has been a measure of some dispute and is still being debated by scholars more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The start of World War II exacerbated the felt need to remove potential fifth columns and intensified the deportation of ethnic groups, including Koreans, Poles, Germans, the Baltic peoples, Chechens, and Tatars. Yezhov had been removed and been replaced with the powerful Central Committee member Lavrenti Beria, marking yet another purge of leading NKVD cadres. Under the leadership of Beria and his equally notorious lieutenants, the organs of state security changed names several times, eventually reconstituting as the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB), which was renamed the Ministry of State Security (MGB) in 1946, functioning alongside and sharing some duties with the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).
In 1953, soon after Stalin’s death, the two ministries were fused, and a separate Committee for State Security (KGB) was established the following year. Beria was arrested by his anxious colleagues and executed toward the end of the year. Thus the three most notorious heads of the state security apparatus during the height of repression, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria, were all eventually removed by the system they had turned into an instrument of mass terror. The collective leadership that emerged took careful steps to reestablish Party control over the state security apparatus, and the security and regular police were now separate organs.
The period of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev brought with it the gradual end of the terror and camp system that had characterized the Stalin period, and Khrushchev’s exposure of the excesses of Stalin’s rule changed the nature of the security organs. At the same time, the transition did not by any means diminish the authority of the KGB under the leadership of Ivan Serov, Alexander Shelepin, and their successors. While the abuses of the previous period were decried, and socialist legality once again stressed, the infiltration and surveillance of society by the security organs continued to intensify. In addition, the foreign counterespionage apparatus now reached a position of supreme importance in the tense atmosphere of the Cold War and the establishment of Soviet client states in Eastern Europe and around the world.
That the KGB had emerged again as a powerful force in Kremlin politics is evidenced by the fact that Shelepin and his handpicked successor, Vladimir
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Semichastny, were instrumental in the coup that overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964. The KGB enjoyed increased prestige and a further expansion of extralegal powers under the Brezhnev-led collective leadership that followed. In conjunction with high Party leaders, the KGB began the well-known crackdown on internal dissidents in 1965 with the arrest of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel and the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974. Under the leadership of Yuri Andropov, who chaired the KGB from 1967 until 1982, it became a stable and critical part of Brezhnev-era mature socialism.
The reforms of the Gorbachev era, with their emphasis on openness and legality, threatened the central tenets of the security police, as did its loss of control over the Soviet satellite empire. The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the formal end of the KGB, which was replaced with several successor institutions within Russia, the most important of which came to be called the Federal Security Service (FSB). Nevertheless, despite the changed political circumstances in post-Soviet Russia, the FSB has maintained a great deal of authority, as is evidenced by the rise of former FSB chief Vladmir Putin to the presidency. While critics of the security police can now complain about its abuses, the legacy of centuries of powerful state security organs continues in the early twenty-first century. See also: AUTOCRACY; OPRICHNINA; NICHOLAS I; PURGES, THE GREAT; RED TERROR; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARI-ONOVICH; TERRORISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1985). Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Daly, Jonathan. (1998). Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866- 1905. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Dziak, John J. (1988). Chekisty: A History of the KGB. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Gerson, Lennard D. (1976). The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hingley, Ronald. (1970). The Russian Secret Police: Muscovite, Imperial, Russian and Soviet Political Security Operations, 1565-1970. New York: Simon and Schuster. Knight, Amy W. (1988). The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union. Winchester, MA: Allen amp; Unwin. Leggett, George. (1981). The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, December 1917 to February 1922. New York: Oxford University Press. Monas, Sidney. (1961). The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruud, Charles A., and Stepanov, Sergei A. (1999). Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Squire, Peter S. (1968). The Third Department: The Establishment and Practices of the Political Police in the Russia of Nicholas I. New York: Cambridge University Press. Waller, J. Michael. (1994). Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Zuckerman, Frederic S. (1996). The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880- 1917. New York: NYU Press.
STUART FINKEL
STATE STATISTICAL COMMITTEE See GOSKOMSTAT.
Allegedly authored by Grand Prince Vladimir (r. 980-1015), who is credited with the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity, the Statute established the principle of judicial separation between secular and clerical courts and forbade any of the Prince’s heirs from interfering in the church’s business. The Statute provided that all church personnel would be tried in church courts, no matter what the subject under litigation. The text scrupulously lists those who qualified for clerical jurisdiction, identifying not only monastics and members of church staffs, but also various social outsiders: pilgrims, manumitted slaves, and the blind and lame, for instance. In addition, the Statute granted church courts exclusive jurisdiction over certain offenses, even if secular subjects of the prince were involved. Divorce, fornication, adultery, rape, incest, disputes over inheritance, witchcraft, sorcery, charm-making, church theft, and intrafamilial violence were among the subjects assigned to church courts. Over and above the income generated by church courts, the Statute assigned the church a tithe from all the Rus land and a portion of various fees that the Prince collected. Finally, the text authorized bishops to supervise the various weights and measures employed for trade.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1473
More than two hundred copies of the Statute survive, but none is older than the fourteenth century, a relatively late date for a document of such ostensible importance. In addition, the text includes some obvious errors that have helped undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the Statute. For instance, in the opening section the Statute reports that Grand Prince Vladimir accepted Christian baptism from Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who died almost a century before Vladimir converted to Christianity.
The most recent study of the Statute, however, has concluded that, if not in Vladimir’s own time, then very soon thereafter, something like the Statute must already have existed. Archetypes of different parts of the Statute probably did originate in the reign of Vladimir, but the archetype of the entire Statute seems not to have arisen before the mid-twelfth century. This document, no longer extant, fathered two new versions in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and each of these, in turn, contributed to a host of local reworkings, especially during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As many as seven basic versions of the Statute survive, each evidently revised to correspond to local circumstances and changing times.
No later than early in the fifteenth century, however, the Statute had come to enjoy official standing in the eyes of both churchmen and secular officials. In 1402 and again in 1419 Moscow Grand Prince Basil I (1389-1425) confirmed the judicial and financial guarantees laid out in the Statute. As a result, most extant copies survive along with other texts of secular and canon law in manuscript books like the Kormchaya kniga (the chief handbook of canon law) and miscellanies of canon law. Medieval secular codes, such as the Novgorod Judicial Charter and Pskov Judicial Charter, confirm that church courts in Rus did exercise independent authority, just as the Statute of Vladimir
