In the years after 1917 the institutions of party education and scholarship the new regime founded in the wake of the Revolution were dedicated to molding a new intelligentsia, refashioning education and science (nauka), building a new culture, transforming everyday life, and ultimately creating a New Man. These institutions, notably Sverdlov Communist University, the Institute of Red Professors, and the Communist Academy, rose to become the most prominent centers of Bolshevik training and thought in the 1920s.
Bolshevik higher learning, as it embraced such quests, evolved along the contours of a particular — and particularly consequential — conjuncture in the Russian Revolution.1 Fundamental revolutionary missions, most of which predated the Bolshevik Party and remained broader than Bolshevism, were channeled through the Party and its institutions. As a result, the concern with creating “new people,” for example, part of the program of revolutionary and student movements since Chernyshevskii and the nihilists in the 1860s, began in part to mean making Bolsheviks; developing a new science came, in part, to imply spreading party Marxism. In a similar fashion, building a socialist culture and cultivating Bolshevik mores, molding a new intelligentsia and training red specialists — all became connected, for each overarching mission could be refracted through a “party” lens. This Bolshevik particularizing of universalistic revolutionary goals, and this universalizing of specific Bolshevik agendas, took place during an extended historical moment, after the October Revolution of 1917 but before Stalin’s Great Break of 1928–29, a moment in which the emergent party-state was still exploring the relationship between power and further revolutionary change.
It is the centrality of the party in power that makes the missions to be explored here, as they were pursued in the institutions of communist higher learning, part of an influential and distinctive revolutionary enterprise. These quests — in scope, intensity, and number greater than before — were pursued all at once and often under the same roof. They were for the first time carried out by a political party in control of a state. Thus Bolshevik higher learning, as it became an established, institutionalized enterprise in its own right, was at the same time integrated into the party polity, developed within an inner-party system of power relations, and, in no small part because virtually all the leading Bolshevik intellectuals were involved, placed near the center of high politics. In these newly created Bolshevik institutions — unified in a new system of education and research that in the 1920s at once became a countermodel to prerevolutionary, “bourgeois,” and Soviet state-run systems — the attempt to revolutionize the life of the mind, along with all other attendant transformations, was therefore filtered through evolving communist practices and concerns. And the objects here were not the benighted masses, but the Bolsheviks themselves, giving party education, like the Party itself, simultaneously a mass and elite character. The Bolshevik Party carried out a project of self-transformation, experimenting on itself more intensively and, in the case of higher learning, at least a step ahead of the society it was attempting to build.
This book is thus not merely about communist visions and theories (although those were ubiquitous) but about the contested and messy attempts to implement them within new institutions. What held these diverse missions together was that they were all pursued as the result of an expansion of the Bolshevik revolutionary project to the “third” or “cultural” front. This new battleground was declared open around 1920–21, just as revolutionary and party agendas were being made inseparable. The cultural arena was widely proclaimed the next locus of revolutionary activity in the wake of Bolshevik victories on the first two “fronts,” the Party’s military and political struggles in the civil war.2
Nascent institutions of Bolshevik higher learning emerged as an intrinsic part of this third front enterprise. Their goals, to bring the revolution into the realms of culture, science, education, and ideology, became in their heyday — the 1920s — a linchpin of the Bolshevik project.
The mingling of revolutionary missions and Bolshevik agendas both reflected and advanced one of the great co-optations of revolutionary history, as the Party deliberately and successfully identified itself with the revolution as a whole.3 This stage of the Russian Revolution, to be sure, had its roots in Octoher, but it emerged full-blown from a discrete historical conjuncture that roughly corresponded to the red victory in the civil war. As the other socialist parties were suppressed and party leaders began to disparage the “declassed” proletariat that had turned against them or melted into the countryside, top Bolsheviks in a time of unusual candor openly justified the dictatorship of a party “vanguard.”4 To effect this dictatorship the Party added the reconstruction of its own base of support to its list of primary missions. Equally important, between 1919 and 1921 “the relationship between party and state in Soviet Russia underwent a profound change,” not at all fully fore-ordained, as the former assumed dominance over the latter.5 It was at the same time as well that the Party with supreme assurance put itself forward as the model for all foreign communist parties, which were to be “bolshevized,” and October as the prototype for all “proletarian” revolutions.6 Indeed, in the scope of its pretensions this moment around 1920–21 might be considered the bolshevization of the Russian Revolution. The birth of a unified system of party education and research — which was part of this same historical conjuncture — ensured that party higher learning would combine a specifically Bolshevik identity with universalistic aspirations for revolutionizing the life of the mind.
This great bid for hegemony also corresponded to the elaboration of a full-fledged Bolshevik engagement in the cultural arena. The proletarian culture (Proletkul’t) movement—a mass organization that had tried to maintain independence from the Party, yet had attracted those Bolshevik intellectuals most concerned with creating a new culture — was stripped of its autonomy, and the impetus for a full-fledged communist cultural mission was set in place. Certain key terms were invoked as the cultural front was constituted: enlightenment (prosveshchenie), education (obrazovanie), and upbringing (vospitanie). All three imply both long-term tutelage and cognitive transformation. Indeed, “enlightenment,” understood not merely as propagandizing for short-term benefit but as the transformation of people and the popular “consciousness,” emerged as such a fundamental feature of the new regime that Soviet Russia might with justification be called the enlightenment state.7 From the start enormous resources and energies were devoted to transforming “consciousness” in what had become an overwhelmingly didactic revolution. Even labor camps formed departments of “political,” later “cultural” upbringing.8
The Bolshevik Revolution, following what was in many ways a chaotic explosion of educational and “enlightenment” movements during the first years after 1917, turned more systematically toward both culture-building and institution-building in the evolving order of the 1920s. One scholar, perhaps the first, to clearly identify this “cultural” program as the beginning of a new stage in Lenin’s Bolshevism and, implicitly, of the revolution was Robert C. Tucker. By 1920, he argued, Lenin “had reached the point of conceptualizing Soviet Russia as the scene of a culture-building culture.”9
Lenin’s endorsement, indeed, was instrumental in raising the profile of the Bolshevik cultural mission, which had hitherto been the special province of the Vperedist wing of the Party. Yet the opening of the third front was a larger phenomenon; virtually the entire top leadership agreed on its importance. By the early 1920s Bolshevik leaders across factional lines came to portray cultural transformation, educational work, and the creation of a Bolshevik intelligentsia as pivotal to the fate of regime and revolution. Trotskii declared, “The upbringing of youth is a question of life and death for the Republic.” Bukharin claimed that only a “cultural reworking” by means of state power could produce the cadres the proletarian dictatorship demanded, and that this was important enough to determine “our fate and historical path.” He added that “the cultural question” is “a central problem of the entire revolution.” Lunacharskii, referring to these statements by Bukharin and Trotskii in 1924, reformulated the question as the creation of “our own intelligentsia” and suggested there could be only one point of view within the Party on its exceptional importance.10
In this book I trace the roots and evolution of this push to bring the revolution into new realms and show how the many third front missions became tightly linked to party institutions. The creation of a system of party education and, under its auspices, the pursuit of revolutionary quests became major components of the “third front” agenda. The rise of a network of party educational and scholarly institutions followed from the constitution of this new revolutionary arena. Yet clear-cut victory on the battlefield of the mind proved more elusive than either military triumph or the consolidation of political power.
The story of Bolshevik revolutionary missions is filled with irony, unexpected yet pervasive constraints, and sudden turns. The third front missions endorsed in 1920 were followed by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. The transformational urge was tempered not only by the enormous weight of “Russian reality” and a decided deficit in the plasticity of man and culture that defied all revolutionary rhetoric but also by urgent considerations forced upon the new regime by the implosion of revolution and the collapse of “war communism.” A preservationist, stabilizing complex of tendencies — whieh in their cultural manifestation Richard Stites has aptly called anti-iconoclasm — was bolstered by certain features of NEP.11 Such tendencies found justification chiefly in the need to rebuild the economy and reach a modus vivendi with the “bourgeois specialists” upon whose survival industry, education, and the state bureaucracy depended. They also included moves to maintain higher education, specialist training, and nonparty scholarship, to reach a working accommodation with the overwhelmingly nonparty professoriat, and, as it was frequently phrased, to adopt the best of the culture of the past.
In much of the literature on the postrevolutionary order as it relates to education, cultural policy, and the intelligentsia, “1921” has overshadowed “1920,” just as a post hoc notion of a “NEP in culture” has overshadowed the third front.12 I contend that the 1920s order in higher learning was only partly the product of the New Economic Policy. It was initiated by an aggressive Bolshevik “advance” on the third front and only then modified by a particular “retreat” associated with NEP. Moreover, NEP the policy could not be disengaged from NEP the concept, as the acronym itself became linked with images of degeneracy and corruption. The very phrase “NEP in culture,” a Western coinage denoting accommodation and moderation, would have at the time implied the insidious cultural influence of NEPmen and class enemies. Still, the NEP era, which largely coincided with the settling of an academie order that coalesced after 1922, unquestionably imposed constraints on communist intellectuals, party scholarship, and myriad forces on the Bolshevik Left. In part this was due to the circumstance that the “old” (prerevolutionary) and other (nonparty) universities, higher educational institutions (VUZy), research institutes, and academies administered under Soviet state auspices were now slated either for long-term, gradual “reform” or ceded their own spheres of influence outright. The great paradox of NEP was that such constraints led almost immediately not only to a resurgence of long-term Bolshevik visions and strategies but also to attempts to transcend “retreat” in new areas, in part stimulating the attempt to realize revolutionary goals first and foremost within the Communist Party. NEP with all its ambiguities and contradictions was a revolutionary era, a phase of the revolution of a particular kind.
Many of the tensions built into the academic order during the NEP period flowed along the contours of this fundamental contradiction at its birth. Among the outcomes least anticipated was the fate of the very institutions of party higher learning I examine here. In a decisive yet ultimately Pyrrhic victory they triumphed over their nonparty rivals at the end of the 1920s, but in the process spiraled into decline and deprived themselves of a primary raison d’etre, setting the stage for their own demise.
By 1928, on the cusp of the Great Break, which altered the organization and ethos of all highet learning in the country irrevocably, one party activist had come to the striking reformulation that comprises the epigraph to this book: the transformative third front missions, now most frequently regrouped under the rubric of cultural revolution, were really about the creation of a new mind. Despite the barrage of plans in this epoch to invent virtually everything ab novo — including, in the widespread phrase, a “new world” — such a modification itself was hardly new. The proposal for a new mind was but one brightly colored thread in an entire tapestry of attempted transformations.
Taking in this sweeping range of the third front of culture requires a broad angle of vision from the historian. Indeed, central categories that generations of scholars of the early Soviet experience have generally considered stable and to a large degree analytically discrete were all profoundly intertwined on a front that advanced a barrage of missions and harbored totalizing aspirations.13 Indeed, a remarkable feature of the age was how categories like “culture” were expanded in a revolutionary way. In party usage in the early Soviet period, kul’tura was increasingly understood not only as high culture but — in what until then had been an ethnographic sense — as encompassing all habits, traditions, customs, and everyday life (byt).14 Better known, but equally in need of exploration, is the explosive expansion of the “political” in the 1920s into realms previously unmarked or private.
A major theme of this book, then, is the interconnectedness of activity on the third front. In broadest terms, this characteristically revolutionary sweep can be related to a communist inversion of the fundamentally liberal axiom that such spheres as the economic, political, scientific, and cultural are separate and autonomous. After all, conceptualizing in terms of the entire “superstructure” and “base” — in the midst of social revolution and the attempt to build a radically new society — led to an inveterate proclivity to aggregate and to link. The Bolsheviks’ Marxism dictated the primacy of class; the Leninist tradition placed political struggle at the center of all revolutionary tasks; the Party had belatedly adopted a cultural mission as it embarked on revolutionary state-building to prepare a “backward” society for socialism. The resulting merger of spheres, the intertwined missions, became a perennial feature of the “cultural” front. This was not simply an enlightenment state, but, however imperfectly realized, a system with an organic thrust.
The holistic texture of the Bolsheviks’ “third front” has several implications. It suggests that its manifold agendas — from creating a new social group, a socialist or proletarian intelligentsia, to reworking science, pedagogy, and education — are fruitfully explored in tandem. It implies, as well, that “ideology” is best examined in conjunction with the practices of the new regime.15 Reflecting on ideology and social revolutions, a historian of the French Revolution, William Sewell remarked upon the ubiquity of a “hierarchical” strategy of “asserting the primacy of some type of cause over the other,” which tends to subordinate the roles of other factors or conflate them with “the chosen causal factor.” The same might be said about the treatment of causality in early Soviet Russia, a problem also caught up, of course, with an overriding question of the origins of Stalin’s “second revolution.” The nature of the “cultural front” has suggested that reductionist approaches, those that rush to privilege a single category, are less likely to capture overlapping dimensions of revolutionary change.16
In each of the four extended inquiries into which this book is divided, I attempt to show how third front missions were woven into the history of Bolshevik higher learning, its institutions, and the groups of party intellectuals and stuclents involved. Having said that, I take special aim at capturing and integrating two of the dimensions of postrevolutionary development that have been — to make a large but not unfounded generalization — less deeply probed in the early Soviet period and in the history of Bolshevism: the cultural and the institutional.
These party institutions are mirrors that reflect many processes that flowed from the establishment of the third front. For example, the effort to live a new communist lifestyle or everyday life (byt) at Sverdlov Communist University; the search to create a truly “red” specialist at the Institute of Red Professors; and the championing of a planned, “practical,” collectivist, orthodox party Marxist science at the Communist Academy were preoccupations of communist students, red professors, and Bolshevik scholars at these three institutions and shaped the development of the institutions where they were pursued most intensively.
In the context of early Soviet Russia, it is clear, institution-building in higher learning following the Revolution was no consolidation of long-prepared cognitive changes or cultural shifts; rather, it occurred simultaneously with such changes. These centers of party higher learning were a new breed of specifically Bolshevik Party institution. As such, they refined distinctive practices and policies that shaped life within their walls. These practices and policies were highly novel for the academic enterprise. Among the most important of these were the activities of the party cell, purge and promotion policies, and the attempts to regulate social origin. By tying such practices to the broader context of the Soviet state and Communist Party — in areas such as purges, proletarianization, the nomenklatura system, and what I call the Party’s disciplinary regime — I explore the participation of party higher learning in Bolshevik institutional organization not only for general insight into much broader phenomena connected to party political practices and Bolshevik state-building but also for particular understanding of the influential results of the practices for the new Bolshevik academic enterprise.
Further, these Bolshevik centers were also actors in the struggles of the day in higher education, culture, pedagogy, and scholarship. During the 1920s, the world of postrevolutionary higher learning was small, and scholars and intellectuals were overwhelmingly centered in Moscow and Leningrad.17 The central Moscow party institutions under the microscope here, as a result, played a decisive role in a decade-long rivalry with the state-run system of old universities, institutes, and the Academy of Sciences, all still dominated to one degree or another by members of the nonparty academic intelligentsia. These rivalries, both constrained and maintained by the dualistic NEP academic order, culminated in the Great Break assault on the chief nonparty institutional rivals.
Finally, these party institutions assumed the status of models and symbols of progress on the third front. The Moscow institutions founded first quickly became prototypes for an entire country-wide system of party education; soon afterward, they began to be explicitly portrayed in the party-Marxist camp as “model” (obraztsovye) institutions for further revolutionary change in the social sciences and, frequently by implication, in higher learning as a whole. In an academic world in which Bolsheviks were a small and parvenu minority, party institutions quickly became symbolic representations of the revolutionary. In this way the very structures of the new party-state, as they were developing, were imbued with meaning. The decade-long experience of party academia therefore took on decisive implications during a Great Break upheaval that attempted to bring the revolution to unreconstructed realms.
In the attempt to scratch beneath the surface of an often secretive communist world, I have paid special attention to the rise and formative years of party institutions and their everyday practices, not just to penetrate the walls of Bolshevik institutions, but to uncover the framework, the cultural underpinnings, that informed activity within them. Communist conventions, refined in the power politics of this “party of a new type,” combined to form a powerful crucible for initiating people. Party schools were explicitly portrayed as “weapons” of “Bolshevik upbringing.” Despite the fact that an institutional framework was, broadly speaking, not primary in Marxist or Bolshevik thought, it is interesting to note how quickly party educational institutions became — and, just as important, were perceived as — primary vehicles of cultural transmission. Andrei Bubnov, powerful head of the Central Committee’s Agitprop department, which oversaw the party schools, gave a very clear indication of this to a group of students from Sverdlov Communist University in 1922: “This is not merely a building, into which new people are packed each year; this is a university, which possesses a defined system of regulations, certain defined internal interrelationships . . . . An institution — with its basic tone, character, customs, everyday life [byt]—all of this creates a certain succession from one graduating class to the next.”18
This book explores Bolshevik culture and culture-building in several different settings and among key groups comprising the milieu of party higher learning: Old Bolshevik intellectuals and Marxist theoreticians, rising groups of “red professors” of the early and late 1920s, and the activists and rank and file of the communist studenchestvo. Taking into account the attributes of such groups, I attempt to portray Bolshevik culture as potent and increasingly conventionalized in many of its manifestations, but itself caught in the throes of change and never static or fully unified.
Because the branch of academia under consideration was part and parcel of the Party, and practices derived from inner-party politics and Bolshevism pervaded the life of party scholarship and education, Bolshevik political culture is critical to this inquiry.19 What has stood out above all is the ritualistic, scripted, and even theatrical quality of Bolshevik political culture in the 1920s. Commonalities across various settings have emerged which, I believe, show how this political culture acquired mass, depth, and an expanded currency in the 1920s; it thus has to be reckoned with in accounting for change. For example, the intense environment of the red professors’ theory seminars exhibit similarities to staged performances of agitational trials, and telltale traces of the rites of party cell meetings are shown to be present in the social science writings of party Marxists. The written word was not isolated from the many other modes of transmission. This explains the special interest here in the development of Soviet Marxism less as a philosophy or system of ideas — for this has been examined many times before and in some fine studies — but as a prominent part of a broader political-cultural idiom. Among the implications for the party intellectuals were that central ideas such as class conflict and methodologies such as unmasking reinforced modes of action and helped crystallize a party style in intellectual life.20
The Bolsheviks, including the intellectuals among them, prided themselves on being tough customers and hard-headed political operators. Some might dismiss the nuances of their political culture as of secondary importance. I do not agree, for the web of stylized conventions they wrought, and which in turn wrought them, became a prominent feature of the communist modus operandi on the third front. Their methods, and the ways of acting and thinking that accompanied them, formed a crucial component of their rise to the commanding heights of organized intellectual life. Bolshevik culture was not only evolving but spreading rapidly outward in the 1920s. In higher learning attempts were made to impose forcibly its conventionalized manifestations, most violently of course at the end of the decade. Here one can cite only one example when the worlds of party and nonparty scholarship clashed, during the bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences in 1929. It is striking how transparently party emissaries attempted to inject well-worn inner-party methods — specific methods of denunciation, self-criticism, purge sessions, and exegesis of the political meaning of one’s biographical past — into a hitherto completely nonparty institution. The quintessentially nonparty scientific community at first reacted defensively and collegially and then, under immense pressure, broke ranks.21
As this suggests, Bolshevik political culture informed action; it was no ethereal abstraction but a phenomenon linked by a thousand threads to the emerging system. This linkage requires us to rethink some of the features of party politics and inner-party struggles of the 1920s. The constitution of the “third front” and the formative political and conceptual conflicts from which an regulatory bureaucracy emerged suggest a new appreciation of the permeable boundaries of party-state dualism. Probing this ambiguous party-state dualism on the emergent third front administrative apparat clarifies some of the contradictory impulses of cultural and higher educational policy in the 1920s. The connection of everyday life with party cell politics at Sverdlov University leads us into the Party’s highest organ of discipline, the Central Control Commission. Both the single party cell and the top organ reflected the pervasive concern with lifestyle deviations as part of an emerging communist disciplinary regime. This, in turn, formed part of a top-heavy system of power relations that was challenged during the height of the Trotskyist opposition of 1923–24 and suddenly if temporarily turned topsy-turvy in Stalin’s Great Break. The scripted and theatrical unmasking of deviations at the Institute of Red Professors forces a consideration of the “Right” in 1928–29 as an “invented opposition” and the birth of “Stalinism” in party intellectual life as a lengthy, gradual process stimulated by this shock. In each of these cases, and in others, immersion in the workings of the Bolshevik political-cultural system as it operated in a single environment can open up perspectives on the broader communist polity and the course of the revolution in the shift from the NEP to the Stalin eras.
The leading educational and theoretical centers of Bolshevism in the 1920s were not only engaged in the making of red specialists, theoreticians, publicists, and social scientists. In this era above all, those activities went hand in hand with the project of training a successor generation of party leaders, often referred to as the “changing of the guard,” or smena. A party education in the Marxist social sciences in this period was a classic career path for well-connected, up-and-coming young cadres, whereas higher technical education largely supplanted it as the primary path for rising party cadres during the industrialization drive after 1928.22 The study of party higher education in the 1920s, then, especially its most prestigious central institutions, brings us into the heart of the protracted first phase of the making of a new elite — a central problem about the Soviet order that has interested observers of communism since Trotskii’s Revolution Betrayed and Djilas’s New Class.
The formation of a postrevolutionary political elite also needs to be appreciated as a mission of the new regime, yet another deliberate project inextricably tied to the third front. Institutionalized party education had come to occupy a position of overriding importance within Bolshevism in no small part because it originated in the underground party schools of 1909–11 as a means of producing both “proletarian intellectuals” and educated Marxists as well as sorely needed, loyal political agents. These goals were not rigorously distinguished either at the birth of party education or in the 1920s.
The younger generation of party members working in the central party institutions in the 1920s carne from diverse national, geographical, and social backgrounds and were bound together by certain special tieso For one thing, they were nominated, mobilized, monitored, recommended, and distributed by the party-state in an elaborate appointment and promotion system developed in this same period and extended to higher education and especially the party members in it. Cadre politics was thus fundamental in structuring the training of both party scholars and politicians, and the rising generation of cadres was party-recruited and party-registered. It was as part of a new cadre system, as well, that efforts to regulate social composition and “proletarianize” the Party and the intelligentsia were first launched.
Yet perhaps the most fundamental aspect of creating a new elite took place after the promotion of cadres — the phenomenon of Bolshevik acculturation. Outlooks were molded, groups made, and identities remade by the extraordinarily intensive enviroment in which party members were educated — an environment that included the new institutions created to train them, the kind of education they received, and the powerful grip of the Bolshevik political culture into which they were initiated. This period was one of formative flux, since the project of training a party elite, the institutions created to train it, and the culture and outlook of groups that belonged to it were all evolving simultaneously.
The “new class” discussion has a full-fledged history in its own right and has been pursued in contexts ranging from the international Left, Sovietology, and social history. Here it can only be suggested that in several of these contexts over the decades social origin or social position has frequently been accepted as determinative of culture, whereas the opposite possibility — that Bolshevik culture in fundamental ways shaped the new class — has not been fully considered. At the same time, sweeping and global treatments of the place of the “new class” or political elites in the Soviet order have overshadowed the specific milieus from which its members emerged, and preoccupation with the Stalin and post-Stalin periods has tended to camouflage the sizable contribution of the NEP experience.
The debate that racked the international Left over the “bureaucracy” or “new bourgeoisie” since the 1930s — which in fact can be directly traced to the theoretical disputes of inner-party opposition groups in the USSR during the 1920s — engaged the problem of the new class above all as it affected classification of the socioeconomic nature of the regime.23 Whether an exploiting class, or class in the Marxist sense, could exist in the Soviet mode of production comprised the heart of early debates about the nature of the Soviet system under Stalin; yet the striking result was the anonymity of elite depicted. The kind of people rising to the top, in particular their education, culture, and mentality, has long been overshadowed by disputation about their class position in Soviet society and efforts to use class analysis to categorize Soviet communism as a system. Totalitarianism theory, replacing the Marxist debates about class with the primacy of political control, was also interested in the place of elites as part of a global schema. In the decades that followed, the cottage industry that sprang up within Sovietology to analyze, much more empirically, the nomenklatura and high-ranking political figures, while often reaching back into the early years of the revolution for origins, was overwhelmingly oriented around Stalin-era and post-Stalinist developments.24
Western historical study of the making of a new elite, like many of the other topics addressed in this book, has been dominated by the pathbreaking work of a single scholar, Sheila Fitzpatrick. Her work privileged a single dominant generational dynamic — the formation of the “Brezhnev generation” — during massive social promotion of proletarian cadres into higher technical education during the Great Break. By far the most important period in her narrative, in which the definitive element was the social mobility of a single “cohort” during the Stalin era, was the first Five-Year Plan. Indicative of a broader tendency to put class or social origin first as determinative even of great cultural-ideological shifts was a concluding suggestion that the “Great Retreat” of the mid-1930s to hierarchical and conservative cultural values was “really the secondary consequence of a successful social revolution: the mass promotion of former workers and peasants into the Soviet political and social elite.”25
The opening of formerly closed Soviet repositories has made it possible to study the history of the project of training a new elite by probing much more deeply the specific settings that shaped it. This study, with its locus in central party schools, is only one contribution to such an endeavor. Even so, the 1920s, as a time of cultural transformation and formative institution-building, emerges much more clearly as a period of qualitative (rather than quantitative) importance in the project of training what Bolsheviks sometimes called a new ruling stratum. What I mean by this is that the experience of the 1920s produced far fewer “cadres” than the several million beneficiaries of the breakneck proletarianization policies and expansion of higher education during the industrialization drive. Yet the fact that an unquestionably new era of massive social promotion began during the Great Break tells only a part of the story. From the 1920s on, after all, “red specialists” and a new generation began to be groomed and shaped by a new communist educational enterprise. Party cadres began to be trained in ways that integrated them into a certain culture and promoted a certain specifically Bolshevik institutional milieu. The initial stage in the making of a Soviet elite in the 1920s, then, emerges partly as a time of influential transformation in the project, as a distinctive first step that was both a precedent for and swamped by a much larger effort following on its heels.
From the first, the attempt to raise up a new ruling stratum in an age of social revolution and proletarian dictatorship was anything but an unproblematic endeavor. Indeed, the very notion of an elite was anathema to communists — yet elitism was also ever present among the professional revolutionaries in the proletarian “vanguard.” The tensions and taboos, pressures and peculiarities, resulting from the rise of an anti-elitist elite were one of those central ambiguities — along with the phenomenon of what I call anti-intellectual intellectuals — plaguing Bolshevik missions in higher learning in the early years of Soviet power. In the end, so strong was the experience of acculturation in the new party education that it seems to have been capable of producing common bonds among very diverse groups of students. This is especially striking in the combative brand of Bolshevik political culture cultivated by students at the Institute of Red Professors (IKP). Records of student meetings both from the regular IKP departments (where the number of “intelligentsia” or white-collar students was high) and from the two-year IKP preparatory section designed to proletarianize the institute show strong commonalities emerging among ikapisty of highly variegated social and national backgrounds. In the 1920s, an age when the smena being trained by the Party asserted its proletarian nature most insistently, the irony was that such cadres were held together above all by political and cultural bonds; the elite being trained in top Moscow institutions in this period might be seen in many ways as a supraclass and supranational entity.
Party higher learning can also be seen as a network of institutions, comprising a system of higher education, a sector of academia, and a party-Marxist movement in scholarship and science. This “sectoral” perspective holds implications in particular for the history of Soviet science and higher education. Historians of higher education have rarely if ever considered party schools as an intrinsic part of postrevolutionary higher education. Yet the title “higher party school” — bestowed in 1920 on Sverdlov Communist University when that institution first moved from a six-month training program to a three-year course of study — clearly represented the party equivalent of a “higher school” or university. The title then became a standard designation written into the charter of all the communist universities, and special institutions such as the graduate-level Institute of Red Professors and the Communist Academy’s “courses in Marxism.” Yet perhaps because the history of these party institutions was relatively inaccessible, or because party education was largely not considered outside the context of political propaganda — in a time when, as has been emphasized, the very concepts of propaganda, enlightenment, and education were blurred — the Party’s attempt to create an alternative form of higher education has in general not been taken seriously.26 If the 1920s academic order is recognized as bifurcated along the lines of the party-state divide, as it is here, it creates a new picture of NEP-era policy and practice as structured not only by deep divisions but by a contradiction at its core.
Of the major academic sectors in the 1920s — principally the old universities, the VUZy and research institutes under Narkompros, the uniquely autonomous Academy of Sciences, and the commissariat-based institutes — party higher learning faced the greatest challenges, but also held unusual advantages.27 Growing up under the wing of the Party gave it special powers yet also special vulnerability; it represented the revolutionary and the new regime, yet this very closeness subjected it to perennial suspicions and dangers. Not least of its advantages when it faced its academic rivals, however, was that its leaders were often politicians and academic administrators of the highest rank. The institutions examined here, as a result, formed a kind of Moscow nexus of rising party scholarship. The party camp was indeed riddled by divisions in each discipline and in the inner-party disputes, but it cannot be overlooked that as a sector party higher learning developed and frequently acted as a unified entity.
At the same time, this movement cum sectoral base, so powerful politically yet such a parvenu force academically, evolved in tandem with nonparty higher learning, that is, with the institutions and values of the nonparty academic establishment as a principal referent. Thus the history of the Communist Academy, in particular, is unintelligible when divorced from the history of the Academy of Sciences. Party scholars prosecuted a decade-long rivalry with “bourgeois” science, but also emulated and at times imitated their established nonparty counterparts. Even when they deliberately turned their backs on anathematized features of nonparty academia — above all the twin standards of pure science and institutional autonomy — the very definition of themselves as opposite was a backhanded tribute, a form of inverted influence. In part, then, the relationship can be considered not simply antagonistic, but symbiotic.28 Just as postrevolutionary higher education cannot be fully understood outside the context of party education, so the camp of party-Marxist scholarship cannot be fully comprehended apart from its relationship with “bourgeois” or established “academic science.” The underbelly of 1920s revolutionary iconoclasm and the party camp’s struggle in academia was a good dose of covert respect for the nonparty establishment.
Yet the deep-seated rivalry the party camp felt with nonparty forces was animated not by a striving for a stable accommodation, despite the degree of symbiosis in the 1920s, but by what I have called in the case of the Communist Academy the quest for hegemony. No matter how modest their initial situation, they fully expected dominance and even monopoly at the end of the struggle. The party camp’s sense of struggle made the stakes high not only for the immediate actors involved. Ultimately, it helped in no small way to determine the fate of social and humanistic knowledge under Soviet cornmunism. While party institutions did make limited but notable excursions into natural sciences in the 1920s, their overwhelming focus was on the social sciences. It was here, as well, that hegemonic aspirations were given the freest reign, and here that party Marxism can be said to have had the deepest impact (by any measurement, from effects on core methodologies to the number of party members involved).
The resulting devastation can hardly be exaggerated. Moshe Lewin, whom few would accuse of excessive antisocialist or anti-Marxist biases, recendy referred to the social sciences under Stalin as utterly “destroyed,” as social studies assumed the role of abstract, arid mythmaking geared explicitly to celebrating the system that spawned it.29 Yet, strictly speaking, the adoption of such a celebratory, justificatory role did not represent destruction, but rather a remarkable transformation of the purpose and nature of social science. It is this great shift the historian musí understand. It involved a fundamental revision of the purpose and position of social knowledge, as well as the place of social research in academia and its relationship with the regime. In both areas, the significant evolution of party scholarship within the most prominent bastions of the “Marxist social sciences” in the 1920s played a pivotal role.
The October Revolution can be seen as an extraordinary moment in the twentieth-century history of the social sciences — not merely for its ultimate destructiveness, but for the remarkable impetus it gave to their standing in the 1920s. In tsarist Russia, during the rise of social science after the 1860s, not only were Marxists virtually excluded from academia, but as Vucinich has shown, the search for a “science of society” and “most of the systematic sociological thought” was developed to a great extent outside the academic world. Instead, a major locus was the political-ideological movements of populism, anarchism, and Marxism.30 Despite academic advances after the turn of the century, it was only the revolutionary state, in which Marxism was declared the official scientific ideology, which initially took an unprecedented interest in promoting social science in academia.
The Bolshevik scholars, theoreticians, and intellectuals in the new party sector in academia considered their camp synonymous with the Marxist social sciences, and in fact this primary supradisciplinary identity carne to encompass the Marxist branches of disciplines such as literature and history, which in other academic worlds have been classified as humanities.31 The new party academic institutions were hardly the only locus of social research involving Communists and Marxists in the 1920s. Yet the Bolshevik scholars and theoreticians there frequently equated their camp with the “Marxist social sciences” as a whole. These Bolshevik intellectuals in the 1920s viewed their nauka as the highest, most rigorous science and most privileged form of Marxism in a system that began to disseminate Marxist social knowledge in an entire hierarchy of settings. The paradox was that along with this rarified “scientific” self-conception, however, they embraced a cult of “practicality” and “current tasks” in their definitions of the purpose of scholarship and education; they were highly troubled by a scholarly, professorial, or even intellectual identity; and they became preoccupied with developing a service function that would directly harness scholarship for the Revolution and the party-state.
Such problems in the history of the Marxist social sciences reflect a particularly influential spectrum of tensions that plagued the nature and purpose of party scholarship in the 1920s, and especially the new party centers that were the heart of the growth in academic social science. These tensions ultimately had to do with reconciling the iconoclastic, outsider, even anti-academic proclivities of party scholarship with its new role as prestigious academic enterprise; with balancing revolutionary, proletarian, Bolshevik roles with the new status of scholars and academics; and with harmonizing their abstract Marxist theory with an embrace of practicality and service. None of these issues is simple or transparent. Yet in each case a significant evolution took place in the 1920s. Ultimately the delicate balancing act that party scholarship attempted to perform in each of these realms either broke downor led to wrenching adjustments within its own camp.
It is no exaggeration to say that consideration of any kind of intellectual, scholarly, or cultural activity under communism must confront the relationship of the enterprise to the political system. One is confronted at each and every turn with relationships so central they have become encapsulated in convenient shorthand: power and culture, the Party and the intelligentsia, politics and science. While the questions raised by them are hardly unique to Soviet studies, the dilemma here has always been how to grapple with what is ostensibly the extraordinarily overt predominance of the first of each pairing.
The history of Bolshevik higher learning provides a particularly interesting window into these problems because it comprises a distinct enterprise subject to party control, yet at the same time is itself so evidendy a component of the Party, power, and polities. As a result, the manifestations of power and politics reveal themselves far beyond yet clearly involving intervention and control. In short, in this enterprise the underlying, everyday, implicit, systemie manifestations of power have seemed particularly unavoidable (while they can be more subdy disguised elsewhere); it is perhaps for this reason that the history of this enterprise can highlight a broader necessity of distinguishing between what might be called the pervasive and focused ramifications of power, politics, and polity.
Brute political Diktat played an unmistakable role. In fact, the extent of party-state intervention in higher learning emerges as more intrusive than often imagined, as it does in cultural and educational policy during NEP. However, such explanations — the “focused” aspects of power and politics — only advance our understanding so far. Bolshevik higher learning, it is impossible to forget, was integrated into the Party, functioned as part of the larger system, yet in its sphere represented a radical movement in its own right. The effects of intervention pale in comparison to the “pervasive” and frequently more subtle effects of power and politics as it affected its own enterprise — how patterns of authority, the Party’s power hierarchy, and the extended environment of the communist political order in general influenced activity.
With this in mind, the process of change in Bolshevik higher learning — the many-layered transformation of the 1920s that is the central motif of this work — appears less frequently imposed than self-inflicted and unforeseen within this new enterprise, as, ever eyeing those it marked as rivals, the Bolshevik camp launched the first attempts to realize its own potent yet elusive aspirations.
The title of the book is emblematic of the Bolsheviks’ transformative missions on the third front during the 1920s, in particular as they relate to higher learning. In its way such a simple slogan, the phrase, like the 1920s order that gave rise to it, harbors conflicts and contradictions. On the one hand, the phrase suggests that the life of the mind was revolutionized; on the other, it raises the possibility that the revolution itself brought to this realm was to a degree thought up, in that it was subject to imagination and revision. Both meanings assume importance in terms of a very particular dynamic with which the book is concerned. The institutions the Party erected on the third front attempted to bring the Revolution to the life of the mind; as the Bolshevik intellectuals embarked on the quest to achieve their many missions, however, they could not foresee how the very definition of the revolutionary was subject to a continual and often subtle process of reformulation. No matter how ultimately elusive the goals, the attempt to implement them began the process of associating the revolution in higher learning not solely with visions of the future, even while those persisted, but with the substantial strides the Party was already making. The Revolution was being filled with content on a new front.
1. I use the phrase “higher learning” to encompass all higher education, research institutes, and academies. Nauka (science), like its equivalents in other European languages, encompasses all fields of knowledge; thus I distinguish it from “natural science” throughout.
2. Samuel N. Harper recognized the link between the third front and party education many years ago, when he wrote that “a forced retreat on the economic front [i.e., NEP] led to special emphasis on education, and particularly on Communist training.” Harper, Making Bolsheviks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 108.
3. Although no single work fully explores this epochal shifr in the Russian Revolution, its importance and its links to the Bolsheviks’ ability to create effective new institutions are underlined in Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13–14, 292.
4. Sheila Fitzpatrick in “The Bolsheviks’ Dilemma: Class, Culture, and Politics in the Early Soviet Years,” Slavic Review 47 (Winter 1988): esp. 609–11. The “self-conscious reorientation of the regime’s justification” as a party-dominated dictatorship of the proletariat by mid-1920 is analyzed by Neil Harding in “Socialism, Society and the Organic Labour State,” in Harding, ed., The State in Socialist Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 22–25.
5. T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 185.
6. As famously and formally codified in the “21 Conditions” adopted by the Second Congress of the Comintern, which opened in July 1920.
7. Peter Kenez gives an overview of activities referred to at the time both as agitation-propaganda and as political enlightenment in The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Metbods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
8. See chapter 18 of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, trans. Thomas Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 2:468–501.
9. Robert C. Tucker, “Lenin’s Bolshevism as a Culture in the Making,” in Abbott Gleason et al., eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 36.
10. L. Trotskii, “Polozhenie respubliki i zadachi rabochei molodezhi (Doklad na V Vserossiiskom s”ezde RKSM 11 oktiabria 1922 g.),” in Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1927), 21:308; N. Bukharin, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i kul’tura (Petrograd: “Priboi,” 1923), 9, 25; A. V. Lunacharskii, “Novoe studenchestvo,” Narodnoe prosveshchenie, no. 2 (1924): 7–8.
11. Richard Scites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 76–78.
12. In a significant branch of historiography in the 1970s and 1980s, the cultural “compromises” were taken out of context, mistaken for the whole of the new regime’s cultural and educational policy, and reified. under the cicle “NEP in culture.” For an example, see Timothy O’Connor, The Politics of Soviet Culture: Anatolii Lunacharskii (Aun Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).
13. I prefer to speak of totalizing aspirations rather than totalitarianism in order to emphasize the decisive gap between plans and achievement.
14. I. Luppol, “Problema kul’tury v postanovke Lenina,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no. 7 (October–November 1925): 14–28.
15. I know of no Begriffsgeschichte of ideology in the early Soviet period, which in general was shifting from a classical Marxist, demystifying notion of ideology as “false consciousness” to a positive notion of codified doctrine and worldview. See, for example, the discussion and citations in V. V. Adoratskii, “Ob ideologii,” Pod znamenem marksizma (henceforth cited as PZM), no. 11–12 (November–December 1922): 199–210. Because I am concerned with institutions of party-Marxist thought and education which used ideologiia to refer to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and more broadly to self-conscious worldviews, I restrict the term to those connotations.
16. William Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,” Journal of Modern History 57 (March 1985): 57–58. Of the most visible examples of such a strategy in the Russian field, one can mention Martín Malia’s “agenda” of “reassert[ing] the primacy of ideology and politics” (Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 [New York: Free Press, 1994], 16), with heavy emphasis on the first of the dyad; Richard Pipes’s characterization of the “decisive and immediate factors making for the [old] regime’s fall and the resultant turmoil” as “overwhelmingly political,” in Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 491; and Ronald Grigor Suny’s identification of “social polarization” as the “key to a new paradigm” in his landmark survey, “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 31–52. Certainly it is also possible, in a similar way, to come to a cultural essentialism that seeks a cause of causes in Russian or Soviet culture.
17. According to 1922 and 1923 census data, up to 90 percent of all professors, lecturers, and scholars lived in Moscow or in the cities of the Moscow guberniia; analogous figures for various kinds of professionals and “literati” ranged between 70 and 80 percent. Figures on scholars and scientists at the end of the 1920s show that the vast majority of these groups had not budged from the large cultural centers of Moscow and Leningrad. See L. A. Pinegina, “Nekotorye dannye o chislennosti i sostave intelligentsii k nachalu vostanovitel’nogo perloda (po materialam perepisei 1922 i 1923 gg.),” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, 8th ser., no. 3 (1979): 12–20, and V. S. Sobolev, “Uchet kadrov issledovatel’skikh uchrezhdenii i vuzov (1918–1934),” Vestnik akademii nauk SSSR, no. 11 (1989): 87–91.
18. “Zasedanie 26/1–23 goda. Agitprop Otdel TsK RKP,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 500, l. 47.
19. Sidney Verba’s classic definition of political culture refers to that “system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which defines the situation in which political action takes place. It provides the subjective orientation to politics.” Lucian Pye and Sidney Yerba, eds., Political Culture and Politicál Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 513. By using the term I hope to capture not only that system of values and norms informing approaches to politics but also those expressed in the canon of “cultural” activities developed in the Soviet state as part of political education, such as “political-enlightenment work.”
20. Karl Mannheim first adopted the concept of style as developed in art history to his notion of “styles of thought,” denoting constellations of patterns that become meaningful in social context. See his “Conservative Thought,” in Essays in Sociology and Social Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 74–164.
21. “Stenogramma zasedaniia Plenuma komissii po proverke apparata Akademii Nauk SSSR, 24 avgusta 1929,” GARF f. 3316, op. 1, d. 15, l. 479–84; “Komissiia po chistke apparata Akademii Nauk. Zasedanie 21 oktiabria 1929 g.,” ibid., 1. 488–95; “Stenogramma zasedaniia obshchego sobraniia sotrudnikov Akademii Nauk,” 19 August 1929, ibid., 1. 411–15, and 27 July 1929, ibid., 1. 8–11.
22. See Harley Balzer, “Engineers: The Rise and Decline of a Social Myth,” in Loren Grallam, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 141–67.
23. I have explored aspects of the genealogy of these debates in “Ante Ciliga, Trotskii and State Capitalism: Theory, Tactics, and Reevaluation during the Purge Era, 1935–1939,” Slavie Review 50 (Spring 1991): 127–43, and “Trotskii i ego kritiki o prirode SSSR pri Staline,” Voprosy istorii, no. 11–12 (1992): 33–45. A comparative analysis is contained in Michael M. Lustig, Trotsky and Djilas: Critics of Communist Bureaucracy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988).
24. For a valuable but in its focus unrepresentative example, see Mervyn Mathews, Privilege in the Soviet Union; A Study of Elite Life-Styles under Communism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978); for a survey of other works, see especially 9–10.
25. Sheila Fitzpatrick, in Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 254. Such a reductive view is questionable particularly in light of Fitzpatrick’s own later work, which presses for an interpretation of Soviet social origin statistics as reflecting a highly political process of creating a kind of Marxist estate system. See Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History 65 (December 1993): 745–70.
26. For example, Christopher Read derides Sverdlov Communist University as “more akin to a seminary devoted to the study of dogma rather than a university” where “half-educated people were being filled with pre-packaged, crude dogma.” Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (London: Macmillan, 1990), 137–40. Yet Read’s conclusions were based almost exclusively on materials before 1921, that is, before Sverdlov emerged as a communist university; it is just as significant that the reluctance to accord communist universities a place in higher education closes off entire avenues of analysis.
27. For an introduction to the major divisions of postrevolutionary higher learning, see Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1917–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 72–91, and Klaus Meyer, “Wissenschaft-politik,” in Oskar Anweiler and Karl-Heinz Ruffmann, eds., Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner Verlag, 1973), 145–89.
28. Susan Gross Solomon first developed a similar thesis in her depiction of an evolving, complex interaction between agrarian Marxists (centered at the Communist Academy after 1926) and the organization-production school led by Chaianov in “Rural Scholars and the Cultural Revolution,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 128–53. I am also indebted to Fitzpatrick’s suggestive remarks on the Communist Party and the nonparty intelligentsia as interdependent elites in the introduction to her collection, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
29. Moshe Lewin, “Concluding Remarks,” in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 381.
30. Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1861–1917 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970), 424–88, and bis Social Tbought in Tsarist Russia: The Quest for a General Science of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
31. Marxist social science had had as its core the three disciplines of political economy, history, and social philosophy ever since the rise of Marxism in Russia in the 1890s; not coincidentally, these disciplines were institutionalized in the three original departments of the Institute of Red Professors when it was founded in 1921.