In January 1989 Varennikov was made com-mandor of Soviet Ground Forces. In August 1991 he was an active participant in the conspiracy to remove Mikhail Gorbachev and prevent the proclamation of a new union treaty. During the attempted coup Varennikov was in Kiev. Arrested and jailed when the coup collapsed, Varennikov refused to accept an amnesty when it was offered in March 1994. Later that year, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court ruled that he was not guilty of treason. In December 1995 he ran for election to the State Duma as a candidate from the Communist Party and won. He won re-election in 2000 and serves as chairman of the parliamentary Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST- SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1991). The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons. New York: Harper Collins. Kipp, Jacob W. (1989). “A Biographical Sketch on General of the Army Valentin Ivanovich Varennikov.” Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies Office. Odom, William E. (1998). The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(1879-1964), major figure in the Soviet economics establishment and expert on the world capitalist system who fell afoul of Stalinist dogma.
Eugene Varga was educated at the universities of Paris, Berlin, and Budapest, receiving a doctoral degree from the last in 1909. He joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in 1906 and was a writer and editor on economic matters for its central organ. When the communists came to power in Hungary in 1919, he served as commissar of finance and then as chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. After the regime fell he moved to the USSR.
Varga’s specialty was capitalist political economy and economic conditions in the capitalist world, on which he was an influential and authoritative spokesman during the interwar period. He was elected a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1939 and was director of its Institute of World Economics and Politics until 1947, when the institute was shut down because of the views he expounded in Changes in the Capitalist Economy as a Result of the Second World War. Varga defended himself vigorously at a conference of economists held to attack him, but was forced to recant. In the post-Stalin period Varga was ultimately restored to a position of honor, and in 1959 his eightieth birthday was celebrated as a notable jubilee presided over by Academician Konstantin Ostrovitianov, who had orchestrated the attack on him in 1947. In 1963 he was awarded the Lenin
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Prize for “scientific treatment of the problems of modern capitalism.”
Despite his independence in analyzing economic developments in the capitalist world, and his courage in fighting Stalinist dogmatism, Varga was a thoroughly orthodox Marxist, and a critic of the ideas of Soviet econometricians and mathematical economists. See also: MARXISM
Domar, Evsey. (1950). “The Varga Controversy.” American Economic Review 40:132-151.
(1895-1977), Soviet military hero of World War II.
A member of the Communist Party from 1938, Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky was born in the village of Novo-Pokrovka, now Ivanovo Oblast. He graduated from military school in 1914. He served as a junior officer in the tsarist army during World War I. From 1918 to 1931 he commanded a company, then a battalion, then an infantry regiment in the Red Army. From 1931 to 1936 Vasilevsky held executive posts in combat training organs within the People’s Commissariat of Defense and Volga Military District. From 1937 to 1941 he served on the General Staff, from 1941 to 1942 as deputy chief, and from 1942 to 1945 (during World War II or the Great Patriotic War) as Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces and concurrently, deputy people’s commissar of defense of the USSR.
Upon instructions from the Supreme Command Headquarters, Vasilevsky helped to elaborate many major strategic plans. In particular, Vasilevsky was among the architects (and participants) of the 1943 Stalingrad offensive. He coordinated actions of several fronts in the Battle of Kursk and the Belorussian and Eastern-Prussian offensive operations. Under Vasilevsky’s leadership, a strategic operation aimed at routing the Japanese Kwan-tung army was successfully carried out between August and September of 1945.
Increasingly, after the German invasion of June 1941, officers with world-class military skills, who
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
either emerged unscathed by Stalin’s purges or were retrieved from Stalin’s prisons and camps, came to the fore. Vasilevsky was among these men. Although Stalin was loath to trust anyone fully, this innate distrust did not prevent him from tapping the resources of his most talented military strategists during World War II. In the first year of the war, when the USSR was on the defensive, Stalin often made unilateral decisions. However, by the second year, he depended increasingly on his subordinates. As Marshal Vasilevsky has recalled,
He came to have a different attitude toward the General Staff apparatus and front commanders. He was forced to rely constantly on the collective experience of the military. Before deciding on an operational question, Stalin listened to advice and discussed it with his deputy [Zhukov], with leading officers of the General Staff, with the main directorates of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, with the commanders of the fronts, and also with the executives in charge of defense production. His most astute generals, Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov included, learned how to nudge Stalin toward a decision without talking back to him.
While serving as a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party between 1952 and 1961, Vasilevsky also held the post of first deputy minister of defense from 1953 to 1957. Twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, he was also twice awarded the military honor, the Order of Victory, and was presented with many other orders, medals, and ceremonial weapons. He retired the following year and died fifteen years later. See also: MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beevor, Antony. (1999). Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943. New York: Penguin Books. Colton, Timothy. (1990). Soldiers and the Soviet State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
(1887-1943), internationally famous biologist.
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov achieved international fame as a plant scientist, geographer, and geneticist before he was arrested and sentenced to death
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VECHE
on false charges of espionage in 1940. Born into a wealthy merchant family in pre-revolutionary Russia, Vavilov was renowned for his personal charm, integrity, and international scientific prestige. He graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1911, continued his studies of genetics and horticulture in Europe the following year, and in 1916 led an expedition to Iran and the Pamir Mountains to search for ancestral forms of modern agricultural plant species. “The Law of Homologous Series in Hereditary Variation,” his first major theoretical contribution, published in Russia in 1920 and then in the Journal of Genetics, argued that related species can be expected to vary genetically in similar ways.
Vavilov spoke many languages and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe to meet with colleagues and study scientific innovations in agriculture. He is best known for The Centers of Origin of Cultivated Plants (1926), in which he established that the greatest genetic diversity of wild plant species would be
