Russia’s Involuted Paths toward and within Educational Modernity

Abstract

The articles in this cluster explore the past and present trajectories of educational change in Russia from the 18th century to the present day. The authors focus on the multiple social actors, visions, forces, and changes that in combination brought about Russia’s modern educational realities. The emphasis in these contributions is put upon the often-decisive role of local, grassroots-level actors vis-à-vis the state and its central apparatuses in modernizing the schools.¹ We discuss the heterogeneity of modernizing projects, multi-directedness of their trajectories, and contradictory nature of their outcomes. This is why the title of our assemblage of articles refers to the involuted paths (plural) taken toward and within educational modernity. Intrinsic to our approach are comparative–historical and/or cross-national–perspectives that highlight both the distinctive nature of the Russia’s case and its similarities with developments elsewhere in the world.

Introduction

In speaking about Russia’s educational modernity in these terms we follow a school of thought that has rejected the monolithic and hegemonic notion of a universal, homogenizing Eurocentric modernization, an approach popular among some interpreters of modernity in the 1990s (e.g., Holquist, 1997, 2002 in David-Fox, 2016). Similarly, we reject the contrary view that the Russian-Soviet variant of modernity was either nonexistent (a failed modernity) or entirely different from and incompatible with the identifiable western pattern (e.g., see Giddens, 2013; Fitzpatrick, 1999; Getty, 2013 in David-Fox, 2016).² Instead we follow the view of “multiple modernities” formulated some time ago by Shmuel Eisenstadt (2002) and others.; the term denotes a multiplicity of modern projects informing social transformations within specific civilizational, cultural, and national contexts, carried out by diverse social actors and animated by distinct cultural programs. To be sure these projects reflexively develop vis-à-vis Western ideas and patterns of modernity, yet, the outcome is not a homogenizing Westernization, but variation and divergence. Furthermore, the multiplicity of actors and their cultural programs and the variability of local conditions together account for a plethora of historical paths or “roads” to modernity, to use the terminology of Gertrude Himmelfarb (2004). This idea of plural modernity models and paths, not one–the Western-liberal variant–negates the dualism of perceiving everything not conforming to this dominant pattern as pre-modern, non-modern, backward, failed and/or missing. Instead, this approach allows us to consider the case of Russia as a special historical type, both distinct and at the same time connected to other patterns of modernity.

In speaking of Russia in this way we must not lose sight of those core characteristics that are common to all modernity projects: the rejection of tradition; the development of new socio-cultural ideals, orientations, and norms largely associated with prioritizing subjectivity; and the establishment of new practices and institutional arrangements (Taylor, 1999; Kołakowski, 1990; Bayly, 2004; Taylor, 2009; Giddens, 2013; Bauman, 2013; Brague, 2018; and others). At the same time, we agree with those who suggest that modernity may be intertwined or “entangled” (Therborn, 2003), with elements of tradition, which itself constantly evolves or even may be “invented” (Hobsbawm, 2003[1983]). From this point of view, “rejecting tradition” may be a constant of modernizing, as enduring as “the clash between the ancient and the modern… [which] we will never get rid of it, as it expresses …. an essential characteristic of life” (Kołakowski, 1990, p. 4).

As such, modernity projects are seldom orderly, unified, or fully realized. They are instead likely to develop in steps and stages and are frequently accompanied by crises, deviations, retreats or, on the other hand, radical disjunctures as well as leaps forward. Thus, within one and the same geographic and civilizational setting, one can find competing modern actors and projects guided by diverse programs intertwined with elements of traditions serving as targets to be overcome. Thus, in the Russian case we talk about competing or sequential Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet, projects and historical movements within a general framework of modernity.³ It is admittedly a messy picture, but one reflecting historical actualities.

Scholars have long recognized educational modernity as a major driving force and manifestation of modernity as a whole (e.g., Best, 2020; Fagerlind & Saha, 1983; Fuller, 1991; Fuller & Rubinson, 1992; Meyer & Hannan, 1979; Müller et al., 1987; Tröhler, 2019; Tröhler et al., 2011; Tröhler & Lenz, 2015). As Wook Park (1980) put it long ago, the “high valuation of education was a sign of modernity itself” (p. 35). As with modernity in general, rejecting tradition and designing new institutions to better fit perceived modern needs have been guiding principles for transforming European schools since the sixteenth century.⁴ The new type of school which historically crystallized has certain characteristics in common: such schools are national, mass, public, compulsory, state-controlled, free and state-supported (at least, to an extent) educational institutions where students are taught by professionally trained teachers in a highly disciplined classroom, deploying a modern and segmented curriculum in the vernacular language, and using standardized textbooks. An important aspect of rejecting tradition was (at least partial) freedom from religious control and the promotion of children’s cognitive development (e.g., Arenas, 2007; Kamens, 2012; Lave, 1988; Rapple, 1988; Smith, 1992).

Historians of Russia would agree that the establishment of such modern (and even of the “ultra–modern”–that is, exclusively public, totally secular, and free on all levels) school system was fully accomplished in the Stalinist era (the 1930s). Yet the Russian model had its distinctive features and developed following its own distinctive paths. Russia’s educational modernity project was not an orderly one; it was carried out by diverse social actors and animated by competing cultural/educational programs and traditions. Hence, its path was involuted, involving breakthroughs, reversals, dead ends, and dramatic shifts in the overall trajectories of educational change. Finally, the project developed in stages; we consider it still ongoing and incomplete.

In order to examine Russian educational modernity within this framework the articles in this collection employ comparative historical and cross-national approaches. First, the very concept of modernity assumes a diachronic and, therefore comparative-historical dimension. Something can be considered modern only vis-à-vis something that is traditional, pre-modern, or, by the same logic, post-modern. Thus, exploring Russia’s paths to and within educational modernity requires a comparative historical examination of social and educational changes. Furthermore, articles in this collection demonstrate the reflexivity, or conscious self-awareness, of those who promoted Russian educational projects. Multiple actors from the 18th to the 21st century conceptualized and assessed outcomes of reforms vis-à-vis and thus, implicitly or explicitly, in comparison with early modern or contemporary European, Russian imperial, or lastly, Soviet educational projects. Therefore, historical comparison in the examination of Russian paths to modernity is complemented here by a cross-national comparative approach, one emphasizing the role of international cultural transfers, modeling, diffusion, and adaptation.⁵

From this perspective articles in this collection join a venerable research tradition in comparative education of examining educational modernity at the intersection of the local, national, trans-national, and global. In so doing we are better enabled to reveal the uniqueness of a particular case without losing site of the general patterns and regularities reflected in it. On the one hand, our essays are congruent with the long established view that the core characteristics of the modern school have proliferated around the globe and that nowadays the systems of public schools worldwide look remarkably similar (Benavot & Riddle, 1988; Boli et al., 1985; Meyer & Hannan, 1979). On the other hand, the case of Russia confirms the paradoxical, yet central principle in comparative research that there is no one single path to establishing such a system. Even such flagships of educational modernization as Prussia, France and England, developed their systems by a variety of routes (Cole, 1960; Müller, Ringer, & Simon, 1987). Since the late 1960s, volumes of studies in the comparative history and sociology of education globally have accumulated addressing the diversity of paths taken to modernize schools. (e.g., Kazamias, 1967; Rust, 1977; Masemann, & Welch, 1997). This line of inquiry has been continued in the 21st century (e.g., Butt & Gunter, 2007; Hefner & Zaman, 2007; Hyde, 2013; Kwiek & Kurkiewicz, 2012; Resende & Vieira, 2006; Sahlberg, 2011; Yonezawa et al., 2018; Zhao, 2011).

Last but not least, one of the emphases in our discussion of educational modernity in Russia is on the limits to social engineering. The articles tend to confirm the arguments made by James C. Scott in his landmark work, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Scott, 1998) by emphasizing the unpredictability nature as well as distortions that arrive in the course of implementing state-driven plans to transform society in an era of “high modernity”.

Contributions

The articles here cover the full sweep of three centuries. The contributors to this volume address a variety of historical cases and competing traditions in the history of the educational modernity project in Russia. They include reviewing the Russian variant of Enlightenment, which is traditionally considered a major factor of modernity (Marker); a comparative examination of the social history of school buildings in Europe Russia (Westberg); consideration of the roots and mechanisms of standardization of the rules of spelling in both Prussian and Russian schools (Levinson); the “lived experience” of schooling under Stalin (Holmes); the rise and fall of the educational democratization project of the perestroika era (Eklof); the bewildering persistence of a Stalinist- era narrative in textbooks on the history of medicine in use today (Vishlenkova and Zatravkin); the corporatization of higher education, and faculty perceptions of changing university temporality (Saburova), and, finally, examination and conceptualization of educational modernity projects in the context of social revolutions, including two such Russian upheavals (Lisovskaya and Karpov). The articles address the complexity and diversity of cultural programs as well as the driving forces, trajectories, and outcomes of modernizing Russian education over time. Hence the title of this volume “The involuted paths toward and within educational modernity in Russia.”

Gary Marker presents an overview of the evolution of the historiography of eighteenth-century Russian education, with specific emphasis on paradigms of secularization and recent movements toward possible paradigm shifts. He does so through three wide vectors, all cast more-or-less within the rubric of histoire croisée: (1) the place and historiographic understanding of the state as the prime institution builder; (2) the pace and consequences of standardization; and 3) the problem of reflexivity, or laying bare the assumptions and outlooks behind the scholarly narratives. Marker argues that the paradigm of secularization, while still valuable in many of its particulars, fails to explain many fundamental aspects of Russian education and educational reform in the eighteenth century, and thus needs revision. As has been true for much recent scholarship on early modern Europe, several Russianists–mostly but not exclusively younger scholars–have begun to cast their research in ways that implicitly break with or ignore long-standing templates. The autor suggests that these implicit revisions ought to be brought to the fore so as to situate early modern Russian education within the “big questions” emerging in our field.

Turning to the nineteenth century, Johannes Westberg argues for a renewed interest in cross-national examination of the social and economic history of the development of national school systems in Europe. He focuses upon the connection between the local, national and transnational in the history of building schoolhouses and investigates the “phenomena that cross and surpass national boundaries including borrowing, modelling, diffusion, transfer, reception and adaptation.” Acknowledging that the process of designing and building schools was affected by national policies and international knowledge transfer, the author shifts focus from models emphasizing policies and ideas formulated by statesmen to the historical realities of ordinary people in place. Westberg’s work is also representative of a recent move among scholars to utilize the material history of objects and artifacts, ranging from school desks, pens and blackboards as well as school buildings as a whole, to tease out the lived experience, political economy, social and cultural hierarchies embedded in their design, construction and deployment. It is at the same time entirely compatible with neo-institutionalism, which seeks to integrate the study of rules, regulations and decrees with “history from below” (Tröhler, 2019).

Kirill Levinson continues in the comparative vein by showing that strict rules of spelling and the norm of stigmatization of misspelling as a sign of miseducation originated in Prussia and were imported to Russia in the nineteenth century. He discusses similarities and differences in the processes of crystallization of these rules and norms in both countries, and the roles teachers played in the search to unify and “optimize” spelling (something taken up by the state only later). Levinson notes that the process of defining and enforcing spelling rules was functional for the formalization of social and educational control, including accountability, assessment, selection, and disciplining of students in the context of growing mass, universal, compulsory, and state-controlled national education systems. The article shows that the development and implementation of standardized vernacular language was both a sign and a vehicle of educational modernity at the turn of the century and further contributed to strengthening German and Russian nation-states in the decades leading up to World War I.

Ben Eklof examines the attempt at modernizing [via democratizatiion] the Soviet-type school in the perestroika era. He outlines the political aspirations of the progressive education movement in Imperial Russia and their influence upon perestroika-era discourse. In particular, Eklof explores the mindset of the brilliant and innovative historian-turned bureaucrat [Minister of Education, 1990–1992], Eduard Dneprov, as he sought to devise ways to transform and diversify the Soviet educational monolith. Eklof argues that Dneprov’s viewpoint on reforms—heavily influenced by his intimate knowledge of late 19th century Russian educational politics—paradoxically contributed to the failure of his own reform efforts. Even later in life, reflecting upon the mixed reception his transformative school policies encountered, he continued to see events exclusively in the ideological terms focused upon a state-society dichotomy, and largely overlooked embedded school traditions and practices—the “resilient classroom”. Interdisciplinary research on schools in recent decades indicates that they must be treated as “loosely-coupled” with multiple stakeholders–institutions capable of both enacting and contesting state forms.

Working from his decades of research in archives in provincial Kirov and Moscow, Larry Holmes offers a vibrant description of the lived experience of secondary school pupils in the Stalinist era as well as a brief comment upon continuity and change in the culture of the Soviet school after 1953. Without whitewashing this terrible era, he shows that pupils and teachers found multiple ways to get around an oppressively centralized system, and also that many children found joy and meaning in their years of schooling. Holmes contributes to a lively ongoing debate about the prevailing atmosphere in Soviet schools and challenges the more negative portrait provided by Catriona Kelly (2007). More than that, Holmes implicitly weighs in on a larger historiographic debate: was the Soviet experiment [like the path pursuit by Germany in the twentieth century] a radical departure from, or rather a variant of modernity? Holmes’s inclinations are clearly in favor of the latter perspective; his work also suggests how educational history can contribute to a better understanding of larger issues pertaining to state, society and culture in general.⁶

After finding an archive containing the minutes of a lengthy discussion of the manuscript of a textbook on the history of medicine (1948–1951), Elena Vishlenkova and Sergei Zatravkin reconstructed the substance of Stalinist era scholarly historical conventions concerning the country’s medical past. The authors of the proposed textbook were unable to develop an evidence-based and truthful master narrative for the history of education in medical schools that would also conform to party dictates of the time. As a result their proposed textbook was never published. This study reveals that the canon which emerged from those protracted deliberations has, despite never seeing the light of day as a textbook, has persisted to the present day. Textbooks currently used by Russian students to study the history of medicine continue to tell the same nationalistic, even exceptionalist story concocted in the Stalinist era, according to which Russia’s historical contribution to medical science outweighs that of all countries elsewhere. Such treatments continue to ignore the extraordinary rates of morbidity and mortality as well as the primitive quality of medical provision in the Stalinist era and beyond and contribute to a nostalgic and utopian view of that era among the medical community. If we are to treat “modernity” as “rendering contemporary” including the rationalization of administration and utilization of expertise, then the Stalinist-era textbook case and its legacy in the post-Soviet era speak to the possibilities for inertia and the autarchic nature of school policies, as well as to the heterogeneity of educational modernization, even within a given single country.

Tatiana Saburova examines the transformation of higher education in post-Soviet Russia by addressing such questions as how the pace of university life has been altered, how Russian professors gauge and evaluate the impact of the global process of converting universities into corporate entities, and how different generations of faculty in Russia perceive as well as try to adjust to a fast-changing academic climate. More specifically, this article focuses on the connection between notions of academic freedom and temporality, the perceived ability to exert control over one’s at the university. Drawing upon oral interviews with more than a hundred faculty members about their lives in the period from the late Soviet era to the last decade, Saburova draws a vivid picture of the changing subjective realm of professors in Russian universities, of their temporality and of the acceleration of life in academia, and compares these reflections to a similar discourse in the West. She portrays a rapidly changing, but at the same time very conservative academic environment. In doing so she depicts the fraught outcomes consequent to the establishment of a hybrid university model which combined the features of a market-oriented corporation and the Soviet bureaucratic monolith.

Elena Lisovskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov conclude our collection by comparative examination of attempts to build or transform school systems in the course of three revolutions, one French and two Russian. Their article applies a theoretical model of educational change in the context of revolutionary cycles. In this revised cyclical model, which the authors first applied to the Soviet experience fifteen years ago, educational change proceeds from innovative reforms launched amidst the social instability of the cycle’s radical stage, to the conservative, if not reactionary, recuperation of pre-revolutionary educational patterns as the socio-economic order is reconstructed. In their approach, Lisovskaya and Karpov draw upon a venerable tradition combining history and sociology on the trajectory of revolutions to uncover a predictable Thermidor in official educational policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In so doing the authors develop a concept of educational “mutations” to show the efforts of local schools to survive at the radical stage of this cycle. Approbated in the comparative case-studies of three revolutions, the predictive power of the model was further validated by Russia’s post-communist educational changes since 2005 as well. Here the authors update the original model by pointing out what the model could not predict: the neo-imperialist and revanchist political forces and desecularizing aspirations of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Acknowledgements

Ben Eklof’s contribution to this overview was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program and funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Eklof

Ben Eklof is professor emeritus of history at Indiana University and a senior research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. His publications have been on a wide range of topics in the history of late Imperial Russia, including education, the history of the peasantry, political reform and local governance. His most recent books, co-authored with Tatiana Saburova, are Druzhba, sem’ia i revoliutsiia: Nikolai Charushin i pokolenie narodnikov 1870-kh godov [2016] and a substantially revised English-language edition A Generation of Revolutionaries: Nikolai Charushin and Russian Populism from the Great Reforms to Perestroika [2017].

Elena Lisovskaya

Elena Lisovskaya (Ph.D. in Sociology, The Ohio State University) is Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. She teaches courses in Sociology of Education, Religion and Gender, Comparative Sociology, and Methods of Social Research, including Text Analysis. Lisovskaya’s research interests are in comparative studies of ideological and institutional changes in transitional societies with foci on education and religion. She published articles and book chapters on dogmatism and ideologies of textbooks, privatization of schools, and educational change in revolutionary contexts. Since 2000s, she has engaged in comparative research on desecularization and religious education, and authored Religious Education in Russia: Inter-Faith Harmony or Neo-Imperial Toleration? (2016); Religion’s uneasy return to the Russian school: A case of contested desecularization ‘from above’ (2018); and co-authored Religious intolerance among Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Russia (2008); Orthodoxy, Islam, and the desecularization of Russia’s state Schools (2010); Ethnodoxy: How popular ideologies fuse religious and ethnic identities (2012) and others. Lisovskaya is a founder of a special interest group in Religion and Education within Comparative and International Education Society (2013) and a co-editor of the FIRE special issue on Religion and Education (2019).

Notes

1 This theme originally brought most of the collection’s authors together at two international conferences, first in Moscow at the German Historical Institute, Beyond the boundaries of the traditional historiography of Russian education, late 17th to early 19th century, in January 2017, and then in Berlin, “Seeing like a state?” Innovative and comparative approaches to the history of education in Russia [From the eighteenth to the twenty-first century] in October 14–15 on the history and present-day realities of Russian education. An international group of historians and sociologists got together to problematize the theme “Seeing Like a State?” relating both to James Scott’s highly influential work of that name (1998), and the stubborn tendency in scholarship on the history of Russian education to prioritize legislation and state regulation as a deus ex machina over the role of local agency, such as that exerted by low-ranking bureaucrats, school administrators, teachers, parents, and students in defining the trajectories of educational change. In their talks, the authors strove to move beyond state optics which treats the subject exclusively as the result of state planning and implementation. Instead, they discovered the zones, events and developments in history of Russian educational reform that pointed at a remarkable degree of unpredictability and “illegibility” of its course and resulting in promoting new forms of adaptation and initiative, sometimes resulting in undercutting educational projects in their entirety. With time, this discussion has grown into a larger project aimed at contextualizing the theme of the state-local agency interplay within a broader framework of Russia’s movement toward educational modernity. [The article: A host of contradictions: State compulsion and the educational experience of Soviet Russia’s youth, 1931–1945 by Larry Holmes was solicited for this volume separately].

2 Discussions of the term “modernity” and its Russian-Soviet variant in English-language literature have been intense since 1990s. They have primarily been held among historians of Russia and sovietologists. In the 2016 discussion of the term organized on the pages of Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie [The New Literary Review], Michael David-Fox provided an overview of four major clusters of perspectives on Russian-Soviet modernity including “shared,” “none or missing,” “alternative,” and “entangled.” His position is that Russian-Soviet modernity represents a mix of the third and the fourth types, something distinct yet sharing the common characteristics at the same time. Our perspective resonates with that of David-Fox.

3 The term modernity has its own genealogy, see: Slovar’ osnovnykh istoricheskikh poniatii: Izbrannye stat’i [Dictionary of basic historical terms] in 2 vols. (Trans. from German) (Slovar', 2016). Moscow: NLO (vol 1, pp. 241–296). (Original work published in 1971–1996). For a more recent consideration of the term, see the collection of essays in the American Historical Review, 116(3), pp. 631–751, especially the essay by Wolin, Richard (2011) "Modernity": The peregrinations of a contested historiographical concept, 741–751.

4 The origins of educational modernity can probably be traced to, at least, John Amos Comenius [Jan Amos Komensky] (1592–1671) referred to as the first modern educationalist and sometimes called the Father of Modern Education, and perhaps farther back in history.

5 We avoid the word “borrowing” in favor of the term “transfers,” in order to undue Eurocentrism and depict instead two-way [if not always symmetrical] exchanges of values, practices and structures.

6 For a succinct argument that also places twentieth century Germany within the framework of “modernity” and rejects exceptionalism, see Enza Traverso (2003). The case for Soviet [and Russian in general] “exceptionalism” was the main fare of Cold War historiography, but has been challenged by many recent historians, including especially Stephen Kotkin (1995).