From Peter the Great’s technical schools to Catherine’s allusions to widespread education in the Nakaz, rulers in Russia have strived or at least leaned in the direction of reforming the nation’s social sphere through education. However, these efforts were not a particular priority for many years, and when Catherine’s seemingly modest changes in publishing and education became fuel for insurgence, one could draw the conclusion that mass educations and Russia’s ruling systems should not mix if order was to be maintained.
However, Stalin clearly believed otherwise. In the early years of the Five Year Plan, technical experts at the head of Soviet administration and industry were regarded with suspicion, and various policies were put in place to encourage the promotion of workers and Communists to higher positions, especially by making higher education in technical subjects available to them. “It was imperative to begin training a new generation of cadres who would be both Red and expert. The normal higher education system, especially the engineering schools, would provide the training. This meant curriculum changes and a new admissions policy that would discriminate strongly in favor of working-class and Communist applicants, even if their educational preparation was poor” (Fitzpatrick, 156). These social policies pushed certain demographics very intentionally into a new kind of Soviet elite, cadres who were both personally committed to the Soviet project and also prepared to head its growing industry and governmental leadership positions.
Fitzpatrick quotes Stalin’s reasoning for these social policies: “We need commanding and engineering-technical cadres capable of understanding the policies of the working class of our country, capable of mastering those policies and prepared to carry them out conscientiously… Our country has entered the phase of development when the working class must create its own productive-technical intelligentsia, capable of standing up for its own interests in production as the interests of the working class” (Fitzpatrick, 155, quotes fromStalin, “Novaia obstanovka-novye zadachi khoziaistvennogo stroitel’stva” (23 June 1931), in his Sochineniia”). Unlike Peter, Catherine, and other rulers wary of educating peasants and other working classes in fear of their uprising, Stalin is encouraging similar demographics to take control of the regime in accordance to his own agenda.
How did Stalin’s efforts to replace “bougeois” elements in the growing Soviet elite by reforming higher education and publicly pushing for workers to become technical experts build or break away from past relationships between rulers and education?
Stalin’s rise to power (and the first half of his dictatorship) was a revolution in itself, both with his purging of government officials and elites and his apparent effort to integrate the working-class into his new elite. This latter point signifies a self-conscious break (or attempted break) with the apparently bourgeois nature of post-revolutionary Russia. Under Stalin, the government made a concerted effort to detach themselves from earlier Bolshevism: Molotov states that, as a result of the government’s training program, “during the time between the Shakhty period and the present we have produced tens of thousands of Bolshevik cadres who are genuinely tempered in a technical sense… In technical respects, our people are better qualified than the Trotskyists, the present wreckers” (Fitzpatrick 171).
Yet Stalin’s mass recruitment and subsequent treatment of workers and party members was still primarily about control. The Stakhanovite movement – and the Socialist Realist dramatization of labor – created a mythology of what the worker could become by means of hard work. Pasha Angelina is a further example of a successful laborer glorified by Stalin, whose later words would only reinforce Stalin’s ideological power: “Stalin saved my litter daughter and millions of other children in the USSR…” (Angelina 321). Stalin, it seems, was beloved and did commit himself to the working-class – it is just the implications of control and the clear dynamics of manipulative power that blur this assertion.
I’m not entirely sure where my thoughts are leading or what my conclusion is because I’ve fallen down a hole and can’t stop thinking about Alexei Yurchak / Adam Curtis’ idea of hypernormalization. I guess I mainly want to echo the point in the original post, while also raising the issue of reality / myth / Socialist Realism.
During the reigns of Peter and Catherine, Russia was still an absolute monarchy with a thriving noble class, and a subjugated peasantry that made up 85% of the population. While both Peter and Catherine had ambitions to educate their people, institutions of mass education were at the same time economically, socially, and politically unfeasible. Education of the peasants and serfs led to the exposure of new “western” ideas and ways of thinking to the lower classes, who were unfairly exploited by an elite nobility and an absolute monarch. In learning more “enlightened” ways of thinking, they began to truly see how subjugated they were, and were therefore spurred to revolt. Due to this, mass education was often perceived as a threat to the economic hierarchy and ruling class.
Stalin, on the other hand, saw the strength he could attain from winning the loyalty of those who were historically impoverished and disenfranchised. Since he openly raised up the working class through education, there was much less threat of that education being dangerous to his regime. In fact, by explicitly educating traditionally marginalized groups, and pushing them quickly up the social ladder, he gained their undying loyalty and gratitude, and even blinded them to the evils of his regime that later came to light. Fitzpatrick explains: “many citizens linked their own individual upward mobility with their country’s form of government. Such a perception might well be a major factor in the legitimization of the regime. Among the members of the new elite, the pride of self-made men must surely have been combined with a sense of indebtedness. For, as they saw it, it was the Revolution (or Stalin) that had given them the opportunity to rise.” (Fitzpatrick, 182) By instituting a rapid and explicit reversal of the social hierarchy, Stalin gained the loyalty of a large percentage of the population. Unlike previous rulers who relied on the support of the few who had the most wealth, Stalin relied on the support of the many who had the least wealth.
In raising up and educating the Soviet Youth specifically, he instilled this loyalty in a younger, more impressionable generation, who saw his changes as progress, and therefore saw anyone who disagreed with them as “leftovers” (Angelina, 318) of an outdated generation.