Preliminary Programme

Soviet education arose in the context of far-reaching social upheaval. The topic of education is thus closely connected with the question how self-organized learning can be seen as a component of an educational system intended to prepare for the development of a socialist community. In view of the very low level of education in Russia – even by the standards of that time – and the high rate of illiteracy among the poor rural population, a variety of teaching concepts and ways of organizing learning processes were tried, especially at the inception of the Soviet state. These concepts were intended to lift broad segments of the working population out of the political passivity to which they had been relegated under the tsars, and to enable them to participate in shaping the economic and cultural life of the new society.
Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and the chair of the Education Committee under the People’s Commissar for Education from 1920 on, developed the “complex method”, which was aimed at setting the learner’s specific life practice on a higher scientific level. The presentation will address the question what progressive education concepts Krupskaya draws on in her work on education, and what changes these concepts underwent through their first practical implementation in a socialist society. (Show less)

The relationship between museums and educational issues is omnipresent in the early phase of the Soviet state in Russia, and what function museums were to serve in the Soviet society was a fundamental question. The relationship is characterized by complex connections at different levels. Educational issues were important factors both in leading Soviet politicians’ ideas and hopes for education policy and in the wording of decrees that were formative for the new museology. The first proletarian museums to be formed in Moscow after the revolution were intended as a general and central educational offering to their visitors, and they are an example, alongside the new school policy, of the first attempts at implementing early Soviet education policy. The presentation introduces the first proletarian museums in Moscow, with their aims and some of their ideas for the education of the population in museums, examining their position on the cultural heritage of the past. (Show less)

“[...] and the bourgeois family will die out. In its place will come a new type of family – the working collective. In this new basic form people do not live together on the basis of any blood ties, but they are united in solidarity by their common work, their common interests and duties, and they educate each other.” (Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai)
For Russian revolutionary and politician Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai, born in 1972, the liberation from her own marriage at the age of 21 was the impulse for her active struggle for the right of all women to live and work in conditions freed from normative constraints. As Commissar for Social Affairs of Lenin's Cabinet of Councils in 1917, she was the world's first ever female minister. She introduced legal maternity protection, kindergartens, public cantinas (“Volksküchen”) and labor protection for women. For the so-called women’s question (“Frauenfrage”) could not be considered independently of the capitalist mode of production. At the same time, however, a successful revolution overcoming capitalism would not only have to transform labor conditions, but above all would have to entail a “revolution of traditional habits of life and ways of thinking.” In particular, the legalization of abortion introduced by her, but also the opening up and collectivization of reproductive work previously done unpaid by women, made it clear that, according to Kollontai, a change in wage labor conditions alone was not sufficient for the liberation of women: man would also have to revolutionize his habits and ways of thinking from the bottom up.
The lecture will analyze Kollontai’s ideal of a society whose cohesion is based neither on economic dependence nor on reproductive “blood ties”. For what she called a free love and sexuality of women, she relied on mutual education. This educational principle will be traced through her lectures on the situation of women in social development to women workers and peasants at Sverdlov University in 1921. (Show less)

Clara Zetkin is usually considered as an important proponent of the international women’s movement. She was also active in education and education policy, however, and up to now this part of her work has received attention primarily in the formerly state-socialist countries, but been only marginally noticed in the West. This focus is at the center of the research project “Clara Zetkin’s Influence in Soviet Education and Education Policy”. The presentation will examine Zetkin’s representation of developments in the Soviet Union and show the differences visible between her official publications and her private opinions expressed in letters to family members and comrades. The empirical basis of the project consists of readings in Clara Zetkin’s private papers in the German Federal Archives in Berlin and in the Russian State Archives on the History of Social Policy (Rossiiski Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Sotsial´no-Politicheskoi Istorii, RGASPI) in Moscow. (Show less)