Policies and Practices of Transition in Soviet Education from the Revolution to the End of Stalinism

Abstract

This essay introduces the major themes of the special issue by presenting the period between 1917 and 1953 as a time of intense yet ambiguous ‘Sovietization’ of education, a complicated era of turbulent sociohistorical ‘transition’ that cannot be reduced to massive political U‐turns and definitive shifts in educational policy. The changes that the emergent Soviet education underwent in the course of these decades were characterized by surprising overlaps and reversals across commonly accepted historical boundaries. The essay brings together and analyses the arguments put forward in the main articles of the collection, placing them in the context of the general historiography of this period.

Notes

¹ Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “The ‘Soft’ Line on Culture and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy, 1922–27.” Slavic Review 33 (1974): 267–87.

² Lewin, Moshe. “Society, State and Ideology during the first Five Year Plan.” In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–31, edited by S. Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978: 56.

³ Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: the revolution from above, 1928–1941. New York: Norton, 1990; Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: the Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: terror, propaganda, and dissent, 1934–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Hellbeck, Jochen. “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9.” In Stalinism: New Directions, edited by S. Fitzpatrick. New York: Routledge, 2000: 95.

⁴ Studies examining Stalinism as a ‘civilization’ or ‘way of life’ include Siegelbaum, L. and A. Sokolov. Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004; Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1995; Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

⁵ Larry Holmes's masterful study of a privileged Moscow school is one such attempt to focus attention on the intricate operations of ‘Stalinism’ on a day‐to‐day basis (Holmes, Larry E. Stalin's School: Moscow's Model School No. 25, 1931–1937. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).

⁶ Jochen Hellbeck's work has been pioneering in this regard, e.g. Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul.”

⁷ Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; Holmes, Larry E. The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse. Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991.

⁸ Cf. Holmes, Larry E. “Soviet Schools: Policy Pursues Practice, 1921–1928.” Slavic Review 48, no. 2 (1989): 234–54.

⁹ David Hoffmann argues that this ‘retreat’ was no less ideologized and radical than any of Stalin's other reforms, however (Hoffmann, D. Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

¹⁰ For more context on the nature of the Stalinist school, see Holmes, Stalin's School.

¹¹ ‘Magic tablecloth’ from Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 89; Petrone, K. Life has Become more Joyous Comrades! Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000; See also Holmes, Stalin's School, esp., 151–55, on genuine belief and pride in Stalinism and Stalinist education.

¹² For more on the role of education in achieving social mobility, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

¹³ Dunstan, John. Soviet Schooling in the Second World War. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997: 15.

¹⁴ The most detailed study of Stalinist teachers is Ewing, E. Thomas. The Teachers of Stalinism: Policy, Practice, and Power in Soviet Schools of the 1930s. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

¹⁵ Further proof of teachers' ‘preference for the customary’ and their willingness to protest against reform can be found in Holmes, Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 44 and passim.

¹⁶ For just some of the research on this particular era produced in the past 15 years see: Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse; Eklof, Ben, ed. School and Society in Tsarist and Soviet Russia. New York: Macmillan, 1993; Dunstan, Soviet Schooling in the Second World War, and Holmes, Stalin's School, as well as the more recent Krasovitskaia, T. Rossiiskoe obrazovanie mezhdu reformatorstvom i revoliutsionarizmom. Fevral’ 1917—1920 god. Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History, 2002; Balashov, E. Shkola v Rossiiskom obshchestve 1917–1927 gg. Stanovlenie ‘novogo cheloveka’. Saint‐Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003 and Ewing, The Teachers of Stalinism, which are reviewed in this issue.

¹⁷ Most obviously, it barely touches on the problems of higher education and vocational training, for example. On these see, for example, Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 and David‐Fox, Michael and György Péteri, eds. Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe. London: Bergin & Garvey, 2000.

¹⁸ The conference was generously funded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and the following institutions of Oxford University: Wolfson College, Worcester College, Modern History Faculty, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literatures, and the Management Committee for Research into Russia and Eastern Europe.