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)
Collective farm (literally, ‘collective enterprise’, where the peasants nominally own the land, fulfil state grain procurements, and receive compensation as ‘workdays’ that they have contributed)
Komsomol
Communist Youth League
Kulak
Rich peasant (derived from the word for ‘fist’ after 1917 formally used to designate any peasant who ‘exploited’ the labour of others)
Lishentsy
Disenfranched (those members of the former ‘exploiting classes’, such as nobles, bourgeoisie, and clergy, who were deprived of civil rights and subjected to various other forms of discrimination from 1918 to 1936)
Manufaktura
Primitive handicrafts and industrial enterprises in early modern Russia
MTS
Machine Tractor Stations (state units established in 1935 to provide tractor and technical services to the kolkhoz)
Narkomindel
People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
Narkompros
People’s Commissariat of Education
NEP
New Economic Policy
Nepman
Traders and entrepreneurs who engaged in ‘free enterprise’ during NEP
NKVD
People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs
Nomenklatura
System of appointment lists, emerging in the first years of Soviet power and eventually coming to define the country’s political élite
Oblast
(pl. oblasti) Soviet territorial unit, roughly equivalent to a pre-revolutionary province
Obrok
Quitrent (payment of serf obligations in kind or money)
Oprichnina
The separate state ‘within a state’ established by Ivan the Terrible in 1565; more generally used to designate this reign of terror, which lasted until 1572
Orgburo
Organizational Bureau
Perestroika
Reconstruction (the term adopted to designate a fundamental reform in the Soviet system from the mid-1980s)
Pomest′e
Conditional service estate in Muscovy, but by the eighteenth century equivalent to hereditary family property
Posad
Urban settlement in Muscovy
Prikaz
Term for ‘chancellery’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Proletkult
Proletarian culture movement
PSR
Party of Socialist Revolutionaries
Rabfak
Workers’ faculty (special schools for workers with little or no formal eduction)
Rabkrin
Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (organ to control state and economy, 1920–34)
RSDWP
Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party
RSFSR
Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic
SD
Social Democrat
Seredniak
Middle peasant (in Soviet jargon, a peasant who was self-sufficient, neither exploiting the labour of others nor working in the employee of others)
Smychka