With the accelerated growth of the urban working class during the rapid industrialization of the First Five- Year Plan (1928-1933), the practice of treating with vodka took on greater significance, and in most factories it became nearly impossible for workers to receive training or secure the proper tools without bribing foremen with vodka. It was quite common for skilled workers to demand payment in vodka for training new recruits. As with rural communities, in the factories custom set firm limits on the amount of drink required. So prevalent was the practice of treating, a nationwide survey conducted in 1991 revealed that the workplace was the primary place for imbibing. Moreover, in 1993 average consumption levels were placed at one bottle of vodka for every adult Russian male every two days. See also: ALCOHOLISM; ALCOHOL MONOPOLY; FOOD
Christian, David. (1990). ’Living Water’: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation. Oxford: Clarendon. Christian, David, and Smith, R.E.F. (1994). Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Herlihy, Patricia. (2002). The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia. New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, Laura. (2000). The Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900-1929. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Transchel, Kate. (2000). “Liquid Assets: Vodka and Drinking in Early Soviet Factories.” In The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, ed. William B. Husband. Wilmington, DE: SR Books.
KATE TRANSCHEL
(1928-1995), Soviet and Russian military and political figure, historian, and philosopher.
Colonel General Volkogonov was born in Chita province, the son of a minor civil servant who was shot in 1937. Without knowledge of his father’s true fate, Volkogonov entered military service in 1949 and rose rapidly in rank. As a political officer after 1971, he held various posts within the Soviet MinENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY istry of Defense, eventually becoming deputy chief (1984-1988) of the Main Political Administration.
Although known as an ideological hardliner, Volkogonov’s foreign experiences gave rise to grave doubts about the Soviet system. Travels in the Third World taught him that revolutionary leaders sought only cynical advantage from the Soviets. An academic visit to the West convinced him that capitalist societies had produced greater equalities than their supposedly egalitarian socialist counterparts. He was already reading suppressed writers when he learned the truth about his father’s death-that he had been executed as an enemy of the people. Hence sprang the desire to expose the truth about Stalin and his times.
Estrangement from the military-political leadership precipitated Volkogonov’s transfer to the USSR Institute of Military History. There, while chief from 1988 to 1991, his subordinates’ revisionist draft history of the Great Patriotic War, coupled with his growing adherence to democratic ideals and an unorthodox evaluation of the Stalinist legacy, provoked clashes with the Mnistry of Defense. Following the Soviet collapse, he served from 1991 to 1995 as security adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, while simultaneously championing democratic causes and chairing several parliamentary commissions as a Duma deputy associated with the Left-Centrist Bloc. Before his turn against Soviet convention, Volkogonov’s more significant works, including Marxist-Leninist Teachings about War and the Army (1984) and The Psychology of War (1984) reflected orthodox zeal. However, his subsequent conviction that the Soviet system had been flawed from the beginning permeated his historical works, including a revisionist biography of Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy (1990), and later volumes on Trotsky, Lenin, and other significant early Soviet leaders. See also: STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Menning, Bruce W. (2003). “Of Outcomes Happy and Unhappy.” In Adventures in Russian Historical Research, eds. Catherine Freirson and Samuel Baron. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1991). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, tr. and ed. Harold Shukman. New York: Grove Wei-denfeld. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1994). Lenin: A New Biography, tr. and ed. Harold Shukman. New York: Free Press.
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Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1998). Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, tr. and ed. Harold Shukman. New York: Free Press.
(b. 1932), political leader and industrial lobbyist in the 1990s.
Arkady Ivanovich Volsky began his career in the military-industrial sector as deputy chief of the Department of Machines from 1978 to 1984. He became active in politics by serving on several high-profile committees dealing with industry and gained national recognition as Mikhail Gorbachev’s special representative in Nagorno-Karabakh during the crises there from 1988 to 1990. Volsky is best known for founding the Union of Science and Industry in 1990, which he renamed the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs after the failed 1991 coup. He used this position to establish the perception that he spoke for the interests of managers and business entrepreneurs during the crucial era of privatization and transition to capitalism. In mid-June 1992 he was a central figure in the formation of the Civic Union, a broad alliance of political parties and parliamentary factions that played an important role in forcing alterations to the program of rapid priva tization and economic reform presented by Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. Volsky was widely seen as one of the key forces behind the June 1993 replace ment of Gaidar with Viktor Chernomyrdin and oth ers who favored a slower transition with a greater role for incumbent managers. Although Volsky con tinued to head the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, its influence, and his, peaked in 1993 and rapidly declined thereafter. By the late 1990s privatization had transformed the economic and political landscape, bringing power and influence to a small and shifting group of wealthy, wellconnected oligarchs, deeply undermining his claim to speak for the business class. See also: CIVIC UNION; PRIVATIZATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lohr, Eric. (1993). “Arkadii Volsky’s Political Base.” Europe-Asia Studies 45:811-829.
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(“Minga”) (1782-1856), leading statesman during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I.
Although Mkhail Vorontsov was considered a military hero (his portrait hangs in the Hero’s Hall of the Hermitage), mainly for his generalship at the Battle of Borodino (1812) and his command of the Russian occupation army in France (1815-1818), his historical significance is due to his rule as governor-general and viceroy in New Russia and Caucasia from 1823 to 1854. Born a count in an illustrious and wealthy family of imperial servitors, he was awarded the titles of field marshal and most illustrious (Svetleyshy) prince of the Russian Empire for his service.
Vorontsov was an unshakably loyal servitor to the emperors, yet thanks to his upbringing in England (his father, Semen Vorontsov, was the Russian ambassador) and an excellent education, as well as his high social status and fabulous wealth, in attitude and action he was more Western, liberal, and business-minded than his conservative Russian colleagues. The poet Pushkin out of spite called him “half lord and half merchant.” He was one of Russia’s largest serf-owners. Although he supported emancipation in principle, he spurned overtures to join the Decembrist plotters, many of whom received their inspiration in France under his command. The serfs, he said, could be freed only when the Emperor decided to do so. Indeed, he was named by Nicholas I to serve on the commission set up in 1826 to investigate the Decembrist conspiracy.
Vorontsov excelled in the field of imperial administration. In New Russia, from its capital Odessa, and in Caucasia from Tbilisi, his government brought vast improvements to the economic life and sheer physical appearance of these southern regions. He attempted, with limited success, to improve the operation of the notoriously corrupt and inefficient imperial bureaucracy. He decentralized decision making in these peripheral territories of the empire, partly by bringing educated locals into the civil service. He also fought constantly, with limited success, for some autonomy from the jealous central ministries in St. Petersburg. He encouraged local
