Economy and Society of Russian Empire and the USSR Flashcards
what did the Tsars do for industry?
- Reutern reforms 1862-1868
- Railways: Trans-Siberian line
- Medele’ev Tariff 1891
- Witte’s ‘Great Spurt’ 1893-1903
what did the Tsars do for agriculture?
- Emancipation 1861
- Peasant Land Bank 1883
- Stolypin’s reforms 1906-1911 ‘wager on the storm’ / land reforms
- emergence of Kulaks and commercial farming
what did the Communists do for industry?
- State Capitalism
- War Communism
- the NEP
- centralised planning
what did the communists do for agriculture?
- dekulakisation and collectivisation from 1929
- the kolkhozy, sovkhozy and MTS
- the Virgin Lands scheme 1954 onwards
what were the Reutern reforms?
1862-1878 reforms encouraged foreign investment and foreign technical expertise
what did the Medele’ev tariff (1891) do?
raised government revenues
what was State Capitalism?
central control of the economy through the SEC December 1917
what was the SEC?
Supreme Economic Council
what was War Communism?
nationalisation, partial militarisation of labour and grain requisitioning
what was the NEP?
denationalisation of small-scale enterprise and a return to private ownership
what is Centralised planning?
the seven Five-Year Plans under Khrushchev and the aim of economic autarky
Whats MTS?
Motor Tractor Stations responsible for loaning tractors to peasants, distributing seed, collecting grain and deciding what farmers could keep for their own consumption
Virgin Lands scheme from 1954?
by 1964, 165 million acres had been given over to the production of wheat
what reasons were there for social change?
- population growth
- urbanisation
- decline of nobility
- communist ideology
population growth?
1858 - 74 million
1960 - 212 million
decline of nobility?
in the 1870s gentry owned 200 million acres of land, fell to 140 million acres in 1914
rise of middle class
by 1914 there’s about 2 million people who fell into middle class bracket
how much of population was still reliant on agriculture by end of 19th century
80 percent
proof of hierarchical bureaucracy in communist society?
by early 1930s supposedly 1.5 million promotions of ordinary workers to managers
Tsar changes to primary education?
- education under Zemstva
- 1877 Ministry of Education in control; school inspectors
- number of primary schools rose from 23,000 in 1880 to 81,000 in 1914
Communist changes to primary education?
- 1930: attendance made compulsory to the age of 12
- by 1930, 18 million children attending
All changes to primary education?
- 1877 Ministry of Education in control; school inspectors
- number of primary schools rose from 23,000 in 1880 to 81,000 in 1914
- 1930: attendance made compulsory to the age of 12
- by 1930, 18 million children attending
Tsar changes to secondary education?
- Alexander II’s ‘new code’: numbers attending doubled by 1865
- Alexander III reversed his father’s policy, banning lower class children from secondary schools
Communist changes to secondary education?
- ‘bourgeois’ gymnasia scrapped, replaced with polytechnic (vocational) schools
- by 1932 6.9 million attending secondary schools
- 1939 Stalin scrapped school fees
All changes to secondary education?
- Alexander II’s ‘new code’ meant number attending doubled
- Alexander III banned lower class children from attending
- Communists scrapped ‘bourgeois’ gymnasia for polytechnic (vocational) schools
- By 1932, 6.9 million children attending
- 1939, Stalin scrapped school fees
Tsar changes to higher education?
- under Stolypin all non-academic meetings of students at unis made illegal
- Alexander III took away autonomy of universities