De (1758-94), political leader during the french REVOLUTION OF 1789. The eldest of five children, he was effectively orphaned when his mother died in childbirth and his father left home. After completing his education at the elite Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Robespierre entered legal practice in his native Arras, establishing a reputation as the poor man’s lawyer. On the eve of the Revolution, he communicated to louis xvi his hopes for the reform not just of French institutions but of morals and even human nature itself. Elected to the ESTATES GENERAL as one of eight deputies from Artois, he became prominent among the jacobins. He distinguished himself as an ardent supporter of liberty and opponent of the abuse of power, thereby establishing the reputation for incorruptibility that would underpin his political career. Robespierre’s oft-repeated warnings concerning the dangers of resort to war, unpopular before April 1792, subsequently appeared prescient when the French military effort faltered (see FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARs). His careful cultivation of support among the Paris commune ensured his election to the convention in September. He immediately pushed for the king’s execution, and then helped to orchestrate the popular insurrection that expelled the girondins in May-June 1793. By this stage, the plight of France was desperate, faced as it was by external and internal enemies. Elected to the committee of PUBLIC SAFETY in July, Robespierre played a crucial role in formulating and defending the policies of centralization and the organized use of violence that characterized the government of the terror. He detested the excesses of the more radical revolutionaries, in particular their pursuit of dechristianization[2]. He was equally opposed to demands from those on the right for an end to the Terror as it became clear in the spring of 1794 that France was now winning the war. Accordingly he used the guillotine to purge his opponents, the adherents of Hebert and danton. Public opinion was disconcerted at the removal of hitherto popular heroes. The strains of work told upon Robespierre’s health and he probably suffered a nervous collapse, fatefully withdrawing from the Assembly and the Committee. His reappearance in the Convention on July 26 (see also thermidor) was marked by a rambling speech calling for a final purge of traitors. Fearing for their lives, his enemies banded against him. The following day he was arrested, despite a botched attempt at suicide, and executed on July 28. His legacy was ambiguous. For many he was a bloodthirsty monster. And though his calls for an end to inequality earned him popular support, he set out no concrete program to achieve this.
Rohm, Ernst (1887-1934), head of hitler’s storm-troopers, generally known as the SA (see sturmab-teilung). Son of a Bavarian bureaucrat, Rohm joined the army and fought courageously in WORLD WAR I. A fierce nationalist, he wholeheartedly opposed the Versailles treaty and became a member of the freikorps, taking part in several plots against the fledgling weimar republic. Drawn to Hitler’s rhetoric, he was one of the earliest supporters of Nazism. He participated in the 1923 Munich beer hall putsch, for which he served a short prison sentence. Back in civilian life, he worked as a travelling salesman and as a military instructor in Bolivia, before returning to Germany in 1930 and taking charge of the SA. His thugs did much to create a sense of general crisis, fighting communists on the streets and facilitating Hitler’s takeover of power. Though grateful to Rohm, the new German leader was troubled by the SA’s radicalism and was conscious that his generals did not want the movement to be incorporated into the regular army. Roohm’s overt homosexuality also caused embarrassment. unable to negotiate with the SA chief, Hitler came to the conclusion that he had to be eliminated. Roohm was shot on July 2, 1934, two days after his main associates had been murdered in the so-called night of the long knives. In acting thus, Hitler’s regime demonstrated the ruthlessness that would become its hallmark.
Roman question (see under papal states)
Romania A country whose borders include a Black Sea coastline running between the frontiers with BULGARIA to the south and Ukraine to the north. its broadly Latin ethnicity is reflected in the Eastern Romance form of its main language. During the sixteenth century Romanian territory, centered on the danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, came under Ottoman rule. By the mid-nineteenth century such control by Turkey (see turkey and europe) was rapidly weakening, and Russia’s influence was conversely growing. The Paris Treaty of 1856, which concluded the CRIMEAN WAR, provided international confirmation that each of the principalities should continue to enjoy autonomous status within the sultan’s empire. However, in 1862 under the leading influence of cuza, they declared their union as independent Romania. Formal recognition by the great powers then followed at the BERLIN CONGRESS in 1878, and three years later the unitary princedom proclaimed itself a kingdom. The new state was weakened from the outset by internal tensions, with its governing class of landowners regularly (and most notoriously in 1907) undertaking brutal suppression of peasant-based campaigns for agrarian reform. in 1913, as a result of involvement in the second of the Balkan WARS, Romania gained the southern Dobrudja from Bulgaria, thus enlarging its control over the mouth of the Danube (see Danube question). Despite earlier alliances with Germany and Austria-Hungary (see habsburg empire), the country remained neutral during the first part of world WAR I. In 1916, however, it declared war on the CENTRAL POWERS, hoping to seize Transylvania from HUNGARY. The upshot was Romania’s rapid humiliation in the face of invasion by German and Bulgarian forces. in November 1918 it re-entered the fray during the very last hours of the war, thus becoming, formally at least, one of the victors.
At the PARIS PEACE SETTLEMENT, Romania benefited greatly from the Allied policy of strengthening it as part of a bulwark against the spread of COMMUNISM (see also Russian revolutions of 1917). The gains more than doubled its territory, and included Transylvania, Bessarabia, and northern bukovina. This achievement of “Greater Romania” served chiefly to confront the government with more ethnic complexities than it was capable of handling. It proved increasingly insensitive to the legitimate complaints of its minorities (nearly 30 percent of the population), and by the end of the 1920s right-wing nationalists (see nationalism) were firmly in the ascendant. Romania now produced its own version of fascism, in the form of the iron guard movement led by CODREANU. This had an uneasy relationship with the more conservative authoritarianism favored by King carol ii (who ruled from 1930 to 1940) and his army chief and eventual prime minister, ANTONESCU. In 1940 the latter began to disband the increasingly unruly movement, while also forcing Carol’s abdication and imposing a military dictatorship. By then Romanian security was deeply imperiled due to the growing ambitions of hitler and STALIN alike. The secret protocol to the NAZI-SOVIET PACT of 1939 had offered the latter a free hand in the seizure of Bessarabia, which the SOVIET UNION then compelled Antonescu to concede in June 1940. During this opening phase of WORLD WAR II, the Romanian regime was already lending support to the German military effort, particularly through oil supplies. Then, in June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation BARBAROSSA against the USSR, Antonescu brought his people formally into the conflict on the Fuhrer’s side. Once the fortunes of war on the Eastern Front turned against the Germans, whose disastrous defeat at the battle of STALINGRAD involved Romanian contingents too, Antonescu’s dictatorship had little future. It ended in August 1944, when his country was falling under red army occupation. By turning against the Germans in the final phase of war, the Romanians were able to limit their territorial losses (confirmed in the Paris TREATIES of 1947) to southern Dobrudja, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina.
With Romania now in the sphere of Soviet control, its development under COMMUNISM became inseparable from the careers of gheorgiu-DEJ, Party leader from 1945 to 1965, and of his protege CEAUjjEScu who thereafter dominated the political scene until the end of 1989. The former secured complete abolition of the monarchy in December 1947, followed by inauguration of a People’s Republic. This duly entered comecon in 1949 and signed the Warsaw pact in 1955. One major achievement of Gheorghiu-Dej’s singleparty dictatorship was to negotiate, in 1958, Soviet agreement to a withdrawal of the Red Army from Romanian territory. His regime also managed to introduce a greater measure of industrialization than the Kremlin leaders had in mind for an economy whose strongly agrarian emphasis they wanted to preserve. Under Ceausescu there were even clearer signs of policy divergence between Bucharest and Moscow (exemplified in Romania’s non-participation in the Soviet-led 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia). For a time these won him plaudits in (and investments from) the West, where the growing brutality of his Secur-itate secret police was all too readily overlooked. However, in the later 1980s, when gorbachev was setting a new reformist agenda for the USSR and its allies, Ceau§escu’s complete contempt both for this and for any other significant form of liberalization became plainer to all. Not least, the neo-Stalinist dictator gravely underestimated his unpopularity among Romanians themselves. As communist authority rapidly weakened throughout eastern Europe in the opening phase of the REVOLUTIONS OF 1989-91, Ceau§escu was clearly ill-prepared for the mass rising that caused his overthrow and, swiftly thereafter, his summary execution on December 25, 1989.
Romania’s transition to “post-communism” proved particularly difficult. The leading figure of the new era was Ion Iliescu (president, 1990-6, 2000-4), a former Party stalwart subsequently rebranded as a Social Democrat. Political opponents were still roughly treated amidst charges and counter-charges of grave corruption, and the rights of ethnic minorities (most notably Magyars and gypsies) continued to be regularly violated. Nonetheless, there was also evidence of the country’s improving capacity to effect democratic and peaceful shifts of power. By the early twenty-first century the increasingly privatized economy of Romania (with a current population of around 22 million) remained in a fragile and unstable condition. Involvement in the processes of EUROPEAN INTEGRATION was also progressing more slowly than was generally the case with former satellites of the USSR. However, having already been admitted to NATO in 2004, Romania succeeded in achieving membership of the European Union three years later.
Romanov dynasty (see under Russia; and, in chronological order, Catherine ii, paul i, Alexander
I, NICHOLAS I, ALEXANDER II, ALEXANDER III, NICHOLAS Il) romanticism A movement in philosophy, politics, literature, and the arts that was particularly important from the late eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth. It developed as a series of largely spontaneous expressions of a shared sensibility that had native roots in a large number of countries. Like the enlightenment, it was often concerned to question the habits of life and thought, society and government, that had become entrenched in ancien regime Europe. On the other hand, it firmly rejected the excessive rationalism to which the philosophes were so frequently prone. According to the romantics, there was more to nature than desiccating analysis alone could reveal. Thus they reveled in stressing differentiation rather than regularity, in evoking heart and soul, in exploring the transcendental and the unconscious, in responding to the promptings of passion and intuition, and in championing the revelatory qualities of the emotive and imaginative faculties. Among the most towering representatives were the literary polymaths Goethe and Pushkin. Others who strongly exemplified aspects of the romanticist spirit were Scott, Manzoni, Byron (see also philhellenism), Hugo, and Baudelaire amongst imaginative writers; Kant in philosophy, as well as Michelet and carlyle in historiography; the painters Goya, Friedrich, Turner, and Delacroix; and Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Chopin, Wagner, and Verdi from the sphere of musical composition. As for the politics of romanticism, these proved incapable of reduction to any single approach. in so far as the movement nurtured nostalgic yearnings for the past (and perhaps most strongly for the medieval epoch), it could become allied to reactionary conservatism. Yet, equally, its celebration of individualistic self-fulfillment could prove deeply influential in the emergence of liberalism. it was possible, for example, to describe the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 in terms of a blissful dawn (as Wordsworth, the quintessential English romantic poet, originally did), or, by contrast, to perceive it (especially after the terror) as the destructive rupture of an organic continuity with the past. Similarly, romanticism’s concern for diversity, whilst it might well encourage a cosmopolitan empathy towards other cultures, could also promote, especially in an era of rising nationalistic tensions (see nationalism), a far narrower arrogance about the unique worth of one’s own people. Thus, Herder as the embodiment of the former position and Fichte as the incarnation of the latter have equal entitlement to be counted amongst the German romantics. in eastern Europe especially, the movement became strongly associated with populism. Moreover, even the socialist thought (see socialism; utopian socialism) of the earlier nineteenth century, despite its primary debt to rationalistic models, owed something to the romanticist aspiration to create, or indeed re-create, a sense of organic wholeness, harmony, and belonging. Romanticism in the arena ofpublic affairs reached its high-point (and most clearly its liberal apogee) amidst the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848-9, in which such representative figures as lamartine, mickiewicz, and MAZZINI became embroiled. Thereafter the romantic sensibility, though certainly surviving into the later-nineteenth century, lost ground to the cult of POSITIVISM in social science and philosophy, and to the related growth of realism and naturalism across the literary and artistic domains.
Rome, Treaties of Agreements central to the development of European integration. They were signed by the six on March 25,1957 and came into operation on January 1, 1958. Largely the outcome of the MESSINA conference, the two Rome treaties established euratom (the European Atomic Energy commission) and the much more important European Economic community (EEc). These bodies henceforth formed, together with the European coal and steel community (Ecsc) launched in 1952, what became known as the European Community (EC). Under the EEc treaty, the signatories agreed to abolish all custom duties and quotas among the six within a 12-year period. A shared external tariff would apply to states outside this arrangement. The six further agreed to cooperate on settlements concerning international trade, and the free movement ofworkers, capital, and products within the community’s overall borders. They also looked ahead to devising a common agricultural policy (CAP). Collectively these arrangements were soon called “the Common Market.” To oversee the implementation of the EEc treaty, the six established a series of bodies which largely mirrored those already created by the Ecsc, and which became fused together through the so-called Merger Treaty of 1965. There were four key institutions: the Commission, an executive body entrusted with initiating legislation; the Council of Ministers, which possessed decision-making powers on all Community matters; the European court[1] of Justice, which ruled on Community as distinct from national law; and the Assembly of the European Communities, which eventually became the European Parliament. Each body was to be manned by officials and representatives from all of the Six. The treaty also cited improved living standards for workers, a shared transport policy, the expansion of industries, the provision of aid to the developing world, and the promotion of international “peace and liberty.” It envisaged, moreover, “an ever closer union” of European peoples, and indeed specified the mechanisms for assessing further membership bids. By the early 1960s the EEC had constructed the crucial platform for future integration, though a substantially unified internal market would have to await the
SINGLE EUROPEAN ACT and the MAASTRICHT TREATY
Operative from 1987 and 1993 respectively.
Rome Statute Foundation document of the International Criminal Court (ICC) finalized in July 1998 at a diplomatic conference organized by the UNITED NATIONS. Formation of such a permanent tribunal had been one of the longer-term aspirations voiced by some planners of the NUREMBERG TRIALS. However, little further progress was possible during the COLD WAR decades. Circumstances changed in the early 1990s, not least because of well-publicized atrocities amidst civil war in former YUGOSLAVIA, and in Rwanda too. To deal with these specific situations the UN improvised in 1993-4 two ad hoc international criminal tribunals (see Hague tribunals). Against that background, new impetus was given to the case for locating a more permanent body at The Hague. The resulting ICC was inaugurated in 2002, after 60 state-ratifications of its Rome Statute. The Court’s subsequent development proved increasingly impressive, despite being badly handicapped until early 2009 by hostility from the administration of US President George W. Bush.
Rommel, Erwin (1891-1944), German general whose tactical shrewdness in world war ii was widely recognized by both sides. After advising on the militaristic training ofthe HITLER YOUTH, Rommel became in 1937 the chief of the Fuhrer’s security unit. In 1940 he participated in the invasion of France, and took command of the Afrika Korps the following year. He was promoted to Field Marshal in mid-1942, at the height of his success in Egypt against the British. Thereafter his desert campaign faltered, and HITLER recalled him to Germany in March 1943. Having prepared the Nazi takeover of northern Italy, Rommel was then transferred to organize the Atlantic coastal defenses. Shortly after the NORMANDY LANDINGS in 1944, he was severely wounded. Having become increasingly convinced of Germany’s inability to win the war, Rommel showed sympathy towards the JULY PLOT. When this failed, he was betrayed and given the choice between suicide and trial for treason. By settling secretly for the former, he was able to protect his family and receive a state funeral.
Roon, Albrecht Theodor Emil, Graf von (180379), soldier, Minister of War (1859-73), and Field Marshal (1873-9) who was responsible, with MOLTKE, for military reform in PRUSSIA. Born near Kolberg in Pomerania, Roon followed his father into the army. In 1858, having warned that Prussian forces were inadequate for the tasks they faced, he was appointed by the regent (the future WILLIAM i) to head a commission of investigation. As minister of war he then implemented, with BiSMARCK’s support, a series of changes that created a large long-service conscript army with the Land-wehr (militia) as a reliable reserve. Thus he helped forge the instrument that brought victory in the
AUSTRO-PRUSSIAN and FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WARS.
Rothschild family (see under banking)
Ruhr occupation Occupation of German industrial area on the Ruhr between 1923 and 1925.When Germany defaulted on reparations in 1923, the VERSAILLES TREATY of 1919 was invoked to justify this response. French and Belgian troops moved into the Ruhr region to exact payment by force. For the weimar republic, this was a sign that Paris was determined on the break-up of Germany, a fear heightened by French support of Rhineland separatists. In truth, France had no major designs on German territory, but was driven by financial concerns and a desire to show its determination to uphold the Versailles terms fully. The passive resistance advocated by Berlin crumbled in the face of military intervention, and Germany suffered severe inflation and constitutional crisis. This prompted the dawes plan of 1924 which regularized future payments and encouraged a Franco-Belgian withdrawal in 1925. Most historians agree, however, that the occupation was a mistake. The same outcome could have been reached by diplomacy; the expedition exposed the weakness of the franc; international goodwill towards Paris was lost, especially on the part of the USA; and Britain became convinced that France was intent on preventing even a prudent measure of German postwar recovery. Within the Weimar Republic itself, the event hardened criticisms of the regime, strengthening the far right in particular.
Rural society Towards the close of the eighteenth century at least four-fifths of Europeans lived in the countryside and generally subsisted upon income related to work on the land. Since then, however, the proportion thus constituting “rural society” has been in constant decline. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this whole agrarian-based sector was exposed to major forces of change. These included growth in overall population, rising urbanization and industrialization, improvements in communications, new technical developments, and more intense foreign and overseas competition. However, their impact was mediated by a range offurther factors, among which the size of peasant landholdings, the security and nature of tenure, and conditions of access to markets constituted some of the most significant. This meant that change, while affecting the whole of rural Europe, proved quite variable in the nature and pace of its operation.
By the end of the Ancien Regime three main zones ofagricultural organization and rural social structure (see also class) were already broadly discernible. The first covered Britain, most of the Low Countries, and parts of northern Italy. There the term “peasant” was wholly inadequate to describe the variety of groupings involved. They ranged from landless day laborers (a majority), through small cottagers and subsistence farmers, to the surplus producers. This last category included smallholders able to feed themselves and their families in normal years but vulnerable to intermittent harvest failure, prosperous yeomen, large tenants (generally with secure leases), and landowning farmers. Although the rural poor were plentiful in this region, there was a core of wealthy individuals committed to agricultural improvement and large-scale commercial profit. The second zone comprised most of the rest of western Europe, and was typified by France. Across this region too rural society contained a wide range of types. But, although there were prosperous farmers (e. g. the wheat producers of the Beauce and the Beauvais), the region tended to be dominated by smallholding subsistence producers. After the french revolution of 1789 had abolished seigneurialism at home via the august DECREES, the application of these was eventually extended to foreign areas (especially Rhenish Germany and Belgium) occupied during the
FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS and NAPOLEONIC WARS.
The owner-occupier was liberated from dues, though the tenant farmer often found that the landlord raised his rent when the dues ceased to be paid, and in this respect it can be argued that the Revolution preserved the smallholder a little longer. The final zone ranged eastwards beyond the river Elbe. Here there was much less variety within rural society, which was dominated by large estates owned by nobles and farmed by serf labor (see aristocracy; serfdom).
The early nineteenth century was a difficult time for the majority of rural inhabitants. The rising prices of agricultural products since the mid-eighteenth century had reinforced the longstanding movement in western Europe towards the enclosure of common lands, a practice which generally worked against the interests of smallholders. Such producers were also hit especially hard by the slump that followed the ending of the Napoleonic Wars and precipitated resistance to LAISSEZ-FAIRE policies. Many poorer families survived only because they combined laboring on the land with work in the industrial processes - especially textile manufacture - which were located in the countryside, although production in this sector of the rural economy also fell. However, the mid-nineteenth century saw a return to relative prosperity in agriculture. The rising population, and especially growing urban demand, brought higher food prices (though the trend with respect to wheat went in an opposite direction in England). output increased quite markedly. Greater use of root crops allowed the exploitation of hitherto marginal areas; crop rotation avoided the need to leave fields fallow; the importation of guano from Peru and of nitrates and phosphates from Chile in the 1840s, together with the introduction of manmade fertilizers, heightened production; and so too did gradual improvements to mechanization. Additionally, there was a trend towards increased specialization, accentuating regional differences. Thus wine production became a specialty of the French Midi and of parts of Italy; Sicily and Spain became major grain producers; the demand for meat products stimulated the rearing of cattle in Britain and pigs in Denmark; while in northern Europe crops such as sugar-beet, rape, and hops were cultivated for industrial use. Higher output, coupled with improvements to communications (especially railways which permitted the transportation of bulk products from areas of plenty to those of dearth), brought an end to the generalized subsistence crises which had routinely afflicted Ancien Regime Europe: that of 1816-17 was probably the last. The drive towards more commercial farming, characteristic of western Europe, also played a part in the ending of serfdom farther east. However, not all elements within rural society benefited equally from higher agricultural prices and output. In western Europe especially, those best placed to exploit market opportunities were the larger surplus producers; since subsistence farmers and laborers fared less well, the result was an increased stratification of rural society as the gap between rich and poor widened. In the case of eastern Europe, the abolition of serfdom proved to be a similarly mixed blessing. The typical Prussian peasant gained a farm only one-half or two-thirds the size of his former holding, and, if disaster struck, he was likely to have forfeited the protection and assistance of his lord (see junkers). The new dispensation might also have deprived him of previous grazing rights and of access to cheap fuel from woodland. Former serfs in Hungary and the Austrian parts of the habsburg empire, emancipated after the revolutions of 1848-9, were constrained to compensate their ex-masters for lost labor services. Like their counterparts in Prussia, many of the emancipated serfs found their situation increasingly unsustainable and, if once forced to sell up, they then swelled the ranks of the low-paid day laborers. In Russia too, serfs did not gain hugely from the liberation edict of 1861.
This was partly because of the extent to which they remained effectively under the thumb of their previous owners, some of whom did try to work their estates more efficiently on the Prussian model even while others continued profligately to sell off land. More significantly, however, the peasants themselves had little inclination or opportunity to farm in a commercial manner; and they frequently exchanged control by lords for control by the mir, which prevented mobility and sustained outmoded methods of production.
If the middle decades of the nineteenth century were years of prosperity for some elements of rural society, the first of the great depressions between 1873 and 1896 witnessed a generalized crisis for the agricultural sector. This was challenged by the importation of cheaper foodstuffs from North and south America, as well as Australia - made feasible by the development of railways, steamships, refrigeration, and canning technology. one response was to modernize European production via rural cooperatives, as formed in Franche-Comte, the Netherlands, Denmark, and parts of Germany. However, this option was not open to all, and for many the alternative was migration. This was not a new phenomenon. seasonal displacement as the poor travelled in search of work was a longstanding characteristic of rural society, but increasingly they made a one-way journey to the towns in search of work, or charity, or the possibility of eking out a living from crime and prostitution. Emigration overseas also gathered pace, with 28 million Europeans leaving between 1871 and 1891 compared to 1.5 million between 1800 and 1845 (though up to one-quarter may have returned). These were flows that ceased only with WORLD WAR I. Meanwhile, attempts at mobilizing the discontented rural poor into political movements, especially socialism, met with little success, as evidenced by the failure of populism in Russia and of anarchism’s efforts to recruit among the landless laborers of the Po valley and of western Andalusia in the late nineteenth century. In contrast, however, the 1920s and 1930s would witness the emergence of some peasant parties (e. g. the Croatian one) that offered more fertile potential for political cultivation within the context of FASCISM or proto-fascism.
Although the changes affecting rural society in the nineteenth century were undoubtedly significant, those of the twentieth century would prove altogether more momentous. In Russia, many descendants of the emancipated serfs flocked to the towns in the wake of the stolypin reforms of 1906-7. After the Russian revolutions OF 1917, LENIN hoped that those who had still remained in the countryside tending their privately-owned plots would now modernize. As that prospect faded, stalin embarked upon agrarian collectivization as an allegedly essential complement to accelerated industrialization. This proved disastrous to the rural economy of the SOVIET UNION, even if it also added around 20 million displaced peasants to the urban labor force during the 1930s. After world war ii and the spread of communism, the new regimes in eastern Europe were eventually required to adopt much the same approach. At first, large estates were sequestrated and handed over to peasants, in the hope that this might secure the loyalty of those who had recently proved so susceptible to the blandishments of nationalism and fascism and who might otherwise seek now to revive rightwing aspirations. whole classes of landed gentry and large farmers thus disappeared in poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and East Prussia. However, collectivization of agriculture followed within a few years, and those who tried to resist it faced arrest, deportation, or financial coercion. By the 1960s, except for the cases of Yugoslavia and of Poland (where collectivized production was abandoned under gomulka), most farmland was no longer under private ownership. The rapid industrialization and urbanization implied by the managed economy led to a sharp decline in the proportion of the population living and working in the countryside throughout eastern Europe, apart from Albania. Even the post-communist period, following the revolutions of 1989-91, has witnessed only a partial reinstatement of traditional “peasant” landholding.
In twentieth-century western Europe the proportion ofrural population also declined, though for largely different reasons. There the agrarian community was already significantly smaller than its eastern equivalent by 1900. At that point, the estimated numbers of those engaged in agriculture amounted perhaps to barely one-tenth of overall population in Britain, to between a quarter and a third in Belgium and the Netherlands, and to between a third and a half in France, ireland, and Scandinavia: all of this stood in contrast to around four-fifths in Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The scale of the agrarian workforce in western Europe was then further reduced due to falling agricultural prices from 1925 onward, and because of the related introduction of more intensive mechanization. Many small family farms were proving to be uneconomic by the 1950s. Although British production remained dominated by medium-to-large commercial operators, around 40 percent of farming units in France and 64 percent in Italy were judged to be already non-viable at the start of that decade. The new and better-paid employment opportunities that were opening up in towns and cities, first within industry and subsequently across a rapidly-enlarging “service” sector, further stimulated flight from the land. Anxieties about the maintenance of a satisfactory urban-rural balance and of traditional popular culture in the countryside contributed to the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s. They also led to protective legislation, such as the West German Agricultural Law (1955) and the French Loi d’Orientation (1960). Such concerns were similarly reflected in the COMMON AGRICULTURAL POLICY (cap) operative from the early 1960s across the European Community (see also European integration), which sought to protect farmers by price subsidies and import tariffs.
Costly though such initiatives were to the taxpayer, they failed to halt the retreat from the land. For instance, France’s 4 million independent farmers in 1945 had been reduced to only 1.5 million at the start of the 1980s. Thus the CAP was substantially revised in 2003. As the demographic and economic significance of the countryside has lessened, so too has general awareness of the realities of agriculture and stock-rearing. For example, regular contact with farm animals, which even at the start of the twentieth century was still a routine part of everyday life for most Europeans, has now dwindled. Yet there has also been a countervailing insistence on the wholesomeness of rural life, evidenced by irenic proposals echoing earlier calls for “garden cities” where each inhabitant would enjoy the benefits of direct contact with the soil, in response to the rampant industrial urbanization that had allegedly destroyed previous forms of sociability. By the opening of the twenty-first century a new relationship between town and country was rapidly forming. The wider ownership of motor cars, telephones, televisions, satellite dishes, and internet connections had brought urban lifestyles to those living in the countryside. Increasing numbers of rural inhabitants were commuting to earn their living in towns, or moving from their “village” to work in one of the greenfield sites colonized by private industry, or running enterprises and services simply from their home-based and electronically-equipped “cottage” offices. Thus it was even becoming questionable whether, at least in the most densely populated regions of western Europe, a distinctly rural society now survived in any traditional sense at all.
Russia The most extensive and populous European country, with vast territories also extending eastwards beyond the Ural mountains to the Pacific seaboard of northern Asia. Its modern history contains three main phases. The first covers a continuation of tsarist rule (as initially established by the Romanov dynasty in 1613) down to the Russian revolutions of 1917; the second encompasses the communist era (which is treated chiefly via a separate entry on the soviet union); and the third relates to the post-communist development of the so-called Russian Federation over the years since 1991.
By the late eighteenth century the Romanov domains, originally based on the expansion ofthe principality of Muscovy, formed a multi-national but slav-dominated empire ranging from the Baltic to the Pacific. Its mode of rule from St Petersburg was essentially autocratic, backed by a regular standing army as well as a privileged nobility (see also absolutism; aristocracy). Further support stemmed from the orthodox Church (see orthodox Christianity), with its subservience to state authority. Under Catherine ii (r.1762-96) Romanov gains in Europe included territory newly won from the ottomans (see russo-turkish wars), as well as the lion’s share of dissolved Poland. During the tsardom of her son PAUL I (r.1796-1801) Russia participated briefly in the Second Coalition against revolutionary France (see french revolutionary wars; NAPOLEONIC wars). From 1805 to 1807 Alexander i (r.1801-25) resumed this challenge in the context of the Third and Fourth Coalitions, but after French successes at the battles of austerlitz and
Friedland he settled in the Treaties of tilsit for a compromise peace. This required Russian participation in NAPOLEON I’s so-called continental system. It was Alexander’s eventual withdrawal from this that triggered Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia, launched and repulsed in 1812 (see Moscow, retreat from). Thereafter the tsarist regime was fully involved in the sixth Coalition whose victory at LEIPZIG in October 1813 prepared the way for the final stages of Napoleon’s downfall. Alexander’s attendance at the Vienna congress of 1814-15 enabled him to urge the case for a holy alliance; more importantly, his presence also helped to confirm Russia’s status as the leading continental power alongside the similarly conservative habs-burg empire.
Reactionary autocracy prevailed during the rest of Alexander’s reign and throughout that of his successor, Nicholas i (r.1825-55). The latterbegan by crushing the Decembrist conspiracy against his succession, and the same ruthlessness marked his response to the Polish revolt of 1830-1 (see also revolutions OF 1830-2). The policy of suppressing disruptive nationalism was again apparent when, towards the end of the European revolutions of 1848-9 which did not carry into Russia itself, tsarist forces assisted Austria in quelling the Magyar rebellion. Altogether less successful was Nicholas’s decision of 1853 to challenge the ottoman sultanate’s treatment of its orthodox subjects. This became the immediate cause of the Crimean war, during which he was succeeded by his son, ALEXANDER II (r.1855-81). Russia’s military failure in the face of Anglo-French intervention left the new tsar little choice other than to sue for peace on unfavorable terms. The end of that conflict, which had starkly exposed the administrative and technological backwardness of the Romanov regime, became Alexander’s cue for the introduction of a reformist program. its centerpiece was the emancipation statute of March 3, 1861, which sought to remove from the still overwhelmingly rural society of Russia the practices of serfdom that had been fortified there in the eighteenth century even while being progressively abandoned further west. This reform nonetheless left the peasantry over-burdened by redemption dues. Alexander’s modernizing efforts also extended, with varying success, to the military, legal, and fiscal systems and to the reorganization of district government (see zemstva). Yet most of the reformist enthusiasm of the “tsar liberator” failed to outlast the 1860s, during which he suppressed a further Polish insurrection and was soon imposing RUSSIFICATION across his multi-national empire. Within the intelligentsia, however, the earlier concessions had intensified ongoing debates about the best strategy for further change. Here Westernizers confronted Slavophiles. The latter placed their reliance not on imported models but on native strengths springing from the social solidarity attributed to the traditions of the peasant commune and the Orthodox faith. This emphasis was then translated increasingly into POPULISM, and sometimes even into the endorsement of TERRORISM. Alexander’s retreat into reaction made him the target of assassination attempts, one of which eventually dispatched him in 1881.
Under his son, Alexander iii (r.1881-94), policies of repression and Russification became still more emphatic, as did xenophobic pogroms associated with official antisemitism. Despite the frustration that Russia had previously encountered at the 1878 Berlin congress, the new tsar also continued the efforts to support the Slavic peoples of the BALKANS against Ottoman rule (see also panslavism). This strained the three emperors’ league, which Alexander III had inherited from his father as a diplomatic link with both Austria and the new GERMAN EMPIRE. By the end of his reign he had replaced it with the franco-russian alliance. This also encouraged Parisian bankers to supply the tsarist empire with sorely-needed foreign investment, since, in the sphere of industrialization if hardly elsewhere, Alexander had become an enthusiast for modernity. As finance minister from 1892 to 1903, witte served both him and his successor Nicholas ii (r.1894-1917) in a state-directed campaign to underpin Russian power with heavy industry, and with such projects as the Trans-Siberian Railway. Although by the turn of the century four-fifths of the empire’s overall population of some 125 million was still classed as peasantry, this industrial progress was also hastening large-scale urbanization focused especially on St Petersburg, Moscow, and the regions around Tula and Rostov. These processes (which by 1914 would make Russia the world’s fifth largest industrial producer) gave enhanced organizational opportunities to dissidents bent upon strengthening proletarian socialism, and - as things turned out - particularly to those inspired by local adaptations of the radical communism originally formulated in a more western context by MARX and engels.
War and revolution dominated the final phase of the tsarist era. The disastrous russo-japanese WAR of 1904-5 brought defeat on land, and soon at sea as well. While in progress, it also triggered the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905. Though this failed to oust Nicholas, he was forced to concede the introduction of the duma. Yet this was allowed to develop little real authority even under the premiership of stolypin, who held such a parliamentary body largely in contempt. His own ministerial efforts at agrarian reform were abruptly terminated by assassination in 1911. Meanwhile, tsarist foreign policy had become reliant on broadening the Franco-Russian link so as to develop, from 1907, a triple entente that involved Britain too. Within the increasingly unstable Balkan context, Nicholas’s priority was to protect the interests of Serbia and the southern Slavs against not only Turkey but Austria and Germany as well. Following the Balkan wars of 1912-13 and the JULY CRISIS of 1914, this orientation brought Russia into world war i as an enemy of the so-called CENTRAL POWERS. The victories that might have eased the chronic ills of political stagnation and social discontent were not forthcoming. Particularly after Nicholas himself assumed direct supreme command over his forces in 1915, a series of defeats brought his personal authority into ever greater peril. In March 1917 the tsar was forced to abdicate, and in November, after seven months of revolutionary confusion, KERENSKY’s Provisional Government was overthrown by LENIN. Under the slogan “All power to the SOVIETS,” his regime sought rapidly to consolidate communist hegemony in its bolshevik form, and to extricate Russia from the war (see also brest-litovsk).
During the seventy years or so of Soviet rule (which began with the Russian civil war of 1917-21), loyalty to class rather than attachment to nationhood officially prevailed. But for Russians the reality was more complex, in a system that had inherited most of the tsarist imperial territory and where they themselves were numerically so predominant over other ethnic groupings. Not even the much-vaunted federalism of the constitution that formally created the
Soviet Union (otherwise known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR) at the end of 1922 could redress such imbalance of influence. Nor did transfer of the central government to Moscow serve other than to reinforce a distinctive Russian hegemony. Even though Lenin was soon succeeded by the Georgian-born stalin, the latter’s three decades of brutal Soviet dictatorship witnessed no more concessions to the other domestic nationalities than those that ultimately served the Muscovite Kremlin’s own centralizing agenda. Between 1941 and 1945 the conflict with Nazi Germany was often called in Soviet propaganda the “Great Patriotic War,” not least with a view to mitigating huge suffering by appeals to recall proudly the historic Russian deeds of 1812. Moreover, once eventual victory in world WAR II gave the USSR the opportunity to enlarge its territory and to create a broader “satellite” bloc across much of eastern Europe, the geopolitical outcome resembled in many ways the aspirations of later-nineteenth-century Russian Pan-Slavism.
When the European revolutions of 1989-91 not only challenged the communist order and reversed the expansionism of the 1940s but even dissolved the structures of the Soviet Union too, a state of Russia (itself still internally federated) survived into the new era. The successor government took over from the USSR a permanent seat on the Security Council of the united nations, and headed the formation of a loosely-knit commonwealth OF INDEPENDENT STATES that covered most of the old imperial territories. However, the newly-liberated BALTIC STATES refused to join this CIS; and, even within it, such countries as Ukraine and BELARUS could now negotiate with Moscow as internationally-recognized sovereign entities. There would also be continuing problems with CHECHNYA on the European side of the Caucasus, as well as with seceded Georgia beyond. The difficulties that Russia itself faced both in domestic and in foreign policy during the first decade of transition to post-communist circumstances can be traced by reference to the career of yeltsin, marked by an increasingly eccentric conduct of affairs that ended at the turn of the millennium. He was succeeded by putin whose practice of “directed democracy,” whether as president or prime minister, gave him a genuinely popular base upon which to develop more consistent policies of national recovery. By 2010 the Russian
Federation still contained a population of more than 140 million. It also continued to possess a formidable nuclear arsenal, as well as to exercise sovereignty over a huge expanse of Eurasian territory (comprising more than one-eighth of the global land surface) whose resources of scarce minerals, petroleum, and natural gas remained as yet under-explored. Thus, for all its deep-seated social and political problems, it had endured into the early twenty-first century as a major force in world affairs.
Russian Civil War (1917-21). A multi-sided conflict in which, following the Russian revolutions OF 1917, the BOLSHEVIKS confronted their many enemies. The latter included dispossessed elements ofthe upper and middle classes; political opponents in the shape of the Mensheviks and the SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARY PARTY; national minorities who, with the break-up of the Russian empire, demanded independence; certain Allied military contingents (from France, Britain, Japan, and the USA), together with some German and Czech ones; and, most crucially, the White forces still battling for the tsarist cause. The chaos was exacerbated by the general breakdown of law and order and by the actions of peasants who seized lands they believed to be rightly theirs. The Civil War was fought on several fronts: in the south and the Caucasus where the Cossacks under General Krasnov, backed by the Germans, declared an independent state; in the Ukraine where, in the aftermath of brest-litovsk, the Germans installed a puppet regime; in the Baltic where Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland sought independence; and in Siberia where the Whites enlisted the support of Czech prisoners of war. The course of the fighting had three main phases. The first lasted from the Bolshevik takeover in late 1917, when the forces of counter-revolution began to coalesce, to the close of world war i when the Allies intervened particularly with respect to matters of supply. it was during the second period (November 1918-November 1919) that the conflict became most intense, with the Whites nearly seizing Petrograd and other key cities. The final phase (November 1919-March 1921) saw the Bolsheviks emerging supreme. on one level, they were able to clamp down on their many internal enemies (e. g. by crushing the kronstadt rising). on another, they extracted themselves from the campaigns against Poles (see russo-polish war) and Finns. Though independence was granted to the BALTIC STATES, Georgia and the Ukraine were reclaimed. Most critically, the Whites were overcome. Bolshevik victory is usually credited to TROTSKY’s reorganization of the red army, yet other factors also counted. The Bolsheviks always possessed greater resources of manpower than their opponents; they also commanded the cities and railways, and resorted to the ruthless policies of war communism. The Whites had to cope with exposed supply lines, were overly reliant on foreign support, and suffered more than the Reds from internal divisions and their unpopularity with many of Russia’s ethnic minorities (e. g. among victims of the white TERROR in the Ukraine). It is thought that, overall, the fighting and the war-related famine and disease cost the lives of between 7 and 10 million people. Though the Bolsheviks emerged victorious, the civil war exposed the brutality at the heart of lenin’s regime.
Russian Revolution of 1905 This upheaval was prompted principally by two factors. The first was the RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR of 1904-5 which severely humiliated the tsarist regime. The second was social unrest not only among the peasantry but also in the rapidly growing industrial workforce, especially those elements concentrated in St Petersburg. They toiled in appalling conditions and increasingly resorted to illegal strike action. in January 1905 some 100,000 workers, led by Father Gapon, marched through the capital to the Winter Palace with a petition outlining a series of demands. These included improved salaries, better living conditions, a reduction in the working day, an end to the war, and the introduction of universal male suffrage. Some protestors had taken their families with them in the mistaken belief that their demands would be taken seriously. in the event, troops panicked, opened fire, and killed up to a thousand demonstrators, including many women and children. The violence of this “Bloody Sunday” produced a rash of strikes across Russia. Several areas saw the establishment of SOVIETS, as attempts at local democracy led by BOLSHEVIKS, MENSHEVIKS, and members of the socialist REVOLUTIONARY PARTY. In June sailors from the battleship Potemkin mutinied at Odessa, although ultimately the military remained loyal to the tsar (a loyalty not repeated in the Russian REVOLUTIONS OF 1917). In the course of 1905 NICHOLAS II agreed minor concessions. However, when faced in the autumn by a general strike, he was prompted to issue the October manifesto promising a wider range of political freedoms, most notably the inauguration of a parliamentary DUMA. The manifesto took some of the sting out of the protests, assuaging the moderate kadets; it also bought time to enable the forces of counterrevolution to be marshaled. The following year saw widespread reprisals against the revolutionaries. Although the tsar quickly reneged on many of his earlier concessions, it has been argued that the Revolution of 1905 placed Russia on a potentially reformist path that was unfortunately destroyed by the outbreak of World War I. Others consider that 1905, and its aftermath, revealed the unwillingness of the tsarist autocracy to sustain fundamental changes, thus rendering inevitable a further revolutionary challenge to its authority.
Russian Revolutions of 1917 Two uprisings that achieved, first, the overthrow of tsarist rule and, second, the establishment by lenin of a bolshevik regime committed to communism. They are usually identified as the February and October Revolutions, due to their timing within the “old style” Julian calendar that was abandoned early in 1918 when Russia “advanced” its dates by a fortnight to align with the “new style” Gregorian one generally used elsewhere (and in the present text). According to the orthodoxy that developed in the soviet union, these revolutions had followed the historical determinism articulated by marx and had been the expression of the popular will. For their part, western commentators generally acknowledged the spontaneous character of the earlier uprising while viewing the Bolshevik takeover as a cynical piece of factional opportunism. Even before the dissolution of the USSR, these arguments - long reinforced by the ideological confrontations of the cold war - had begun to lose something of their bitterness. However, they have retained much of their complexity, as the focus has shifted from high politics to an investigation of popular attitudes on the ground where there prevailed a genuine revolutionary frame of mind on the part of both the workers and the peasantry, a mood that existed largely independently of the main political parties.
The long-term origins of these events clearly relate to the particular political, economic, and social circumstances of Russia under Romanov rule. Though less backward than sometimes portrayed, the country possessed an industrial and agricultural base that was incapable of sustaining an ambitious foreign policy. Defeat in the Crimean war had prompted the reforms of Alexander ii, which were then accelerated by witte in the 1890s. Yet the speed of change proved insufficient, as illustrated by the russo-japanese war. This led to the unsuccessful Russian revolution of 1905, and to a turbulent period of half-hearted reform associated principally with stolypin. Between 1914 and 1917 world war i placed intolerable strains on tsarist infrastructures. Russia mobilized a far larger proportion of its population than did the other belligerents, which meant that huge numbers were exposed to the horrors of war. Military difficulties were compounded by a series of strategic blunders, many due to the supreme command actively assumed by Tsar Nicholas ii himself, as well as by shortages of equipment resulting from poor distribution rather than inefficient production. The home front faced its own share of problems characterized by a growing scarcity of foodstuffs and fuel, and a rampant inflation which negated any increase in earnings. Liberal opposition, chiefly the kadets and Octobrists gathered in the parliamentary duma, despaired at the general conduct of affairs which was dominated by petty squabbles, ministerial instability, and the interference of rasputin. By January 1917 plans were afoot to force Nicholas’s abdication, though these were not designed to provoke an insurrection. The more revolutionary elements - the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks and the social revolutionary party (the SRs) - eagerly watched events, while being poorly prepared for what was about to unfold.
On March 8,1917 riots broke out in Petrograd, and within 24 hours the crowd had swollen to around 100,000 and much of the city was on strike. it has since been speculated that, had the tsar been in the capital, a personal appeal might have calmed matters, yet his reputation and that of his family was by now at a low ebb. on March 10-11 his troops ignored orders to break up the demonstrations, and the Duma defied his attempts to dissolve it. Influenced by SR propaganda and disillusioned by the conduct of the war, peasant conscripts identified with the protestors. This was a key difference from 1905, when the army had remained predominantly loyal to the crown and had effectively scuppered that earlier insurrection. The Duma now proceeded to institute a Provisional Government headed by Prince Lvov, while the Bolsheviks reconvened the petro-grad SOVIET of workers’ deputies (abandoned since 1905). So emerged a dual authority that exacerbated the sense of crisis. This was heightened further when, on March 15, the tsar conceded his own abdication.
In sharing power with the petrograd soviet, the liberal-republican provisional Government was always at a disadvantage. First, it regarded itself as a stop-gap administration holding the fort until elections for a Constituent Assembly later that year. One counter-factual speculation suggests that, had those polls been brought forward to June, the Bolsheviks (then still a minority within the petrograd soviet) would have been outmaneuvered. There may be something to this argument, though it ignores the fact that both the SRs and the Mensheviks were already at loggerheads, especially over the conduct of the war, even while sharing a belief that they remained powerless to prevent a bourgeois revolution. Second, the Provisional Government was increasingly unpopular. After pledging the democratization of local government and the granting of civil liberties, it was unable to deliver on the social reforms for which the peasants in particular were clamoring. During the agonized debates on land reform they simply took matters into their own hands and appropriated noble estates. Third, the Provisional Government suffered from its continued involvement in the war. In June kerensky, the newly-appointed socialist minister of war, initiated a fresh offensive that proved a spectacular failure, causing 400,000 casualties and severe shortages on the home front. Fourth, the government was badly placed to defend itself. The hated tsarist police had been broken up in March, while the army, itself now full of Soviets, was wholly unreliable. The general expectation was that any successful coup would come from the right not the left, especially after Lenin (who had returned from exile in mid-April) failed in a putsch during the so-called “July Days” and was forced to flee to Finland. The anticipated conservative backlash came early in September when General kornilov was encouraged to seize Petrograd and disband its Soviet. Though his plot was foiled, the government (now under Kerensky’s premiership) took the fateful decision of distributing guns among the city’s workers. They now remained armed, as well as hungry and disaffected, while conservatives and liberals were ever more divided and disempowered.