Editor's Introduction

Abstract

To publish in this journal, in 1984, the translation of a Russian book on the Twenty-sixth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the development of public education in that country may certainly seem, on the surface, a curious exercise for several reasons. First, two years ago, one year after the congress took place, a triple issue (January-February-March 1982, Volume 24, No. 3-4-5) was devoted to the Twenty-sixth Communist Party Congress and the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, which included program guidelines for education from the congress reports and policy directions that education would take during the economic planning period from 1981 to 1986. Second, since the congress, not only has the then-Chairman of the CPSU Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev-leader of the Soviet government for eighteen years-died, but his successor Iurii Vladimirovich Andropov has also died, after a brief tenure in office from November 1982 to February of this year. To compound the apparent obsolescence of another set of issues centering on the Twenty-sixth Party Congress and education, in January of this year the short-lived Andropov government issued a set of draft guidelines for a new Soviet school reform, which might well seem to make the prose of the authors presented herein hopelessly out of date.