engage in domestic and foreign trade. Second, a stabilization program was instituted to eradicate inflation, control the budget deficit, and limit the foreign debt. Third, a structural transformation was intended to create the institutions of a market economy. The main component of the transformation was privatization: the task not only of putting the former state ownership into private hands-individual or corporate-but also of creating a new private sector. Transformation also implied a banking reform, which would put an end to the monopoly of a single state bank and allow the new private sector to be financed by credit. Tax reform and the building of a modern financial market were on the agenda. In order to replace the former social security system where the citizens were in complete charge of the state through subsidized health, education, housing, and even recreation systems, a market-type social security safety net only partly financed by the state was needed.
These measures were applied in Russia as in most of the Central and East European countries,
1570
under a program that started with Boris Yeltsin’s first term on January 2, 1992, and was conducted by a team of reformers headed by Yegor Gaidar. Liberalization was swift and stabilization was achieved, albeit with difficulties and some crises. However, structural transformation progressed slowly and unevenly, and, ten years later, it could not be considered finished. The private sector was dominant, but the restructuring of the former state enterprises had not been completed, and monopolies prevailed in such crucial sectors as energy. The private companies were not applying the rules of a transparent corporate governance. The banking reform continued, with the banking sector suffering as a result of the financial crisis of 1998. The social security reform was not implemented.
The former Soviet Republics were in a still more difficult position. They were hit by the collapse of the USSR. Their links with Moscow and among themselves, defined by the former central plan, were disrupted. Most of them, except for states rich in oil and natural resources, such as Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan, could only rely on foreign assistance to conduct their reforms. Some of them, such as Belarus, or to a lesser extent Ukraine, hardly began their structural transformation. Some others, such as the Caucasian states, or the southern republics of Central Asia, are still plagued by ethnic conflicts or border wars.
The full transition to a market economy was not yet completed in Russia ten years after its beginning. Why has it been a much more chaotic process than in the countries of Central Europe, or even Eastern Europe? Several factors may explain these differences: the length of the Communist rule in Russia; Russia’s size and diversity; paradoxically, its huge natural resources, which relieved the state of the need for more radical reforms and allowed a small minority of corrupt businessmen to grab these resources through the mechanisms of privatization; and, the lack of incentives and assistance, which were provided to Central and Eastern Europe through the European Union enlargement process but were not available to the CIS countries. See also: ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; MARKET SOCIALISM; PRIVATIZATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aslund, Anders. (1995). How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
Braguinsky, Serguey, and Yavlinsky, Grigory. (2000). Incentives and Institutions: The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. (1999). Transition Report 1999: Ten Years of Transition. London: EBRD. Kolodko, Grzegorz W. (2000). From Shock to Therapy: The Political Economy of Postsocialist Transformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lavigne, Marie. (1999). The Economics of Transition: From Socialist Economy to Market Economy, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. (2000). Economic Survey of Europe, vol. 1. New York: UNECE.
The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway between 1891 and 1916 ended the era of great transcontinental railway building. The Trans-Siberian stretches 5,776 miles between Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station and Vladivostok (6,117 miles from St. Petersburg). It takes a minimum of a week to traverse that distance by train.
The longest railway in the world, the Trans-Siberian project was mired in controversy from the moment Tsarevich Nicholas shoveled an inaugural spade full of dirt into an awaiting wheelbarrow in Vladivostok on May 31, 1891, until the completion of the Amur River Bridge at Khabarovsk in 1916. A technological marvel at the time, it soon bore the reputation of “a monument to bungling.” The rails and crossties were too light, causing frequent derailments; the wooden bridges were flimsy; and, since the builders were mostly exiles and convicts, there was justifiable reason to believe that much of the line had been sabotaged.
Moreover, the estimated costs in 1916 U.S. dollars ranged from $770 million to $1 billion, which represented one-fifth of Russia’s national debt at the time. During its construction, the Trans-Siberian was a serious drain on the Russian economy and, between 1914 and 1916, on the war effort. Despite the criticism, the great railway more than paid for itself during the twentieth century. Still the only transportation artery to span Siberia and the Russian Far East, the Trans-Siberian has solidified Moscow’s hold on Russia’s eastern periphery.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Fanatically supported by high-ranking tsarist officials like Count Sergei Witte (1849-1915) and Anatoly Kulomzin (1838-1924), the Trans-Siberian’s influence was immediate. The annual number of migrants to Siberia and the Russian Far East doubled (to 88,000) between 1896 and 1904 and then doubled again (to 174,000) between 1905 and 1914. Between 1895 and 1916, a total of 2.5 million land-poor peasants migrated to the region from European Russia. This Great Siberian Mgra-tion represented 57 percent of everyone who had migrated to Siberia and the Russian Far East since 1796. Additionally, the Siberian economy, which had been almost nonexistent, exploded. New settlers rapidly cultivated West Siberia’s virgin black earth, doubling the sown area. The region quickly became one of Russia’s major breadbaskets. Flour mills sprang up like mushrooms. West Siberia’s butter industry jumped from nonexistence to becoming the second leading butter exporter behind Denmark. Virtually every railhead had sawmills, stockyards, and slaughterhouses. Without the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Siberia’s industrial revolution never would have succeeded.
The Trans-Siberian’s principal commodities are coal, oil and oil products, and wood and wood products. Major non-Russian users of the railway, which is now double-tracked and electrified for much of its distance, are China, Japan, and South Korea. See also: RAILWAYS; SIBERIA; TRADE ROUTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Marks, Steven G. (1991). Road to Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia: Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Treadgold, Donald. (1957). The Great Siberian Migration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tupper, Harmon. (1965). To the Great Ocean. Boston: Little, Brown.
(1894-1931), military theorist and intellectual.
Triandafillov was one of the key intellectual leaders of the Red Army during the inter-war period (1918-1939). Triandafillov was instrumental
1571
in formulating a new and revolutionary understanding of modern war. Up until the Industrial Revolution, military campaigns had consisted of a single decisive battle or series of inconclusive combats. The industrialization of war set in motion a revolutionary change in the means and methods of waging war. Campaigns became more protracted, battles were less decisive, and armies were more widely distributed in a theater of operations. Triandafillov, along with Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky, Alexander A. Svechin, Boris M. Shaposhnikov, Mikhail V. Frunze, and G. S. Is-serson, recognized that the material transmutation of war demanded a corresponding conceptual transformation. He believed that one could no longer think about modern war using a Napoleonic paradigm.
