drawing up of the First Five-Year-Plan. He opted for the teleological method of planning, which takes the final (production) targets as a starting point. His demographic works, among them a prediction regarding the number and age-sex composition of the population of Russia for 1921-1941, were influential in the Soviet Union and gained international attention.
Strumilin managed to survive the purges of the Josef Stalin period and benefited from the rehabilitation of the economists after World War II. He then concentrated on labor issues and the impact of education on wage differentials, participated actively in the economic debates of the 1950s and 1960s, and published until 1973. He represented the first generation of Soviet Marxist economists. See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; GOSPLAN; MENSHEVIKS
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Nove, Alec. (1969). The Soviet Economy. An Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: Praeger.
(1870-1944), liberal political leader, economist, and author.
As a young man Peter Bernardovich Struve rose to prominence on the liberal left. In the 1890s he joined the Social Democratic party and authored its manifesto. He was then a proponent of a moderate legal Marxism. Struve, however, was not a doctrinaire. He was dedicated to learning and loved literature and poetry. By contrast, the Russian militants saw such a pursuit as a distraction from the task of revolution.
As Russia moved toward revolution Struve moved toward a liberal conservatism. From 1902 to 1905 he edited the journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), a liberal publication. He eventually joined the Constitutional Democratic party (Cadet). In 1906 he won election as a deputy to the second Duma. In 1909 he contributed to Vekhi (Landmarks) as one of a group of prominent intellectuals who broke sharply with the militant leftists, seeing them as a threat to Russia’s liberation from despotism and its transformation into a liberal and democratic constitutional state. He was deeply patriotic as well as liberal in orientation. In 1911 he wrote a series entitled Patriotica. From 1907 to 1917 he engaged in scholarship as well as politics as a professor at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. After the 1917 October Revolution Struve briefly joined an anti-Bolshevik government in southern Russia and then was forced to emigrate to the West where he spent the remainder of his life as a scholar and writer on economics and politics. See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; VEKHI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pipes, Richard. (1970). Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905. Russian Research Center Studies, no. 64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pipes, Richard. (1980). Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944. Russian Research Center Studies, no. 80. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
From the common slang word stukachestvo, stukach was widely used in the Soviet period to describe “squealing,” or informing on people to the government authorities. The word is evidently derived from stuk, Russian for the sound of a hammer blow.
The government, and especially the security police, in all communist-ruled or authoritarian countries, depended on informers in order to keep tabs on the loyalty of the populace. In the Politics, Aristotle had observed that tyrannical regimes must employ informers hidden within the population in order to keep their hold on absolute power.
In such countries as the USSR, Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Cuba, and so forth, informers were sometimes made heroes by the regime. Thus, in the Soviet Union, Pavlik Morozov, a twelve-year-old boy living in the Don farming region when Stalin was enforcing collectivization of the peasants’ farms in the early 1930s, became a stukach. He informed on his parents when they allegedly concealed grain and other produce from the authorities. The boy was killed by vengeful farmers. He was thereupon iconized as a martyr by the communist authorities. Statues of Pavlik sprang up throughout the country.
The Soviet writer Maxim Gorky urged fellow writers to glorify the boy who had exposed his father as a kulak and who “had overcome blood kinship in discovering spiritual kinship.” Another well-known Soviet novelist, Leonid Leonov, depicted a fictitious scientist of the old generation who as a stukach had nobly betrayed his son to the authorities.
Stukachestvo was expected of any and all family members, schoolchildren, concentration-camp prisoners, factory workers-in short, every Soviet citizen, all of whom were expected to place loyalty to the State above all other linkages. See also: GORKY, MAXIM; MOROZOV, PAVEL TROFIMOVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Galler, Meyer. (1977). Soviet Prison Camp Speech: A Survivor’s Glossary: Supplement. Hayward, CA: Soviet Studies. Heller, Mikhail, and Nekrich, Aleksandr. (1986). Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, tr. Phillis B. Carlos. London: Hutchinson. Preobrazhensky, A. G. (1951). Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language. New York: Columbia University Press.
(1848-1917), government official who reached the rank of president of the State Council, or premier, of the Russian Empire.
Boris St?rmer studied law at St. Petersburg University and then entered the Ministry of Justice. He was appointed governor of Novgorod Province in 1894 and of Yaroslav Province in 1896. In 1902 he became director of the Department of General Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior and in 1904 was appointed to the Council of State. From January to November 1916 he was president of the Council of State, serving simultaneously as minister of the interior (March-July) and minister of foreign affairs (July-November). Nicholas II dismissed St?rmer after Paul Milyukov’s famous “Is this stupidity or is it treason?” speech in the Duma, in which Milyukov accused St?rmer of being a German agent. In fact, he was not. Arrested after the February Revolution of 1917 and placed in the Peter and Paul Fortress, St?rmer died there in August 1917.
St?rmer owed his rise to his arch-conservatism and friends in high places, including the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna and Grigory Rasputin, who reputedly referred to St?rmer as “a little man on a leash” and to whom St? rmer reported weekly and received instructions. St?rmer has received universal scorn. Contemporaries called him a “nonentity” (Vasily Shulgin), “totally ignorant of everything he undertook” (Mlyukov), “a man of extremely limited mental gifts” (Nikolai Pokrovsky, his successor as minister of foreign affairs), “a man who had left a bad memory wherever he occupied an administrative post” (Sergei Sazonov), and “an utter nonentity” (Mikhail Rodzianko). Historians have seen St?rmer as “an instrument of the personal rule of the Empress [and Rasputin]” (Mikhail Florinsky), “a reactionary [who] brought discredit on the extreme Right” (Marc Ferro), and “an obscure and dismal product of the professional Russian bureaucracy” (Robert Massie). See also: ALEXANDRA FEDOROVNA; RASPUTIN, GRIGORY YEFIMOVICH
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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Florinsky, Mikhail. (1931). The End of the Russian Empire. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Fulop-Muller, Renee. (1929). Rasputin: The Holy Devil. New York: Viking Books. Miliukov, Paul. (1967). Political Memoirs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
