The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921

by Sheila Fitzpatrick

• ISBN13: 9780521524384
• ISBN10: 0521524385
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-06-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

A study in the formation and development of a Soviet government institution after the Revolution of October 1917. The commissariat - which was responsible both for education and the arts - was the main channel of communication between the government and Bolshevik party on the one hand, and the Russian intelligentsia on the other. The commissar, Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, was, in his own words, 'a Bolshevik among intellectuals and an intellectual among Bolsheviks'; his closest colleagues were Lenin's wife Krupskaya and the historian Pokrovsky.

Table of Contents

List of plates	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	xi
List of abbreviations	xix
Lunacharsky	1	(10)
The establishment of Narkompros	11	(15)
School education	26	(33)
The new educational system	26	(8)
Teachers	34	(9)
The new educational system in practice	43	(16)
Technical and higher education	59	(30)
Technical education	59	(9)
The Academy of Sciences and the universities	68	(21)
Proletkult	89	(21)
The arts	110	(52)
First contacts with the literary and artistic world	110	(29)
The theatre	139	(23)
Towards reorganization of Narkompros	162	(26)
Reorganization	188	(22)
Narkompros after reorganization	210	(46)
Education	210	(17)
Child welfare	227	(9)
The arts and Proletkult	236	(7)
Glavpolitprosvet	243	(13)
Narkompros and the New Economic Policy	256	(35)
Appendix I: Budgetary expenditure on Narkompros (estimates)	291	(2)
Appendix II: Biographical notes	293	(36)
Notes	329	(33)
Bibliography	362	(13)
Index	375