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COMMUNIST INSTITUTIONS
AND REVOLUTIONARY MISSIONS
IN HIGHER LEARNING

From the first tentative innovations of the revolutionary underground to the rise of a unified system of party learning after 1920, the creation of educational institutions under Bolshevik Party auspices underwent a transformation of enormous scale and velocity — one that cuts to the heart of the relationship between Bolshevik missions and party institutions in revolutionary Russia. This historical vantage point affords some unexpected vistas.1 The goals of party education, no matter how often overshadowed by utilitarian political concerns (the desperate need to train loyal party cadres), in a succession of widely differing periods consistently blended visions of long-range transformation with imperatives of the most immediate practical utility. This potent mix, embedded in this learning of a new type, allowed the making of party schools to play a decisive role in broadening the Bolshevik project on the third front.

Yet party education was reborn after 1917 as only one of several educational and academic movements whose various impulses had been well established in opposition to tsarist policies, and which seized the revolutionary moment to expand and institutionalize lower-class, mass, and adult education. In the civil war period, moreover, party education arose as one of the least visionary of several forms of education that became alternatives to prerevolutionary institutions, since short-term crash training programs dominated its agenda. Yet by 1920–21 party learning, from remedial to advanced, was constituted as both a unified academic system and a cultural-ideological movement, as a Bolshevik agenda on the third front was endorsed and linked to party institutions.

Just as revolutionary missions may lead to the creation of new institutions, those new institutions may in turn shape revolutionary missions, channeling and, in a sense, re-creating them. This dynamic, fraught with irony and subversion of intent, was an intrinsic part of the post-civil war rise of communist education as a vehicle for Bolshevik missions on the third front. As new communist institutions became entrenched in the 1920s, codifying their own type of learning and scholarship, and consolidating their own evolving culture and place in the party polity, they increasingly provided the basis for the model that Bolshevism had lacked in higher learning when the revolution carne. Party education was traveling on a trajectory from a vehicle to a shaper of missions, from a revolutionary alternative to apart of the Soviet establishment.

For a crucial period in the 1920s, however, party academia remained an alternative challenge at the forefront of revolutionary missions on the cultural front. The rise of this party system bifurcated higher learning, in policy as in perception, as the Party created Bolshevik equivalents of academies, research institutes, universities, middle schools, and so on. It was party schools — more Marxist, more communist, and more proletaria n than the old institutions — which claimed the mande of revolution. Despite decisive changes the new order had brought to the old universities and VUZy, many policymakers began to analyze higher learning in terms of binary oppositions between old and new, state and party, universities and party schools, bourgeois and proletarian.

In the successive political-cultural shifts of the Great Break, the Great Retreat, and the Great Purges in the 1930s, all of higher education was at least outwardly Sovietized and Stalinized; the dual educational system of NEP lost its significance. With the early Soviet polarity between “bourgeois” and “red” muted if not obliterated, party education no longer commanded its extraordinary position of the 1920s. To be sure, party schools had become a permanent part of the system; in the 1930s, and especially after the reorganization of 1946, party education came to represent a vast training network encompassing higher schools for party cadres and political training for millions of adults. But never again were party institutions in a position directly to rival the conventional higher learning, and to influence the direction of organized intellectual life and central communist missions in so powerful a fashion.2 In this sense, the heyday of Bolshevik party education was when the making of institutions was still intertwined with revolutionary attempts to jettison the old and define the new.

Capri, Bologna, and Longjumeau:
Origins of Bolshevik Culture-Building, 1909–1911

Bolshevik education, given its singular importance for recruitment, inculcating rudimentary theory, and achieving “consciousness,” had roots in practices in the revolutionary movement that predated the notion of an alternative “party” education and, for that matter, the existence of political parties in Russia. The incipient social-democratic movement of the 1880s inherited underground study circles, or kruzhki, as the most durable means of transmitting revolutionary ideas. For generations of expelled students and workers with little formal education, they also provided makeshift apprenticeships in the techniques of agitation and conspiracy.3

The Bolshevik wing of Russian Social-Democracy, formed in 1903 and almost immediately thrust into the Revolution of 1905, faced crisis and attrition in “period of reaction” following the suppression of the revolutionary movement and the Stolypin coup d’etat. Yet just as a system of party education was largely created amid perceptions of a post-revolutionary “retreat” in the 1920s, the first party schools emerged in post-1907 exile to attempt the transformation of workers into party leaders, intellectuals, and agents. The reversal of open revolutionary offensive thus led, in both experiences, to a decisive broadening of Bolshevik revolutionary goals in education, culture, and science.

No matter how short-lived the three party schools of 1909–11 proved, the experience that created them influenced the Bolshevik tradition. The maximalist dreamers of this epoch, the Left Bolshevik (Vpered) group led by the philosopher of proletarian culture, Aleksandr Bogdanov, were effectively defeated by the hardheaded “centrist” Leninists by 1912. But the victors proved susceptible to elements of the cultural dreams of their rivals, just as the Vperedists were no strangers to hard-headed politics and utilitarian cadre production. As a result, the Vperedists’ innovative and organicist missions were wedded to the creation of party schools, even as the creation of party schools became enmeshed in Bolshevik high politics.

The German, French, and Belgian Social-Democratic parties were the first to found “higher party schools,” the Germans in 1905, and this precedent was duly noted by Lenin’s group after it had founded its own school at Longjumeau.4 But the impetus behind the first Bolshevik schools was rooted in Russian circumstances that linked the enterprise not just to politics and culture but also to the making of a new intelligentsia. Such phenomena as the rise of adult education in industrial neighborhoods and the passage of several generations of lower-class revolutionaries through student kruzhki had led to widespread recognition of an intermediate stratum of educated “worker-intellectuals” after the turn of the century, who, by their very existence, bridged the venerable social gulf revolutionaries had so often yearned to span.5 It was a self-educated rank-and-file worker organizer from the Urals known as comrade Mikhail (N. E. Vilonov) who proposed the idea of a “party university” to Maxim Gor’kii in 1908, and the idea gained support among several delegates traveling from Russia to the Fifth Party Conference a short time later.6 Since a central political fact resonating throughout the entire Bolshevik faction in this period was the “flight of the intelligentsia” from the movement in the wake of 1905, calls were widespread to replace the much-denounced fickle intellectuals with a new group of workers educated in Marxist theory and party organizational skills.7 In July 1909 Bogdanov and the engineer-turned-insurrectionist Leonid B. Krasin issued a call for a “new type of party school” that would prepare “reliable and conscious” working-class leaders, endowing them with the knowledge and the discipline of mind that intelligenty received in higher schools.8 From here it was but a step to associating the handful of workers attending the “underground” schools with the birth of “our own” proletarian intelligentsia. Party education began as an attempt to replace wayward intelligenty with reliable workers, a modest effort immediately endowed with grandiose symbolic resonance; it blossomed after 1917 into a quest ultimately to supplant the “old intelligentsia” tout court.

The Leninists and Vperedists teetered on the verge of a split in Bolshevism; Lunacharskii later dubbed it a “semi-schism.”9 Yet the recent rediscovery of the political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of the prewar ferment have identified it as a major development in the history of the revolutionary movement and Russian Marxism. Politically, the phenomenon of “anti-Leninist Bolshevism” has called attention to early Bolshevism’s nonmonolithic character. Philosophically, the new trends embraced by Bogdanov and colleagues gave more weight to the role of consciousness and culture than Lenin’s Plekhanovian orthodoxy.10 Left Bolshevism thus emerged as a Marxist parallel with modernist cultural movements that aimed at a kind of “secular religion of the one.”11 The creed of these innovative Bolsheviks intertwined making revolution with the creation of a collectivist, proletarian culture that would usher in a new kind of art, literature, and science.

Yet these origins of what later became central communist cultural missions in the 1920s have been interpreted, like the NEP era when many of them were mobilized, largely through a constricting choice between counterfactual “alternatives” and the seeds of totalitarianism. Bogdanovism has appealed to some as a lost choice, a libertarian program for worker self-empowerment that contrasts with the authoritarian tutelage of Lenin’s professional revolutionaries; to others, the Vperedist vision of the socialist intellectual, as arbiter of the group’s new theories of collective consciousness and proletarian culture, sowed the seeds of totalitarian domination in realms passed over by the Leninists.12

This rigid dichotomy has slighted both Vperedist and Leninist practice and interaction. Despite the voluminous literature on Bogdanov and Vperedism, the major organizational achievement of the Left Bolsheviks, the party schools at Capri and Bologna, have not been analytically compared to Lenin’s school at Longjumeau. I suggest a degree of cross-fertilization occurred, that distinctively Vperedist innovations passed into and informed Bolshevik traditions even as party education and cultural agendas remained at a nascent stage. I argue that party education, since it in many ways transcended factional lines, was flexible enough to accommodate both ambitions for cultural revolution and the pressing political tasks of providing a crash program for loyal cadres. Not only did such a blend of utopian vision and cadre politics become quintessential Bolshevism; the dual emphasis endowed party education with a lasting importance to those Leninists who emphasized political instruction above all and those former Vperedists who especially yearned for the advent of a new culture through the vehicle of a proletarian intelligentsia.

The two schools for “party propagandists” that the Vpered group organized at Capri and Bologna, and Lenin’s counter-school in the Paris suburb of Longjumeau, despite their brief existence and limitation to several dozen workers sent by party committees in Russia, had a far greater impact than their size or longevity suggest. Lenin attempted successfully to “disorganize” his rivals by provoking splits among their students, by luring them to Paris, and by using all the means at his disposal to have the Capri and Bologna schools branded “factional” and even “anti-party.” This, combined with the Vpered group’s natural inclination to use the schools to train its own loyalists, ensured that party high politics in these years revolved around the schools.13 One result was that party education was assured a place of permanent importance in the Bolshevik tradition.

It was significant for the making of this tradition, however, that Capri, Bologna, and Longjumeau schools were in fact not completely “factional” institutions. The schools were founded amid endless maneuverings and negotiations, which broke down in mutual recriminations, to create a nonfactional “general-party school.”14 As a result both groups attempted to give their own schools an “all-party” rather tha’n just a factional list of lecturers; Lunacharskii, for example, lectured on art and culture at all three institutions.15 Most important, all established educational agendas combining similarly defined realms of party theory, current politics, and practical revolutionary training. The utilitarian and party-political aspects of education were no less present at the Vperedist schools.

None of the schools can be understood without keeping in mind a basic fact later discussed by one of the Capri students, a certain Kosarev: he and his group were being prepared in the space of a few months to set off to do illegal party work in a provincial Russian city, where after three to six months they could expect arrest or at best relocation to a new assignment.16 At a time when the connections of the émigré revolutionaries to the empire were strained, it was obvious that the schools offered a great opportunity to cultivate loyalist followers. One is struck by the repeated assertion that for the Vperedists a major goal behind the schools was to train their own corps of agents (agentura). Lunacharskii later recalled, “Above all Bogdanov wanted to organize this whole top echelon of Vperedism as a strong propaganda center with its own journal and its own agentura. The agentura had to be recruited . . . with the help of these schools.”17 The charge dated back to June 1909, when the Bolshevik Center claimed that “the initiators of this [Capri] school . . . are organizing their own agentura.”18

The accuracy of this accusation was in a sense unimportant, for Lenin not only believed the story but admired the example. In a letter to Rykov in 1911, Lenin enviously referred to the Bogdanovites’ strength in maintaining a school and a group of agents. While Kosarev later claimed “Bogdanov’s group from the beginning conducted affairs so that during class time there was never talk of empirio-monism or of recallism,” he acknowledged that “this measure did not change any­ thing.” A schism occurred at Capri when students leaning toward Lenin protested about factional instruction, and after being expelled by the school soviet five students made their way to Paris.19

In the summer of 1911 in Longjumeau, Lenin was certainly no less assiduous in using his school to recruit workers loyal to his faction. The Bolshevik Center, as Krupskaia noted in her obituary of Longjumeau lecturer Inessa Armand, was above all concerned with strengthening its ties within Russia, a motivation which also led to its relocation to Kraków in 1912. The best-known alumnus of Longjumeau, the future Politburo member and commissar of heavy industry in the 1930s, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, thus accepted in 1911 the “obligatory condition” for participation in the school, which was to return to Russia on party work upon completion of the course. With Bogdanov’s Left Bolshevism already faltering in 1911, Lenin turned the potentialities of the Long-jumeau school to use in his struggle with the Mensheviks. Of the eighteen delegates to the all-Bolshevik Sixth Party Congress Lenin convened in Prague on 18 January 1912, eight had been present at Longjumeau and the rest had been recruited by Longjumeau graduates.20

While cadre production exerted strong appeal to all those involved in Bolshevik party education, it was the Vpered group which from the first attached the enterprise firmly to a project of cultural transformation. Clark observes, “Marx and Lenin saw a socioeconomic revolution as a precondition of any spiritual revolution; most non-Marxist anticapitalists (and some Bolshevik intellectuals) insisted that this sequence had to be played in reverse.”21 Those Bolsheviks struggling to reconcile the primacy of culture and consciousness with Marxism were, of course, the Vperedists and their heirs. The Vpered platform of 1909 first advanced the “slogan” of proletarian culture. Bourgeois culture, it maintained, had shaped contemporary science, art, and philosophy, and to accept it meant to “preserve the past within us.” Under the rubric of the new socialist culture that would be “created” and “spread among the masses” a new science, a new art, and a new philosophy would emerge. In such a way the Vperedists recast socialist “consciousness” as a sociocultural as well as a political phenomenon; through revolution the proletariat would achieve not just political predominance but cultural hegemony.22 The Vpered platform thus suggested the deliberate reconstruction of the entire “superstructure”; even its preoccupation with replacing the very “habits” of bourgeois individualism presaged the communist movement’s attempt to introduce a new everyday life. The means of conveying this new culture would be a “total [tselostnoe] socialist upbringing.” The notion that “socialist proletarian culture” would flow from the “spiritual unity” of the “living, complete organism” of the proletariat was developed by Bogdanov in 1910; the organic metaphor led to a definition of a “new nauka,” which would triumph over specialization and “strive toward simplification and unification of science.”23

Party educational institutions found a major place in this transformative agenda from the first. Moving from cultural quest to institution-building, the Vpered platform called for the “elaboration of a higher form of institution” in order to create an “overall and complete” socialist “upbringing.” The heavy-handed organicism may have been particularly Vperedist at this time, but there is evidence that Leninists echoed the Vperedist rhetoric of creating a new proletarian intelligentsia.24

Reflecting the several levels of aspirations built into their mission, the curricula of all three schools mixed abstract theory with practical skills. In 1909, the revolutionary worker-students gathered at Capri, in the incongruous setting of Gor’kii’s aristocratic villa on the island resort of Roman emperors. There they devoted a major portion of their time, not only to lectures on political economy and other subjects, but also to such “practical” topics as “approaches and methods of agitational influences over the masses,” practice polemics with representatives of other political parties, techniques of underground publishing, and ciphers and codes. Aside from the practical training and main section of theoretical studies, the newest concerns of the Vperedists were reflected in a smaller section on literature, art, socialist culture, and “societal worldviews” (these subjects comprised a cycle on the “philosophy of the proletarian struggle”) and study of the current political situation. With much of the abstract talk at Capri apparently going over the heads of the worker-students, however, the Vperedists took steps to make the second, Bologna school, held in part at the Garibaldi University, include more of such “practical” training and a less theoretical approach. The champions of proletarian culture, who at times heroicized the proletariat in their writings as more authentically intellectual than the intelligentsia, were forced from the very outset to modify their enterprise by the living objects of their theories.25

The Longjumeau studies, conducted largely in a metalworkers’ shop rented by Inessa Arrnand in the one-street village south of Paris, were similarly divided into theory, tactical problems, current party life, and practical work. The practical training included such projects as producing a mock-up of a trade union journal. But if anything, the Longjumeau school was less concerned than its Vperedist counterparts with imparting the techniques and skills of the underground; as Ralph Carter Elwood notes, “Sorne of the students later criticized this lack of practical training.” Of the major components initially included in party education — theory, practical training, and current politics — the Vperedist schools stressed the first two elements, with a special excursion into culture, whereas Longjumeau especially emphasized political instruction. Lenin’s lieutenants Zinov’ev and Kamenev, for example, focused their lectures on Duma tactics, the programs of various parties, and current political problems.26 All elements, however, were represented at all three schools.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii, Anatolii Vasil’evich Lunacharskii, and Martyn Nikolaevich Liadov (first row, second, third and fourth from left respectively) with former students of the Capri School — the first Bolshevik party school, organized in Maxim Gor’kii’s villa on the island of Capri in 1909 by the Vpered group of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. The photo was taken in 1926. Reprinted by permission of the Museum of the Revolution, Moscow, Russia.

The allocation of time for the “academic” or theoretical portions of the program at all three schools, moreover, reflected a common hierarchy of concerns. At Bologna, for example, they were dominated by Bogdanov’s lectures in political economy, followed by several lecturers’ courses on the history of socialism in Europe and Russia; next were the lectures by Martyn N. Liadov and Mikhail N. Pokrovskii on party and Russian history, followed by topics considered more specialized, such as the agrarian question and international politics. Lunacharskii held eight lectures, the fewest of any course, on the history of Russian literature. Lenin’s Longjumeau school structured lecture time in a manner quite similar to the schools at Capri and Bologna: Lenin gave most of the lectures on political economy, followed by Zinov’ev and Kamenev on Social Democracy in Russia and the political parties, and concluding with more specialized topies such as the national and agrarian questions. Lunacharskii taught literature and art at Longjumeau as well, but in only four lectures, which he supplemented by leading his students on tours of the Louvre.27

The parallels between Longjumeau and the Vperedist institutions suggest that Lenin’s school was deliberately modeled on the Vperedist experiments. The Longjumeau school, founded in the wake of the school on Capri, faced the task of proving to a party audience that the Leninists were as capable in proletarian education as in political maneuvering; in retrospect it seems that the Leninists had scrutinized their rivals’ activities so intensely that some degree of emulation was unavoidable, whether fully deliberate or not. For example, the Central Committee’s School Committee, dominated by Lenin through his proxy Zinov’ev, received a report of a defecting student from Bologna that catalogued that school’s activities and organization down to the contents of breakfast (coffee, rolls, and butter).28

The vital importance the Bolshevik leaders placed on party education, the reasons the factions debated the schools so hotly, rested not on the education itself, but on the manifold results expected from it. Bolshevik party education, whether Leninist or Vperedist, was expected above all to produce loyal cadres, if not, in some sense, new men — whether professional revolutionaries or proletarian intellectuals.

At the same time, the common hierarchy of academic topics indicates strongly held assumptions about how to impart theory and hence higher consciousness; despite the preponderance of utilitarian goals, the curricula suggest that the transformational value of theory (if not culture) was accepted by the Leninists’ school as well as by the Vperedists. Party education was launched with a preponderance of extra-academic goals defining its importance, and, simultaneously, a scholastic belief that proper party education required acquisition of a body of theory that was intrinsically necessary for all educated Bolsheviks. The curriculum, designed as a program in general party education, preserved a distinct hierarchy of “party” subjects that were in their own way specialized. Latent tensions can therefore be detected in the nascent party education between general education and specialization, theory and practice, scholasticism and revolutionary practicality.

For Leninists and the Vperedists, in the end the question of cadres carried with it the promise of a future social transformation. Lenin’s conceptualization of this revolved around his well-known ideal of a stratum of professional revolutionaries (although, it has been pointed out, his condemnation of slavish, passive Russian “Oblomovism,” and related yearning for a homo novus inherited from Chernyshevskii, can be regarded as a precursor to his call for cultural revolution in the early 1920s).29 For the Vperedists, the social dimension of pedagogy was linked to the concept of a workers’ intelligentsia, a collectivity of proletarian culture-creators. The two concepts, however different ideologically (their differences were not so great that they prevented Lenin’s reconciliation with Gor’kii and Lunacharskii, if not Bogdanov) overlapped in certain key respects. Both assumed a hierarchical ladder of consciousness. Both proposed to overcome the division between intelligentsia and workers through a new identity. In both cases party education was to be the basis for the formation of a new social group, a stratum of model leaders. A major divergence in the two approaches—the Vperedist insistence that a new culture be built as a precondition for socialist revolution — became less significant although not irrelevant after 1917.

Longjumeau, however, marked Lenin’s only significant involvement in a party school. The greater concern of the Vpered group with cultural questions attracted them both to the proletarian culture movement and to party education, where they had far more impact than Lenin’s immediate entourage. Leading Vperedist intellectuals — Bogdanov, Gor’kii, Lunacharskii, Pokrovskii, Liadov, Lebedev-Polianskii, as well as the Bogdanov-influenced Bukharin — later founded and played leading roles in the foremost institutions of proletarian and party education. Of the participants at Longjumeau only Krupskaia, the Bolsheviks’ leading pedagogical writer, and the “nonfactional” Marx scholar David Borisovich Riazanov made major commitments to party education.

The Vperedists’ overriding concern with education and culture was novel to Bolshevik movement, but became an integral part of Bolshevism that broadened the scope of the Party’s agenda. As party education was launched, it embodied a combination, or perhaps conflation of immediate party-political concerns and long-term transformation. It therefore retained its vitality for those, like the Vperedists, who placed primary emphasis on sociocultural aspirations, and for others, like Lenin, who demanded above all political action. As yet lacking were a mass movement, the taste of social revolution, and confrontation with a genuine representation of the old society rather than the posturing of a semi-schism.

Co-opt and Conquer: People’s,
Proletarian, and Party Education

The Bolsheviks carne to power with few concrete plans for higher learning’s postrevolutionary future and a lengthy experience of viewing Russia’s universities with profound ambivalence. The student movement had proven a prime recruiting ground for the revolutionary parties, but was also steeped in communitarian traditions that did not necessarily revolve around the revolutionary struggle.30 The academic intelligentsia’s obsession with pure science and institutional autonomy had been forged in a half-century of skirmishes with tsarist authorities, but many Bolsheviks, particularly after 1905, derided such concerns as the illusions of a bourgeois elite. Nevertheless, these primary values of the mainstream professoriat (in sharp contrast to its more elitist model, the German professoriat) were tempered by a commitment to social reform and popular enlightenment. This provided some common ground with revolutionaries also caught up in an enlightenment movement. Moreover, for several months after October the new regime was too weak and preoccupied to take any substantive initiatives in academia. In the first half of 1918 top Narkompros officials Lunacharskii and Krupskaia seemed actually to endorse the venerable ideal of institutional autonomy.31

The October Revolution thus seemed initially to hold an uncertain or ambiguous meaning for the world of higher learning. But between 1918 and 1920 a program took shape that made the mass education of workers and party members an essential part of the communist revolutionary agenda — and again began to link culture-building to institution-building, systems of education to systems of thought. This transformation, however, was by no means an inexorable progression. Since the war effort and economic crisis prevented full-fledged Bolshevik initiatives in the cultural realm in general and prevented much more than a cycle of threats and standoffs with the nonparty professoriat in the old universities, “war communism” witnessed a chaotic flowering of trends that had reformist prerevolutionary roots but had remained stymied before 1917. Indeed, many of the academic causes of the civil war period can be understood in this light. The exuberant mushrooming of new institutions (many of which never survived or existed only on paper), the move in the midst of dire hardship toward specialized and applied scientific-research institutes, initiatives in long-slighted higher technical education, and above all the explosion of general educational opportunities for adults and the underprivileged all came out of long-standing impulses that were quickened by revolution. In 1917 and after, for example, almost every province and major city tried to found its own university, and the number of new higher educational and academic institutions of all kinds shot upward (only to be sharply restricted in the fiscal austerity of NEP). At the same time, a militarized and centralized Bolshevik party was growing in the womb of this de facto decentralization and these various initiatives of the nonparty intelligentsia — which would in turn have an impact on the Bolshevik agenda once the red side achieved victory and turned its attention to the cultural front. There is an analogy here with the manner in which avant-garde cultural groups seized the opportunity of revolution to shape the mass festivals and revolutionary art that in many ways defined war communist culture.32

Party education emerged in particular proximity with adult and working-class educational initiatives, above all the people’s university and proletarian culture movements. The first had its roots in the enlightening ethos of the liberal academic intelligentsia; the second was left socialist and linked to the Vperedists tradition and Proletkul’t, the ex-Bolshevik Bogdanov’s new mass movement for proletarian culture.

The “people’s universities” arose in 1905 and after as a response and alternative to the contradictory foundations of late imperial higher educational policy. In broadest terms, tsarist policy attempted to increase the numbers of qualified candidates to the bureaucracy and professions while maintaining the social hierarchy of the estate (soslovie) order and to expand or diversify higher education without conceding more autonomy to the universities and intelligentsia.33 The new institutions and their sponsors aspired to provide education to people from all estates, to become institutions free of state intervention, and to spread science and enlightenment among the masses. They emerged on the heels of several decades of organized secular general education for adults in “Sunday schools” and elsewhere, and in fact the very term “people’s universities” apparently originated in the Russian translation of an 1897 book on university extension programs in England and the United States.34 People’s universities were initially made possible by allocation of funds from city dumas, the first in Nizhnii-Novgorod in 1905; St. Petersburg followed in 1907 and Kharkov in 1909.

The best-known people’s university and the leader of the movement, however, was Moscow’s Shaniavskii University. It was founded by a retired officer who had made a fortune in the gold industry and had previously donated large sums to women’s medical education. This link was not coincidental: the movement to create university-level courses for women, still barred from the universities, was an integral part of the “social-pedagogical” movement that intensified in the late nineteenth century to create a “free” (vol’nyi) university outside state control, independent of state subsidies, open to both sexes, and free of restrictions by nationality and estate. Conservatives in the Ministry of Education and professoriat were the main opponents of this movement, and virtually all but the most famous “women’s university,” the Bestuzhev Courses in Petersburg, were closed down during the era of counter-reforms. But when the tsar lifted the ban on opening private higher educational institutions at the end of the revolutionary year 1905, a spurt of growth in both higher women’s courses and people’s universities began which lasted until the war. Shaniavskii University opened its doors in 1908 after a lengthy battle with tsarist authorities, admiting 975 students in its first year and 5,372 in 1914. It accepted all students over sixteen years of age without requirements, offered tuition waivers, and featured lectures (always in the evening) by some of the outstanding liberal academic figures of the age.35

Politically, the school was reportedly dominated by liberals and Kadets, who rejected the notion of “class” institutions. At the first Congress of People’s Universities and Other Institutions of Private Initiative in 1908, trade-union calls to orient the institutions primarily toward the working-class were voted down. Yet future Bolshevik controversies were prefigured in the split between Shaniavskii organizers, who wished to “democratize access to scientific knowledge without compromising that knowledge” and others in the movement who viewed the popularization of knowledge as the beginning of “the very democratization of science itself.” Despite the generally liberal and liberal-populist orientation of the movement, however, social-democratic factions were organized within the institutions, and one source claims that involvement in the people’s universities was the first legal educational activity in Russia in which the Bolsheviks were involved.36

People’s education and certain of its cherished goals influenced all the socialist parties, including the Bolsheviks. Early Soviet decrees opened higher education to all citizens over sixteen years of age free of charge; Pokrovskii’s first pronouncement on higher educational reform adopted the rhetoric of the “democratization” rather than proletarianization or party control of higher learning.37 The special concern with adult or “extra-mural” education after 1917 also had obvious prerevolutionary roots.

Behind the dramatic civil-war era expansion of higher education several movements coexisted. Not only did the well-established impulses of the people’s education movement flourish; newly invigorated tendencies of proletarian and party education emerged. Yet these educational movements, all alternatives to the established academic system, must be identified as ideal types, because in many newly created institutions they seem invariably to have been mixed.

The founding of new people’s universities gained the approval of Narkompros immediately after 1917, for example, and one source claims 101 such institutions existed in the RSFSR in 1919. If “people’s” education carne to represent general education for all classes, however, “proletarian” education championed class principles; its ideals were not placed in “general enlightenment” but in the controversial notion of the proletarianization of culture and science. In practice, however, when people’s universities came under attack for their apolitical character and “liberal” stress on enlightenment for its own sake, many simply changed their names to proletarian universities.38

The Proletkul’t universities, part of Bogdanov’s mass movement for proletarian culture which attempted to retain its independence from the Communist Party, were the most visible exemplars of civil war proletarian education; however, Bogdanov himself complained that many of the lesser-known Proletkul’t institutions that sprang up in this period, such as the Karl Marx University of Proletarian Culture in Tver’, in fact retained traditional curricula similar to those of the prerevolutionary people’s universities and for his taste were not nearly proletarian enough in social composition. He made similar criticisms even about the first Proletarian University in Moscow, which was jointly opened by Proletkul’t, the Moscow city soviet, and the local Narkompros division in the spring of 1918, but soon fell prey to conflicts among its sponsors. In March of 1919, Proletkul’t began anew by opening the Karl Liebknecht Proletarian University; its 400 students were mostly workers and peasants and the curriculum bore the imprint of the interdisciplinary tenets of Bogdanovian proletarian science.39

Party education, which can be understood as educational endeavors under the auspices of Communist Party organizations, stressed the party affiliation of its students and at first was almost exclusively associated with crash courses. But party education maintained its original combination of practical, political, and theoretical training and at this time also began to orient itself toward both mass enlightenment and the proletarianization of the higher school.

To be sure, courses for party workers set up under party auspices initially revolved mostly around rapid training of agitators and apparatchiks rather than the birth of a new kind of learning, and in these endeavors there was very little centralization until late 1920. Moreover, the efforts of party organizations were hardly cordoned off from the efforts of other Soviet organizations, most notably the Red Army. Like the local party committees, the largest “school of socialism” was deeply involved in organizing short-term instructional courses and training for party members, but chaotic conditions hindered centralization before 1920. Virtually all the Central Committee Secretariat could do was issue warnings about such matters as the reliability of the teaching staff.40 The Central Committee sponsored its own institution, which became the most prominent party educational institution in this period, the future Sverdlov Communist University. Nevertheless, some party institutions, like the adult education movement, emphasized general education, teaching courses in natural sciences and literary skills, as well as aspiring to give precedence to students of proletarian origin and transmit Marxist and Bolshevik doctrine. In short, party education in this period cannot be neatly distinguished from other Soviet efforts or rigidly separated from peoples’ and proletarian education.

The Lenin Communist University in Tula, for example, was founded by the Tula party organization on the anniversary of the revolution in 1918. Four-month courses were offered in a former women’s gymnasium for 31 Communists, 28 “sympathizers,” and 31 nonparty students. The eight-hour daily schedule combined general education (Russian language, mathematics, geography, history of the region, accounting) and political education (political economy, the Soviet constitution, history of the revolutionary movement, the Bolshevik party program, and so on). The party university also showed some affinity with the proletarian education movement by its proclaimed goal of training proletarians for future leadership positions and its attempts to “merge labor and science.” By 1920 there were 183 party members, 47 non-party students, and 5 sympathizers.41

In 1920 the Bolshevik victory in the civil war coincided with the political-ideological justification of the one-party monopoly on power and a much tighter equation of the goals of the Party with the aims of the revolution. As one aspect of this great hegemonic claim, people’s and proletarian education ceased to exist as autonomous forces and educational movements; the schools themselves were disbanded and often their buildings and resources were appropriated by institutions of party education. Given Lenin’s prerevolutionary experience with Bogdanov’s Capri and Bologna schools, it is not surprising that the hostile takeover of the Proletkul’t universities — and of Proletkul’t itself — proved cause not simply for denouncing a “deviation” but for appropriating aspects of the condemned organization’s mission into the party program.

Many leading Bolsheviks, some of them former Vperedists, did not regard proletarian education as incompatible with party education, in the same way that Proletkul’t leaders liked to portray their organization as a bastion of proletarian purity not incompatible with the activities of the Communist Party. Bukharin and Lunacharskii spoke at the opening ceremonies of the Karl Liebknecht University, Bukharin taught there, and the proletarian university apparently commanded some support in the Narkompros collegium. But the president of Liebknecht University, N. V. Rozginskii, from the Adult Education Division of Narkompros, soon defied Bogdanov and many of the students by proposing a merger with Sverdlov. The Central Committee ordered the proletarian university “temporarily” shut down in July 1919.42 When the Party moved against Proletkul’t as a whole the next year, some of the party supporters of proletarian culture would transfer to party channels their project of building a new culture through a new kind of university.

The Politburo formulated plans in October 1920 to effect Proletkul’t’s “subordination to the Party.” This, again, was arranged through motions from within the organization itself. For this purpose the Politburo enlisted Proletkul’t leader Lebedev-Polianskii — whose participation foreshadowed his rise to head of the Soviet censorship agency Glavlit. Proletkul’t lost its autonomy, Bogdanov resigned, and much of the movement’s vitality passed to what soon became a better-funded, politically important, and ideologically approved movement of party education. Between the fall and winter of 1920 — at precisely the same moment that Proletkul’t was stripped of its autonomy — the Party moved to invigorate party education and unite it into an educational system. For example, at the Ninth Party Conference in September 1920, Preobrazhenskii announced plans to consolidate existing party and Red Army schools and develop a unified (edinaia) program for party institutions formed into a single hierarchical “ladder.”43

The launching of this centralized educational system in 1920 followed on the heels of an act of great symbolism: the Party’s new flag-srup institution, Sverdlov Communist University, absorbed both the Proletkul’t university and Shaniavskii University. As the Party commandeered or abolished the leading institutions of people’s and proletarian education, it became the de facto avatar of educational opportunities for adults, proletarians, and revolutionaries; it became heir to the deep-seated motivations that had fueled the educational explosion during the civil war. In 1921, for example, a Proletkul’t writer on the higher school, while making the radicals’ standard claim that the very contents of nauka remained to be reworked from a collectivist point of view, allowed that Sverdlov University was realizing the idea of the proletarian university. At the same time, as part of a newly broadened mission in general education, the natural science courses of Shaniavskii were integrated into the higher party school.44 Party institutions thus coopted not just the resources but also the aspirations of movements that had been alternatives to the traditional university system.

The widening ambitions of party education were also linked to the fact that the university system was proving highly resistant to Bolshevik incursions. Most old professors were reelected when that became mandatory, and few Marxists or communist sympathizers materialized even in the social sciences. But the irony of the “war communism” period in academia was that while the Party made relatively few inroads, threatening Bolshevik gestures suggested imminent, apocalyptic change (whereas under NEP conciliatory gestures accompanied far-reaching change). Arrests of leading scholars tainted by former membership in the Kadet party, humiliatingly incarcerated in connection with the Cheka’s “Tactical Center” affair, swept up even such cooperative moderates as academician Sergei F. 01’denburg. The self-styled protector of the intelligentsia and Soviet patron extraordinaire in this period, Maxim Gor’kii, fulminated to Lenin on 6 September 1919 that the “mind of the people” was being destroyed; Lenin retorted that the intelligentsia was not the mind but the “shit.” Five days later, however, the Politburo considered the protest of Gor’kii, Lunacharskii, and Kamenev about “the latest mass arrests” of scholars and professors and authorized the three to reevaluate cases in cooperation with Bukharin and Dzerzhinskii.45

The professoriat continued to block efforts to bring Communists and Marxists into their institutions. The Moscow Uniiversity historian Got’e, who situated himself well to the right of the Kadets politically, noted in his diary that “our young people” showed “solidarity with us” in the reelections of 1919; only one professor, Pavel N. Sakulin, was black-balled, “for his currying favors with the Bolsheviks, of course.” Early Narkompros efforts to alter the social and political composition of the student body were outright failures, leading Pokrovskii in March 1919 to mandate a regularized system of workers’ faculties (rabfaks), preparatory sections attached to every higher school. (The rabfaks were also bulwarks of pro-Soviet support.) The conservative wing of the professoriat, while frequently putting up less overt resistance than liberals and leftists conditioned to struggle under the tsars, often linked the appearance of rabfak students, Jews, commissars, and Communists together as the harbinger of the decline of Russian science and civilization.46

As the standoff deepened at the universities, and with Communists weak there even as animosities sharpened, even the first signs of an incipient system of party education increased the temptation to view higher learning in the Manichaean terms that the civil war exacerbated in Bolshevik thought. Almost before the party schools moved from crash courses to longer-term training, the notion grew that there had emerged two hostile educational worlds, one revolutionary and communist, the other “bourgeois” and reactionary.

The ABC of Communism, written by Preobrazhenskii and Bukharin as the first communist textbook and instantly transformed into a widely studied classic, treats higher education in such dualistic terms as early as 1919. The fate of the universities is uncertain: “At the present time it is still impossible to foresee precisely what character the higher schools for the training of specialists will assume under communism.” Nevertheless, the present universities have “ceased to be serviceable institutions” and “most of the students” in the future will have to be workers. In sharp contrast, the soviet-party schools represent a revolutionary alternative, “a new type of school, which is intended to be serviceable to the revolution now in progress.”47

The first congress of Soviet-Party Schools and Communist Universities, held after the introduction of NEP, demonstrated that what had begun in emergency conditions had blossomed into a full-fledged movement with pretensions of building a new higher learning. The resolution passed by the congress noted that the “old party schools underground” had attempted to train agitators with some knowledge of Marxist theory; in the civil war, the overwhelming need was for short-term training for party and state cadres. Now the opportunity was at hand to produce loyal new specialists, theoreticians capable of battling the bourgeois worldview, leaders for the proletariat, and genuine scholars to advance Marxist science.48 If party education always encompassed both immediate political imperatives and visions of long-term transformation, its postrevolutionary rebirth under the “utopian” war communism had paradoxically accentuated the utilitarian impulse, while the particular “retreat” to a contradictory NEP order would revitalize the revolutionary imagination.

Participants of the first congress of Soviet-Party Schools and Communist Universities, 1922. Identified are Adrian Filippovich Ryndich (first row, first to left), V. N. Meshcheriakov (first row, sixth from left), G. I. Okulova (Teodorovich) (second row, fifth from left), and Emelian Mikhailovich Iaroslavskii (second row, eighth from left). Reprinted by permission of the Museum of the Revolution, Moscow, Russia.

One Step Backward, Imagination Forward:
Hotheads, Specialists, and NEP

The phrase “transition to NEP” (perekhod k nepu) referred to after late 1921 deliberately suggested a disciplined progression and therefore masked conflicting trends and impulses. In this epochal shift, pursuit of immediate socialism gave way to a lengthening of the millenarian time line and the notion of forced compromise with key social groups (peasants, specialists); at the very same time, the ebb of civil war precipitated a shift toward a new advance on the “cultural front,” itself offering possibilities of transcending retreat almost as soon as it was begun. The turn to NEP also accompanied a drive to take control of the old universities that culminated in 1922, a campaign against idealism in higher learning, and the intensive building of a system of party education after 1921. Finally, despite such anonialies as an April 1921 report from an Agitprop worker and Cheka consultant advocating the legalization of other socialist parties, the economic plan was decidedly not matched by a “political NEP.”49

The creation of a party educational system and the articulation of a full-fledged communist educational-cultural mission — both hallmarks of the 1920s order — thus predated the introduction of NEP in 1921. As we have seen, they were more connected to the eclipse of Proletkul’t and the ebb of civil war. But the New Economic Policy also had far-reaching effects on both these earlier developments. At the heart of NEP was an endorsement of differentiated economic sectors (state, cooperative, rural); notions of differentiation, parallel systems, distinctions between party and state policy, and even compartmentalization took hold in spheres well beyond the economic. In the arts, Clark even refers to an “increasing apartheid” between high, popular, and proletarian culture overtaking the war communist dream of an integral revolutionary culture.50 While a similar division into separate spheres came to structure the world of higher education, the boundaries of the division (like those of the dualistic party-state itself) were permeable. “Reform” was pursued in the state higher educational institutions even as the very growth of party education threatened gradual reformist approaches. Party education was stimulated to groom itself to replace bourgeois higher education precisely because the “transition period” was to now be lengthy and old institutions were to be tolerated. These central contradictions of the 1920s order grew out of the tensions between the construction of the new and forced toleration of the old and as such were typical of the epoch.

The campaign for the “winning of the higher school” launched at the end of the civil war reflected party priorities and strategies in policy toward higher education. Primacy was given to wresting administrative and hence political control from a professoriat bent on maintaining autonomy. To compound the challenge for the Bolsheviks, the studenchestvo in the early years of Soviet power was overwhelmingly non-Bolshevik and contained sizable contingents of activists from other political parties. Mensheviks, SRs, and anarchists, driven underground in the early 1920s, focused attention and hope on the students, their traditional supply of activists.51

This situation led the Bolshevik leadership in the early 1920s to rely heavily on the party cells in higher educational institutions, and on militant communist students who led them. The cells gained enormous political and administrative power in the universities, as did, to a lesser extent, the rabfaks. Many communist student politicians thus came to view themselves as leaders on the front lines of a class struggle to transform higher education. The communist student movement straddled the new party institutions and the old universities, and destruction of the old prompted if anything as much enthusiasm as the creation of the new. Although rabfaks, which numbered 64 with 25,000 students in 1922, were not administered by the Party but by Narkompros, politically they were also centers of the communist student movement. A rabfak student in 1923 voiced this perceived mission in the language of ideological warfare that became connected to the communist student movement’s generational ethos: “The rabfak students, fulfilling their historical role in higher education in their capacity as a proletarian avant-garde, must destroy the higher school as a nest of counterrevolutionaries (and this includes white, pink, three-colored, and all other kinds of counterrevolutionaries) who are among the students and the white-Kadet professoriat.”52

The “hotheads” who saw their task as the total destruction of bourgeois higher education — and this may well have been the bulk of the communist student aktiv — often ignored pressing considerations incumbent upon even the most “anti-specialist” figures in the Bolshevik leadership. Overly precipitous action quite simply threatened the continued functioning of higher educational institutions. Even Narkompros’ most influential policymaker on higher education, Pokrovskii, deliberately cast aside his persona of crusading commissar when addressing the Congress of Communist Students in 1920. “We must put off until better days,” he enjoined, “all that is not absolutely necessary.” Pokrovskii singled out reform of social science and humanities curricula as among the most urgent tasks, but opposed hothead demands to shut down social science and philological departments as a “tactical stupidity.”53

From the point of view of the communist students, however, it must have been difficult indeed to understand why some repressive measures were necessary and others were blunders. Indeed, the difficulty of fomenting and then reigning in revolutionary sentiment was a perennial result of the militarized party chain of command in the young revolutionary state. To the chagrin of many revolutionaries, the attack on “intelligentsia” and institutional resistance — the two were typically conflated in this struggle — proceeded only in fits and starts. When decisive action finally came in 1922, it produced a higher educational order utterly different than anticipated.

The weakness of the Bolsheviks’ hand and their investment in Marxism dictated that attention be focused on the social sciences, and in fact natural science programs such as the Physical-Mathematical Faculty of Moscow University were least touched of all departments.54 In 1920 Sovnarkom appointed a special commission to review social science programs, inviting leading Bolshevik intellectuals such as Bukharin, Volgin, Pokrovskii, Rotshtein, Svortsov-Stepanov, and Friche to take part. This was soon dubbed the Rotshtein commission, after its chair, Socialist Academy member Fedor A. Rotshtein. The commission recommended creating the Party’s own red specialists in the Marxist social sciences in a special graduate school, the Institute of Red Professors. By February 1921 the Rotshtein commission had also put together a “program of political literacy for higher educational institutions.” Sovnarkom proceeded to ratify this proposal, changing the name to the more advanced-sounding term “social minimum,” a group of mandatory courses to be taught in all higher schools. These courses included historical materialism, the proletarian revolution, and the political structure of the RSFSR. For years, however, the social minimum remained a marginalized part of curricula in the universities and VUZy. In the mid-1920s the minimum was designed to take up ten percent of all study hours, but widespread textbook shortages were still reported.55

In 1922 the scientific-political section of the State Academic Council (Gosudarstvennyi Uchennyi Sovet, or GUS), which assumed the power to ratify academic appointments, began a “verification” of teaching personnel in the social sciences and humanities. In line with the current campaign against “idealist” tendencies in scholarship and publications, the goal was to weed out “theologians, mystics, and representatives of extreme idealism,” to reduce the number of philologists and archaeologists in favor of disciplines “comparatively more useful to the state,” and to ensure that younger teachers knew the basics of Marxism.56 Both the social minimum and such open attempts to reconfigure the professoriat, while apparently having little effect in the short term, added fuel to the fire in the mounting struggle over political command in higher education.

The long-awaited confrontation carne to a head in 1921–22 over the new university charter. The result, however, was an ambiguous Bolshevik victory rather than apocalyptic destruction of the bourgeois system of higher education. In 1921, a university statute (polozhenie) was ratified as a stepping-stone to a new charter. The obvious aim of the measure was to establish party-state appointment of university rectors and administrations and thus formally abolish university autonomy. A 1921 Central Committee directive to Narkompros, approved with corrections by the Politburo on 10 May, gave party regional committees veto power over Narkompros appointments of rectors and insisted on the “one-person” (edinolichnyi) decision-making powers of rectors and deans over collegial organizations.57 The Party’s strategy proved an explosive issue. The decades-long struggle against the 1884 tsarist charter, which had limited university authority over academic and administrative appointments, had been a cause célèbre until its repeal after the February Revolution. Now the Bolsheviks planned to assume even more direct control over university administrations and to ban independent “social organizations” at the universities as well. Communist students and staff had already been brought into the Moscow University administration in 1920, but the permanent subordination implied in the 1921 statute prompted the rector, former Kadet Mikhail M. Novikov, to resign — after a stormy confrontation at Narkompros where he likened Pokrovskii and Lunacharskii to the symbols of tsarist reaction, Pobedenotsev and Kasso.58

The communist student leaders reacted with jubilation; this seemed to be the moment for which they had been waiting. An All-Moscow Conference of Komsomol Cells in March 1921 vowed to defeat the “Kadet—black hundred professoriat.” The same month, leaders of the “red” group in higher education, 46 communist professors and scholars, called for an end to negotiations, full Soviet control over admissions to higher education, and debate on the higher school to be put on the agenda of the next party congress. Pokrovskii brought this last proposal before the Politburo, which, no doubt wishing to avoid the likely result, considered it “not expedient.” But in 1922, Moscow VUZ cells continued to pressure Narkompros to enforce the new charter. The Central Bureau of Communist Students also lobbied the Central Committee to wield student stipends as “the sharpest weapon of class power politics in the higher school.”59

At the All-Union Conference of Communist Cells of VUZy, Rabfaks, and Higher Party Schools in April 1922, activist students were told by the head of the Moscow Bureau of the Communist Students that they were witnessing a time “of the most cruel class struggle” in higher education over “the question who will be master.” Reflecting the confidence of the cells, the conference resolution boasted that current events proved the communist student body was the only base on which the state could rely in restructuring the higher school. The student cells demanded the right to help determine all party policies affecting “school construction.”60

With their autonomy threatened and chaotic funding problems resulting from the introduction of NEP, faculty members of the Moscow Higher Technical School went on strike in the spring of 1921. In early 1922, in connection with the new university charter, (but gaining momentum not least because of irregularly paid and meager professorial salaries) “professors’ strikes” broke out in Moscow, Petrograd, and Kazan’.61 A dejected Lunacharskii asked the Central Committee to take him off the faculty of Moscow University and to transfer him to Sverdlov Communist University, because the students had organized “something like a boycott” of his classes and only the rabfak students had appeared. The Politburo — consistently less inclined to embrace a revolutionary offensive that might wreck nonparty higher education than many Narkompros officials, “red” scholars, and communist students — ordered an “immediate” and “peaceful” liquidation of the strike on 6 February. Three more Poliburo resolutions followed concerning immediate amelioration of the “material condition” in higher education, and Preobrazhenskii and Pokrovskii were given reprimands for not fulfilling directives on ending the strike. On 13 February Preobrazhenskii, a leader of the Socialist Academy whose hard-line stance was conditioned by his championship of the new party institutions, resigned from the Politburo special “commission on higher eduction.” But the Politburo was not all conciliation; it improved material conditions, but also decreed a reduction in the number of higher schools and professors.62

There were still some grounds to believe that an assault on “bourgeois” higher education was imminent. Toward the end of 1922, Central Committee secretary Valerian V. Kuibyshev and Agitprop chief Andrei S. Bubnov instructed regional party committees to take an active part in implementing the new charter, and on its basis to participate in the selection of VUZ administrators and leading professors, to organize citywide networks of communist students, and to monitor curricula so that “proletarian” university students would not undergo a “bourgeois work-over.” Typically, these measures were proclaimed the “next step in the winning of the higher school, in which until now bourgeois scholars and bourgeois ideology have ruled.”63

Such calls to arms, moreover, were buttressed by widespread fears within the Party that the NEP retreat had created a crisis of revolutionary purity and the imminent reassertion of alien socio-ideological influences. The moves to establish control over higher education were closely connected to the August 1922 arrest and subsequent deportation of leading “professors and litterateurs,” a group of about 200 people (including families) that cut across the elite of the nonparty intelligentsia in Moscow and Petrograd. The deportees, who were given seven days to prepare for departure or face a trial, included some of the most authoritative scholars at Moscow University, those who had opposed the trial of the SRs that had begun in June, or who were identified with a “renaissance of bourgeois ideology” in a handful of newly viable nonparty publications. In the summer of 1922, lists of “anti-Soviet intelligentsia” were bandied back and forth among Lenin, Stalin, and top GPU officials. Deportees eventually included former rectors of Moscow and Petrograd universities; the historians Aleksandr A. Kizevetter and Anatolii A. Florovskii; and the philosophers Nikolai A. Berdiaev, Semen L. Frank, Sergei N. Bulgakov, and Aleksandr S. Izgoev. Also deported were prominent agronomists, scientists, professionals, and other “thinkers.” Coincidentally echoing his famous phrase about NEP lasting “in earnest and for a long time” (nadolgo), Lenin told Stalin: “We will clean out Russia for a long time.”64

The initial Menshevik report of the event perceptively discerned that the arrests were connected with the struggle for control of higher education. Indeed, the laconic announcement of the deportations in Pravda on 31 August suggested the principal activity of the anti-Soviet intellectuals was in higher education, and that they had turned public opinion against higher educational reform.65 The deportations were thus a cleansing, a banishment of anti-Soviet elements to non-Soviet space. All this was complemented by another rationale: the measure was a “crack of the whip” against intelligentsia society (obshchestvennost’) as a force capable of aspiring to leadership and influence in the postrevolutionary order.

The earliest plans for the expulsions perhaps lie in a letter from Lenin to Dzerzhinskii on 19 May 1922, which proposed the GPU collaborate with Politburo members in identifying leading anti-Soviet professors and writers. A letter from Trotskii to Kamenev on 9 August 1922 indicates that such a discussion among Politburo members on this subject took place. This fragmentary piece of evidence shows Trotskii providing a polemical profile of a proposed deportee, a well-known literary critic: “Is Nestor Kotliarevskii included on the list? His speech ‘Pushkin and Russia,’ published by the Academy of Sciences (by the permission of academician Ol’denburg) is saturated through and through with reactionary-serfholding idealism.”66

The deportations were not the only measures taken in this period by the top leadership to counter the supposed resurgence of bourgeois ideology. Scarce resources were diverted to found a series of new scholarly and literary “thick journals” designed to bolster Marxist hegemony and mitigate, as one historian has put it, the “corrosive economic and social climate of NEP.”67

The shift to the 1920s academic order, then, predated and was broader than the New Economic Policy. But the introduction of NEP also had particular ramifications in higher learning, above all the well-known conciliation intended to stabilize the regime’s relations with so-called bourgeois specialists. Bolshevik policy clearly carried a carrot along with the stick.

The universities were linked to the new line on the so-called bourgeois specialists (spetsy), a term which included state bureaucrats and technical workers as well as scholars. A new wage scale was introduced, paving the way for nonmanual workers to reeeive significantly higher salaries. Lenin’s victorious platform in the trade-union eontroversy rejected compulsory membership of specialists in mass unions and permitted continued existence of professional organizations. Above all, attacks on specialist-baiting (spetseedstvo) and a new stress on “winning over” specialists to Soviet power gave the specialists a place of respect if only a quasi-legitimized identity in the Soviet order — no matter how hostile or divided the impulses of many (arguably all) Communists remained on the question of old elites.68 It was in 1921–22 that the Central Commission for Improving the Life of Scholars, the “expert commission” of which was headed by party scholars Pokrovskii and Otto Iu. Shmidt but included several academicians and nonparty figures, founded eighteen local sections and widely increased its activities in providing special privileges such as sanatoria for scholars. The economic specialist in VSNKh, Valentinov-Vol’skii, underlined in his well-known memoirs the psychological shift in specialist circles in 1921–22: many “saw in NEP not only the ‘repeal’ of the hated ration system, but the repeal of a system of ideas which were fettering and destroying life.”69

The Politburo also maneuvered to strengthen an unofficial rapprochement between the specialists and the regime through its partly surreptitious support for the “changing landmarks” movement (smenovekhovstvo) of émigré intellectuals. In 1921 a group in Prague had published the namesake collection with the message that the intelligentsia should “go to Canossa” for its fruiless hostility to the Bolshevik regime, which was recreating a Russian great power and unitary state. The idea was found to have resonance among the nonparty specialists in the state bureaucracy (and was first dubbed the “ideology of the specialists” by the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin in December 1921, before he himself was deported as an anti-Soviet intellectual the next year). While many Bolsheviks were immediately hostile to any assumption that the revolution had compromised with Russian national tradition, the dominant response in the Soviet press was triumphalism. The response of Lenin and the leadership was to seize the opportunity: in 1922 the Politburo supported the group’s publications financially and demonstrated that Soviet ambassadors abroad had entered into an intricate involvement with the movement’s leaders. Still, the flirtation was symptomatic of the intractable ambivalence toward even a compromise with the “bourgeois intelligentsia” deemed highly useful. Even Bolshevik “supporters” of the movement issued dualistic blends of praise and denunciation; and no doubt emboldened by the deportations of intellectuals the same month, Agitprop arranged a campaign against “changing landmarks” in August 1922.70

In the end, however, the coincidence of the establishment of a new position for the specialists and the rockiest period in the struggle for political command of higher education undercut the plans of those who wished to immediately and irrevocably transform the existing system. The battle had to be “won” without threatening the edifice on which the new reconciliation with the specialists was built. Lenin publicly rebuked the VUZ communist cells and rabfaks for their overzealous attacks on bourgeois professors, and the thrust of much party policy toward the universities willy-nilly became reining in the powers acquired by the cells and local student “commissars” in previous years, some of whom had seized administrative and even financial control in some institutions. A main priority now became the consolidation of power in new party-controlled school administrations, which could keep relations with the professoriat under control.71 In all probability as a result of these policies, the head of the Central Bureau of Communist Students, Zelinskii, appealed to Stalin in 1923 that Politburo decisions tying the hands of the communist student leadership had “made it impossible to work further under such conditions.” The 1921–22 battle in higher education therefore cemented Bolshevik administrative control and launched a struggle for Marxism in the social sciences, but muzzled the most ardent revolutionary zeal in the state-run institutions. This resulted in an enduring division of influence within the universities and VUZy and the prospect of further, drawn-out reform between the deportations of 1922 and the Shakhtii affair of 1928.72

As with the introduction of NEP itself, Lenin played a large role introducing this tension-riddled compromise in higher education, not just in its political contours but in the direction of higher educational curricula as well. Lenin stepped into a standoff jn 1920–21 between Narkompros’ advocatesof broad-based (“polytechnical”) and political education and Glavprofobr’s support of an ultra-centralized vocationalism. A compromise solution was dictated: vocationalism would be combined with both general and political education in the VUZy.73 This did not just affect the shape of the university curriculum, but held important political dimensions as well. The rejection of both radical centralization and a stress on practical educational results had the effect of preserving rather than destroying the influence of the nonparty professoriat within its sphere, as much as this was possible in the conditions of the early 1920s.

The settlement of 1922, fraught with its own tensions in the state sector, does not suffice to explain the emergence of an overall 1920s order in higher learning. As we have seen, the transition to NEP not only produced this uneasy alternation between concessions and advanee; it accompanied the rise of a new and powerful alternative to all the old institutions.74

Efforts to strengthen party education were inititially justified largely in inner-party terms, as a step toward the better socialization of new party members, the creation of a new generation of Bolshevik leaders, and in this period even the solution of the much-publicized internal frictions between leaders and rank and file. The party educational system was plagued by thorny problems when it was launched in the early 1920s. Directives attempted to increase the regulation of student admissions and to initiate the lengthy process of standardizing curricula.75 It was a time-consuming and often chaotic process to coordinate curricula and textbooks. Problems with finding qualified communist teachers and students were severe. “We are forced to depend on the old party and Marxist cadres,” Pokrovskii wryly remarked in 1924, “who are spread so thinly that they are turning into invalids or are setting off directly for the next world.”76

Yet contrasts between the party and nonparty systems were equally striking. The central party organs had little trouble establishing the principle of direct party control over the burgeoning party educational system; indeed, the new party institutions, unlike the universities, were eager to respond to new curricular and pedagogical initiatives. The higher educational struggle culminating in 1922 affected interpretations oí this situation: the party schools became “ours,” while the universities were still “theirs”; the universities were lagging behind while the party schools were forging ahead. “The whole system of party schools,” Lunacharskii put it in 1921, “is, as it were, a forward march of the avantgarde, a cavalry raid of enlightenment.”77

The self-evident contrasts between the new and old systems of education perceptibly drew the participants in the system of party education toward a new pretension, one which appeared to mitigate the compromises the Party had struck with the specialists and the professoriat. The radical transformation of all of higher learning would still take place; only now this would be accomplished first and foremost in new communist institutions. The party institutions could become the basis for an ideological victory over all bourgeois science. One Glavpolitprosvet report, treating the ostensibly dry subject of the academic goals of the party schools, claimed (not entirely logically) that because communist universities had the highest concentration of party members and were focused on the social sciences where Marxism was most developed, “it is possible to create conditions that will guarantee our ideological [ideinuiu] hegemony in all areas of knowledge, both methodologically and organizationally.”78 A step backward toward NEP compromise, it seems, provided the springing ground for a forward leap of institution-building and imagination.79

The new system of communist education kept one foot in the vast agitprop network and the other in the more rarified world of Marxist scholarship and theory. Party education, as it expanded and broadened its typology of institutions in the first half of the 1920s, retained the multiplicity of aims that had been present at its prerevolutionary founding; now, however, the new resources of the Party and the state, despite the grim material conditions of the early 1920s, allowed for a much broader differentiation of goals within a new hierarchy of institutions. The range of institutional emphases now included remedial, primary, and secondary-level education, including instruction in party politics and Marxism. It also incorporated the training of cadres for the farflung regions of the new Soviet state and indeed for the world revolution, as well as the advance of high Marxist theory and scholarship.

Just above the efforts toward the mass “liquidation of illiteracy,” ground-level organizations of party political education included schools of political literacy, Marxist study circles, and evening soviet-party schools. These were designed to spread general education in varying doses along with the rudiments of Marxist ideology and the current political agenda to frequently semiliterate party workers. For example, special short-term schools were organized for the workers brought into the Party as part of the “Lenin Levy” in 1924.80 These kinds of low-level party institutions overlapped with “polit-circles” and courses organized at enterprises, factories, workers’ clubs, and party cells, which exploded in number after 1924. A step higher on the “ladder,” soviet-party schools of the first and second levels were, in the early 1920s, oriented toward basic training for provincial agitators and propagandists; after 1922, they increasingly turned into schools for rural and regional party and Komsomol workers.81

A new array of “higher” party institutions now developed differentiated functions. Since many of these trained semiliterate or poorly educated cadres, academically most cannot be considered more than remedial secondary institutions. Of the institutions that targeted specific groups of cadres, one can count the Central Committee’s special training courses for future heads of uezd party committees (Kursy sekretarei Ukomov), administrated by Agitprop’s Kirsanova, who in 1925 was appointed to head the Comintern’s newly founded Lenin School.82 The Communist Academy’s Courses in Marxism, initiated in 1922, were geared toward increasing the theoretical knowledge of both up-and-coming party politicians and potential Marxist scholars.

The special tasks inherent in training non-Russians, political émigrés, and foreign Communists were addressed in two special party universities: the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West (KUNMZ), and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV). In addition to rehearsing the standard Marxist social science courses (political economy, historical and dialectical materialism, the history of the Party and socialism), all these schools strove to provide political and practical training for communist movements in the students’ homelands. The clandestine skills of the underground were emphasized most at the Lenin School, the most important training ground for foreign communists. Students there were trained in techniques of strikes, military insurrection, and espionage; they learned practical skills, such as conduct under interrogation, and were considered potential candidates for the Soviet and Comintern secret services.83

On the other end of the spectrum of party education, the more academically oriented party institutions held up as their most important goals the advancement of Marxist theory, scholarship (at first almost solely in the social sciences), and pedagogy. As communist universities were expanded at the outset of NEP to three- and four-year programs, they hegan to act as alternative universities. They specialized in the social sciences, but included large doses of general education, including language, mathematics, and natural sciences.84

At the summit of the academic hierarchy, the Institute of Red Professors and the Communist Academy aspired to produce Marxist researchers and professors, as well as a new generation of party theorists. Two other key institutions, which have yet to find their historian, came to he mentioned in the 1920s together with the Communist Academy as the Party’s leading “scientific-research” organizations—the Lenin Institute and the Marx-Engels Institute. In fact, they can be taken as representing two poles in the world of party scholarship.

The Lenin Institute was created along with the incipient Lenin cult in 1924 and put in charge of publications, documents, and an archive on Lenin and Leninism. Because of the centrality of party history for the inner-party struggles, and the place Leninism irnmediately assumed at the heart of party ideology, the work of the Lenin Institute immediately became a linchpin in high-level political-historical battles as well as in the construction of Leninism. Kamenev was put in charge in 1924, but proved unable to spend much time directing institute affairs, so a key figure became the deputy director I. P. Tovstukham—Stalin’s pomoshchnik from his personal secretariat, two-time head of the Central Committee’s Secret Section (repository for classified documents), and author of the first Stalin biography in 1927.85

The Marx-Engels Institute (IME), in contrast, was firmly under the hand of the internationally distinguished Marx scholar David Riazanov and had originated before 1921 as a section of the Socialist Academy. Riazanov secured an Orgburo decision in that year to control the staff of the IME and specifically to include nonparty Marxists; in the 1920s he was given the resources to create the largest library in the world on Marxism. With documents purchased in Western and Central Europe, IME also created a preeminent archive on Marx and the history of socialism. In the ten years of its existence, before the institute was merged with the Lenin Institute in 1931 upon Riazanov’s arrest, it published not only the largest extant scholarly edition of Marx and Engels but Russian editions ranging from the works of Hobbs, Diderot, Hegel, Ricardo, and Kautsky to those of Adam Smith.86

In sum, the commitment made to the expansion of both party education and research after the introduction of NEP reflected a series of priorities high on the agenda of the new regime—from “enlightenment” to high Marxist scholarship, from differing combinations of remedial, general, specialized, and revolutionary instruction to elite theory and formulation of party ideology. The rapid expansion on all levels in the first half of the 1920s was all the more striking considering the financial problems of the revolutionary state.87 Konstantin Popov, who headed Agitprop’s subsection on propaganda which oversaw the party schools, estimated that at the beginning of NEP the entire party instructional system included several tens of thousands of people, while in 1925 the number had swelled to 750,000–800,000. The Tenth Party Congress in 1921 made some kind of party schooling, if only at the level of “political literacy,” obligatory for new members of the Communist Party.88

At the outset of the new era in the Party’s cultural mission, however, an outstanding political question regarding party education remained unsolved. It was not certain which party or state organization would win control over the new educational system and grasp the power to influence its direction.

The Politics of Culture and the Party-State:
Formative Struggles on the Third Front

The rise of a system of party education paralleling the old and non-party institutions overseen by the state might be seen as a reflection of the dualistic party-state itself, in which the Communist Party paralleled all state structures (including commissariat bureaucracies in this period staffed by large numbers of former tsarist officials and nonparty specialists). Yet the theory and practice of this dualism has been understood by historians in different ways. Fitzpatrick, in a seminal article on cultural policy in the 1920s, emphasized the barriers set up in the partition: “In the 1920s official cultural policies were carried out as a rule by government agencies, not by the party.” This pointed to a heavy focus on Narkompros and underscored the official nature of the “soft line on culture” it represented.89 More recently, Kotkin has explained the persistence of the party-state dualism, despite early proposals to abolish parallel party institutions as unnecessary, through the Party’s discovery of a postrevolutionary raison d’etre: the conspiratorial shadowing of the state and the pursuit of ideological purity. Kotkin interprets the lasting party-state dualism as creating a structural division between the spheres of expertise and economic-technical administration (the state) and ideological and political oversight (the Party).90

Both insights — the ratification of spheres of influence along the fault lines of the party-state divide, and the rationale for the enduring division in terms of ideology versus expertise — reveal crucial aspects of the Soviet polity. But both obscure as much as they explain, as can be seen in the story of a formative struggle over the continuation of party-state dualism in the cultural and educational sphere, the emergence of the Main Committee on Political Enlightenment (Glavpolitprosvet, or GPP). An agency under Narkompros, in 1920–21 it attempted with top-level backing to consolidate “party” functions of agitation and propaganda and party education under state control and thus step toward abolition of party-state division of spheres on the third front. It did not succeed, but the struggles surrounding the attempt reveal much broader features of the emerging apparatus of cultural regulation and the place of party education in it.

First and foremost, it became impossible for the Bolsheviks to fully distinguish “ideology” from expertise, propaganda from culture. This can be attributed, first, to the basic fact that party positions and doctrine (the traditional focus of agitation-propaganda) were disseminated using media that were by no means solely reserved for agitprop: when, for example, was a poster cultural but not agitational, or a curriculum educational but not propagandistic? It was partly because the newly established party educational network could be considered part of both the network of agitation and propaganda (as disseminator of the party program) and the world of higher education (as an alternative higher school) that it was not obvious at the outset of NEP which agency would take charge.

Fundamental conceptual ambiguities were complemented by political and institutional ones. Although GPP was defeated, it was not destroyed, and it was succeeded by other state agencies on the third front administration that remained deeply involved in “ideological” affairs, just as party organs like Agitprop became enmeshed in the “cultural” and specialized ones. In practice, the overarching dualism accompanied a crazy-quilt of overlapping competencies and byzantine rivalries in the emergent third front apparat.91 The bureaucratic infighting of NEP accompanying the triumph of party-state dualism was ideally suited to amplify the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the division of spheres.

The concepts and terms “political enlightenment,” “agitprop,” and “culture” tended to merge and expand, given the organicist ethos at the heart of the consciousness-raising revolutionary state. A strict division among them was untenable not least because the regulatory organs had strong political incentives to broaden their jurisdictions, not to confine them.

The transition to peacetime and then to NEP coincided roughly with a series of formative power struggles over the shape of administration on the entire third front. During the civil war the political administration of the Red Army (PUR) played a leading role in propaganda, political art, literacy campaigns, and political instruction; each army and division had a political section (politotdel) responsible for newspapers, recruiting party members, and organizing political meetings. Narkompros had assumed the role of most important agency in the arts, the school system, and scholarship. The end of civil war produced a volatile new situation for both of these organizations. The future of the Red Army itself in peacetime was in doubt.92 While PUR had sent out a barrage of almost 20,000 Communists to the armies and fronts between December 1918 and July 1920, a recent work has argued that its political education efforts were a disaster rather than a success. It does so, however, on the basis of only one case study, by pointing to the chasm separating the urban Communists sent from the center from the pillaging, rural, often anti-Semitic troops of the famed “red cavalry” (Konarmiia) in 1920.93 It is possible that the party leadership’s perception of failures in PUR’s work in that year may have undercut the agency and spurred recognition of the need for a large-scale commitment to longer-term educational endeavors. What is certain is that Narkompros found itself in 1920–21 under severe pressure from many quarters. Lunacharskii’s commissariat was attacked for being too conciliatory toward the intelligentsia, and for ceding virtual monopoly powers to certain avant-garde groups such as the futurists. Finally, the number of party and state agencies taking part in the revolutionary explosion of the most widespread activities gathered under the rubric of “political enlightenment” — such as theater and political instruction — had reached what some considered absurd proportions. In 1921 Iaroslavskii justified the need for a new centralizing agency, GPP, by noting that even the Commissariat of Food Supply had a theatrical section and conducted political-enlightenment work.94

The push for centralization may have somewhat reduced the proliferation, but it never eliminated the bureaucratic cacophony. Nevertheless, the embattled Narkompros leadership and other enemies of PUR recognized in the high-level support for centralization their chance to reap political gains by centralizing control of political enlightenment. It is emblematic of the endemic conceptual ambiguity that the new agency’s very competency depended on how this term would be defined. In 1920 the plans to give Glavpolitprosvet sweeping powers bolstered an expansive definition of political enlightenment, and it became a possibility that the new agency would succeed in acquiring the powers of a dominant agency at the nexus of the entire apparat overseeing the third front. For example, it was set up to include a division of agitation and propaganda, an artistic section, and the committee on the liquidation of illiteracy. At the outset of 1921 GPP claimed 475,000 politprosvet personnel under its jurisdiction, a figure that shrank to a mere 10,000 when GPP lost virtually all power ayear later.95

As PUR’s protest in 1920 indicates, the charter of Glavpolitprosvet was drafted by Narkompros, while the Red Army organization was excluded from participation.96 Glavpolitprosvet was to be under Narkompros and therefore a state agency, but would have direct channels to higher party organs and thus acquire a quasi-party status. Krupskaia, a high Narkompros official and Lenin’s wife, was to be the central figure. The Politburo resolution of 28 October 1920 on Glavpolitprosvet, which first advanced the formula that the new organ would “unite all political-enlightenment work,” is attributed to Lenin, and the agency was later designated the “direct apparat of the Party in the system of state institutions.” Preobrazhenskii declared: “What we are witnessing is the process of communization of the state apparatus.”97

As Krupskaia revealed in a letter to the Politburo in 1921, as her organization was rapidly losing power to what became its major rival, the Central Committee’s Agitprop department, “the Politburo discussed and appointed [GPP’s] committee, and it was ordered that it would include a sufficiently authoritative member of the Central Committee. At first comrade Preobrazhenskii carne in to the committee, then comrade Iaroslavskii.”98

But at the time of the Tenth Party Congress in the spring of 1921 the outstanding issue of the relationship between GPP and the Party remained unresolved. Chances for a takeover of party functions in agitation and propaganda seemed increasingly remote. Debate nonetheless revealed widely differing agendas even among GPP’s backers. Lunacharskii, with the most to gain, made the incendiary proposal that all cultural and propaganda tasks not “purely party” be taken away and given to GPP. To justify such a power play, the former “god-builder” attempted to undermine a literal or strict interpretation of party-state dualism, which he claimed was commonly misunderstood. Giving the state more functions would not deprive the Party, but the opposite, since “the Party must be everywhere like the biblical spirit of God.” Krupskaia held out the possibility that GPP might someday become a party organ. Preobrazhenskii adopted a middle position, calling for GPP to take priority in uniting political-enlightenment work, but maintaining it should assume only some functions claimed by party organs. Finally, a certain Ivanov arose to have the last word. Announcing that he spoke on behalf of local agitators and propagandists in regional party committees, he denounced Narkompros as an art-obsessed, power-hungry appropriator of the rightful powers of the Party. Ivanov called for the party committees themselves to control political enlightenment, since “only the devil” could make sense of the futurist posters now put out by Narkompros, which “already has art, already has science, and now they want to add agitation and propaganda to that.”99

In 1920–21 GPP and its supporters at times seemed to be winning a two-front battle against PUR and Agitprop. The congress and its aftermath made it possible for GPP to attempt to assume control over PUR’s activities in the Red Army, a process which produced fierce resistance in the fall of 1921.100 The Tenth Congress resolution noted that GPP did have the task of raising the consciousness of party members, and it would carry this out through control of the party schools.101 Party education initially appeared to be one of Glavpolitprosvet’s greatest prizes.

Agitprop, until 1920 simply a coordinating committee of representives from myriad agencies involved in disseminating the Party’s message, which had lacked strong leadership and a clear-cut mandate from the Central Committee, emerged the next year as Glavpolitprosvet’s major competitor. The agency’s powers and aspirations swelled almost immediately, and its status was increased by the fact that the strengthening of the Central Committee apparat was a key factor in an entire complex shift in party-state relations in this period to the side of the Party. It was aided by those agencies, including PUR and the regional party committees, which saw their interests threatened by GPP. The first head of Agitprop in 1920, Ruben P. Katanian, was succeeded at his post by a more energetic young militant, Bubnov. Agitprop’s 1921 charter gave the agency four divisions: agitation (with subsections of political campaigns, industrial or “production” agitation, and agitational technology), propaganda (with subsections for internal-party propaganda and the school section), and the press. The school section in 1921 was authorized to participate with GPP in formulating the programs of the party schools and the “social minimum” courses in the VUZy.102

As Krupskaia’s letter to the Politburo also makes clear, the key moment in Agitprop’s victory over GPP came in late 1921, when Agitprop’s dominance was cemented by the influx of large group of high-ranking party members, some of them transferred directly from GPP. Agitprop’s trump card in the struggle against GPP was its status as a “party” institution. Krupskaia protested:

Is the proposed organization of Agitprop correct? . . . In composition the Agitprop department is no more of the Party than Glavpolitprosvet. Why was Solov’ev, when he was at Glavpolitprosvet, less a party member than when he was transferred to the Agit department . . . ? In my view, we should leave things as they were, and propose that Stalin control the work of Glavpolitprosvet directly, and not through Solov’ev, Vardin, and the 87 comrades who are now going to work at Agitprop . . . the workers who are now being picked for the Agit department should be given to Glavpolitprosvet.103

Stalin’s association with Agitprop thus seems to have provided a critical boost for the party organization. In April 1921 the Politburo instructed Stalin to spend three-quarters of his time on “party” (as opposed to state) work, including “no less than one-and-one-half hours” with Agitprop.104

As the political contest between Agitprop and GPP heated up, an ideological basis for the conflict developed that gave the events of 1921, and GPP’s subsequent reduction of power, a lasting significance. Agitprop and the Red Army political workers indicted GPP for the old populist sins of a Kulturträger or “non-class” approach, for working for “general enlightenment” rather than political propaganda. ln von Hagen’s words, “Kul’turtregerstvo, and its more Russified variant kul’turnichestvo, was a clearly pejorative term from the pre-1917 vocabulary of the revolutionary parties. . . . For the working-class militant, kul’turnichestvo was associated with the bourgeois intelligentsia, who endeavored to replace genuine class struggle with the palliative of ‘abstract enlightenment activity.’” Glavpolitprosvet workers, as von Hagen points out, certainly did not consider their approach any less political than that of their critics; rather, they prided themselves on integrating cultural and political approaches and on using participatory methods of instruction.105

The lasting resonance of these disputes over the relationship between culture and propaganda can be discerned in the 1928 theses of an Agitprop official called Chistov, whose views could have easily been advanced six or seven years earlier. Chistov attacked GPP’s work throughout the 1920s as an example of enlightenment “for its own sake.” Both Krupskaia and her GPP deputy Meshcheriakov, in responding to Chistov, cited GPP excesses in politicizing reading materials in the illiteracy campaigns as evidence that they were not guilty of kul’turnichestvo, but it is likely that even these protestations would have only confirmed Chistov’s suspicions. “On the contrary,” Krupskaia noted acerbically, “excesses were always on the side of agitation. Even grammar and literacy were transformed into agit-babble [agitboltovniu].”106

Krupskaia’s 1921 letter to the Politburo suggests how she portrayed the differences between GPP and Agitprop at the height of their political rivalry. There, she asserted that “pure agitation” could never be effective and must always be combined with “enlightenment work.” Only the lure of general educational opportunities could make the inculcation of party doctrine and policies palatable to the masses in the long run and at the same time raise their consciousness. Agitprop, she charged, “looks down on enlightenment work, disdainfully calling it ‘cultural’ in quotation marks; at the same time Agitprop is making this criticism come true by separating out the political work from the enlightenment, which GPP has always tried to combine in its work with the masses.” In short, Agitprop professed little interest in the general education work that GPP and Narkompros leaders viewed as an essential component of their approach; rather, it stood for the development of a “pure” party propaganda.107

In the course of 1922 the true dimensions of Agitprop’s victory over Glavpolitprosvet became apparent. GPP lost control of its massive apparat, was allowed to run out of funds in the often chaotic fiscal austerity of NEP, and was even forced to justify its continued existence.108 A kind of contract was drawn up to clarify the relationship between GPP and Agitprop; this document gave Agitprop resounding priority in all matters having a “party character.” The document’s language made clear that GPP would now become a subordinate organization. As part of this new agreement, the propaganda subsection of Agitprop was instructed to “control the work of GPP” in the realm of party education.109

Glavpolitprosvet documents from the mid-1920s show that the agency became largely concerned with political-enlightenment work in the countryside, administering such initiatives as the local “reading huts” and libraries, and attempting to popularize party positions among the peasantry.110 GPP remained involved in the system of party education, however, and retained some influence in this area. The main reason for this appears to be that the GPP budget financed the communist universities and sovpartshkoly; GPP, as part of Narkompros, was officially a state agency and in this way the party schools could be financed out of the state budget. In 1924, the vast bulk of GPP’s monthly budget was devoted to the party schools, while approximately one-eighth of the total went to all its other politprosvet work combined.111 Yet the attempt to create quasi-party outposts within the Soviet state and the spread of “party” functions to the state did not end with the decline of Glavpolitprosvet. In 1922 Glavlit was created under Narkompros to coordinate all censorship activities and achieved the transcendence of party-state dualism on the third front for which the earlier impetus behind Glavpolitprosvet may have paved the way.

The main initiative in party education, however, now passed to Agitprop. True to its position in the 1921–22 conflict with GPP, Agitprop’s major achievement between 1923 and 1926 was to orient party school curricula around disciplines closely tied to current party politics, such as the history of the party and, after 1924, Leninism; at the same time, the importance of general education was reduced. Agitprop also championed the idea that the higher party schools should produce “practical” party politicians rather than, as in 1921–23, emphasizing the training of erudite Marxist theoreticians and scholars. Agitprop used its manpower to centralize and standardize party school curricula and increase regulation of the selection of students, making slow but steady progress toward the goal of further proletarianization and stiffening required party qualifications.112

Agitprop’s ascendancy in the regulation of party education did not just exaggerate the division between the communist institutions and the VUZy. It paved the way for the agency to influence policy toward the old higher educational institutions as well. In academic as in cultural affairs, the line between the Party and the state remained a kind of semipermeable membrane. As was noted, Agitprop from the outset was authorized to deal with the “social minimum” program in higher schools. Agitprop held influence over nonparty higher education especially through its regulatory control over the powerful student party cells.113 In 1923 Agitprop, with the help of the head of the communist student bureau, Zelinskii, conducted a special investigation into the party cells in Petrograd VUZy. When Zelinskii found “elements of corruption, revisionism, opportunism, and other deviations within the cells,” Agitprop chief Bubnov lobbied the Central Committee Secretariat for permission to conduct similar investigations in VUZy throughout the country. The result was a circular directive to the party gubkoms to set up special investigative commissions headed by a gubkom agitprop representative, a representative from the proletarian students, and a Communist from the local Narkompros division.114

Agitprop also assumed an important role in influencing the most important policies that applied to both state and party education, to VUZy and Komvuzy. These induded admissions quotas and requirements, proletarianization, the training of communist teachers and scholars, and student purges. One of Agitprop’s main activities became the reviewing and recommending of literature for political education in all institutions, induding the VUZy.115 In this endeavor, Agitprop established particularly dose relations with another quasi-party subdivision of a state agency, the scientific-political section of Narkompros’ State Academic Council (GUS). This organization, staffed completely by communist intellectuals and headed by Pokrovskii, might be considered a successful example in the academic realm of what GPP failed to achieve, a “communized” state organ. Narkompros, a divided institution, has far too often been associated solely with the personality of Lunacharskii, whose hands were explicitly tied by the Politburo in 1922.116 The political section of GUS, in charge of academic appointments and curricula in the social sciences, was deliberately created as a communist stronghold in a large commissariat that in other areas was committed to fostering the participation of nonparty specialists. Pokrovskii noted in 1924 that the political section was revising the “social minimum” in “close contact” with Agitprop’s propaganda subsection.117

Agitprop and the political section of GUS focused their attention on developing the Marxist disciplines in the VUZy and increasing the importance of the social minimum. The communist institutions and the VUZy, in this case, were treated to the same regulatory initiatives in the social science disciplines. Much of Agitprop’s clout was reserved for the most politically sensitive topics. After the condemnation of the Trotskyist opposition at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, for example, the history of the party was rewritten by Agitprop and GUS’s political section to include heavy-handed anti-Trotskyist teachings, which in January 1925 were made obligatory for the entire system of party education and the mandatory courses in the VUZy. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Agitprop’s propaganda subsection hosted the multiagency meetings that mobilized party forces to launch the “propaganda and study of Leninism,” a key initiative in the incipient cult of Lenin. As a part of this mobilization, Agitprop and the GUS political section began to saturate social science curricula with the new discipline of Leninism. The efforts to develop and regulate the curricula in the system. of party education thus had significant ramifications for the study of the social sciences in all higher schools. In the mid-1920s, the political section of GUS collaborated with Agitprop to increase mandatory course requirements in Marxism, and revamp their content. This occurred at the very moment when other parts of Narkompros were attempting to strengthen the post-1922 accommodation with the nonparty and non-Marxist professoriat.118

While Narkompros was strengthening the modus vivendi with the nonparty professoriat, then, its own political section was working along with Agitprop to undermine the compromise. Such contradictions of NEP-era cultural and higher educational policy flowed inexorably from the unstable regulatory crazy-quilt underneath the party-state duality, and the pervasive ambiguity in the basic concepts that governed Bolshevik administration of the third front. In 1929, the collapse of party-state dualism as it had been known during NEP was personified in the replacement of Lunacharskii, the commissar of enlightenment, by Bubnov, the former chief of Agitprop and PUR.

Models, Institutions, and Systems
in the 1920s Academic Order

Party institutions first assumed the status of models in the social sciences, the area of most concern to party and Marxist forces in the 1920s and thus the source of greatest friction in the fragile post-1922 academic settlement. Narkompros had first begun efforts to consolidate change in the social sciences during the civil war by founding social science schools (fakul’tety obshchestvennykh nauk, or FONy) at the universities to replace the old history, law, and philology departments. The original hope that the FONy would become centers for the Marxist social sciences, through both the appointment of party scholars and control over the curricula, had already foundered badly by the end of the civil war. The severe shortage of qualified party scholars and the resistance of the nonparty professoriat seemingly undermined the very purpose of the FONy.119

The result was that there were attempts to divide the Marxist social sciences from non-Marxist and nonparty “specialized” and “narrowly practical” areas of the social sciences—just the kind of division later found in the spheres of influence in the party-state and in post-1920 higher education between party and nonparty institutions. Beginning in 1920, Glavprofobr attempted to reorient the FONy around specialist training for future employees of the commissariats, including “economic” and “legal” administrations.120 It seemed that a new practical orientation might save the FONy and in so doing legitimate the value of non-Marxist expertise in social science education.

As the struggle over the university charter heated up in 1922, however, the weakness of the Party’s foothold at the FONy proved a more important consideration than the potential benefits of their new programs. Glavprofobr, according to Volgin, reexamined all the FONy; on the basis that they had few or no Marxist or communist teachers, the Central Committee then shut down the schools in Simbirsk, Samara, Orla, Kostroma, Astrakhan, Krasnodar, and elsewhere. Volgin noted that the weakness of party forces made “reform” of these provincial FONy impossible for a very long time; it was considered more advantageous for the Marxist social sciences simply to close them down. The five remaining social science schools (with the exception of the Moscow University FON, which contained comparatively more communist teachers) were given further instructions to maintain only a “narrow specialist” training. Such orders were easier to issue than to monitor. But for the advocates of the new party schools, in any case, the major concern was not the modification of the FON programs, but the fact that they represented an organizational rival to the party schools in the social sciences.

In the spring of 1924 conflicts arose over the fate of the remaining FONy. As Pokrovskii’s comments in meetings at GUS in March of 1924 make clear, opponents of the FONy wanted to “create a unified higher social science school on the basis of the communist universities.” The patrons of party education were calling for the elimination of the remaining FONy because they represented an enclave for the nonparty professoriat in the social sciences.121 Pokrovskii, who this time sided with the gradualists, wished to preserve the FONy as valuable institutions and to subject them to a continuing influx of Marxist forces.

The opponents of the FONy gained the upper hand; in March 1924 the scientific-political section of GUS ratified the decision to close the FONy at Irkutsk, Rostov, Saratov, and Leningrad Universities. In each case, the FONy were broken up into their constituent parts and instructed to maintain a “narrow specialist preparation.”122 In late 1924 a special five-man Orgburo commission was set up to decide the fate of the last and most important FON, the one at Moscow University. The two minority members of this commission, Pokrovskii and V. Serezhnikov, tried unsuccessfully to preserve the FON as what they called the only remaining “genuine Higher School in the social sciences in the republic.” In this minority opinion they were joined by the collegium of Narkompros. The victorious majority of the special commission was made up of the two top Agitprop officials in charge of the party schools, Bubnov and Popov, joined by Narkompros’s Iakovleva. Significantly, the majority resolution judged it “fundamentally desirable to unite the functions of the Moscow FON with those of Sverdlov [Communist] University.” As two protest letters from the vanquished minority reveal, the decision in the disputed case of the Moscow FON was the culmination of broader plans underlying the elimination of all the FONy in 1922–24. The nonparty professoriat was to be deprived of an organizational base in the social sciences, and the communist institutions were to replace the FONy as social science higher schools.123

The FONy were thus liquidated as institutions, but once again the results were different than those intended by the champions of party hegemony. Sometimes under the cloak of new names, the old professors managed to continue teaching their specialties.124 By the mid-1920s, the demise of the FONy assured there was no single institutional or organizational rival to the party schools in social science higher education; but it also effectively broadened the gulf between the Marxist social sciences in the party schools and the teaching in the universities. Paradoxically, the 1924 attempt to ensure the dominance of the party schools simply made the division of higher educational spheres starker.

After 1924 there were renewed attempts to consolidate a party bulwark in the state institutions. A special Central Committee commission beginning work in December 1924 created new departments (kafedry) of Leninism and party history in the VUZy and bolstered the party composition of the social minimum teaching staff. As a GUS report in 1926 shows, however, these efforts changed little in the VUZy as a whole: almost all the communist teachers in the VUZy were concentrated in the social minimum courses. “Thus, the social science department in the higher school, in general, remains as before in the hands of the bourgeois professoriat,” the report concluded.125

Narkompros data show that of the over 12,500 teaching personnel in 17 universities and 86 VUZy in 1925 in the RSFSR, only 6.1 percent were party members. This figure had barely increased by 1928, and even at that time represented only a few percentage points increase over the number of communist teachers in VUZy in the early 1920s. The figure was virtually identical for researchers and scholars as a whole. According to Central Committee data, of the 1,590 Communists classified as scientific (that is, scholarly) workers in the USSR in 1929 (excluding Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), 42 percent were in Moscow and 61.4 percent were in the social sciences. Yet party members comprised a mere 6.3 percent of the country’s total of 25,286 scientific workers.126

Outside the social sciences, the professoriat, as a speech by Pokrovskii in 1929 underlines, had retained de facto control over most faculty appointments and the selection of graduate students for the duration of NEP. The situation was somewhat different in terms of the closely monitored composition of the student body in the non-party institutions. According to Narkompros data, by 1925 the contingent of communist and Komsomol students in 17 universities and 86 VUZy in the RSFSR was 10.3 and 10.0 percent; the number of students classified as proletarian was 21.8 percent.127

After several years of relative stability in higher learning, the non-party professoriat made raising academic standards among the student body in the VUZy a top priority. The professors won a significant victory in this area in 1926. After the deliberations of a multiagency commission, admission requirements and examinations were reinstated; the previous quota (razverstka) system of nomination by organization was modified, although rabfak graduates and party members retained priority in admissions. While Lunacharskii promised the proletarian students that Narkompros had no intention of allowing the new entrance requirements to lower the proletarian contingent in the VUZy, the measure was a significant blow to communist students; overburdened with party work and political literature, they were often the least academically qualified. The Politburo upheld entrance examinations in 1927, although it ordered they should not take on a “competitive character” and rescinded the reserved spaces for children of specialists and the “working intelligentsia” that had been introduced in 1926.128

In sum, the shortage of Marxist forces, the acute need for qualified graduates, and the policies Narkompros pursued toward the nonparty professoriat in the mid-1920s had slowed “reform” of the state-run institutions. In spite of this conjuncture, there is no sign that the communist transformation of all higher education had become any less of a firmly-fixed, long-term goal for party forces at virtually all levels. As Bukharin remarked in a speech to the Thirteenth Party Congress, which was reprinted in 1926, the higher school “has not been won over by us one whit. I in no way demand the expulsion of all nonproletarian elements, but in front of us lies a very complex and difficult task.” The image of an unreconstructed ivory tower virtually untouched by the Revolution did not only result from statistical representations of communist weakness. It reflected values attached to the rival educational systems following the split of higher learning into party and nonparty spheres.129

In the mid-1920s concrete plans for “communization” of the social sciences were formulated. Pokrovskii noted in an internal report for the scientific-political section of GUS in 1925 that up to 600 professorial positions in the social sciences would have to be filled by newly minted Marxists from party institutions such as the Institute of Red Professors. From the social sciences the plans spilled over into higher education as a whole: “Thus, under the most favorable conditions we can count on the more or less complete ‘communization’ of our higher school[s] in no less than six years. . . . [M]ore cautiously one would leave ten years for the completion of this process. This time period is clearly too long.”130

Communization on the most basic level thus implied the promotion of party scholars, and with them party Marxism. But the notion that inner-party norms could be exported to nonparty institutions accompanied the idea that institutions of party education were models for a new higher learning. This gained the imprimatur of the Politburo in July 1923, when it approved Agitprop’s draft resolution for the Twelfth Party Congress which called for “a strengthening of our own forces and positions on the cultural front.” Soviet-party schools and communist universities would become “model schools” (obraztsovye shkoly) of communist enlightenment. “In all schools” social-economic and political education must draw closer “to their type.”131

Within the party educational system itself, a widespread notion that there were such things as Bolshevik institutions — and that party educational institutions were not just centers of the Marxist social sciences but also shapers of culture and instruments of socialization — became especially explicit when party education formulated its strategies for foreign Communists. After 1925 the Comintern’s courses, and later the Lenin School, were consciously integrated into the system of Bolshevik party education. Agitprop played a leading role in organizing the Comintern institutions and teachers were recruited from the Institute of Red Professors and central communist universities. Significantly, the executive committee of the Comintern (IKKI) had set up the school as one means of “bolshevizing” foreign communist parties. Yet perennial problems resulted from what one 1929 account of the institution’s activities termed “an excess of various political traditions and habits.” Given these, it continued, “you can fully imagine how difficult the task of reeducating the collective was.” The school was threatened by splits as many foreign Communists protested against the methods of “Bolshevist upbringing.”132 The Comintern’s higher educational endeavors after 1925 demonstrate that only a few years after the Party had consolidated its own system of education, and certainly before it had achieved the grandiose goals that it embodied, the party model was being exported to fit new situations outside the Bolshevik Party, although as yet within the communist camp.

The rise of Bolshevik education had been from the outset intertwined with the adoption of the Bolshevik third front mission to build a new culture, create a new science, shape a new intelligentsia, and mold a New Man. The crucial development after the creation of a unified system of party education was that for the first time there was a concerted attempt to actually implement these visions in an institutional framework. The divided 1920s academic order, surrounded by the imperfectly dualistic party-state, tended to ground these visions and channel revolutionary energy above all in the party educational system. But the possibility persisted that the quest would ultimately remake all of higher learning. As a result, even institutional and systemic structures were endowed with political affiliations. Bolshevik missions — and hence the process of revolutionizing higher learning — were now being filtered through a set of rapidly evolving, rising party institutions which had assumed the status of models and instruments of the regime.

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1. In the rare cases when party education has been examined at length by non-Soviet historians, it has invariably been put in the context of mass propaganda or examined separately as political education, that is, in contexts that isolate it from higher learning as a whole and tend to minimize its cultural dimensions. See Zev Katz, “Party-Political Education in Soviet Russia” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1957), and Kenez, Birtb, 121–44. The best-known discussion of postrevolutionary higher education, Fitzpatrick’s Education, is only peripherally concerned with party institutions.

2. As one study, referring to changes begun in the Stalin period, sums it up: “In most cases, a party education is remedial in nature, of low prestige, and a handicap to political mobility. The Soviet elite are for the most part trained in technical institutes and universities.” Kenneth C. Farmer, The Soviet Administrative Elite (New York: Praeger, 1992), 32. See Tatjana Kirstein, “Das sowjetische Parteischulsystem,” in Bocis Meissner et al., eds., Einparteisystem und bürokratische Herrschaft in der Sowjetunion (Cologne: Markus Verlag, 1979), 199–230, and Ellen Propper Mickiewicz, Soviet Political Schools: The Communist Party Adult Instruction System (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967).

3. On social democratic kruzhki, see D. El’kina, Ocherki po agitatsii, propagande i vneshkol’noi rabote v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1930), 76–96, 105–20.

4. “Otchet pervoi partiinoi shkoly v Lonzhiumo,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 5 (September–October 1962): 43; N. A. Semashko, “O dvukh zagranichnykh partiinykh shkolakh,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 3 (March 1928): 143.

5. The worker-intelleetuals have been explored espeeially in the work of Reginald Zelnik, most prominently in “Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of the Russian Workers Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher,” Russian Review 35 (July 1976): 249–89, and 35 (October 1976): 417–47.

6. Ralph Carter Elwood, “Lenin and the Social Democratic Schools for Underground Party Workers, 1909–11,” Political Science Quarterly 81 (September 1966): 371–75.

7. Ibid., 371; Jutta Scherrer, “Les écoles du Parti de Capri et de Bologna: La formation de I’intelligentsia du Parti,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 19 (July–September 1978): 259 and passim; V. Kosarev, “Partiinaia shkola na ostrove Kapri,” Sibirskie ogni, no. 2 (May–June 1922): 63; Semashko, “O dvukh,” 143–44.

8. “Otchet tovarishcham-bol’shevikam ustranennykh chlenov rasshirennoi redaktsii Proletariia,” 3 July 1909, in N. S. Antonova and N. V. Drozdova, comps., Neizvestnyi Bogdanov (Moscow: ITs “AIRO-XX,” 1995), 2:175–76 (hereafter cited as Neizvestnyi Bogdanov by volume and page numbers).

9. A. V. Lunacharskii, introduction to S. Livshits, “Partiinaia shkola v Bolon’e (1910–1911 gg.),” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 3 (March 1926): 111. One of the best accounts of the many dimensions of the Left Bolshevik challenge is Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

10. Aileen M. Kelly, “Red Queen or White Knight? The Ambivalences of Bogdanov,” Russian Review 49 (July 1990): 311, and “Empiriocriticism: A Bolshevik Philosophy?” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 22 (January–March 1981): 89–118; Andrzej S. Walicki, “Alexander Bogdanov and the Problem of the Socialist Intelligentsia,” Russian Review 49 (July 1990): 293–304. On the ideological and philosophical dimensions of the Vperedism, see especially Jutta Scherrer, “La crise de I’intelligentsia Marxiste avant 1914: A. V. Lunačarskij et le bogostroitel’stvo,” Revue des études slaves 51, no. 1–2 (1978): 207–15, and “’Ein gelber und ein blauer Teufel’: Zur Entstehung der Begriffe ‘bogostroitel’stvo’ und ‘bogoiskatel’stvo,’” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 25 (1978): 319–29.

11. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 17. Little-known Vperedist connections to avant-garde groups—in particular to those attempting to create an “academy” of artists and revolutionaries around 1912—are discussed in John Biggart, “The ‘Russian Academy’ and the Journal Gelios,” Sbornik, no. 5 (Summer 1980): 17–27. In addition to their links with Vperedists concerned with proletarian cultural revolution, at least one of these modernists involved in this venture, Oskar M. Leshchinskii, also reportedly helped organize the Lenin’s Longjumeau school outside Paris (21).

12. The libertarian aspects of Vperedism have been promoted most forcefully by Zenovia Sochor in Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Kelly and John Eric Marot, from different angles, underline the authoritarian potentialities of Vperedism. See Marot, “Alexander Bogdanov, Vpered, and the Role oí the Intellectual in the Workers’ Movement,” Russian Review 49 (July 1990): 242–48, and responses, 283–315.

13. V. I. Lenin, “Uchenikam Kapriiskoi shkoly,” in Pol’noe sobranie sochinenii (henceforth cited as “PSS”) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1964), 47:202. The most detailed accounts of the political maneuvering surrounding the schools are in two articles by S. I. Livshits, “Kapriiskaia partiinaia shkola (1909 g.),” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 6 (June 1924): 33–73, and “Partiinaia shkola v Bolon’e.”

14. “Sekretar’ gruppy ‘Vpered’ Maksimov (A. A. Bogdanov). V Komitet shkoly pri Ts.K. ot gruppy ‘Vpered,’” 7 June 1910, RTsKhIDNI f. 338, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1, and d. 4, l. 5; Andrei B. Rogachevskii, “Social Democratic Party Schools on Capri and in Bologna in the Correspondence between A. A. Bogdanov and A. V. Amifteatrov,” Slavonic and East European Review 72 (October 1994): 673.

15. Lunacharskii and another Vperedist, the philosopher Stanislav Vol’skii, participated at Longjumeau along with a Bundist, a Polish Social Democrat, a Menshevik, and two “nonfactional” Russian Social Democrats. Similarly, the Bologna school boasted the participation of such non-Vperedists as Trotskii, Aleksandra M. Kollontai, and the Menshevik Vel’tman-Pavlovich (Volonter). “Otchet pervoi partiinoi shkoly,” 47; Livshits, “Bolan’e,” 132.

16. Kosarev, “Partiinaia shkola.”

17. Lunacharskii, introduction to Livshits, “Bolon’e,” 113. See also St. Krivtsov, “Pamiati A. A. Bogdanova,” PZM, no. 4 (April 1928): 183.

18. V. I. Lenin, “O partiinoi shkole, ustraivaemoi za granitsei v NN,” in PSS, 19:41.

19. John Biggart, “Predislovie: ’Antileninskii bol’shevizm,’” in Antonova and Drozdova, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, 2:18; Kosarev, “Partiinaia shkola,” 69; “Doklad v Shkol’nyi Komitet RSDRP,” no date, RTsKhIDNI f. 338, op. 1, d. 5, l. 3–11; Livshits, “Kapriiskaia partiinaia shkola,” 56. “Recallism” (otzovizm) refers to opposition to participation by Bolshevik deputies in the Duma, “empirio-monism” or “empiriocriticism” to Bogdanov’s philosophy.

20. Nadezhda K. Krupskaia, “Inessa Armand (1875–1920),” no date, 1920, RTsKhIONI f. 12, op. 1, d. 47, l. 29; Kosarev, “Partiinaia shkola,” 70; “V komitet partiinoi shkoly pri TsKRSORP,” signed “Sergo,” no later than 6 May (23 April) 1911, RTsKhIDNI f. 338, op. 1, d. 16, l. 1; Elwood, “Underground Party Workers,” 390–91.

21. Clark, Petersburg, 21.

22. The point is underscored by John Biggart, “’Anti-Leninist Bolshevism’: The Forward Group of the RSDRP,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 23 (June 1981): 134–53.

23. “Sovremennoe polozhenie i zadachi partii. Platforma, vyrabotannaia gruppoi bol’shevikov,” in Antonova and Drozdova, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, 2:37–61, and A. A. Bogdanov, “Sotsializm v nastoiashchem,” in Antonova and Drozdova, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, 2:93–95.

24. “Sovremennoe polozhenie,” 61, and “Otchet tovarishcham-bol’shevikam,” in Antonova and Drozdova, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, 2:175; “Mitglieder der Schulkommission an die Depositäre,” Paris, 5 August 1911, in Dietrich Geyer, ed., Kautskys russische Dossier: Deutsche Sozialdemokraten als Treuhänder des russischen Parteivermögens, 1910–1915 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1981), 430.

25. Livshits, “Kapriiskaia partiinaia shkola,” 59–63; Scherrer, “Les écoles,” 271; Elwood, “Underground Party Workers,” 378; Clark, Petersburg, 19, 83.

26. Elwood, “Underground Party Workers,” 387, Semashko, “O dvukh,” and “Partiinaia shkola pod Parizhem,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 14 (1923): 605–7.

27. Livshits, “Bolon’e,” 132–33, and “Kapriiskaia partiinaia shkola,” 58; “Otchet pervoi partiinoi shkoly,” 46–47.

28. “Doldad v Shkol’nyi komitet RSDRP” (cited in full at n.19).

29. Mikhail Agursky, “Nietzschean Roots of Stalinist Culture,” in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 258–59. Unfortunately, the author’s treatment of Lenin is skewed toward attempting to prove parallels with Nietzscheanism.

30. See especially Susan Morrissey, “More ‘Stories about the New People’: Student Radicalism, Higher Education, and Social Identity in Russia, 1899–1921” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1993).

31. On the above points, James C. McClelland, “The Professoriate in the Russian Civil War,” in Diane P. Koenker et al., eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 243–56.

32. N. I. Cheliapov, “Vysshee uchebnye zavedeniia RSFSR,” in Pedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1930), 3:183–95; James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

33. This idea is developed by Peter H. Kneen, “Higher Education and Cultural Revolution in the USSR,” CREES Discussion Papers, Soviet Industrialization Project Series, no. 5, University of Birmingham, 1976, 4–27.

34. David Currie Lee, The People’s Universities of the USSR (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 20–22.

35. v. G. Kinelev, ed., Vysshee obrazovanie v Rossii. Ocherk istorii do 1917 goda (Moscow: NII VO, 1995), 131–38; S. N. Valk et al., eds., Sankt-Peterburgskie Vysshie zhenskie (Bestuzhevskie) kursy (1878–1918 gg.). Sbornik statei (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1965); Morrissey, “More Stories,” 325–84.

36. Lee, People’s Universities, 26–29, 46–47, 39 n. 29; El’kina, Ocherki po agitatsii, 209–15; V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Russkaia intelligentsiia v 1900–1917 godakh (Moscow: Mysl’, 1981), 104–5; James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 93–94; Kinelev, Vysshee obrazovanie, 139–44.

37. “O pravilakh priema v vysshie uchebnye zavedeniia. Dekret SNK RSFSR ot 2 avgusta 1918,” in N. I. Boldyrev, ed., Direktivy i postanovleniia sovetskogo pravitel’stva o narodnom obrazovanii. Sbornik dokumentov za 1917–1947 (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Pedagogicheskikh Nauk RSFSR, 1947), 3–4; Domov [M. N. Pokrovskii], “Reforma vysshei shkoly,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. 4–5 (1918): 31–36.

38. Lee, People’s Universities, 50–51; M. Smit, “Proletarizatsiia nauki,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 11–12 (December 1919): 27–33.

39. Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 165–73; Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enligbtenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 101–4, 106; Read, Culture and Power, 131–33; S. Zander, “Vysshaia shkola i proletarskii universitet,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no. 20–21 (January–June 1921): 19–27; and “Pis’mo A. A. Bogdanova neustanovlennomu adresantu,” 24 November 1920, RTsKhIDNI f. 259, op. 1, d. 68, l. 1–3.

40. A. F. Ryndich, Partiino-sovetskie shkoly: k voprosu o metodike zaniatii so vzroslymi (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925), 5–6; Lira S. Leonova, “’Perepiska Sekretariata TsK RSDRP(b)-RKP(b) s mestnymi partiinymi organizatsiiami’ kak istochnik osveshcheniia problemy podgotovki partiinykh kadrov v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, 8th ser., no. 6 (1987): 3–14.

41. “Kratkii obzor uchebnoi deiatel’nosti Tul’skogo Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta im. Lenina,” no earlier than March 1921, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 434–38.

42. Mally, Culture of the Future, 165–73; Fitzpatrick, Commissariat, 101–4, 106; Read, Culture and Power, 131–33.

43. “Protokol No. 49 zasedaniia Politicheskogo Biuro Ts.K. ot 9 oktriabria 1920 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 113, l. 1, and on measures taken to restrict Bogdanov’s publishing and teaching, d. 75, l. 3; “O proletkul’takh,” Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), 26 December 1920, reprinted in A. Ia. Podzemskii, ed., Direktivy VKP(b) po voprosam prosveshcheniia (Moscow-Leningrad: Narkompros RSFSR, 1930), 250–52; Deviataia konferentsiia RKP(b). Sentiabr’ 1920 goda. Protokoly (Moscow: Politizdat, 1972), 124–25; Podzemskii, Direktivy, 33, 250–52. In December 1921 the Party publicized a decision to enlarge the network of party schools “at the expense” of theatrical, art, and other schools that “do not have direct educational [vospitatel’nogo] significance for the working class.” Vserossiiskaia Konferentsiia R.K.P (Bol’shevikov). Biulleten’, no. 3, 21 December 1921, 36.

44. GARF f. 5221, op. 4, d. 71, l. 8; Lee, People’s Universities, 51; Antonova and Drozdova, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, 1:238 n. 224, citing Orgburo decision in RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 27, l. 52; Zander, “Vysshaia shkola,” 26; Kirstein, “Das sowjetische Parteischulsystem,” 205 n. 34.

45. “Protokol No. 1 Zasedaniia Politicheskogo Biuro TsK ot 11 sentiabria 1919 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 26, l. 2; S. G. Isakov, “Neizvestnye pis’ma M. Gor’kogo V. Leninu,” Revue des études slaves 64, no. 1 (1992): 143–56; Lenin quoted in Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: Politicheskii portret (Moscow: Novosti, 1994); 2:184, citing RTsKhIDNI f. 2, op. 1, d. 11164, l. 7–8.

46. Terrence Emmons, ed., Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 251–52; “Protokol zasedaniia kollegii Nauchnoi Sektsii NKP ot 24 marta 1919,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 5–7. On the combined anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism of Got’e’s university milieu, see Emmons, Time of Troubles, 249 and passim, and Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 330, 350.

47. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, The ABC of Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 239–40.

48. “Rezoliutsiia I s”ezda sovpartshkol i komvuzov,” in A. F. Ryndich, ed., Metodika i organizatsiia partprosveshcheniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskogo universiteta im. Sverdlova, 1926), 52–54.

49. E. G. Gimpel’son, “Politicheskaia sistema i NEP: Neadekvatnost’ reform,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 2 (March–April 1993): 29–43.

50. Clark, Petersburg, 143–47.

51. The literature on student politics outside the Communist Party is sparse. A valuable source is the memoirs of the anti-Bolshevik activist Sergei Zhaba, Petrogradskoe studenchestvo v bor’be za svobodnuiu vysshuiu shkolu (Paris: J. Povolozky, 1922).

52. D. Rozit, “Rabfaki i vysshaia shkola,” Rabfakovets 1 Gune 1923): 9. In contrast to me party schools, devoted above all to me Marxist social sciences, the rabfaks in me 1920s were quickly oriented less toward socioeconomic and pedagogical concentrations and far more toward the training of industrial and technical workers, although the only academic admission requirements in 1922 were reading, writing, and “knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic in whole numbers.” See report on rabfaks considered by me Politburo on 22 March, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 284, 1. 7–8; Frederika Tandler, “The Workers’ Faculty (Rabfak) System in the USSR” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1955).

53. M. N. Pokrovskii, “Zadachi vysshei shkoly v nastoiashchii moment,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. 18–20 (January–March 1920): 3–9.

54. V. Stratonov, “Poteria Moskovskim Universitetom svobody,” in V. B. El’iashevich et al., eds., Moskovskii Universitet, 1755–1930: Iubileinnyi sbornik (Paris: Sovremennye zapiski, 1930), 198.

55. “Protokol No. 22 zasedaniia GPP ot 12-go fevralia 1921 g.,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 18, l. 70; “Postanovlenie Sovnarkom. Upravlenie delami soveta narodnykh komissarov 18/XI 1920,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 313–14; M. N. Pokrovskii, “Postanovka obshchestvovedeniia v komvuzakh, Vuzakh i dr. shkolakh vsroslykh,” no exact date, 1926, ibid., op. 1, d. 186, l. 8–13.

56. “Protokol No. 30 Zasedaniia Nauchno-Politicheskoi Sektsii G.U.S. 8-go avgusta 1922 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 19.

57. “Direktivy TsK,” no later than 10 May 1921, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 161, 1. 1–7.

58. “Polozhenie oh Upravlenii VUZ RSFSR (priniato v zasedanii kollegii NKProsa 4 marta 1921 g.),” ARAN f. 496, op. 2, d. 119, l. 3; M. Novikov, “Moskovskii Universitet v pervom periode bol’shevistskogo rezhima,” in El’iashevich et al., Moskovskii Universitet, 191; M. M. Novikov, Ot Moskvy do N’iu Iorka. Moia zhizn’ v nauke i politike (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1952).

59. “Protokol obshchegorodskoi konferentsii iacheek RKSM gor. Moskvy ot 12 marta 1921,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 76, l. 1–2; “Protokol No. 113 Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK ot 16 marta 1922 goda,” ibid., op. 3, ed. khr. 282, 1. 1–5; “Tsentral’noe Biuro Kommunisticheskogo Studenchestva. V TsK RKP. Dokladnaia zapiska,” no date, 1922, ibid., op. 60, d. 205, l. 92, see also 1. 93; “Vypiska iz protokola Konferentsii Sekretarei iacheek Moskovskikh VUZ ot 21 fevralia 1922 g.,” ibid., d. 199, l. 11; “Moskovskoe biuro Kom”iacheek Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii. V prezidium Glavprofobra t. Iakovlevoi,” no date, 1922, ibid” d. 75, l. 103.

60. “Otchet zasedaniia Vserossiiskoi konferentsii kom”iacheek VUZ, [Rabfakov i vysshikh partshkol] 26–go aprelia 1922,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 224, l. 2, 135 ob.

61. “Protokol Zasedaniia Ob”ed. Biuro iacheek Universiteta Sverdlova ot l2/IV-22 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 15, l. 14; “Protokol Zasedaniia Moskovskogo Biuro studencheskoi fraktsii RKP ot 17 fevralia 1922 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 216, l. 10; Stratonov, “Poteria,” 222–41; Emmons, Time of Troubles, 444–45.

62. A. V. Lunacharskii, “V TsK RKP v uchetno-raspredelitel’nyi otdel, t. Syrtsovu. 7/III-22 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 142, op. 1, d. 455, l. 5; Politburo resolutions and addenda from 6, 11, 13 February 1922, ibid., f. 17, op. 3, d. 260, l. 1; d. 261, l. 2, 8; ed. khr. 263, 1. 2; ed. khr. 265, 1. 3, 10. Lenin at this time reportedly instructed the Old Bolshevik intellectual Ivan I. Skvortsov-Stepanov to give Stalin periodic updates on the activities of academic circles. Skvortsov-Stepanov to Iaroslavskii, 24 February 1927, ibid., f. 150, op. 1, d. 74, l. 34.

63. “Vsem oblbiuro TsK, TsK Natsional’nye Kom. Partii, obkomam i gubkomam RKP. Tsirkuliarno,” 14 December 1922, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 200, l. 1.

64. Volkogonov, Lenin, 2:179–86, citing Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF) f. 3, op. 58, d. 175, I. 35–36, 72. The most comprehensive single account of the deportations remains Michel Heller, “Premier avertissement: Un coup de fouet. L’histoire de l’expulsion des personnalités culturelles hors de l’Union Soviétique en 1922,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 20 (April 1979): 131–72. See also “Razgrom intelligentsii,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 21 September 1922, 10; Gimpel’son, “Politicheskaia sistema,” 39; Novikov, Ot Moskvy, 324–27; Stratonov, “Poteria,” 238–41.

65. “Aresty sredi intelligentsii,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 8 September 1922, 12; Heller, “Premier avertissement,” 160.

66. L. D. Trotskii to L. B. Kamenev, 8 August 1922, RTsKhIDNI f. 323, op. 1, d. 140, l. 5; Heller, “Premier avertissement,” 155.

67. Roger Pethybridge, “Concern for Bolshevik Ideological Predominance at the Start of NEP,” Russian Review 41 (October 1982): 445–46.

68. Ronald G. Charbonneau, “Non-Communist Hands: Bourgeois Specialists in Soviet Russia, 1917–1927” (Ph.D. diss., Concordia University, Montreal, 1981), 251, 279–80, 289–300, 350, 461–62; Ettore Cinella, “État ‘prolétarien’ et science ‘bourgeoise’: Les specy pendant les premières années du pouvoir soviétique,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 32 (October–December 1991), 469–500.

69. Piat’ let raboty Tsentral’noi komissii po uluchsheniiu byta uchenykh pri Sovete narodnykh komissarov RSFSR (TsEKUBU), 1921–1926 (Moscow: Izdanie TsEKUBU, 1927), 3–16; N. Valentinov [N. Vol’skii], Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika i krizis partii posle smerti Lenina. Gody raboty v VSNKh vo vremia NEP. Vospominaniia (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1991), 60.

70. “Protokol Zasedaniia TsK RKP ot 9/II-1922,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 261, l. 3–4; “Protokol No. 27 Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK RKP ot 21/IX.22 g.,” ibid., ed. khr. 313, 1. 5. The phrase is from S. S. Chakhotin, “V Kanossu!” in Smena Vekh (Prague: Politika, 1921), 150–66. See especially Hilde Hardeman, Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime: The “Changing Signposts” Movement among Russian Emigrés in the Early 1920s (DeKalb: Nonhern Illinois University Press, 1994), 98–107, 145, 155, 159, 178–79.

71. “Tsirkuliarnoe pis’mo TsK RKP vsem kom”iacheikam VUZ, Rabfaki i kommunistam, rabotaiushchim v Pravleniiakh VUZ,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 205, l. 119; V. I. Lenin, “Iz zakliuchitel’nogo slova po politicheskomu otchetu TsK na XI s”ezda RKP(b) 28 Marta 1922 g.,” in PSS, 45:121; O rabote iacheek RKP(b) Vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii (Moscow: Izdanie TsK, 1925), 7; Vladimir lakovlev, “O vzaimotnosheniiakh studorganizatsii s pravleniiami vuzov,” Krasnaia molodezh’, no. 2 (1925): 77–79.

72. “Otvetstvennyi Sekretar’ Ts. B. Komstudenchestva Zelinskii. Sekretariu TsK t. Stalinu,” no later than 30 March 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 486, l. 75; Fitzpatrick, Education, 67.

73. James McClelland, “Bolshevik Approaches to Higher Education, 1917–1921,” Slavic Review 30 (December 1971): 818–31; V. I. Lenin, “Direktivy TsK Kommunistam-rabotnikam Narkomprosa,” in PSS, 42:319–21, and “O politekhnicheskom obrazovanii. Zametki na tezisy Nadezhdy Konstantinovny,” in PSS, 42:228–30; “Massovaia podgotovka spetsialistov i podgotovka nauchnykh Rabotnikov (tipy Vysshei Shkoly). Tezisy O. Iu. Shmidta, odobrennye Narkomprosom,” no date, ARAN f. 496, op. 2, d. 109, l. 1.

74. Party directives of 1920–21 behind the rise of the new system are enumerated in A. Fil’shtinskii, “Sovetskie partiinye shkoly i kommunisticheskie vysshie uchebnye zavedeniia,” in Pedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia, 3:434–35.

75. “Proekt tezisov k X s”ezdu partii. Glavpolitprosvet i agitatsionno-propagandistskie zadachi partii,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 92, l. 4; “Sekretar’ TsK E. laroslavskii. Poriadok komplektovaniia partiino-sovetskikh shkol,” no date, 1921, ibid., op. 4, d. 25, l. 1–8; “Predmetnaia skhema obshchei programmy kommunisticheskogo universiteta,” no date, ibid., op. 1, d. 1, l. 56–57.

76. “Soveshchanie Narkomprosov Soiuznykh i Avtonomnykh Respublik. I-e zasedanie—27 oktiabria 1924,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 59.

77. A. V. Lunacharskii, “Znachenie sovpartshkol i ikh mesto v sisteme narodnogo obrazovaniia (Rech’ na s”ezde sovpartshkol),” in Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1923), 84.

78. “Glavneishie zadachi Kommunisticheskikh universitetov v oblasti uchebnoi raboty v nastoiashchii moment,” no date, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 572.

79. A similar phenomenon was observed by Roger Pethybridge, who wrote: “The introduction of NEP did not lead to an abandonment of long-term planning. Psychologically it tended to have the reverse effect.” See Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics in the New Economic Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 177.

80. Massovoe partprosveshchenie (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926); “Ob uchete raboty sokrashchennykh shkol politgramoty ‘Leninskogo nabora,’” no later than spring of 1924, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 87, l. 89–91. For a standard political literacy curriculum, see M. B. Vol’fson’s Politgramota (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929).

81. Gabrielle Gorzka, Arbeiterkultur in der Sowjetunion. Industriearbeiterklubs, 1917–1929. Ein Beitrag zur sowjetischen Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: Verlag Arno Spitz, 1990), 426; “Sotsial’nyi sostav kursantov obshcheobrazovatel’nykh shkol vzroslykh povyshennogo tipa i sovpartshkol, 9/V-28,” RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 613, l. 5–6. A Soviet work with better than usual archival and bibliographical foundations is Lira Stepanova Leonova’s Iz istorii podgotovki partiinykh kadrov v sovetsko-partiinykh shkolakh i kommunisticheskikh universitetakh (1921–25) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1972).

82. Piatnitskii to Bubnov, 30 May 1925, RTsKhIDNI f. 531, op. 1, d. 1, l. 11.

83. These schools were joined by the Sun Yat-sen University for Chinese cadres, founded in the autumn of 1925. On the founding of KUNMZ and KUTV, see GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 244; d. 69, l. 46–50; a and d. 1, l. 442; and Branko Lazitch, “Les écoles de cadres du Comintem: Contribution à leur histoire,” in Jacques Freymond, ed., Contributions à l’histoire du Comintern (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1965), 231–55. A few works containing archival research on these institutions have begun to appear: Woodford McClellan, “The Comintem Schools” (forthcoming in a collection edited by Jürgen Rojahn) and “Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925–1934,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26:2 (1993): 371–90; Miin-ling Yu, “Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, 1925–1930” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1995).

84. “Predmetnaia skhema programmy Kommunisticheskogo universiteta,” no date, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 5756.

85. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power: The Role of Stalin’s Secret Chancellery in the Soviet System of Government (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1978), 50, 151–52, 171–73, and passim; Larry Holmes and William Burgess, “Scholarly Voice or Political Echo? Soviet Party History in the 1920s,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 9:2–3 (1982): 378–98; T. Khorkhordina, Istoriia otechestva i arkhivy 1917–1980-e gg. (Moscow: RGGU, 1994), 99–102, 140 n.18.

86. On the Orgburo decision, Khorkhordina, Istoriia otechestva, 96; on IME and 1931, la. G. Rokitianskii, “Tragicheskaia sud’ba akademika D. B. Riazanova,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (March–April 1992): 118–20, 130–33.

87. The harsh material conditions of party schools in the early 1920s, in fact, were exacerbated because this system, as opposed to the state sector, was expanded in spite of the financial austerity of NEP. See “Otchet p/o Sovpartshkol Glavpolitprosveta za 1922 g.,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 83, l. 102–23.

88. K. Popov, “Partprosveshchenie v nachale nepa i teper’,” Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia, no. 24 (December 1925): 3–11; also, M. P. Fil’chenikov, “Iz istorii partiinykh uchebnykh zavedenii,” Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 1 (1958): 112. The 1925 figure did not include Komsomol political education, rabfaks, or party members studying in state-administered higher educational institutions.

89. Fitzpatrick therefore minimized the role of the Central Committee’s Agitprop, maintaining that its role was limited largely to the party schools and to nominating party members for higher education; the “enemies” of the soft line, by implication, were the relatively marginal militants in the proletarian culture organizations (not agencies like Agitprop and Glavlit that were also major players in official policy on the third front). See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The ‘Soft’ Line on Culture and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy, 1922–1927,” Slavic Review 33 (June 1974): 267–87.

90. Consequently, Kotkin attributes the Party’s “self-immolation” in the Great Purges in part to the systemic bureaucratic rivalries and quasi-religious revolutionary revivalism that resulted. Magnetic Mountain, 282–98.

91. Explored in greater length in my artiele “Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party Policy in Cultural Affairs, 1922–1928,” Soviet Studies 44 (November 1992): 1045–68.

92. Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 132.

93. Stephen Brown, “Communists and the Red Cavalry: The Political Education of the Konarmiia in the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920,” Slavonic and East European Review 73 (January 1995): 82–89. This article is vague on the educational efforts carried out, and it is unclear how representative the Konarmiia was in terms of political education.

94. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Emergence of Glaviskusstvo: Class War on the Cultural Front, Moscow 1928–29,” Soviet Studies 23 (October 1971): 236–53; Fitzpatrick, Commissariat, 242; Desiatyi S”ezd Rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii. Stenograficheskii otchet (8–16 marta 1921g) (Moseow: Gosizdat, 1921), 87.

95. “Dekret Sovnarkoma o Glavpolitprosvete,” 23 November 1921, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1; von Hagen, Soldiers, 152 n. 56; Robert H. MeNeal, Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaia and Lenin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 196, 198.

96. “Vypiska iz protokola Orgbiuro Ts.K. ot 25/X-20 g. No. 64,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 1, l. 34.

97. “Protokol No. 54 zasedaniia Politbiuro Ts.K. ot 28 oktiabria 1920 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 118, l. 1–2; V. I. Lenin, “Proekt postanovleniia Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) o Glavpolitprosvete,” in PSS, 41:397; M. S. Andreeva, “Glavpolitprosvet–organ gosudarstvennoi propagandy kommunizma,” in V. G. Chufarov, ed., Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia v SSSR (Sverdlovsk: Ural’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1974), 485–93; MeNeal, Bride, 195–97.

98. N. K. Krupskaia, “V Politbiuro TsK RKP,” 28 November 1921, RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 458, l. 3–4. Handwritten top center: “t. Leninu.” The first GPP meetings in 1920 were attended not only by the top Narkompros leadership, including Krupskaia, Lunacharskii, and Evgraf A. Litkens, but by Preobrazhenskii as well. The 1920 meetings of GPP are in GARF, f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 16, 17–18, 24, 25–26.

99. Desiatyi t”ezd, 74–98; “Tezisy t. Preobrazhenskogo o GPP i agitproprabote partii,” 2 February 1921, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 128, l. 1–6. On early debates and institutional shifts affecting party-state relations, see Walter Pietsch, Revolution und Staat: Institutionen als Träger der Macht in Sowjetrußland, 1917–1922 (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1969), 140–56.

100. Von Hagen, Soldiers, 137–52.

101. “O rabote Glavpolitprosveta. X s”ezd RKP(b),” March 1921, in Direktivy VKP(b) po voprosam prosveshcheniia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1929), 10–11.

102. “K organizatsii otdela agitatsii i propagandy pri TsK,” Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), 18 September 1920, 16; Deviataia konferentsiia RKP(b). Sentiabr’ 1920 goda. Protokoly (Moscow: Politizdat, 1972), 91, 106, 110, 126–37; “Polozhenie ob Agitatsionno-Propagandistskom otdele TsK RKP (utverzhdeno Orgbiuro TsK RKP 27 noiabria 1921 g.),” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 33, l. 1.

103. Krupskaia, “V Politbiuro TsK RKP,” 28 November 1921, RTsKbIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 458, l. 3. V. Solov’ev became the deputy director of Agitprop in 1921.

104. It seems most likely those hours were calculated on a weekly basis. Of the “remainder” of his time he was to spend the bulk on the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate. RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. knr. 199, 1. 5.

105. Von Hagen, Soldiers, 153, 156.

106. Krupskaia to Chistov, no earlier than 12 February 1928, RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 458, l. 22–24; “Zampred. GPP Mesheheriakov. V Agitotdel TsK tov. Chistovu,” 12 February 1928, RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 458, l. 25–28.

107. Krupskaia, “V Politbiuro TsK,” l. 3; A. V. Lunacharskii, “Kommunisticheskaia propaganda i narodnoe prosveshchenie,” in Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia: sbornik (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1923), 88–93.

108. On the apparat, “V Politbiuro TsK ot komiteta GPP,” 24 November 1922, RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 458, l. 4–5; on finances, “Protokol zasedaniia GPP,” 15 June 1922, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 69, l. 70; “Protokol soveshchaniia redaktsii zhurnala ‘Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie’ ot 2-go Marta 1922 g.,” ibid., d. 72, l. 15.

109. “Polozhenie o vzaimotnosheniiakh Agitpropotdela TsK RKP(b) s Glavpolitprosvetom,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 461.

110. “Plan doklada Glavpolitprosveta na Orgbiuro TsK. Proekt. XII-14–26,” RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 472, l. 81–83; N. K. Krupskaia, “V Politbiuro TsK RKP(b),” 25 February 1928, RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 458, l. 31–32. The GPP archive from 1926–29 is considered lost. Andreeva, “Glavpolitprosvet,” 493.

111. “Zampredglavpolitprosvet V. Meshcheriakov. V Agitprop TsK, 28/II-24,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 87, l. 19–20.

112. Popov, “Partprosveshchenie v nachale nepa i teper’,” 6–7; GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 87, l. 92. Agitprop was staffed by members of the prestigious propgruppy TsK, which in the mid-1920s consisted of about a hundred graduates of central communist universities, chosen from those who were the “most developed theoretically and loyal politically.” N. Bogomolov, “K predstoiashchemu vypusku kommunisticheskogo studenchestva,” Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia, no. 9 (May 1926): 22–23; “V Agitprope TsK,” Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia, no. 24 (December 1926): 61–64.

113. “Vvedenie v otchet Ts. B. Komstudenchestva v Agitprop TsK 24/11-23,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 489, l. 6–9; “Zav. Agitpropotdel A. Bubnov. V Sekretariat TsK. 8 marta 1923 g.,” ibid., d. 220, l. 22; “TsB kommunisticheskogo studenchestva. Sekretar’ Zelinskii. V TsK RKP t. Bubnovu. Kopiia t. Stalinu,” no date, ibid., d. 205, l. 87; “Protokol soveshchaniia po vysshei shkole pri p/otdele propagandy TsK RKP(b) 9-go ianvaria 1923 g.,” ibid., d. 471, l. 1–2.

114. “V Tsentral’nyi Komitet R.K.P. Doklad otvetstvennogo sekretaria Ts. B. o poezdke v Petrograd, soglasno postanovleniia Orgbiuro TsK ot marta 1923,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 489, l. 10–11; “Doklad organizatora kollektiva Petrogradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta t. Zelinskomu, predstaviteliu Ts. B. Kommunisticheskogo Studenchestva, 8/III-1923,” ibid., d. 489, l. 14–15 (see also 1. 16–18); “–Gubkomu RKP(b),” Agitprop circular, no date, 1923, ibid., d. 471, l. 22–23.

115. “A. Bubnov. V Politbiuro TsK. Sekretno. 2-IX-22 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 274, l. 81–82; “Protokol zasedaniia podkomissii po podgotovke prepodavatelei kommunistov ot 6-go dekabria 1924 g.,” ibid., d. 738, l. 49; K XIV s”ezdu RKP(b) (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925), 117; “M. N. Pokrovskii. V Agitprop TsK VKP(b) t. G. Knorinu, 18.IV-27 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 4, d. 45, l. 1.

116. In 1922 a so-called “constitution” was worked out by which no decision by Luna charskii held force unless it was approved by rus deputies (who then included Pokrovskii, Khodorovskii, and Iakovleva). “Prilozhenie k p. 18 pr. PB No. 39 ot 7.xII.22,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 325, l. 9.

117. “Soveshchanie Narkomprosov Soiuznykh i Avtonomnykh Respublik. I-e zasedanie–27 oktiabria 1924,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 59–61, on the origins of GUS, 1. 50–51.

118. “Meropriiatiia po ob”edineniiu rukovodstva prepodavaniem obshchestvennykh distsiplin v shkolakh vsekh tipov (postanovlenie TsK ot 2/VII-26 goda),” in Direktivy VKP(b) po voprosam prosveshcheniia (1929), 75; “Vypiska iz protokola No. 9 zasedaniia Podsektsii VUZ Nauchno-Politicheskoi Sektsii GUS-a ot 21-go dekabria 1926 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 1, d. 123, l. 2; “Stenogramma soveshchaniia Nauchno-politicheskoi sektsii GUS-a po politminimumu 30 marta 1926,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 190–205; “Zam. Zav. Agitpropotdel TsK K. Popov M. N. Pokrovskomu, NKPros. 6 fevralia 1924,” ibid., d. 33, l. 10–13; “O propagande i izuchenii Leninizma,” approved by Agitprop’s subsection on propaganda, 9 February 1924, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 87, l. 57–62; Fitzpatrick, Education, 75.

119. Fitzpatrick, Education, 69; Bronislava I. Cherepnina, “Deiatel’nost’ Kommunisticheskoi Partii v oblasti podgotovki nauchno-pedagogicheskikh kadrov po obshchestvennym naukam v SSSR za 1918–1962 gg. (na materialakh vysshei shkoly)” (Candidate of Sciences diss., Institut narodnogo khoziaistva im. Plekhanova [Moscow], 1964), 24.

120. “Tezisy k dokladu V. P. Volgina. Reorganizatsii FON-ov Rossiiskikh Universitetov,” no date, GARF f. A-2306, op. 1, d. 469, l. 10–11.

121. “Protokol No. 79 Zasedaniia Podsektsii VUZ-ov Nauchno-Politicheskoi Sektsii GUS 8-go marta 1924,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 86–87; “Protokol 80 Zasedaniia Nauchno-Politicheskoi Setskii GUS-a 15-go marta 1924,” ibid., 1. 92–93.

122. “Protokol 81 Zasedaniia Nauchno-Politicheskoi Sektsii (Podsektsii VUZ) GUS-a 22-go marta 1924,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 94–97.

123. “V Orgbiuro TsK RKP(b). Osoboe mnenie men’shenstva komissii Orgbiuro po preobrazovaniiu FON-ov,” no date, late 1924, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 2c, d. 5, l. 22–23; V Serezhnikov to G. Zinov’ev, probably Oetober 1924, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 83–85.

124. Fitzpatrick, Education, 72–73.

125. “Protokol Zasedaniia komissii po VUZ-am pri TsK ot 1-go dekabria 1924 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 738, l. 6–8; “Vypiska iz protokola No. 16 zasedaniia Orgbiuro ot 18/VI-24 g.,” ibid., op. 2c, d. 5, l. 5; “Vypiska iz postanovleniia ob ‘Obshchestvennoi minimume i propaganda leninizma v VUZ-akh’ priniatogo na zasedanii Sekretariata TsK RKP ot 2/I-25 g.,” ibid., 1. 13; “Tezisy k dokladu o prepodavanii obshchestvovedeniia v shkolakh RSFSR, 1925–26, s popravkami M. N. Pokrovskogo,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 171–86.

126. Narodnoe obrazovanie v RSFSR (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Doloi negramotnost’,” 1925), 185; Statisticheskii sbornik po narodnomu prosveshcheniiu RSFSR 1926 (Moscow: Narkompros, 1928); Kneen, “Higher Education,” 39; “Nauchnye kadry VKP(b),” no exact date, 1929, GARF f. R-3145, op. 2, d. 10, l. 35–61.

127. M. N. Pokrovskii, “O podgotovke nauchnykh rabnotnikov,” Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 1 (January 1929): 16–28; Fitzpatrick, Education, 81–82; Narodnoe obrazovanie v RSFSR (1925), 185.

128. “Protokol No. 1 zasedaniia po voprosu o pravilakh priema v VUZ-y,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 752, l. 212; N. S. Derzhavin, “O povyshenii kvalifikatsii okonchivaiushchikh vysshuiu shkolu,” Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 9 (September 1926): 63–71; A. Abinder, “K voprosu ob akademicheskoi podgotovke molodezhi,” Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 11 (November 1926): 33–49; A. V. Lunacharskii, “Doklad k IV Mezhsoiuznoi Gubernskoi konferentsii proletarskogo studenchestva III/19-25 g.,” RTsKhIONI f. 142, op. 1, d. 197, l. 104–13; “Protokol No. 91 Zakrytogo zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 17-go marta 1927,” ibid., f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 624, 1. 5. On recruitment to VUZy during NEP, see Fitzpatrick, Education, 87–110.

129. N. Bukharin, “Rechi na XIII s”ezde RKP (Partiia i vospitanie smeny)” in Bor’ba za kadry: Rechi i stat’i, (Moscow-Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1926), 140; E. M. Iaroslavskii, “Partiia i VUZ-y,” not earlier than May 1924, RTsKhIDNl f. 89, op. 8, d. 435, l. 1–3.

130. “Tezisy k dokladu o prepodavanii obshchestvovedeniia v shkolakh RSFSR, 1925–26, s popravkami M. N. Pokrovskogo,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 178.

131. “Protokol No. 19 Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK ot 27 iiulia 1923 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 367, l. 24–28. This notion of “model schools” was invoked by the leading party pedagogue A. F. Ryndich in Metodika i organizatsiia partprosveshcheniia, 4.

132. Piat’ let Leninskoi shkoly (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Mezhdunarodnoi Leninskoi shkoly, 1930), contained in RTsKhIDNI f. 531, op. 1, d. 258, l. 1–94; “Spravka po uchehno-programmnym voprosam mezhdunarodnykh leninskikh kursov. 13 iiunia 1925,” RTsKhIDNI f. 531, op. 1, d. 1, l. 12; “Dokladnaia zapiska po voprosu oh organizatsii Mezhdunarodnogo Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta pri Kominterne,” no date, RTsKhIDNI f. 531, op. 1, d. 19, l. 5–8; “Pravlenie leninskoi shkoly. Otchetnyi doklad Ispolkomu Kominterna oh itogakh dvukhletnei rahoty mezhdunarodnoi leninskoi shkoly,” 15 May 1929, RTsKhIDNI f. 531, op. 1, d. 15, l. 1–27.