Russia. A History

David L. Ransel is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History and director of the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University. He is the author of The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (1975), Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (1988), Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (2000), and A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov (2009). He co-edited a seminal collection of essays, Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (1998) as well as Polish Encounters, Russian Identity (2005).

Lewis Siegelbaum is professor of history at Michigan State University. He has written extensively on Russian and Soviet labour history. Among his books are Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (1988); Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (1992), Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989–1992 (co-authored, 1995), Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (2000), and Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (2008).

Hans-Joachim Torke was professor of Russian and East European history at the Free University of Berlin. His publications include Das russische Beamtentum in der ersten Hälfe des 19. Jahrhunderts (1967) and Das staatsbedingte Gesellschaft im Moskaner Reich (1974).

Reginald E. Zelnik was professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. He was the author of Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (1971), editor and translator of the memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov (A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia (1986)), and, more recently, published

Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872 (1995).

GLOSSARY OF TERMS, ABBREVIATIONS, AND ACRONYMS

Barshchina

Corvée labour (rendering of serf obligations through personal labour)

Batrak

Landless peasant (in Soviet jargon, a peasant who had no land and earned his support as a hired agricultural labourer)

Bedniak

Poor peasant (in Soviet jargon, a peasant whose farm income was insufficient and who had to hire himself out to kulaks)

Besprizorniki

Homeless, orphaned children in the 1920s

Boyar duma

Boyar council in medieval Russia

CC

Central Committee

Centner

Hundredweight, or 100 kg. (from the German Zentner)

Cheka

Extraordinary Commission (created in December 1917 to ‘combat counter-revolution and sabotage’)

Chernozem

Black-earth region of southern Russia

Chetvert′

Unit of dry measure for grain, equivalent to 288 pounds of rye in the seventeenth century

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States (established in December 1991 as an association of most of the former Soviet republics)

Cominform

Communist Information Bureau (established in 1947 to coordinate Communist Parties in the Western and Eastern blocs)

CPD

Congress of People’s Deputies (last Soviet parliament elected in 1989)

CPRF

Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the reconstituted CPSU in the post-Soviet era)

CPSU

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Dikoe pole

The untamed southern steppes (literally meaning ‘wild field’)

Duma

State parliament of tsarist Russia, 1906–17, and post-Soviet Russia; elected city councils after the urban reform of 1870

GDP

Gross domestic product

GKO

State Defence Committee (chief military organ during the Second World War)

Glasnost

Openness or publicity (a reference to the relaxation of censorship controls in the 1850s and again in the late 1980s)

Gosudarstvenniki

Civil servants who were devoted primarily to serving the interests of the state (gosudarstvo), not their own social estate

GULAG

Main Administration of Camps (responsible for management of the labour camps)

lasak

Tribute exacted from non-Russian subject populations in Eastern Russia and Siberia

Kadets

Pre-revolutionary liberal party (name being an acronym of ‘Constitutional-Democrats’)

KGB

Committee for State Security (secret police)

Kolkhoz (pl. kolkhozy)