Boarding schools of various types have long existed within the framework of the Soviet Russian educational system; homes for orphans, delinquents, handicapped or artistically gifted children, and the military and naval academies, to cite just a few examples, are an integral and accepted part of life in the USSR. Nevertheless, when Nikita S. Khrushchev, speaking at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, called for the immediate establishment of a wide system of boarding schools for Soviet children, foreign observers realized at once that this was an entirely new and far more important type of school—one that represented a reversal of many of the educational theories, methods, and even purposes of the preceding two decades. The actual nature and goals of the new boarding schools, however, were not understood immediately.