“We’re all mad here…” Soviet leadership and its impact on education through the looking glass of Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism

Abstract

Despite a vast body of literature on Soviet leadership, very little work in this field seems to have engaged in a critical discussion about its specific impact on educational practice. This inference prompted the author to revisit the key junctions of her experiences of Soviet social order during 1980s, when she was working as a teacher of English at a primary school in Tbilisi, the capital of the Soviet Georgia. The author’s interest in the field was further piqued by the ambition to take Raymond Williams’s concept of cultural materialism outside its typical application confined to literary theory and use it instead as a tool for dissecting Soviet leadership in the attempt to examine its impact on Soviet educational landscape. The paper aims to substantiate that a broader appropriation of Williams’s ideas of cultural materialism extended beyond its original domain of literary theory, can add a rich stratum to the interpretation of Soviet leadership phenomenon, offering a number of valuable insights into its inherent concepts.