Russian Education System

The school system, in Russia as in other societies, can be seen as a microcosm of society. The direction of educational policy speaks volumes about the political and epistemic values of the state. It is also contested ground, where generational and political conflicts manifest over the creation of new knowledge, and new workers. It is also a topic that many writers for The Russian Review have personally experienced, both in the Soviet Union or the United States. By exploring scholarship on education in The Russian Review, one can learn about both the development of the school system in Russia and the Soviet Union as well as the political undercurrents of American academia throughout the Cold War to today.

Articles on education in The Russian Review broadly fall into three categories: Cold War Era studies of the Soviet educational system (based on limited evidence), histories of Tsarist educational policies, and post-archival-revolution scholarship on Soviet education.

During the 1940s through the 1960s, scholarship on education in The Russian Review generally focused on the Soviet educational system. Information about Soviet education was difficult to come by, but many of the authors had firsthand experience of the Soviet educational system. These articles provide valuable information on Soviet education and how it was conceptualized in the United States, making for potentially useful evidence.

Between 1917 and the 1960s, Soviet education was often in a state of flux. With the October Revolution came a major changes in educational policies. A 1918 decree reshaped Russian schools along radically egalitarian lines, abolishing grades and selective admission. N.S. Timasheff writes in a 1945 article that, during this period, “the liberal phase of education was neglected; emphasis was laid on strict specialization, mainly in the technical sciences.” In 1932 the Politburo issued a new decree returning education to a more traditional method. Political education stood at the forefront of the curriculum during this period. Oleg Anisimov was in Riga when the Soviet Union invaded Latvia in 1941, where he continued teaching under Communist authority. In a 1950 article, he discusses the perspective of Soviet educators: “Brushing aside as utterly irrelevant all educational, or pedagogical problems, as we understood them, they pointed out to us that ‘"real’" education was political education, and no amount of pedagogic competence could make up for ‘political illiteracy.’” He continues by saying that “No Soviet teacher ever says that the Communist doctrine is better, more humane, or superior to other social and economic doctrines. ‘Better,’ ‘superior’ are comparatives, and no comparison is possible between truth and error.”

Timasheff and Anisimov take a critical tone toward Soviet education. Both taught at universities in the Soviet Union before they emigrated. Timasheff left in 1921 after it was alleged that he was involved in the Tagantsev conspiracy. Anisimov left Russia for Latvia as a teenager in 1922 and then emigrated from Latvia to Germany at the end of World War II due to his involvement with the Nazi occupation. Anisimov’s article in particular draws heavily from his personal experiences teaching in Soviet-occupied Latvia during World War II and can be read as a primary source. 

By 1961 the tone was more positive. By this point, it was becoming increasingly difficult to attack Soviet education on its merits. The Soviet Union had the highest proportion of engineers of any country and was challenging the US in the space race. Kenneth Dailey explains the changes in Soviet education instituted by a 1958 decree in a 1961 article. Dailey describes the Soviet academy as a rigorous environment, which emphasized science and foreign languages. Dailey also discusses the American reception of these changes, explaining that some scholars increasingly believed Soviet education was overtaking the United States, while others continued to take a negative view. In 1969, George M. Enteen published an article, “The History Faculty of Moscow State University,” based on his experience as an exchange fellow in 1966, as well as on a curriculum he obtained. He confirms Dailey’s points about the rigorous workload and an emphasis on foreign language. Enteen also discusses many of the particularities of the Soviet education system, its teaching, and the administration, comparing them to the American academy.

From the 1970s onward, many articles about education focus on the Tsarist period. Scholarship in The Russian Review increasingly looked beyond the Soviet Union in order to understand the earlier contexts which allowed the Russian Revolution to occur. One issue which looms large in many of these articles is the relationship between revolutionary politics and the pre-revolutionary Academy. 

Gregory Guroff, in a 1972 article, encourages scholars to look into the social and economic conflicts of the decade before World War I, which, as he writes, had often been overshadowed in scholarship by the Revolutionary period. Guroff’s article focuses on how the government revised the teaching of economics to cope with the new challenges caused by Russia’s industrialization, looking specifically at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. He argues that the economic ideology of this period influenced the Soviet central planning apparatus. Another article, by Paul W. Johnson in 1974, discusses how Minister of Public Education I.D. Delianov unsuccessfully attempted to curb student radicalism while also modernizing the education system. Ben Eklof, in a 1988 article, disputes the Soviet narrative of the “backwardness” of Tsarist education, and portrays the school building as a symbol of “the spread of civilization to the peasant mir.” 

From the 1990s through the 2010s, historical scholarship broadly began to emphasize social and intellectual forces over political history alone. Scott J. Seregny, in a 1996 article, discusses a new professional identity that entered the discourse in the decade after the 1905 Revolution - the teacher-cooperator. During this period, rural cooperatives gained prominence in the countryside, and many teachers played an active role in these cooperatives. This arrangement was the subject of political conflicts over education, social class, and state power. In a 2005 article, Andy Byford discusses the emergence of the seminar as a teaching method in late Imperial Russia, emphasizing the role of teachers in leading this change. Byford discusses the philosophical change towards a “democratization” of education that this represented. Another article from Byford in 2006 discusses the “medicalization of education.” Doctors in late Imperial Russia connected medical education with the conception of the nation as an organism, a political metaphor prominent among scientists (and others) at this time. A 2010 article by Ben Eklof and Nadezhda Peterson emphasizes the importance of social history in understanding the rural school system in Tsarist Russia. They use inspectors’ reports, educational curricula, and other primary sources to establish what daily life was like in these schools. A 2012 article, by Joseph Bradley, discusses political controversies over education, particularly the issue of whether education ought to be organized by the state or by voluntary associations. The opening of Russian archives allowed these scholars to provide more resolution on how the school operated in practice.

The final category of articles is post-archival-revolution scholarship on Soviet education. These articles examine a wide variety of topics. This category is distinct from the first in that the articles make use of sources previously unavailable to authors. These articles emphasize divides within the Soviet Union to a much greater degree, and many attempt to find the cause for changes in Soviet education. The articles written earlier focus instead on the implications of these changes for the United States.

A 1991 article by William B. Husband discusses how high school history education changed during Glasnost and Perestroika between 1985 and 1991, particularly in its treatment of Joseph Stalin. In a 1992 article, Larry E. Holmes writes about the educational reforms of the 1930s, analyzing the political and ideological reasons for the end of the Soviet school system’s emphasis on labor during this period. E. Thomas Ewing, in a 1998 article, also discusses the 1930s educational reform, emphasizing the connection between the Stalinist Terror and the teacher certification process. Douglas R. Weiner, in a 2006 article, discusses the conflict between scientific and vocational education during the 1920s, tying it in to Soviet epistemology while also showing the role of pre-Revolutionary pedagogues in promoting science education in the Soviet Union. The most recent article, from Seth Bernstein in 2015, evaluates the process of selecting Komsomol members from 1934 to 1941 and what this showed about the values and priorities of the educational system. All these articles support the broader point that education is not free from political and social forces.

Education is a special topic because scholars cannot separate it from their own lives. When a scholar ruminates on the values of Soviet education, they also, in a way, comment on the educational values of their own country. Through the evolution of scholarship on education in The Russian Review, the development of these pedagogical and academic values becomes visible. Articles written earlier tend to focus on the merits, or lack thereof, of contemporary Soviet education, showing the Cold War values of the time, which included both pride and insecurity over the rivalry in education with the US. Many articles from the 1970s onward focus on the Tsarist educational system. In this group, articles from 1970 to 1991 often address the chain of causality between Tsarist education and the Russian Revolution. This generation of writers, who were was less likely to have personal experience in the Soviet Union, focused more on the historical question of how we got here than on contemporary developments and personal firsthand experiences. The end of the Cold War saw a revival of scholarship on Soviet education, though Tsarist education continued to be a popular topic. In both categories, there is greater emphasis on the social forces that defined the academy, mirroring a broader change in historical scholarship. The body of scholarship on education in The Russian Review reminds readers that historical scholarship cannot be separated from its own historical context.

Written and compiled by Miles Parker, student at Lafayette