Commissariat Of Education Research Articles

Office for People’s Education at the Lenin Library (USSR State Library) (1926-1930)

The history of establishment and dissolution of the Office for People’s Education - that succeeded the Russian State Library for People’s Education established on the initiative of prominent pedagogue and bibliographer V. I. Charnolusky - is discussed. The shady role of People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) and the Lenin Library that undertook the Office’ staff, collections and card catalogs, is revealed.

СУДЬБЫ РУССКОГО ИЗОБРАЗИТЕЛЬНОГО ИСКУССТВА В ГОДЫ РЕВОЛЮЦИИ И ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙНЫ (ОСОБЕННОСТИ ТВОРЧЕСТВА А.А. РЫБНИКОВА)

The article is devoted to the fate of the intellectuals who came over to the Soviet power and participated in the revolutionary process. The analysis is carried out on the example of the life and work of artist Alexei Rybnikov (1887-1949), who came from a merchant family, initially received economic education, graduated from Kharkov school of painting and drawin-gand participated in the exhibitions of “Jack of diamonds”.There are considered the peculiarities of his pre-revolutionary art. The author notes the role of the artist in the rescue of the unique art collections in the years of his work in the People’s Commissariat for Education. There is shownhow the Revolution and the Civil war, the nationalization and requisition of artistic values changed the processes of museum construction in Russia and then the Soviet Union. The author points out that the process of nationalization of the historical and artistic values revealed one of the important issues related to the conservation of works of art - the problem of restoration. The solution to this problem was associated with the need to study the technological characteristics of the paintings by old masters, to record the physical condition of all existing works of art, to describe its technical condition. There is shown that the practical work of rescue and restoration of the old masters’ heritage, which was carried out at the State Tretyakov gallery and the Hermitage by artists, technologists, photographers and scientists (chemists and physicists), led to the discovery of new methods of paintings salvation. Russian artist Alexei Rybnikov began his career before the revolution of 1917 as a painter, book designer and muralist.Like many other representatives of this profession, at first he became an officer of the People’s Commissariat for Education, then an employee of a museum. This path of a free artist’s transformation into a serious museum employee gave the world a new way of washing paintings, and then the method of texture photography invented by him. In the history of the world restoration this method is known as “Methode Rybnikoff’.

ВИСВІТЛЕННЯ В СУСПІЛЬНО-ПОЛІТИЧНІЙ ЛІТЕРАТУРІ 1920-Х РР. КОРЕНІЗАЦІЇ НАЦІОНАЛЬНИХ МЕНШИН УСРР

The article analyses the process, how the socio-political literature of the 1920s presented the Bolshevik policy of so-called “korenization” (supporting development of indigenous cultures) of national communities on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. The Bolsheviks skillfully made use of national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural factors for their authority’s consolidation and gaining support among all national communities of the USSR, including ethnic minorities in particular Soviet republics. In the socio-political literature of the 1920's both goals of that policy and its practical implementation were propagated. Even the party’s and state’s leaders could be authors of publications on this subject, together with officials directly implementing above mentioned policy, members of the People's Commissariat for Education of the Ukrainian SSR, and publicists. The publications were based on Marxist ideology and on party programme and other documents of the Bolshevik Party related to the national question. At the same time, those documents contained materials illustrating the practice of “korenization” policy, including so-called "Soviet construction" among national minorities, national-territorial administration, creation of national, cultural-educational institutions, elimination of illiteracy among ethnic groups and minorities, activity of “village (cultural) houses”, reading-houses, clubs and libraries, as well as publication of newspapers and magazines in the languages ​​of national minorities, preparation of national cadres, and, finally, successes and difficulties of “korenization”. However, the socio-political literature considered the temporary "national-cultural autonomy" of national minorities through the prism of the "cultural revolution", treating such policy as an important component of the plan for building socialism.

Russian State Library for Public Education: The completed project by V. I. Charnolusky

As a contribution to the story of life and activities of Vladimir I. Charnolusky, a prominent pedagogue and bibliographer, the author reviews the successful idea by Charnolusky, namely establishing the all-Russian library at the People’s Commissariat of Education to meet the demands of public education. The author provides data on the library’s collection, staff and head - E. F. Proskuryakova, and the difficult and not so long operation of the Library for Public Education.

Kleberg, Lars and Semenenko, Aleksei (eds) Aksenov and the Environs (review)

REVIEWS 731 Levitan’s approving comments on Chekhov’s verbal landscapes. Thus the story ‘The Grasshopper’ (chapter 6) is extensively analysed as a reflection of Levitan’s affair with one of their mutual friends Sophia Kuvshinnikova. The Seagull is explored less (pp. 146–56; & passim): focus is on reference to the extra-marital pregnancy of another friend, Lidiia Mizinova (Lika), Levitan’s involvement with both a mother and daughter, the Turchaninovs, and his attempted suicide. Significantly enough, Gregory finds it difficult to trace Chekhov in Levitan’s painting, and relies on comment from Levitan’s letters. The attempt leads to his prime differentiation between the two artists: Gregory points to Chekhov as ‘an artist with a penetrating cold heart’ (p. 218) which enabled him to remain at a distance, while Levitan was ever responsive, concerned, often angry or judgemental, and frequently in despair over his own abilities. They both eventually found nature indifferent to human affairs but reacted differently. For Levitan, nature’s indifference emphasized his isolation, feeding into bouts of depression but forming his more troubled landscapes; for Chekhov, it cemented his personal detachment in his creative work. There is rich material in this study. Gregory was right to unpick this relationship. From the point of view of Chekhov studies, Levitan is too often neglected. From the point of view of Levitan studies, this is an artist whose position astride the two most significant movements in Russian painting of the late nineteenth century, ‘The Itinerants’ and the World of Art, is ripe for investigation and appreciation. Gregory is perhaps too modest in his ambitions. A full biography of Levitan and catalogue of his works in English would cement this artist’s international reputation. They would build on the key foundation provided by the Soviet scholar, A. A. Fedorov-Davydov (Moscow, 1976; in English, Leningrad, 1981) and complement the solid work done in English by Averil King (Woodbridge, 2011). Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies Cynthia Marsh University of Nottingham Kleberg, Lars and Semenenko, Aleksei (eds). Aksenov and the Environs. Södertörn Academic Studies, 52. Södertörns högskola, Huddinge, 2012. 242 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. SK195.00 (paperback). Aksenov and the Environs, edited by Lars Kleberg and Aleksei Semenenko, originated from a major international conference held in Sweden in 2008. The volumefocusesonthesomewhatlesser-knownRussianavant-gardepersonality, Ivan Aleksandrovich Aksenov (1884–1935), an experimental Russian poet and prominent critic who was also active as a translator, and who worked both in SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 732 the theatre and in the early Soviet cultural administration. He was born into a family of high Russian gentry and trained as a junior military officer in Kiev and St Petersburg, but eventually was forced to quit the service. In 1910 he was a groom at Gumilev and Akhmatova’s ‘solemn’ marriage ceremony in Kiev. He made a brief but critical acquaintance with Pablo Picasso in Paris during his travels to France during 1915 and his book, entitled Picasso and the Environs, published in Moscow by Tsentrifuga in 1917, is here used as an intertextual source for the playful name of Kleberg and Semenenko’s volume. Aksenov’s book was one of the first theoretical studies dedicated to Picasso, being also an analytical rumination on Cubism as a ground-breaking artistic movement. Vladimir Markov’s colleague, Victor Terras, would later define this work as ‘an original and insightful book of criticism’. It was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies with an original cover design by a prominent Russian avant-garde ‘Amazon’, Aleksandra Ekster. Aksenov was among the founding members of the Tsentrifuga (semi-Futurist) publishing project, overseeing the 1917 printing of Boris Pasternak’s seminal collection, Over the Barriers, which contained the poet’s early verses dating from 1914–16. During the First World War, Aksenov served as a Russian imperial officer. In 1917, he was arrested by the Romanian authorities and turned over to the Red Army, and eventually ended up collaborating with early Soviet military institutions, including the infamous Cheka. His cooperation with the Reds culminated in his obtaining a high administrative post at the Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), and then the deanship at Vsevolod Meierkhol´d’s directing...

Enthusiast bibliographer Vladimir I. Charnolusky and his projects (following the archival sources)

The first in the series article on the multifarious activities of Vladimir Ivanovich Charnolusky (1864-1941), outstanding though forgotten Russian bibliographer, public figure and pedagogue. His professional career (before the October Revolution and during the Soviet era) is reviewed, in particular his service for the People’s Commissariat of Education and V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR. For the first time, data on the Russian State Library for People’s Education existing back in 1920ies, the project of All-Union Information and Bibliographic Bureau of the USSR Central Executive Committee Academic Committee are presented.

Putting Up Moscow: The Commissarat of Education in Kirov, 1941–1943

During World War II, a quarter of million people and many factories, institutions, and government agencies evacuated to the region and city of Kirov (known as Viatka before December 1934) and located 530 miles northeast of Moscow. Their number included the Russian Republic’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros). Putting Up Moscow focuses on the resistance by local, municipal, and regional organs in Kirov, when confronted with Narkompros’s demands of them. While the commissariat at fi rst received scarce resources, including prime physical facilities, Kirov’s soviet and party organs pushed back, tentatively at fi rst, and more boldly later, in order to limit the strain on the region’s resources and the harm to local interests. In 1943, Narkompros completed its return to Moscow. Its leaders and rank-and-file members were happy to go home. Kirov’s government and many of its citizens were equally happy to see them go.

Teaching place, assembling the nation: local studies in Soviet Ukrainian schools during the 1920s

This study focuses on the Soviet introduction of local studies to Ukrainian schools during the 1920s. It argues that, through their efforts at pedagogical reform, educational planners sought a fundamental re‐imagining of place. The Ukrainian Commissariat of Education asked teachers and their students to engage the ‘productive’ world surrounding the school and make connections to an understanding of a nationally defined, territorial Ukraine. However, because the commissariat left decisions regarding curricular content to regions and municipalities, many instructors were able to resist this utilitarian notion of space. Local studies was the linchpin in Soviet educational reform for Ukraine, yet the state’s emphasis on decentralised planning created opportunity for ‘flawed’ interpretations of local and, consequently, national meanings.

Tending to the “Native Word”: Teachers and the Soviet Campaign for Ukrainian-Language Schooling, 1923–1930

In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education and a circle of progressive educators aimed to radically transform the educational system in Ukraine, and, as a consequence, the skills and mentality of its graduates. To do this, they would have to teach students in a language they understood. For nearly three-quarters of the juvenile population of Ukraine, this meant instruction in Ukrainian. Although this may have sounded like a simple proposition, it was not. Throughout the pre-revolutionary period, schools had educated Ukrainian children in Russian, and teachers, regardless of their ethnicity, were trained and accustomed to teaching in it. Pre-revolutionary publications, still widely used in Soviet schools, and even the early Soviet primers were overwhelmingly written in Russian. Ukrainian national leaders had made an attempt to set up a network of Ukrainian-language schools during the country's short-lived period of independence, but their attempts were disrupted by the chaos of civil war and the fall of successive governments. It was under Soviet patronage that the “Ukrainization” of the schools reached its greatest extent; however, it was an achievement that required effort, and real qualitative change in the language of instruction was gradual.

Struggle over the Soviet Future: Science Education versus Vocationalism during the 1920s

Scholars have documented how Bolshevik activists recognized the centrality of education as the means of inculcating in young citizens new values. However, what, exactly, constituted those Soviet values was still hotly contested during the 1920s. This contest was most vehemently waged in the crucial but understudied arena of education. A close look at those disputes provides a new understanding of factional politics within the People's Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), revealing fundamental fault lines that divided not only non-Bolshevik progressive educators from Bolsheviks but also Bolsheviks from each other.' Because the leadership claimed legitimacy on the basis of the scientific nature of Marxist doctrine, the nature of science became central grounds for dispute. The Lysenko Affair is most widely known, but was politicized far earlier. In the 1920s the debate was not between valid and know-nothing anti-science, but rather between two different views of the nature of science. For one party, the heirs of the progressive educational movement of the tsarist era, was an open system that pursued knowledge of the universe for its own sake, and inculcated in its students a democratic questioning of received truths. For them, most of all taught children to think independently and critically, and it instilled in them a wide-ranging curiosity about the universe. For their opponents, radical Marxists of a Stalinist bent, was a source ofcertain knowledge, valuable only because it provided a means of manipulating the material world. For them, taught schoolchildren how to achieve the technical goals the leadership had established.

The Problem of Polytechnism in the Pedagogical System of A. S. Makarenko

The question of polytechnical training of young students in A. S. Makarenko's pedagogical system has yet to be adequately elucidated, although the ideas of the polytechnization of young people occupied a definite place both in his scientific-theoretical and literary works and in his practical work. What's more, for about ten years he waged a fierce struggle against various bureaucratic departments of the Ukrainian SSR People's Commissariat of Education for the right of all students to receive a comprehensive, harmonious education and polytechnical training.

N.I. VAVILOV, GEOGRAPHER AND EXPLORER

Academician N.I. Vavilov had an international reputation as a scientist, agronomist, botanist, geneticist, plant breeder, explorer for wild progenitors of cultivated plants, selector of new crop varieties, organizer of expeditions, administrator of a large research institute, and a statesman. Beginning in 1916 in collection of crop varieties in Iran and the Pamirs, he personally explored large segments of the earth. In 1926 he published his famous study on centers of origin of cultivated plants. While head of the Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops, he organized many expeditions to search for new varieties of crops and their wild ancestors and established an international collection of seeds. While President of the Geographical Society (1931-1940) he arranged to have the society transferred from the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, thus transforming it from the Russian to the All-Union Geographical Society. He presented many lectures to the Soci...

The Man Whose Ears are Stopped up with Cotton

Issue 37 for 1929 of Literary Gazette contains a brief article by E. L. Flerina, Chairman of the Commission on Children's Books, Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR. She has an impressive title.

The Social Role of the Educational System and the Enhancement of this Role Under Conditions of Developed Socialism

The educational system occupies a special place in the structure of socialist society and fills a multifunctional social role. "Education is a vital part of our country's life," Comrade L. I. Brezhnev has emphasized. "It is specifically the school that lays the foundations of a person's knowledge and world view, that shapes his character. All the qualities that determine the personal makeup of the Soviet man — communist consciousness, love of work, patriotism, humaneness, and a feeling of internationalism — are instilled under the influence of, and with active participation by the school" (The Leninist Course [Leninskim kursom], vol. 2, p. 220). Unlike previous social orders, socialist society prepares for its future deliberately, purposefully, and in a planned way, not only with regard to the development and improvement of the material and technological foundation of society, but also with regard to improvement in social relations and the development of the new man. V. I. Lenin always considered the school and the cause of public education as a most important factor in developing and strengthening the entire social system and in expanding and consolidating new socialist social relations among people. In a talk with A. V. Lunacharsky, he once said, "Don't worry, Anatolii Vasil'evich, some day we will have only two large people's commissariats: the People's Commissariat of Economics and the People' Commissariat of Education, and there will not be even the slightest friction between them" (A. V. Lunacharsky, On Public Education [O narodnom obrazovanii], Moscow, 1958, p. 368). The decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, "On Further Improving the Teaching and Social Education of General Education School Pupils and Their Preparation for Labor," notes that during the years of Soviet power, "the general education school has made an inestimable contribution to inculcating all generations of Soviet people with communist convictions, lofty feelings of Soviet patriotism and proletarian internationalism, and a readiness to work and defend the accomplishments of their socialist homeland. The school maintains continuous ties with life, with the great accomplishments of Soviet society, and with the selfless labor of the people to fulfill the historic decisions of the Twenty-fifth Congress of the CPSU. The general education school is truly a school for all the people, a school that consistently implements the Leninist principles of a unified, labor, polytechnical school" (Pravda, December 29, 1977).

Struggle for the Leninist Style of Work in the People's Commissariat of Education

In the 1920's and 1930's, the People's Commissariat of Education [Narkompros] was the only center of state administration in the RSFSR not only for the general education and higher schools, but also for all educational activities in general, the arts, and the press. Hence, the struggle conducted by N. K. Krupskaya and other leading officials of Narkompros for the Leninist style of work had especially great significance at the time.

On Eliminating the Overburdening of Schoolchildren

Overburdening of the pupils is an old affliction of the schools. The People's Commissariat of Education had no sooner succeeded in writing new syllabuses for all subjects in accordance with the resolution of the Party Central Committee of September 5,1931, than, the very next year, in the resolution of August 25, 1932, the Central Committee pointed out that one of the major shortcomings of the syllabuses was an excess of material to be covered, with the result that a number of disciplines were taught hurriedly, and the children did not firmly master the knowledge and skills covered (2, p. 60).

The First Steps of the People's Commissariat of Education

The First Steps of the People's Commissariat of Education

Abstracts of Recent Articles on Mathematical Topics in Other Periodicals

I. Chistakoff, I. Notes on progressions. Matematika i fisika v srednei shkole. (Mathematics and Physics in the secondary schools.) Quarterly Publication of the Commissariat of Education and Public Instruction of U.S.S.R. 1: 15-17. 1934 no. 1.