A Host of Contradictions: State Compulsion and the Educational Experience of Soviet Russia’s Youth, 1931–1945

Abstract

Based on oral and written testimony of pupils and teachers, this essay examines the lived educational experience of the school-age cohort of children in Stalin’s Russia from 1931 to 1945. The state alone determined the structure and curricula of the nation’s schools. However, Soviet youngsters, their parents, and teachers responded to the center’s initiatives in ways that both embraced and defied the attempt to make anew society and humans. They thereby at once hindered, shaped, and advanced the state’s schemes to use the school as an instrument for the creation of a Soviet variant of modernity.

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Acknowledgments

This article is an extensively revised and expanded version of my contribution (2019), “The Educational Experience in Stalin’s Russia, 1931–1945,” in K. Boterbloem (ed.), Life in Stalin’s Soviet Union (pp. 167–182). New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.

Interviews for the Archive of Russian Life History were conducted for a project sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust under grant no. F/08736/A “Childhood in Russia, 1890–1991: A Social and Cultural History” (2003–2006) and are copyrighted by the University of Oxford. For further information about the project, see www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/childhood. My thanks go to the interviewers, Aleksandra Piir (St. Petersburg), Yuliya Rybina, and Ekaterina Shumilova (Moscow), and Oksana Filicheva, Veronika Makarova, and Ekaterina Mel’nikova (village interviews); to the project coordinators, Professor Al’bert Baiburin and Professor Vitaly Bezrogov; and to the project leader, Professor Catriona Kelly, for making this material available.

Author Biography

Larry E. Holmes is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917-1931 (Indiana University Press, 1991); Stalin's School: Moscow's Model School No. 25, 1931-1937 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); and Stalin's World War II Evacuations: Triumph and Troubles in Kirov (University Press of Kansas, 2017).

Notes

1 Five sources of oral and written testimony are of particular importance. The first is the online “Prozhito” (see the entry in references). Of particular importance are the diaries from 1941 and 1942 of two schoolteachers in Leningrad: Ol’ga Fedorovna Khuze and Aleksei Ivanovich Vinokurov. Material from these diaries is henceforth cited in the text by reference to Prozhito and the name of the diarist and date of the entry. Although not cited in this article, the diaries by Elena Vladimirovna Mukhina and Mikhail Vasil’evich Tikhomirov, pupils in Leningrad in 1941, provide valuable general information. While the diaries of David Samuilovich Samoilov, Nina Nikolaevna Kosterina, and Georgii Sergeevich Efron may be found in Prozhito, in this article I use their published versions. The second source consists of interviews from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (henceforth HIP). In the early 1950s, it interviewed more than 700 refugees who had left the Soviet Union from 1943 to 1946. I use the testimony only of people who can be clearly identified as attending or teaching school during the 1930s and early 1940s. Third are the interviews I conducted from 1990 to 1996 of 36 former pupils for my book on a model school in Moscow during the 1930s (Holmes, 1999). It should be noted that this school catered to the children of the elite, including, among others, Iosif Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, and his youngest son, Vasilii. Fourth is the testimony in interviews from an impressive cross section of former teachers and pupils that are part of the Archive of Russian Life History (henceforth Oxf/Lev; see the acknowledgments section at the end of this article). Fifth, I use calculations made at the Conference on Using Soviet Interview Project Data at the University of Illinois, from June 27 to July 1, 1988 (henceforth SIP). Admittedly, the results are at best rough indications of pupil sentiment. The emigrés themselves were overwhelmingly Jewish and urban. Moreover, my sample was considerably limited. I could identify with certainty only about 140 individuals who began and completed their schooling between 1931 and 1950 (and who responded to the questions at issue here) and about the same number who began and completed their schooling after 1950. For general information on the Soviet Interview Project, see Millar (1987).

2 On the validity of the sample and reliability of the result of the HIP, see Inkeles and Bauer (1961, pp. 3–64). On the creation of the historical record by both interviewers and interviewees and the dangers, excitement, and rewards involved, see Holmes (1997, pp. 279–306) and Holmes (2006, pp. 364–369).

3 The authors of works based on the Harvard Interview Project have appropriately insisted that the project “provided the first systematic and comprehensive picture of how the Soviet system looks ‘from inside’” (Bauer et al., 1964, p. 4). The Project elicited from individuals what they “routinely experienced and felt in their daily lives as they grew up, went to school, worked and played” (p. 6).

4 For these and other state decrees mentioned in the following, see Narodnoe obrazovanie (1974, pp. 108–120, 156–182). Basic statistical information cited here and in the following may be found in Kul’turnoe stroitel’stvo (1940), Narodnoe obrazovanie (1977), and DeWitt (1961).

5 The knowledgeable reader might ask why there is an absence, even in a brief essay, of a discussion of Pavel Morozov and Anton Makarenko. For a detailed explanation, see Holmes (2005, pp. 76–79).