From 1900 to the 1970s: Tsarist and Post-revolutionary Education

Abstract

Those of us who were in Moscow from 1982 to 1985 saw the funerals of three Soviet leaders in less than three years. Brezhnev died in November 1982, a sick man who seemed barely alive during his last few months, and who at formal receptions just managed to deliver his official speeches, whilst finding it difficult to focus on someone face to face. Andropov, who followed him, was to live little more than a year after his appointment as General Secretary and because of illness was not operative throughout this time. Chernenko also lasted just over a year before the strains of the funeral march rang out again across Red Square. In March 1985 a younger and fitter man was chosen to lead the Soviet Union and Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on the death of Chernenko. With his arrival on the scene there began a series of changes in the former Soviet Union which no one predicted could happen so soon and so quickly. They led first to what was called the period of’restructuring’ and ‘openness’ -perestroika and glasnost9 - in Soviet life. This was followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the attempt to eradicate Soviet Communism.

‘Without teaching’, Lenin once observed, ‘there is no knowledge; without knowledge there is no Communism.‘¹.