MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENTS OF HISTORY AND POLITICALSCIENCE SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY, 1917-1991
KEY TERMS PAGE 

The terms, personages, and events listed below are drawn from the readings. The definitions provided, drawn from Britannica Online, should make the reading easier to follow but are not a substitute for doing the reading. Please note that interpretations presented in the Britannica may not always agree with those in the reading or those presented by the professors. It is important to read and listen critically, and to come to your own conclusions.

Feb. 8 - The Setting: Tsarism 

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 15-23
*Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, pp. 1-48.  Also on the web: Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3.

Key terms:

Russian Revolution of 1905, Emancipation Manifesto (1861), Duma, autocracy, serfdom, feudalism, mir, otkhodniki, social class, proletariat, intelligentsia, zemstvo, Nicholas II, Alexander II

Look for these in Trotsky: backwardness, privilege of historic backwardness, combined and uneven development, soviets
 

Week 2.

Feb. 13 - The Revolutionary Tradition

Fitzpatrick, pp. 23-39
Sakwa, pp. 5-16, 23-27 (docs 1.4-1.9, 1.10, 1.17-1.20)
*Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 13-44

Key terms:

Populists, Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (SDs) (includes Bolsheviks & Mensheviks), Central Committee, Russo-Japanese War, Bloody Sunday, October Manifesto, Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), Fundamental Laws of 1906, Stolypin reforms, narod, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, class struggle, capital, trade union consciousness (Sakwa, p. 7), spontaneity (Sakwa, p. 7), vanguard of the revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, "permanent revolution," defeatists (Fitzpatrick, p. 37), "the prison-house of peoples," right of self-determination, Great Russian nationalism, cultural (national) autonomy, federalism, "socialism in one country"
 

Feb. 15 - The Revolutions of 1917 

Fitzpatrick, pp. 40-67
Sakwa, pp. 32-73 (docs 2.1-2.31)

You may be interested in this page of links to revolutionary posters.

Key terms:

February Revolution, Constituent Assembly, Provisional Government, Petrograd Soviet of Workers? and Soldiers? Deputies, Soviet Central Executive Committee (TsIK), Political Bureau (Politburo), Military-Revolutionary Committee, ?Dual power,? ?All power to the Soviets,? Order No. 1, factory committees, workers? control, Prince Georgii Lvov, Alexander Kerensky, General Lavr Kornilov (Kornilov affair), Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, April Theses, June Offensive, July Days, Red Guards, Second Congress of Soviets, Council of People?s Commissars (Sovnarkom), Decree on Peace (Sakwa, p. 57), Decree on Land (Sakwa, p. 58), withering away of the state (Sakwa, p. 42)
 

Week 3.

Feb. 20 -- No class meeting (Monday schedule of classes) 
 

Feb. 22 - The Civil War

Fitzpatrick, pp. 68-92
Sakwa, pp. 74-107 (docs. 3.1-3.21)
*Trotsky, "The Train," in My Life, pp. 411-22

Visual aid

In class we discussed this chart about hyperinflation.

Key terms:

Peace of Brest-Litovsk, Civil War, War Communism, Red Army, the "Whites" (and the White Armies), Red Terror (and White Terror), Cossacks (and the "Green Armies"), Czech Legion, the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution), Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh), Komsomol, Communist International (Comintern), Left SRs, Left Communists, Democratic Centralists, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, nationalization, grain requisitioning (prodrazverstka), kulaks, Committees of the Poor, sovkhoz, kolkhoz, "No war, no peace," The ABC of Communism, Constitution of 1918 (Fitzpatrick, p. 91), class justice (Fitzpatrick, p. 90), cadres (Fitzpatrick, p. 91)
 

Week 4.

Feb. 27 - The Crisis of War Communism & the Shift to NEP

Fitzpatrick, pp. 93-106
Sakwa, pp. 107-26, 127-131 (docs. 3.22-3.30, 4.1-4.3)
*Avrich, "Crisis of War Communism," Kronstadt 1921, pp. 7-34

Key terms: (light this session!)

New Economic Policy (NEP), Kronstadt revolt, Tambov revolt, Tenth Party Congress, Workers' Opposition, Secretariat, Aleksandra Kollontai, Mikhail Kalinin, "labor armies" (militarization of labor), tax in kind, bourgeois specialists (spetsy), Makhaevism (Sakwa pp. 108, 18), smychka (worker-peasant alliance), "On Party Unity" (ban on factions)
 

Mar. 1 - Defining Bolshevism 

*Sheila Fitzpatrick, "The Bolsheviks' Dilemma: The Class Issue in Party Politics and Culture," in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, pp. 16-34
*A. A. Solts, "Communist Ethics," in Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions, pp. 42-54
*Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, pp. 123-26, 147-53, 194-208
Sakwa, pp. 131-40 (docs. 4.4-4.8)

Key terms:

Proletkult, Central Control Commission (TsKK), Glavlit, GPU (State Political Administration), Gosplan (State Planning Commission), zhenotdely (women's sections), Pravda, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Nadezhda Krupskaia, Patriarch Tikhon, Black Hundreds (here used cynically), nepmen, chinovniki (functionaries), proletarka/kommunistka, baba (pl: bab-y), rabsel'kory (worker and peasant correspondents), "anarcho-syndicalism" (Sakwa, p. 138; also pp. 121-22), appointmentism (Fitzpatrick, p. 25), the "commanding heights," Lenin levy, enterprise leasing, economic accounting (khozrachet), class position, party ethics, "nepification," (Solts, p. 48), byt
 

Week 5.

Mar. 6 - The Politics and Economics of NEP 

Fitzpatrick, pp. 106-119
Sakwa, pp. 140-69 (docs. 4.9-4.25)

Additional document (discussed in class):
Maiakovskii's poem on the currency reform.

Visual Aids

Scissors Crisis chart
Money of the Early 1920's

Key terms: (most only in the readings this session)

Bonapartism, Lenin's Testament, the Lenin cult, the "triumvirate," Joseph Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Aleksei Rykov, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, "socialism in one country," Five-Year Plan, primary socialist accumulation, "squeezing the peasantry," middle peasantry, the "scissors crisis" (see the chart discussed in class), cooperatives (generic definition), the "New Course," workers' democracy, circular flow of power, Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), nezavisimtsy (also "socialist-nationalists," Sakwa, pp. 141, 143), Constitution of 1924, vozhd (Sakwa, p. 168)
 

March 8 -The Great Break: Collectivization & Industrialization

Fitzpatrick, pp. 120-41
Sakwa, pp. 170-75, 179-190 (docs. 4.26-4.29, 5.3-5.8)
*Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, excerpts

Visual aid

A chart of grain exports.

Key terms:

industrialization (generic definition), collectivization, the Shakhty trial, OGPU, Left Opposition, Right Opposition, "dekulakization," Lazar Kaganovich, Magnitogorsk (i.e., Magnetic Mountain), "gigantomania," "Soviet America," class liquidation, "Dizzy with Success," the "25,000'ers," "revolution from above," village/kolkhoz (Fitzpatrick, p. 138; contrast to "kolkhoz giants"), Famine of 1932-33 (see lower section), internal passport (propiska), "red specialists," subbotnik
 

Week 6.

Mar. 13 - First paper due in class

Film: "Bed and Sofa"
 

March 15 - The New Economy

Khomiakov-Andreev, Bitter Waters, pp. 185-188, 8-13, 22-25, 39-56, 69-85, 105-122.

Key terms:

kolkhozniki, defitsitnyi, udarnichestvo/udarnik (shock worker), Stakhanovism/Stakhanovites (also next week), Yezhovshchina(see p. 190, fn. 11), kombinatsii/kombinirovanie/kombinator (see p. 191, last fn.), Krokodil, artel (see p. 190, fn. 2), partizanshchina
 

Week 7.

Mar. 20 - Building a New Society 

Fitzpatrick, pp. 141-163
Sakwa, pp. 190-98 (docs. 5.9-5.16)
*Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism & the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, pp. 210-46

Key terms:

Cultural Revolution, "Soviet Thermidor," Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), Union of Soviet Writers, Gulag, "sons of the working class," the "new class," Seventeeth Party Congress (the "Congress of Victors"), Stakhanovite movement, "Six Conditions" speech (1931), Kolkhoz Charter (Fitzpatrick, p. 163), kul'tornost'
 

March 22 - Purge and Terror 

Fitzpatrick, pp. 163-170
Sakwa, pp. 199-203, 206, 211-19, 227-33 (docs. 5.17-5.19, 5.21, 5.23-5.26, 5.30-5.32)
*Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power, pp. 441-478

Key terms:

purges (chistki), the Great Purges/Great Terror, NKVD, Sergei Kirov, Marshal Tukhachevsky, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Andrei Vyshinsky, Pavlik Morozov, show trials, dvurushniki (Tucker, p. 475), "humanism" (Sakwa, p. 206)
 

March 27, 29 - No class meeting. Spring Vacation 

Week 8.

April 3 -- World War II 

*John Barber, The Soviet Home Front, pp. 19-44, 59-67
Sakwa, pp. 234-77 (docs. 6.1-6.32)
Khomiakov-Andreev, Bitter Waters, excerpts

Key terms:

Great Patriotic War, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ("non-aggression pact"), Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Bessarabia, Finno-Soviet "winter war", Case Barbarossa, Operation Typhoon, Seige of Leningrad, Battle of Stalingrad, blitzkrieg, Untermenschen, "war of extermination," scorched-earth policy, Order No. 270 (on deserters' families), Order No. 227 (on retreaters and deserters), Lend-Lease, Second Front, Comintern dissolution, "Ten Great Victories," Warsaw uprising, "anti-Soviet" theory of Hiroshima, "all for the front," "Russian national interest," Lavrentii Beria, Katyn, Babii Yar, deported peoples
 

April 5 - The Origins of the Cold War

Sakwa, pp. 277-84, 290-93, 294-97, 309-312 (docs. 6.33-6.36, 7.2, 7.4-7.5, 7.13-7.14)
*"Khrushchev and Kennedy" in Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, pp. 236-74
*Novikov and Kennan Telegrams, in Jensen, ed., Origins of the Cold War, 3-32.

Key terms:

Yalta Conference, Cold War, Bay of Pigs invasion,  Cuban missile crisis, Berlin wall, Warsaw Treaty, Sino-Soviet split, containment, Hungarian revolution of 1956, 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Nikita Khrushchev,Yuri Gagarin, John Foster Dulles, George Kennan, FRG/GDR (West Germany/East Germany), KGB, "Iron Curtain," "wars of national liberation," missile gap, Novocherkassk massacre, "third war," "capitalist encirclement"
 

Week 9.

April 10 - Second paper due in class

Film: "Cranes are Flying"
 

April 12 - The Khrushchev Years: Thaw and Social Change

*Mary McAuley, "Khrushchev and Party Rule," Soviet Politics, pp. 62-74
Sakwa, pp. 313-33, 341-50 (docs 8.1-8.12, 8.15-8.21)
*Medvedev and Medvedev, Khrushchev, pp. 94-101

Key terms:

Anti-Party Group, Twentieth Party Congress (1956), Khrushchev's Secret Speech, de-Stalinization, personality cult, "New Course," agriculture campaigns, Virgin Lands scheme, Lazar Kaganovich, Georgii Malenkov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, shestdesyatniki (Sakwa, p. 341), "peaceful coexistence"
 

Week 10.

April 17 - No class. Institute holiday 

April 19 -- The Brezhnev Era: Politics and Economics 

*Timothy Colton, "Brezhnev's Ambiguous Legacy," in The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union, pp. 6-31
*Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain, pp. 43-56, 61-82
Sakwa, pp. 351-356, 362-66, 374-79, 380-84 (docs. 9.1-9.3, 9.8-9.11, 9.17, 9.19-9.20)

Key terms:

detente, invasion of Afghanistan, nepotism, "period of stagnation" (zastoi), Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko
 

Week 11.

April 24 - The Brezhnev Era: Social Change

*Hedrick Smith, The Russians, pp. 166-95, 363-401
Sakwa, pp. 389-95, 398-408 (docs. 9.23-9.24, 9.26-9.27)

Key terms:

samizdat, politgramota session (Smith, p. 384), apparatchiki, "One Week Like Any Other," Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev, Andrei Amalrik, "fig v karmane" (Smith, p. 401)
 

April 26 - Gorbachev and the Origins of Perestroika

*Timothy Colton, "What Ails the Soviet System?" in The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union, pp. 32-67
Sakwa, pp. 416-422, 423-40 (docs. 9.32-9.35, 10.1-10.9)

Key Terms:

"developed socialism," "Little Deal," "expectations gap," "minimal reforms," uskorenie (acceleration), glasnost, perestroika, New Political Thinking, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev, protektsiya, nalevo, sliyaniye/sblizheniye (Colton, p. 44), the "Novosibirsk report"
 

Week 12. 

May 1 -- From Glasnost to Elections

*Robert Kaiser, "The Birth of a New Russia," Why Gorbachev Happened, pp. 254-88
Sakwa, pp. 440-66 (docs. 10.10-10.19)

Key Terms:

Nineteenth Party Congress (Summer 1988), Congress of People's Deputies (March elections, televised May session), amendment to Article Six (CPSU's "leading role"), Andreeva letter, Yegor Ligachev, Alexander Yakovlev, Boris Yeltsin, withdrawal from Eastern Europe, withdrawal from Afghanistan, Tbilisi crackdown, Fergana riots
 

May 3 -- Nationalism
 

Key Terms:

"Communist empire" (Hosking, p. 83), "bourgeois nationalism" (Hosking, p. 87), "elder brother," indigenous cadres, titular nationalities, "empire-savers" vs. "nation-builders"

Soviet republics: RSFSR (Russia), Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Soviet "East Europe" (Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova), Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan)
 

Week 13.

May 8 -- Third paper due in class.
 

May 10 -- Collapse of the Soviet Union

Key Terms:

"August coup," State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP), Democratic Russia, Russian "White House," Gennadii Yanaev, Vladimir Kryuchkov, Boris Pugo, Anatolii Lukyanov, Andrei Kozyrev, Pavel Grachev, Aleksandr Lebed, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

barter (general definition), "icebergs," food-cards/coupons/orders, Buryatia, Kalmykia, Tuva, Yakutia
 

Week 14.

May 15 -- The New Russia, 1991-present 

Key Terms:

"October events," 1993 referendum, "irreconcilable opposition," National Salvation Front, Ostankino, Yegor Gaidar, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Aleksandr Rutskoi, Ruslan Khasbulatov, price liberalization
 

May 17 -- Review