Humanity's workshops: Progressive education in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1856--1927

This dissertation integrates the first decade of the Soviet regime into the broader history of Russian education by focusing on the development of the theory, policy, and practice of progressive education from 1856 to 1927. I concentrate on two issues: the creation of a distinctively Russian, but recognizably progressive variety of educational reformism in pre-revolutionary Russia; and the interaction of this native legacy of progressivism with Marxist theory and Bolshevik practice during the first years of Soviet rule. I also examine the efforts of Russian educators to interpret Western theory, the role of new psychologically-derived insights into the educational process, the growth of the Russian understanding of the natural scope of the school, and the use of education to define civil society and citizenship. Nearly all historians of the subject have regarded Soviet education as an isolated intellectual phenomenon that sprang fully formed from the conditions of the Bolshevik Revolution, therefore concluding that progressivism failed in Russia because of a combination of superficial interest, shortages of key resources, and popular resistance. I demonstrate that Russian progressivism collapsed on the eve of the Cultural Revolution because of the further development of internal contradictions that existed prior to 1917 but were exacerbated by the addition of Marxism. This dissertation contributes to the efforts of recent historians to reimagine 1917 as a permeable boundary and to give equal emphasis to the periods of gradual but significant shifts (such as the Duma years and NEP) as well as to the moments of radical change (such as 1905, 1917, 1928–1931). This project can also aid the work of post-Soviet Russian educators who are trying to build a new system of public education by constructing a usable past from the pre-Soviet native and progressive legacies and early Soviet experiments. More generally, a close examination of progressivism in the hothouse environment of the Soviet Union in the 1920s reveals much about the practical and ideological underpinnings of Western progressivism itself. This dissertation uses archival, periodical, and published sources in Russian and English.