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A Level History Russia - Essay > Economy and Society > Flashcards

Flashcards in Economy and Society Deck (45)
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1
Q

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

A

6% between 1862 and 1878

2
Q

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

A

The Nobel Brothers, Ludwig Loop, and JJ Hughes

3
Q

How was foreign capital secured?

A

Through government bonds, tax exemptions and monopoly concessions

4
Q

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

A

He moved the railway to 69% national ownership

5
Q

What did Vyshnegradskii do as finance minister under Alexander III?

A

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

6
Q

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

A

It was put on the Gold Standard under Witte in 1897

7
Q

What happened during Witte’s Great Spurt?

A

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

8
Q

What were some shortcomings of the great spurt?

A

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

9
Q

What happened to Russian growth after the 1905 revolution?

A

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

10
Q

What happened to Russian industry during the First World War?

A

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%

11
Q

What did Lenin create to run industry?

A

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

12
Q

What happened during War Communism?

A

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

13
Q

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

A

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

14
Q

What happened under the NEP?

A

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

15
Q

What was a consequence of the Scissors Crisis?

A

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’

16
Q

How did Stalin attempt to achieve economic autarky?

A

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

17
Q

What were the figures under the Five Year Plans?

A

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

18
Q

How did Khrushchev diversify industry?

A

He added nuclear technology, but still stuck to Stalinist planning

19
Q

What did Alexander III create to help the peasants?

A

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

20
Q

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

A

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

21
Q

What was the Land Decree?

A

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

22
Q

What happened to the Kulaks under Stalin?

A

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

23
Q

How many farmers did Stalin put into Kolhozy?

A

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

24
Q

How did Khrushchev attempt to help the peasants?

A

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

25
Q

Why did the Virgin Lands Scheme fail?

A

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

26
Q

When was there dramatic population growth?

A

Between 1890 and 1917 and the interwar period

27
Q

What did the demographic change from across the period

A

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

28
Q

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

A

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

29
Q

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

A

2 million

30
Q

What did Alexander II do for education?

A

He increased the provision of primary, secondary and further education

31
Q

How did Alexander III restrict education?

A

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

32
Q

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

A

He achieved primary education for all students

33
Q

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

A

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

34
Q

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

A

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

35
Q

What did Khrushchev try to replace religion with?

A

The Moral Code

36
Q

What was Russian culture based around?

A

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

37
Q

What did Lenin create for the arts?

A

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

38
Q

How did Stalin attempt to create a cultural revolution?

A

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

39
Q

How much did railway increase under Reutern?

A

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

40
Q

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

A

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

41
Q

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

A

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

42
Q

What was the Decree on Workers’ Control?

A

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

43
Q

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

A

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

44
Q

How many nationalised economic entities were there by 1920?

A

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

45
Q

What were some successes of the Virgin Lands Scheme?

A

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