1 - Education and Soviet society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2009
Summary
In October 1917, the Bolsheviks had taken power in the name of the proletariat and toiling peasantry, against the almost unanimous opposition of Russian educated society. Education, the Bolsheviks perceived, was one of the traditional prerogatives of the privileged classes. If a small minority of those who had received secondary or higher education under the old regime had embraced the cause of proletarian revolution, the great majority had remained ‘class enemies’ of the proletariat. It might be necessary for the new regime to employ the ‘bourgeois’ professionals and ‘petty-bourgeois’ clerks and office workers trained under Tsarism, but the best that could be expected of them in political terms was passive neutrality.
From these premises, two policy conclusions could be drawn. In the first place, the workers' and peasants' state must provide basic education for the masses of the population. This posed no problem of principle for the Bolsheviks, though there was room for argument on the size of the investment which, in the short term, the state could afford to make in primary education and adult literacy teaching.
The second policy conclusion which seemed to follow naturally from Bolshevik premises was that the new regime must create its own ‘proletarian intelligentsia’ – an administrative and specialist group drawn from the lower classes of society, trained in Soviet VUZy and giving whole-hearted allegiance to Soviet power.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1979