The Professors’ Community of the Red Professorate Institute in the 1930’s

Abstract

This article sets out to study the professors’ community in the Red Professorate Institute in regards to the community’s homogeneity and its didactic potential. Based on statistical and autobiographical documents deposited in the State archive of the Russian Federation, the author comes to the conclusion that the Institute did not succeed in crystallizing the cadres of a new type of Soviet professorship, due to their being no common features between its members: neither on the level of education and qualification characteristics, nor in the social homogeneity, nor in their political loyalty. The community was bright, polyphonic, heterogeneous, mobile, variable, sometimes responding to encouraging requests from the authorities (such as, for example, party membership), and sometimes ignoring them. In the socio-demographic aspect, the Institute of Red Professors did not completely become an ideological institution, how it was planned by Soviet government (although it was secured in curricula and programs of the disciplines). It was one of the places where the intelligentsia worked, where their knowledge and skills, often acquired even before 1917, were in demand.