, tr. Ruth Hein. New York: Pantheon Books.
SOVIET-AFGHAN WAR See AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH.
Soviet (sovet) is the Russian word for “council” or “advice.”
Its political usage began during the Revolution of 1905 when it was applied to the councils of deputies elected by workers in factories throughout Russia. Although suppressed in 1905, the soviets reappeared in nearly every possible setting immediately following the February Revolution of 1917. With the soviet in Petrograd setting the tone, they very quickly became the organs of power that the majority of the population saw as legitimate. Although the moderate socialists who initially led the soviets were reluctant to take executive power from the Provisional Government, most Russians seem to have favored rule by the soviets alone; the Bolsheviks’ call for “All Power to the Soviets” may well have been their most successful slogan. The October Revolution was timed to coincide with the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, both to forestall its taking power without Bolshevik initiative and to gain legitimacy from its approval. The new Bolshevik-led government was thus initially based on soviets, and the state structure formally remained so until Mikhail Gorbachev. For most of the Soviet era, the Supreme Soviet was theoretically the highest legislative organ, although the Communist Party held practical power. Throughout their history, soviets generally proved too large for day-to-day governance, a role filled by a permanent executive committee elected by the full soviet. Some scholars have suggested that the soviet became so popular an institution because it was an urban counterpart to the village commune assembly, a governing system with which most Russians, even in the cities, were familiar.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
The Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940, which lasted 103 days and is commonly known as the “Winter War,” had its origins in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939. The secret protocols of that non-aggression accord divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet security zones. Finland, which had been part of the Russian Empire for more than a century prior to gaining its independence during the Russian Revolution, was included by that agreement within the Soviet sphere. Shortly after the dismemberment of Poland by Germany and the USSR, the Soviet government in October demanded from Finland most of the Karelian Isthmus north of Leningrad, a naval base at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, and additional land west of Murmansk along the Barents Sea. The USSR offered other, less strategically important, borderland as compensation. After Finnish President Kiosti Kallio rejected the proposal, the Red Army, on November 30, invaded along the extent of their border as the Soviet Air Force bombed the Finnish capital, Helsinki.
Finland’s most formidable defenses were a line of hundreds of concrete pillboxes, bunkers, and underground shelters, protected by anti-tank obstacles and barbed wire, which stretched across the Karelian Isthmus. General (and later Field Marshal) Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, a former tsarist officer, had organized these defenses, and he commanded Finland’s armed forces during the war. During the first two months of conflict, Finland astonished the rest of the world by defeating the much larger and more heavily armed Soviet forces, especially along the Mannerheim Line. In snow-at times five to six feet deep-with temperatures plunging to -49° F,
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A Finnish village burns after a February 1940 air raid by Soviet planes. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS the Finnish defenders were clad in white-padded uniforms, and some attacked on skis. The Red Army troops were entirely unprepared for winter combat. In early February, the USSR enlarged its forces to 1.2 million men (against a Finnish army of 200,000) and increased the number of tanks and aircraft to 1,500 and 3,000, respectively. In March the Red Army broke through the Mannerheim Line and advanced toward Helsinki. Finland was compelled to accept peace terms, which were signed in Moscow on March 12, 1940. The USSR acquired more territory than it had demanded before the war, including the entire northern coastline of Lake Ladoga and parts of southwestern and western Finland. Approximately 420,000 Finns fled from the 25,000 square miles of annexed territories.
Soviet victory, however, came at a very high cost. Whereas Finland lost about 25,000 killed in the war, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vy-acheslav Molotov acknowledged that immediately after the war almost 49,000 Soviet troops had perished. In 1993 declassified Soviet military archives revealed that 127,000 Soviet combatants had been killed or gone missing in action. The Red Army overwhelmed Finnish defenses with massive formations. For example, to take one particular hill, the USSR attacked its thirty-two Finnish defenders with four thousand men;
