Introduction

Abstract

The history of Russian and Soviet education is still in its infancy. Bibliographies have been compiled¹ and several monographs published on Tsarist policy formation (especially for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries),² on the establishment of zemstvo schools and the spread of literacy,³ on women’s education,⁴ the universities⁵ and the book trade.⁶ For the Soviet period, a handful of works have dealt primarily with early policies.⁷ But the time is still distant when a full-bodied synthesis can be written.⁸ We have no studies of the Ministry of Education in Tsarist times — although recent work on the Russian bureaucracy has stressed the differences in composition, mission and functioning of the various ministries — of the periodical press in education, of children’s health, children’s literature, of textbooks in general. Education in the border regions and among the minorities in general remains largely outside the purview of historians. In the modern period, if we exclude two recent excellent studies on Minister of Education Uvarov and the university question and two other works on educational policy under Catherine the Great,⁹ the century before the Great Reforms in particular is largely unmapped.¹⁰ Most important, the agenda for research remains uncharted; cultural and social history, which have significantly invigorated the study of education in the west, are only faintly visible in the history of Russian and Soviet education.