Suchergebnisse

War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power examines the history of the Pedagogical Institute, located in the USSR's Kirov region from 1941 to 1952. Holmes reveals a tangled and complex relationship of local, regional, and national agencies. While it recognizes the immense strength of the center, it emphasizes a contentious diffusion, although not a confusion, of authority. In so doing, it departs from traditional models of Soviet power with their neatly drawn vertical and horizontal lines of command. It also demonstrates institutional and personal behavior simultaneously consistent with and at odds with a triumphalist wartime narrative.

Grand Theater examines bureaucracy not as a readily identifiable structure, which it certainly was, but rather as a process of day-to-day operation. Thus it is concerned with how agencies of both the Communist Party and the state apparatus not only implemented directives from above but also responded to perceived successes and failures, chose to produce, share, and conceal information, and reacted when common citizens injected themselves into governance by making demands and complaints.

All's quiet now. Summer vacation has started, the halls and classrooms are deserted. Almost. It is 10 July 1992 and I am inside Moscow's School No. 175 with Vladimir Dmitrievich Nikolaev, a pupil here from 1933 to 1941. Once this was School No. 25, hallowed ground, from 1931 to 1937 the most famous school in the Soviet Union, where a talented teaching corps instructed the children of Stalin and other representatives of the Soviet elite. The winner of many awards, School No. 25 was the object of my research for several years. It's a bit unnerving to imagine the sounds and images of the people who worked and played in these very rooms sixty years ago. Nikolaev interrupts, then enhances the experience: "This was the library; the deputy director's office was here; Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, and I were in the same literature class there."

Many Bolsheviks heralded the October Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of a new era in history; by 1921, however, much of this optimism had disappeared. Civil war, peasant rebellion, empty factories, closed schools, strikes in the industrial establishments that had survived, and the Kronstadt Revolt made many party members weary and cynical. A few, however, stubbornly adhered to an untarnished vision of a grand future. They could be found especially among those officials responsible for primary and secondary schools at the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Anatolii V. Lunacharskii, commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929; Nadezhda K. Krupskaia, his chief assistant for school policy; and their colleagues still believed that they possessed the means to reshape not only the schools but also human behavior and society. While the party engineered a calculated retreat with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the state slashed the educational budget, Narkompros remained determined to challenge the present and storm the future. It did so by launching a program of sweeping changes in the content and methods of school instruction. With a faith it hoped was infectious, Narkompros assumed that teachers would follow its lead. It would not be so simple.