passport rules and abolish the rules on shared responsibility for taxes and other obligations laid on the peasants. The other aspects of the agrarian program designed by Witte were later introduced by his successor, Petr Stolypin.
Although Witte was transferred to the less influential post of Chairman of the Committee of Ministers in August 1903, the deteriorating political situation in the country, caused by Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and the insistence of public opinion brought him back to active service in the summer of 1904. Witte led the Russian delegation that concluded peace with Japan in the Treaty of Portsmouth. He then participated in preparing the October Manifesto of 1905, in which the emperor granted civil freedom. Witte took the post of prime minister in the new government and ran political affairs in a European style. He paid attention to public opinion, regarded the Russian and foreign presses as representative of public opinion, and exerted influence upon the public through the press. His government introduced the political rights granted by the October Manifesto, worked to appease the population and win it over to the government’s side, curbed punitive excesses and pogroms, and conducted the elections to the Duma. Witte’s activities, however, received criticism from all sides. The emperor viewed him as a rival in influence and popularity. The wealthy were disappointed in the Duma elections, whose results proved unfavorable for them. Revolutionaries cursed Witte for his repressive measures. Liberals censured him for his defense of the monarchical prerogatives in the Basic Laws and his other concessions to rightists. Conservatives were dissatisfied with Witte’s participation in the demolition of the old political system and transition to a new one. After Witte had concluded the Portsmouth Peace Treaty with Japan, brought troops from the Far East back to European Russia, restored public order in the country, prepared the Basic Laws, organized elections to the Duma, and secured a big loan in Europe (843.75 million rubles or 434.16 million dollars) that brought stability to government finances, he was forced to resign.
Until his final days Witte hoped to return to power. In order not to be forgotten, he used all
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
means available to him: the rostrum of the State Council, the press, intrigues, and connections in the West. Witte died in 1915 at the age of 66, his health undermined by hard work and forebodings. He opposed Russia’s participation in World War I and predicted grave consequences similar to the upheavals that occurred after the Russo-Japanese War. See also: ECONOMY, IMPERIAL; INDUSTRIALIZATION; OCTOBER MANIFESTO; PORTSMOUTH, TREATY OF; RAILWAYS; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
Gindin, I. F. (1972). “Russia’s Industrialization under Capitalism as Seen by Theodore von Laue.” Soviet Studies in History 11(1):3-55. Gurko, Vladimir Iosifovich. (1939). Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Judge, Edward. (1983). Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902-1904. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Kokovtsov, Vladimir Nikolaevich. (1935). Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, Russian Minister of Finance, 1904-1914, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1911-1914, ed. H. H. Fisher; tr. Laura Matveev. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Laue, Theodore von. (1963). Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia. New York: Columbia University Press. Mehlinger, Howard, and Thompson, John. (1972). Count Witte and the Tsarist Government in the 1905 Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weissman, Neil B. (1981). Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and Local Government, 1900-1914. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Weissman, Neil B. (1987). “Witte, Sergei Iul’evich.” The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History 44:9-14. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Witte, Sergei. (1921). The Memoirs of Count Witte, tr. Abraham Yarmolinsky. London: Heinemann.
BORIS N. MIRONOV
Women of Russia (Zhenshchiny Rossii, or ZhR) was formed as a political movement on the eve of the 1993 Duma elections. It contained the Union of Russia’s Women (formerly the Committee of
1671
Soviet Women), Association of Russia’s Women Entrepreneurs, and the Union of Women of the Navy. The movement was headed by Alevtina Fed-ulova, leader of the Union of Women; Yekaterina Lakhova, adviser to Boris Yeltsin on matters of family, childbearing, and children; and the popular actress Natalia Gundareva, and received 4.4 million votes (8.1%, or fourth place) and twenty-one Duma seats in 1993. The success was due to the amorphousness of the political scene, where the lack of parties and transience of elections made a good flag sufficient. In the Duma, the ZhR faction, which was called the first of its kind in the history of world parliamentism, basically supported the government and did not distinguish itself in any way. At the beginning of the 1995 campaign, ZhR was regarded as a potential participant in a broad left-centrist coalition, but it chose to enter independently. In the end it did not attain the 5 percent threshold required to merit proportional representation, winning 3.2 million votes (4.6%, fifth place); three candidates, including Lakhova, were elected in single-mandate districts. At the time, incidentally, most electoral associations included their women candidates in the top three places on the lists.
In 1997, Lakhova, leaving ZhR, founded her own Sociopolitical Movement of Russia’s Women (OPDZh). In the beginning of the 1999 campaign, both Fedulova of ZhR and Lakhova of OPDZh entered Yuri Luzhkov’s Fatherland, then the bloc Fatherland-All Russia (OVR). After Lakhova was included in the central part of the OVR list, and Fedulova was not, ZhR announced its departure from the bloc, with the explanation that OVR, in assembling its list, had demonstrated its traditional, conservative approach to women’s role in society. The ZhR results (2.0%, eighth place) were much lower than expected, partly because “women” diverged: some stayed in the OVR; in addition, ZhR had a double, the Russian Party for the Defense of Women (0.8%). Moreover, social problematics fundamental to ZhR were actively exploited by more powerful electoral associations: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and OVR. On the threshold of the 2003 elections, a paradoxical situation arose, when Fedulova’s virtual ZhR, having met for the last time in an all-Russian conference in the summer of 1999, and not having shown a sign of existence since that time, gathered 4 to 7 percent support in a social referendum. Lakhova’s OPDZh, having dissolved into United Russia, tried to resurface politically, entering the April 2003 elections with the somewhat vague bill
1672
“concerning governmental guarantees of equal rights and freedoms of men and women and equal opportunities for their realization.” See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; FATHERLAND-ALL RUSSIA; FEMINISM
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. McFaul, Michael, and Petrov, Nikolai, eds. (1995). Previewing Russia’s 1995 Parliamentary Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Remington, Thomas. (2002). Politics in Russia, 2nd ed. New York: Longman.
WOMEN’S DEPARTMENT See ZHENOTDEL.
In the general sense of the term, there have of course been workers present since the dawn of Russian history, including slave laborers and serfs. Viewed more narrowly to mean persons employed in industry and paid a wage, however, workers became important to the Russian economy only in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially during the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), who placed a high priority on Russia’s industrial development. But even under Peter most workers employed in manufacturing and mining were unfree labor, forced to toil long hours either in privately owned enterprises or in factories owned by the government. The continued coexistence of free and forced labor at a time when forced labor, except for convicts, had virtually vanished from the European scene was a noteworthy and notorious characteristic of Russian society until as late as
