Economy and Society

Question 1

What was the average growth rate in Reutern’s Free Trade Era under Alexander II?

Answer 1

6% between 1862 and 1878

Question 2

What foreign investors and experts were brought in to develop Russian industry?

Answer 2

The Nobel Brothers, Ludwig Loop, and JJ Hughes

Question 3

How was foreign capital secured?

Answer 3

Through government bonds, tax exemptions and monopoly concessions

Question 4

What did Bunge do to railway as finance minister for Alexander III?

Answer 4

He moved the railway to 69% national ownership

Question 5

What did Vyshnegradskii do as finance minister under Alexander III?

Answer 5

He managed to balance the budget but was blamed for the famine of 1891 which left 350,000 dead as a result of the Medele’ev Tariff protecting Russian industry in return for exporting grain during a food shortage

Question 6

When was Russia put on the Gold Standard and by who?

Answer 6

It was put on the Gold Standard under Witte in 1897

Question 7

What happened during Witte’s Great Spurt?

Answer 7

Coal production doubled, iron and steel increased sevenfold and production went up 7.5% per year. New technologies such as oil and chemical industries developed

Question 8

What were some shortcomings of the great spurt?

Answer 8

Railway increases were still dwarfed by the West (by 1914 Russia had eleven times fewer miles track than Germany) and the reliance on foreign loans and expertise stunted Russian entrepreneurial growth

Question 9

What happened to Russian growth after the 1905 revolution?

Answer 9

Stolypin had Russian growth increasing by around 3.5% again but production was still 10% lower than Britain

Question 10

What happened to Russian industry during the First World War?

Answer 10

The rouble fell off the Gold Standard, taxes increased, the price of fuel and off quadrupled in the first two years of the conflict and inflation rose to 300%

Question 11

What did Lenin create to run industry?

Answer 11

He created ‘State Capitalism’ and they were nationalised under the Supreme Economic Council

Question 12

What happened during War Communism?

Answer 12

It led to the complete militarisation of labour and takeover of all industry and grain requisitioning

Question 13

What happened to industry as a result of the Civil War?

Answer 13

It led to halving of production, the collapse of the rouble to 1% of its worth in 1917 and the payment of workers ‘in kind’ rather than in currency, with the production of coal falling from 29 million tons in 1913 to 8.9 million tons in 1921

Question 14

What happened under the NEP?

Answer 14

Heavy industry was still under State control, however small crafts flourished and 60% of trade was done by a new entrepreneurial class of NEPmen

Question 15

What was a consequence of the Scissors Crisis?

Answer 15

It ended the NEP as high industrial prices were not matched by low agricultural prices, and as farmers refused to lower their prices further, it allowed Stalin to blame Kulaks for economic problems and begin the ‘Great Turn’

Question 16

How did Stalin attempt to achieve economic autarky?

Answer 16

Through the Five Year Plans, although the plans outlined by GOSPLAN were just vague targets with little guidance on how to deliver them

Question 17

What were the figures under the Five Year Plans?

Answer 17

There was a tenfold increase in electricity production and the develop new industries in plastics and synthetics

Question 18

How did Khrushchev diversify industry?

Answer 18

He added nuclear technology, but still stuck to Stalinist planning

Question 19

What did Alexander III create to help the peasants?

Answer 19

He created the Peasant Land Bank in 1883, abolished the poll tax in 1886 and the salt tax in 1881, but blamed peasant character for failures to raise food production and had them more tightly controlled by Land Captains

Question 20

What was Stolypin’s ‘Wager on the Strong’?

Answer 20

It allowed peasants to buy more land and consolidate strips, but only 2 million became these richer Kulaks and they were resented by many

Question 21

What was the Land Decree?

Answer 21

The Land Decree was brought in by Lenin in November 1917 and theoretically gave peasants equal share of land but in practice it was the state who owned it, proven by War Communism

Question 22

What happened to the Kulaks under Stalin?

Answer 22

Stalin liquidated the Kulaks as a class and around 6-18 million disappeared between 1928 and 1932, with 30,000 being shot

Question 23

How many farmers did Stalin put into Kolhozy?

Answer 23

He had 93% of farmers in Kolhozy by 1937 and 98% by 1941, although 75% of farmers fled Kazakhstan for China during the process

Question 24

How did Khrushchev attempt to help the peasants?

Answer 24

He created larger blocs and tried to fix higher prices for peasants in his State Farming Mechanism, however, food production was not significantly raised

Question 25

Why did the Virgin Lands Scheme fail?

Answer 25

The land was overused with little attention paid to crop rotation, leading to a reduction in soil fertility, and in the long term productivity and production slowed, and in 1963 there was a major drought that saw grain production fall to 107 million tons compared to 140 million tons the previous year

Question 26

When was there dramatic population growth?

Answer 26

Between 1890 and 1917 and the interwar period

Question 27

What did the demographic change from across the period

Answer 27

80% agrarian and 20% urban in 1855 to 51% agrarian and 49% urban in 1964

Question 28

What style hierarchy did the Tsars maintain, and what did the Communists replace it with?

Answer 28

The Tsars maintained a feudal style hierarchy which the Communists replaced with a bureaucratic one where industrial managers and workers were locked into a system

Question 29

What was the size of the middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century?

Answer 29

2 million

Question 30

What did Alexander II do for education?

Answer 30

He increased the provision of primary, secondary and further education

Question 31

How did Alexander III restrict education?

Answer 31

He put a tighter state control on education, removing university autonomy and restricting lower class access to secondary education

Question 32

What did Stalin achieve that had been Nicholas II’s aim?

Answer 32

He achieved primary education for all students

Question 33

What did the Communists do to the Tsarist style of secondary education?

Answer 33

They changed the grammar secondary education to more vocational training and in universities moved to a polytechnic model

Question 34

What was the lynchpin of Tsarism and what happened to this under Communism?

Answer 34

Orthodoxy was the lynchpin of Tsarism and this was attacked under Lenin with the League of the Militant Godless, and Stalin maintained this so that there were only around 16 active churches by 1941

Question 35

What did Khrushchev try to replace religion with?

Answer 35

The Moral Code

Question 36

What was Russian culture based around?

Answer 36

It was based around grandeur and Russian traditionalism and people like Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and the Imperial Opera and Ballet flourished without much state interference

Question 37

What did Lenin create for the arts?

Answer 37

He created a more positive tone to the arts and controlled it through Agitprop

Question 38

How did Stalin attempt to create a cultural revolution?

Answer 38

He tool even tighter control over the arts, and tried to force all music, literature, art and cinema to promote ‘socialist realism’

Question 39

How much did railway increase under Reutern?

Answer 39

There was a sevenfold increase in the amount of railway track opened, from 2194 miles in 1862 to 13,979 miles in 1878

Question 40

How much did income earned from industry increase under Nicholas II?

Answer 40

It shot up from 42 million roubles in 1893 to 161 roubles in 1897

Question 41

By 1913 what evidence is there to show that Russia had not caught up with the West?

Answer 41

By 1913, the overall production still lagged significantly behind those of competitors, with Russian production at the start of the war being 10% of that produced by Britain and GNP per capita was only 20% of that in Britain

Question 42

What was the Decree on Workers’ Control?

Answer 42

It was brought in in November 1918 and Workers’ Committees were given ‘extra powers’ to run factories

Question 43

When was the Supreme Economic Council formed and what did it do?

Answer 43

It was formed in December 1917 and it was formed to manage key industries that were nationalised by the Bolsheviks

Question 44

How many nationalised economic entities were there by 1920?

Answer 44

There were 30,000 nationalised economic entities ranging from windmills to huge steel plants

Question 45

What were some successes of the Virgin Lands Scheme?

Answer 45

In 1950 96 million acres of land were given over to the production of wheat, increased to 156 million acres in 1964 and urban dwellers felt that their food requirements were being adequately met