Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934

by Sheila Fitzpatrick

• ISBN13: 9780521894234
• ISBN10: 0521894239
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-05-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a history of Soviet education policy 1921–34 that places special emphasis upon the theme of social mobility through education. One of the hitherto untold stories of Soviet history is the making of the ‘Brezhnev generation’, a cohort of young workers and Communists sent to higher education during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) and subsequently catapulted into leadership positions in the wake of the Great Purge of 1937/38. A focal point of this book is the educational policies which not only produced the ‘Brezhnev generation’, but also linked Stalin’s regime with the massive upward mobility of the industrializing 1930s. The book is the first comprehensive history of Soviet education in the 1920s and early 1930s, and provides a sequel to the author’s highly praised Commissariat of Enlightenment. In this, as in the earlier study, the author has used Soviet archival sources not previously available to Western scholars.

Table of Contents

List of tables	viii
Acknowledgements	ix
PART I
Education and Soviet society
Theoretical bases: Marx, Lenin and progressive education	5	(5)
The formation of education policy: institutional conflicts	10	(9)
The new Soviet school
Progressive methods	19	(3)
The problem of ideology	22	(3)
Political consciousness in the school: Pioneers and Komsomols	25	(4)
Teachers	29	(5)
Reaction against progressive methods	34	(8)
The education system: problems of mobility and specialization
Alternative models: the Russian, Ukrainian and Komsomol systems	42	(6)
Access to higher education	48	(3)
The `bourgeois' secondary school and the working class	51	(3)
The employment problem and the schools	54	(4)
Schools for peasants	58	(3)
Educational achievements and perspectives of NEP	61	(7)
Professors and Soviet power
Marxism and the social sciences	68	(5)
The teaching of ideology	73	(2)
Professorial organizations and attitudes	75	(4)
Professorial salaries and privileges	79	(3)
Accommodation with the Soviet regime	82	(7)
Recruitment to higher education
The selection process	89	(3)
Communist students	92	(5)
The 1924 student purge	97	(5)
Communist and Komsomol students after the purge	102	(3)
Recruitment to higher education after the purge	105	(8)
PART II
The `great turning-point' of 1928--1929
Class vigilance and the Shakhty trial	113	(3)
Leadership conflicts on education: Stalin's call for a proletarian intelligentsia	116	(7)
Training for industry: Narkompros against Vesenkha	123	(4)
The political resolution of the education conflicts	127	(10)
Cultural Revolution and the schools
Reorganization of the educational administration	137	(2)
The call for Cultural Revolution in educational theory and methods	139	(5)
The Komsomol campaign against the secondary school	144	(6)
`Hare-brained scheming'	150	(5)
The impact of Cultural Revolution on the pedagogical profession	155	(4)
Mass education and mobility in the countryside
`Class war' in rural education	159	(4)
The impact of collectivization	163	(5)
Campaigns for adult literacy and universal primary education	168	(8)
Education and peasant mobility	176	(8)
The making of a proletarian intelligentsia
Mobilization of the Thousands	184	(2)
Dimensions of organized worker and Communist recruitment to higher education	186	(3)
Impact of the new policy on higher education	189	(4)
Purging and expansion in higher education	193	(5)
Training in the factory	198	(4)
Training in the factory and upward mobility	202	(10)
PART III
The restoration of order: new policies in education, 1931--1934
The end of organized worker recruitment to higher education	212	(1)
Rehabilitation of the bourgeois specialists	213	(4)
Reorganization of higher technical schools	217	(3)
The Central Committee and the schools	220	(6)
Condemnation of the radical theorists	226	(4)
The teaching of history	230	(5)
The `New Class': social mobility and education under Stalin
Educational opportunity in the Stalin period	235	(4)
Upward mobility and the new Soviet elite	239	(10)
The `New Class' and the `Great Retreat'	249	(6)
Notes	255	(76)
Bibliography	331	(16)
Index	347