Social History

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Imagining socialism in the Soviet century

Anna Krylova

To cite this article: Anna Krylova (2017) Imagining socialism in the Soviet century, Social History,
42:3, 315-341, DOI: 10.1080/03071022.2017.1327640

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Social History, 2017
VOL. 42, NO. 3, 315–341
https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2017.1327640

Imagining socialism in the Soviet century

Anna Krylova
Duke University

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Much of the current conversation about social justice, ‘Speaking Bolshevik’;
economic responsibility and individual self-realization is Soviet modernity;
informed by an explicit or implicit comparison between socialist subjectivity;
capitalist and socialist modernities. The Soviet Union’s Soviet pedagogy; Young
Communist League; history
variety of socialism understandably serves as a critical master of socialism
referent in this conversation. In this regard, a dominant
historical narrative that ties the history of Soviet socialism to
the Bolshevik origins imposes serious limitation to available
depictions of socialism and histories of the twentieth century.
This article turns the Bolshevik fundamentals assigned to the
Soviet project into a problem of historical analysis and argues
that the Soviet experience has more than one normative
vision of socialism to offer. The goal is to foreground the
divergence of normative conceptions of the socialist society
and individual by historicizing the two principal and presently
closely identified ideological-educational undertakings:
those of the New Man and the ‘New Soviet Person’. By tracing
the histories of the two projects, the article shows how the
collectivist ethos of the Bolshevism of the 1910–1920s
that rejected the ontological differentiation between the
individual and his or her social milieu failed to retain its
ideological, institutional, and cultural currency even during
the 1930s, not to mention throughout the Soviet period.

Introduction
This article questions a longstanding convention, in and outside academia, which
allowed scholars, including myself, to conflate in their work such basic cultural
categories of modern Russian history as the ‘Bolshevik’ and the ‘Soviet’, or the
‘socialist’. It is in part a matter of stylistic convenience to refer to the 74 years of the
Soviet Union’s existence, from its militant proletarian republic to Gorbachev’s half-
decade of perestroika, as the ‘Soviet period’. However, when utilized in the analysis
of cultural change over the course of the ‘Soviet’ century, this stylistic convenience
rests on a body of scholarship that assigns undergirding cultural continuity to

CONTACT  Anna Krylova  [email protected]

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
316   A. KRYLOVA

what was in fact a period of social and economic transformation unprecedented

in Russian history. In the resultant historical scenario, such grounding concepts
of the Soviet ideological and cultural project as the socialist individual and the
socialist collective are tied to the Bolshevik origins and enjoy a puzzling degree
of independence from their socioeconomic circumstance.
Most recently, for example, scholars working under the rubric of socialist
modernity have viewed the Soviet socialist project as a Bolshevik experiment in
alternative organization of society and human nature. The concept of ‘speaking
Bolshevik’ used by scholars over the last twenty years to study processes of ‘being’
and ‘becoming Soviet’ vividly illustrates the established inter-referentiality of
Bolshevik and Soviet cultures of socialism in academic literature.
Coined by Stephen Kotkin in his 1995 Magnetic Mountain, ‘speaking Bolshevik’
pointed to the forceful intervention of the Bolshevik ideology from the 1910s to
1920s into people’s everyday lives in Stalin’s pre-war Russia. Explaining the notion,
Kotkin equated the ‘Soviet identification game’, that is, the process of ‘becoming
a Soviet worker’, for example, with ‘an adaptation of the Bolshevik language of
speaking about oneself ’ and its ‘basic tenets’ inspired by the romanticized vision
of a proletarian, collectivist character.1 In the following decades, the ‘speaking
Bolshevik’ concept has become an academic lingua franca of the field itself and has
generated a new body of scholarship. In it, Soviet people not only ‘speak Bolshevik’
but also ‘master Bolshevik’, ‘think Bolshevik’, ‘gain Bolshevik consciousness’, ‘act
Bolshevik’, carry on a ‘constant dialogue with Bolshevism’, and hone their ‘personal
Bolshevism’.2
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the unfolding history of the concept
in all its transfigurations is that it has enabled an impressive list of studies whose
authors manage to investigate variations, contradictions, and even change of the
Soviet ideological project while upholding the project’s grounding in Bolshevik
‘basic tenets’. For example, in her 2000 innovative study of Stalin’s interwar
culture, Karen Petrone found the ‘speaking Bolshevik’ concept (which she
already used interchangeably with ‘speaking Soviet’) ‘very useful’ as she examined
contradictions of official ideology and ‘multiple’ Soviet identities it produced.

1
Here and in the rest of the introduction, italics within quotations are added for emphasis by this author. Stephen
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 220, also 221–5; on Kotkin’s analytics, see
Anna Krylova, ‘Soviet modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik predicament’, Contemporary European History,
23, 2 (2014), 167–92.
2
See, for example, Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘Portrait of a con artist as a Soviet man’, Slavic Review, 57, 4 (1998), 775;
Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist soul: the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9’ in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.),
Stalinism New Directions (London, 2000), 98; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a diary under
Stalin (Cambridge MA, 2006), 9, 13, 37; Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades. Celebrations
in the time of Stalin (Bloomington, 2000), 1–2, 6, 12; Vadim Volkov, ‘The concept of “Kulturnost”: notes on the
Stalinist civilizing process’ in Fitzpatrick, op. cit., 226; Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. A history
of Soviet cybernetics (Cambridge MA, 2004), 295; Elizabeth A. Wood, Performing Justice. Agitation trials in early
Soviet Russia (Ithaca, 2005); Serhy Yekelchyk, ‘The civic duty to hate: Stalinist citizenship as political practice and
civic emotion (Kiev, 1943–53)’, Kritika, 7, 3 (Summer 2006), 529–30; Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews. The
Bolshevik experiment in Minsk (Bloomington, 2013), 144; Timothy Johnston, Being Soviet. Identity, rumour, and
everyday life under Stalin 1939–1953 (Oxford, 2013), xxiv.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   317

The discovered contradictions however did not lead Petrone to questioning the
‘fundamental tenets of Soviet state ideology’ which she defined as encompassing
a sequence of codependent imperatives of ‘gaining Bolshevik consciousness and
[being] synthesized into the New Soviet Man’. Likewise, in his pioneering work
on Soviet subjectivity, Jochen Hellbeck, treated a 1930s diary as ‘a laboratory of
the Soviet self’ that, on the one hand, allowed for ‘reshaping and redirecting [of]
Bolshevik ideological tenets in the process of their reception’ and, on the other
hand, operated within the terrain of the ‘Bolshevik ideal’ of ‘a selfless, collectivist
builder of socialism’.3
The most recent development – the transfer of the ‘speaking Bolshevik’ concept
into the booming literature on the post-war period – captures the elevation of the
term to the status of the field’s comprehensive analytics, pertinent for the Soviet
period as a whole. Noteworthy, this transfer has taken place matter-of-factly while
scholars using the ‘Bolshevik’ as a shortcut for the essence of the Soviet ideological
project do not feel compelled to justify their choice of analytics. Thus, in her 2005
Tear off the Mask, Sheila Fitzpatrick kept the notions of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ and
‘what it meant to be Soviet’ closely identified and offered the following analysis
of post-war Soviet society:
By the 1960s what it meant to be ‘Soviet’ was no longer problematic … the society was
no longer composed of individuals learning to ‘speak Bolshevik’… the older generation
had already learned the language, while the younger – the majority of the population –
were native speakers. Indeed, ‘Bolshevik’ was spoken with such fluency that the whole
Soviet idiom and persona was becoming a cliché.4
Indeed, to offer justifications each time the notion of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ is
invoked to talk about Soviet modernity seems to be redundant thanks to the
powerful historical rationalization at the field’s disposal. Arguing that, in the 1930s,
the Bolshevik core agenda was objectified into economic and cultural-ideological
principles of the Soviet system and that the resultant ‘Bolshevik speaking’ socialism
with all its variations, contradictions, and developments stayed within, what David
Hoffmann called, the basic ‘parameters’ of ‘one culture unified’, scholars offered a
historical justification for the conflated use of the ‘Soviet’, the ‘Bolshevik’, and the
‘socialist’.5 As such, they articulate a sharp departure of the modernity school from
the older, neo-traditionalist school of thinking that cast the 1930s as a decade of
discontinuities of the Bolshevik project: a Stalinist ‘retreat’ away from proletarian

3
Petrone, op. cit., 1, 4–5, 213; Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning’, op. cit., 79, 102, 111; also Hellbeck, Revolution, op. cit., 12.
4
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Mask. Identity and imposture in twentieth-century Russia (Princeton, 2005), 25;
a detailed discussion of the transfer of Bolshevik ‘tenets’ on the post-war period can be found in Krylova, ‘Soviet
modernity’, op. cit., 179–85.
5
David L. Hoffmann, ‘Was there a “Great Retreat” from Soviet socialism? Stalinist culture reconsidered’, Kritika, 5, 4 (Fall
2004), 653, 662; also Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, op. cit., 151–2, 356; Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern times: the Soviet
Union and the interwar conjuncture’, Kritika, 2, 1 (2001), 111–16; on Soviet Russia’s first two decades as being a
history of nonlinear adaptation and change unified by means of ‘fundamental’ myths of the Bolshevik project, see
David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values. The cultural norms of Soviet modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003), 6; Katerina
Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge MA, 1995), 184–8, 190; Moscow, the Fourth Rome.
Stalinism, cosmopolitanism, and the evolution of Soviet culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge MA, 2011).
318   A. KRYLOVA

toward preceding – ‘prerevolutionary’ and ‘bourgeois’ – ideological projects and

cultural forms.6
My query in this article is into the academic tendency, captured by the liberal
deployment of the ‘speaking Bolshevik’ concept, to tie, at the fundamental level,
core ideological and cultural parameters of the Soviet socialist project to the
Bolshevik origins or ‘basic tenets’. Not a subject of an explicit, critical conversation,
the identification of Bolshevik ‘tenets’ with the socialist ideal is not unique to the
modernity school. In fact, what the modernity and neo-traditionalist schools
of thought have in common is the presupposition that the history of the Soviet
Union has only one master narrative of socialism to offer, either fundamentally
unbroken or fundamentally disrupted. ‘Fundamental’ is a keyword in this academic
convention. It points to an undergirding system of Bolshevik values and modes
of thought – a socialist episteme of anti-individualism and collectivism – that
supposedly survived the socioeconomic transformation the Soviet Union began
to undergo in the 1930s.
In what follows, I propose to turn the fundamentals assigned to the Soviet
socialist endeavour into a problem of historical analysis and free them from their
fundamental, history-defiant characteristics. My goal is to create a platform for
historicizing and rethinking the normative parameters of Soviet modernity and to
add a new chapter to the history of imagining and living socialism in the rapidly
industrializing Soviet Union.
I argue that instead of over-determining the Soviet cultural project throughout
the twentieth century, the anti-individualist and collectivist ethos of the 1920s’
Bolshevism had already begun to lose its ideological and cultural grounds to a
markedly non-Bolshevik vision of socialist modernity during the 1930s. As early
as the mid-1930s, Soviet society, in the process of industrializing, began speaking
more than one – still socialist – language of modernity right at the centre of its
political and popular culture. I call the emergent Soviet episteme that did not
utilize Bolshevik ‘tenets’ – individualizing, not to be conflated with individualist.
Unlike individualist ideologies, an individualizing cultural language of Soviet
modernity, examined here, does not position the individual against the social.
On the contrary, it posits the individual and the social as being a priori distinct
dimensions in a person’s life and offers a way to articulate a relationship (not a
‘merger’, to use the Bolshevik vocabulary) between the two.
I make these grounding categories of modern thought and practice – the
individual and the social – key parameters of my analysis. At no point do I frame
my argument in abstracted terms of a transition from collectivism to individualism.
Both the Bolshevik collectivist ethos and, what I call, the emergent individualizing

6
A classic example of neo-traditionalist scholarship, a founding paradigm of Western Sovietology and, today, still
a rich source of the field’s interpretive solutions is Vera Dunham, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass values in Soviet
fiction (Cambridge, 1976); another highly influential treatment of cultural change in the 1930s as a turn toward
pre-revolutionary terms is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s ‘Ascribing class: the construction of social identity in Soviet Russia’,
Journal of Modern History, 65, 4 (Dec. 1993), 745–70.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   319

episteme encompassed and operated with the notions of the individual and the
collective. The differentiation that I seek to demonstrate involves a change in the
normative understanding of the relationship between the socialist individual and
his or her society.7
The historical material for this reconceptualization of the Soviet socialist project
comes from the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, the two principle
cultural-educational undertakings of the period – those of the New Man and the
‘New Soviet Person’ – serve as my main venues to trace the emergent divergence
of normative conceptions of the socialist society and socialist individual before the
war. Predictably, academic literature treats the two as synonymous. Such literature
is characterized by a striking lack of interest in exploring qualitative differences
between the ‘New Man’ – the Bolshevik proletariat-styled, collectivist ideal of the
1900s–1920s – and the ‘New Soviet Person’ – the new discursive creation that first
comes into journalistic, political, pedagogical, and popular vocabulary only in the
mid-1930s. In my analysis, the ideal of the ‘New Soviet Person’ together with a
new set of social, institutional and educational policies constitutes an epistemic
departure from basic ‘parameters’ of Bolshevism – not another historical variation
around the same core tenets.
I argue that, if champions of the Bolshevik collectivist agenda privileged the
‘collective’ as the condition of possibility of individuality and at times aimed
at eliminating the very difference between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’, the
emergent non-Bolshevik alternative – in contrast – posited a new task of learning
how to ‘connect’ (i.e. to relate) individual predispositions and goals with the social
good. I treat the new development which provided Soviet citizens with a formal
language to present individual and social dimensions of their lives as distinct
entities, in need of relation but not identification, as the epistemic beginning of
a new discourse on the socialist individual and its non-market industrial society.
These developments call for a critical re-evaluation of what we mean when we say
‘socialist’ and ‘Soviet’ and what the ‘Soviet’ cultural formation stands for.
The Soviet encounter with socialism, in other words, offers a historian
more than one normative script. How was the proletariat-styled paradigm of
Bolshevism to address the profound social transformation brought about by the

7
The approach here parts with the most recent study of the question of the collective and the individual in Soviet Russia
that analyses the problematic through the lens of Bolshevism and Eastern Orthodox practices: Oleg Kharkhordin,
The Collective and the Individual in Russia. A study of practice (Berkeley, 1999). In it, Kharkhordin excuses the
Soviet socialist experiment from practices of individualization which, according to the author, appeared in the Soviet
Union only after the 1950s and only in defiance of official Bolshevik-Soviet ideology: Kharkhordin, op. cit., 338–40.
The question of the ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ as interdependent concepts of Soviet ideology has not enjoyed a
focused study since Kharkhordin although the notions themselves have been in continuous use, standing for the
Bolshevik collective-based agenda of ‘subjectivization’: see Hellbeck, Revolution, op. cit. For early research on the
concept of the individual, see Raymond A. Bauer’s classic, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, 1952);
Leopold Haimson, ‘The solitary hero and the Philistines’ in Richard Pipes (ed.), The Russian Intelligentsia (New York,
1962); Katerina Clarks’s ‘Utopian anthropology as a context for Stalinist literature’ in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism.
Essays in historical interpretation (New York, 1977). The latter, being devoted to the cult of the Stalinist ‘super
hero’, has been sometimes wrongly construed as exploring ‘individualistic’ currents in Stalinist ideology. For the
most recent study of the problem of the individual, see Anatoly Pinsky, ‘The diaristic form and subjectivity under
Khrushchev’, Slavic Review, 73, 4 (2014), 805–27.
320   A. KRYLOVA

1930s industrialization, namely, the mass arrival of an urban and professionally

differentiated middle class defined by the self-centred and individualizing
character of intellectual labour? In the 1930s, this new face of modernity was
most vividly objectified in much celebrated school graduates who skipped the
ranks of the proletariat and headed directly for university education and middle-
class professional careers. It was to describe this generation of youth preparing for
white-collar careers that the notion of the ‘new Soviet person’ was first invoked
in the mid-1930s press while the term ‘Soviet’ acquired connotations of socialist
identity that exceeded those of the Bolshevik ideal. As I will show, at its early
stages, the emerging ‘New Soviet Person’ lingua franca was a cultural response to
the glaring fact that the 1930s industrial assault on Russia’s backwardness brought
about a socialist modernity that did not fit, and in fact defied the fundamentals
of the Bolshevik script of the New Man.
Although this introduction has so far largely focused on the ideological-
discursive layers of interwar socialist imaginaries, my study of the divergent
languages of socialist subjectivity does not stay within the cultural realm alone.
It is written from the intersection of cultural and social history, connecting the
dynamics of cultural, social, and institutional change in the pre-war Soviet Union.8
I explore not only how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the theoretical premises of the
New Man and the ‘New Soviet Person’ paradigms were translated into different
journalistic languages, habits of public lecturing, party and state decrees and
pedagogical theories, but also how the two ideals were institutionalized: that
is, they developed along different institutional trajectories that are traced here
through the educational and organizational policies of the People’s Commissariat
of Enlightenment, the Young Communist League (Komsomol), and the school
system itself. Between the 1920s and 1930s, the authority to articulate the socialist
ideal and to launch institutional reforms shifted from the Commissariat of
Enlightenment and Bolshevik-Marxist pedagogical journals to the Central Party
Committee and newly created educational publications that began to develop the
formerly non-existent concept of ‘Soviet pedagogy’.
The socio-cultural analysis used here posits a history of the Soviet Union as no
longer overdetermined by Bolshevik fundamentals. As such, it allows us not only

Here I draw on Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon. A historical interpretation (Berkeley, 1989); ‘Society and
8

the Stalinist state in the period of the Five Year Plans’, Social History, 1, 2 (1976), 139–76. Lewin’s research on Soviet
society as a ‘dynamic historical process in which all the subsystems [social, cultural as well as economic and political]
interact in time and space, yielding ever more complex’ patterns has been underutilized and marginalized in the
recent scholarship on Soviet modernity (see Lewin, The Gorbachev, op. cit., 139–76). For work, also underutilized
by the field, that explores deep, qualitative changes in Soviet notions of the socialist right, property, consumption,
and artistic form, see Susan E. Reid, ‘Toward a new (socialist) realism: the re-engagement with western modernism
in the Khrushchev thaw’ in Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid (eds), Russian Art and the West (Dekalb, 2006);
Benjamin Nathan, ‘Soviet rights-talk in the post-Stalin era’ in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed), Human Rights in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011); Marcie K. Cowley, ‘The right of inheritance and the Stalinist revolution’,
Kritika, 15, 1 (Winter 2014), 103–23; Amy E. Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail and Consumption in
the 1930s (Basingstoke, 2008); Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade. Trace policy, retail practices, and
consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, 2004).
 SOCIAL HISTORY   321

to lift the limiting conceptual repertoire that has been prevalent in depictions of
Soviet socialism but also to continue to disrupt the persistent master-narrative
of the twentieth century as a radical opposition between socialist and capitalist
modernities.9

The 1920s: ‘the collective [as] the best path towards individuality’
Looking for 1920s references to the legendary ‘New Soviet Person’, not to mention
discussions and social policies in his or her name, is an unrewarding task. The
term ‘Soviet’ itself, in its adjectival form, was ill-equipped to describe the nature
and qualities of individuals and social groups living in the territory of the Soviet
Union: that is, to signify a collective or individual identity and to perform the role
it is best known for in contemporary scholarship. One way to illustrate the naming
and describing limitations of this otherwise indispensable term is to draw attention
to the fact that, within the mainstream discursive universe of the period, there were
‘Soviet citizens’ but neither ‘Soviet people’ nor individuals with ‘Soviet character’.
The ‘Soviet’ as in the ‘country of the Soviets’, ‘Soviet power’, ‘Soviet Russia’,
‘Soviet Republic’ was a political-administrative term, defining a new principle of
governance – the rule of the proletariat via its representative councils – Soviets
(sovety).10 It was unsurprisingly ill-equipped to assign any collective identity to
the ‘Soviet citizens’ of the 1920s – those class-divided, ethnically diverse, and often
antagonistic individuals living on the territory of the Soviet Union and subject
to the rule of the Soviets. The ‘Soviet’ also carried a strong international message,
promising the rise of new proletarian forms of governance all over the world and
invoking the examples of the 1919 Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet Republics.11
In the 1920s press, literature, and everyday language, the term quickly acquired far
less majestic connotations: those of malgovernance to account for the cumbersome
and inefficient bureaucracy of the proletarian state. In this context, the term rang
with negativity. According to Pravda, the following list of administrative realities
was known as ‘Soviet’ in the early 1920s: being routinely late for work; irresponsible
indifference toward fellow citizens; proliferation of paperwork; bribe-giving and
bribe-taking; or ‘in one word’, as Yakov Yakovlev, the Party’s propaganda chief,
summed up in a 1922 feature article, ‘our careless-irresponsible-Soviet style’. In
Fedor Gladkov’s classic novel of the period, Cement, bureaucrats who populated
this ‘Soviet-style’ state machine were derogatively referred to as ‘Soviet workers’.12

9
Focused on the history of the European Left, Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy. The history of the left in Europe
(Oxford, 2002) engages these challenges; see also Geoff Eley, ‘AHR conversation. History after the end of history:
reconceptualizing the twentieth century’, American Historical Review, 121, 5 (Dec. 2016), 1567–607.
10
On V. Lenin’s theorization of the Soviets as the embodiment of the proletarian creativity to offer new forms of
governance, see Anna Krylova, ‘Beyond the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm’, Slavic Review, 62, 1 (Spring
2003), 1–23.
11
G.E. Zinovev’s speech at the Second Congress of the Communist Youth International, Pravda, 12 July 1921, 2; also
‘V Berline’, Izvestiia, 23 March 1919, 2; ‘Vesti iz Sovetskoi Vengrii’, Izvestiia, 25 March 1919, 3.
12
Ya. Yakovlev, ‘O “proletarskoi culture” I Proletkulte,’ Pravda, 24 Oct. 1922, 2; Fedor Gladkov, Tsement [1922–24]
(Moscow, 1947), 24, 28, 30, 54, 118, 121.
322   A. KRYLOVA

Still, the most striking feature of the 1920s political and bureaucratic vocabulary
was the absence of such seemingly indispensable terms of the socialist lingua franca
as ‘Soviet qualities’, ‘Soviet values’, and ‘Soviet principles’. For example, congresses,
plenums, and conferences of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) that
regularly brought together youth leaders and Party and state dignitaries managed
to discuss the revolutionary agenda of this militant, self-identified proletarian
youth organization without invoking the ‘Soviet character’ of its members. Such
programmatic goals as ‘the rearing of physically and spiritually healthy generation’
infused with a ‘communist worldview’ and ready to ‘defend socialist forms of
living’, which were adopted at the 1920 Komsomol Congress, did not warrant
invocations of ‘Sovietness’.13
In fact, within the thriving Bolshevik discursive universe of the 1920s and
experimentation with non-bourgeois forms of education and living, it was
inconceivable to refer to the New Man project as ‘Soviet’. The New Man of the
1920s was of course proletarian. Users of this vibrant and militant discourse
demonstrated the authority of the term ‘proletariat’ to set and describe virtually
anything in relation to itself. Bolshevik journalists, educators, writers who often
served as party and state officials, not to mention the Bolshevik leadership itself,
were busy assigning ‘proletarian’ and ‘non-proletarian’ ways of experiencing
and knowing the world to the masses. Contributing to the emergent public
language, the 1919 Program of the Russian Communist Party, in its section on
education divided the Soviet citizens into ‘proletarian’, ‘semi-proletarian’, and
‘non-proletarian’ masses. According to the Program, the new, socialist school
was to serve as a ‘conduit of ideological, organizing, and educating influence
of the proletariat on semi-proletarian and non-proletarian layers of labouring
masses’.14
Over the course of the 1920s, the Bolshevik-Marxist rationale as to why the New
Man had to have a proletarian profile was compressed into an easily reproducible
master narrative that one encounters in press, pedagogical literature, and public
lectures. A staple account acknowledged that the proletariat might, at first, appear
to be a paradoxical social formation. How could a class born amidst exploitative
labour routines of capitalism be a negation of the capitalist system and a bridge
into a socialist future identified with collectivist values? Writing in 1921 for the first
issue of a Marxist pedagogical journal, On the Road to the New School, Nadezhda
Krupskaia, a leading educational theorist and one of the principal administrative
pillars of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment explained that the answer lay

13
Programma Rossiiskogo kommunisticheskogo soiuza molodezhi (Moscow, 1920), 4; see also, A. Kosarev’s
Responses to N. Bukharin’s and N. Chaplin’s Reports, VIII Vsesoiznyi s’ezd VLKSM, 5–16 Maia 1928 goda (Moscow,
1928), 216, 218.
14
Programma Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii bolshevikov (Moscow, 1919), punkt 12; see also Nikolai Chaplin’s
Report to the VIII Komsomol Congress, VIII Vsesoiznyi s’ezd, op. cit., 70.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   323

with the presumed ‘collectivizing’ power of industrial labour which ‘condition[ed]

a habit of collective action, [and] collective life’ among workers.15
Translating the theory into an educational policy, the Commissariat of
Enlightenment issued in 1918 two founding documents on the new United Labour
School – the nationwide cradle of the future collectivist generation.16 Indebted
to American and European educational theory and the progressive education
reform movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the outlines
of proposed polytechnic education carried the unmistakable stamp of Bolshevik-
Marxist pedagogy.17
Both documents relied on the notion of the ‘school commune’ and the ‘school
collective’, to be forged by productive labour. The document under the signature
of Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharsky provided a theoretical grounding
for the vision. It offered elaborate scenarios of the demolition of artificial walls
between the school and the collective-forming life of the industrial proletariat.
In it, teenagers laboured in actual working-class collectives, developed their
sensibilities of ‘collectivism’ and also grasped the organizational logics of relevant
branches of knowledge and production, becoming de facto worker-engineers.
‘Recalling Marx’s words about turning child factory labour from being a curse into
a source of healthy, purposeful, and active knowledge, the new socialist school’,
Lunacharsky promised, ‘will take pupils to factories and plants, railroads and
mines. … They will be going there not on excursion, not to have a look, but to
labour’. This way, Lunachasky explained, the ‘collectivizing force [of industrial
labour] that has soldered and forged the unity of the contemporary proletariat’
would be brought into the educational process and would ‘plant into every child’s
soul … a social aptitude to feel oneself, with one’s whole heart, as a solidarity
particle of the great whole’.18
Although this collectivist worldview has long become a primary and often self-
sufficient characteristic of Bolshevism in scholarly literature, the Bolshevik theory
of socialist upbringing did not veto the notion of ‘individuality’.19 From the heights
of Bolshevik-Marxist philosophizing, the ideal of the New Man as a ‘collectivist’
with ‘individuality’ was, by no means, an oxymoron. The two notions were in fact
intricately interdependent where the ‘individual’ served as the ultimate destination

15
The journal was published by the State Academic Council and the Society of Marxist Teachers. N.K. Krupskaia,
‘Obshchestvennoe vospitanie’ [Na putiakh k novoi shkole, 1 (1922)] in N.K. Krupskaia, O Kommunisticheskom
vospitanii (Moscow, 1956), 114; also speeches by P.L. Lebedev-Poliansky, E.P. Khersonskaia and F.I. Kalinin at the
First All-Russia Conference of Cultural-Enlightenment Organizations, September 1918, in P.I. Lebedev-Poliansky
(ed.), Protokoly pervoi vserosiissoi konferentsii kulturno-prosvetitelnykh organizatsii, 15–20 Oktiabira 1918 g.
(Moscow, 1918), 19, 68, 85.
16
‘Polozhenie ob Edinoi Trudovoi Shkole Rossiiskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Federtivnoi Sovetskoi Respublike’, Izvestiia, 16
Oct. 1918, 5–6; ‘Osnovnye printsipy Edinoi Trudovoi Shkoly’, from the State Educational Committee, written by A.
Lunacharsky, Izvestiia, 16 Oct. 1918, 6.
17
For the defining works from the period accessing Western and Russian education theory, see N.K. Krupskaia,
Narodnoe obrazovanie I demokratiia (Kommunist, 1919); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades. Revolutionizing
childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York, 2001), 86, 105.
18
‘Osnovnye printsipy’, op. cit.
19
See note 8 above.
324   A. KRYLOVA

of the socialist project and the ‘collective’ as its means and precondition. This
construct that simultaneously asserted ‘individuality’ and refused to posit it as
something unconditionally there, without and prior to the collective, proved to
be one of the least developed and most confusing statutes of Bolshevism.
At the 1918 First All-Russia Conference of Proletarian Culture Organizations,
one could witness the kind of confusion the notion tended to create. Delegates
from local proletarian organizations exemplified the common difficulty to make
sense of the notions of socialist individuality and much criticized ‘bourgeois
individualism’. They used the two terms interchangeably and believed them to be
opposed to the collectivist ideal. When one of the most accomplished Marxists
of his generation and unofficial leader of the Proletarian Culture movement,
Aleksandr Bogdanov attempted to clarify the issue, he turned out not to have a
clear answer. Having assured the confused delegates that ‘in reality, collectivism
is the best path toward individuality’, Bogdanov had nothing else to add to this
succinct and highly abstracted declaration.20
The difficulties of Bogdanov and others in explicating the individualizing
dimension of the collectivist project pointed to a serious conceptual gap in the
Bolshevik theory of the New Man. Having explicitly rejected the ‘individualist
theory of the child’ that treated children, in the manner of John Dewey’s
theorizations, as depositories of innate predispositions and individuality, leading
Bolshevik intellectuals did not explain how exactly the collective was to produce
the individual.21 Instead, the Bolshevik theory about the New Man’s individuality
was mired in metaphors which terminated the story at moments of an individual’s
‘merger with’ or ‘dissolution in’ a working-class collective.
Relying on metaphors where theory fell short proved paramount for the
operation of Bolshevik political culture. For example, the tireless propagandist
Nadezhda Krupskaia utilized the full repertoire of Bolshevik figurative language.
In her public lectures and publications, she routinely treated her audiences to
images of the New Man as a socialist ‘individuality’ (lichnost) that ‘merged with’
the collective. Her other favourite figures of speech which she used at the 1924
Komsomol Congress, called upon her listeners to visualize a ‘synthesis (sliianie)
of individual and collective interests’. This way, she effectively collapsed collective
and individual aspirations into an undifferentiated identity-synthesis and erased
the very ontological difference between the subject and its social milieu.22
In the 1920s, the plans for the new labour school to become a cradle of the first
post-revolutionary generation of young collectivists remained largely the property

20
Comments by delegates A.V. Shliakhov and E.I. Tikhonov, Lebedev-Poliansky, Protokoly, op. cit., 36–37; A.A.
Bogdanov, ‘Nauka I proletariat’, ibid., 40–41; for Lunacharsky’s unsuccessful attempts to address the question see
‘Osnovnye printsipy’ [1918] in A.V. Lunacharsky, O Narodnom obrazovanii (Moscow, 1958), 51–55.
21
Lunacharsky, ‘O sotsialnom vospitanii’, op. cit.
22
Krupskaia, ‘Obshchestvennoe vospitanie’, op. cit., 115; N.K. Krupskaia, ‘Rech na VI sezde RLKSM 12 July 1924’ in N.K.
Krupskaia, O Kommunisticheskom vospitanii (Moscow, 1956), 130. Also, for popular use of such metaphors by
rank-and-file activists, see speeches by I.I. Nikitin, delegate from the Petrograd Proletkult; S.S. Krivtsov, delegate
of the Organizational Bureau of the Conference at the First Proletkult Congress in 1918, in Protokoly pervoi, op.
cit., 25, 61, 90; Chaplin, VIII Vsesoiznyi s’ezd, op. cit.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   325

of the Bolshevik discursive universe. The Commissariat of Enlightenment, a

chronically under-funded institution in a backward county with no industrial base
to rely on, spent the first post-revolutionary decade making endless compromises
and constantly revising its radical educational plans.23
The most vicious critic of the perpetual failure to transform the national school
system into an actual proletarian, polytechnic institution was the Komsomol, which,
in accordance with its founding documents, conducted itself as an affirmative
action organization of working-class youth and poor peasants. Although vicious,
the gist of the Komsomol’s critique was not controversial. The Commissariat of
Enlightenment agreed that the United Labour School of the 1920s, which working-
class teenagers could not even afford, was neither proletarian nor polytechnic.24
The educational institution that the Komsomol leadership deemed worthy of
state funding was the slowly growing system of factory-based schooling (FZU).
Directly integrated into production and offering working-class teenagers general
education and professional training without separating them from their proletarian
collectives, the FZU schools were endorsed by all Komsomol Congresses of the
1920 and existed largely thanks to the Komsomol’s patronage. Letters, reports,
and bulletins exchanged between the Komsomol Central Committee, its district,
city, and regional cells and various industrial commissariats document the
organization’s educational priorities: overseeing FZU curricula, lobbying for
students’ decent wages, even monitoring prices at FZU and factory canteens.25
The years of the Stalinist Industrialization that abruptly ended the first post-
revolutionary decade in 1928 promised to finally create the necessary material
base for the nationwide development of proletarian, polytechnic education. The
realization of the Bolshevik-Marxist vision seemed to become a question of
concrete planning. Between 1928 and 1932, the Commissariat of Enlightenment
and Marxist pedagogical journals celebrated the imminent ‘demolition of the
school walls’ and, as one editorial in Communist Enlightenment put it in February
1931 – the school’s final entrance into ‘the centre stage in the struggle for the
New Man’.26 The Komsomol organization, led by Aleksander Kosarev since 1929,
pushed for the mass expansion of the FZU model. During the high day of the

23
See the Commissariat’s report for 1917–22 in A.V. Lunacharsky, ‘Politika narodnogo komissariata po prosveshcheniiu
za 5 let’ in A. Lunacharsky, Problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia. Sbornik statie (Moscow, 1923), 170–82; A.V.
Lunacharsky’s speech at the Conference of Teachers of Social Sciences, June 1928, Narodnoe prosveshchenie,
7 (1928). On the Commissariat’s perpetual de-radicalization and popular resistance to its curriculum, see Larry E.
Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931 (Bloomington,
1991).
24
A.V. Lunacharsky, ‘Kakaia shkola nuzhna proletarskomu gosudarstvu’ [report at the House of the Soviets, 4 December
1922] in Lunacharsky, O Narodnom Obrazovanii, op. cit., 193, 197, 204, 207.
25
See the 1921 policy-setting resolution on national education: ‘Rezoliutsiia po dokladu o shkolnom stroitelstve’ in IV
S’ezd RKSM. Stenograficheskii otchet, 21–28 Sentiabria 1921 (Moscow, 1925), 222–3, 226, 250; also, at the Russian
State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), see, ‘Materialy o rabote I sostoianii shkol FZU’, 25 June 1926, fond 1,
opis 23, delo 633, 35–36; ‘Kratkii otchet Moskovskogo Komiteta VLKSM’, 26–27 Feb. 1927, op. cit., delo 681, 2–25; ‘O
sostoianii shkol FZU’, op. cit., delo 783, 24; on the Komsomol’s 1920s class radicalism see Matthias Newmann, The
Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932 (New York, 2011).
26
‘Usilim borbu za politekhnizm’, Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie, 3–5 (1931), 8; also N.K. Krupskaia’s speech
at the First Congress on Polytechnic Education in Na putiakh k novoi shkole, 8–9 (1930), 77; A.S. Bubnov’s report
to the Second Party Meeting on People’s Education, 26 April 1930, Na putiakh k novoi shkole, 6 (1930), 10–16.
326   A. KRYLOVA

FZU campaign when enrolment numbers increased just in 1930 from 73,000 to
473,000, Kosarev’s Central Committee celebrated what appeared to be a definitive
beginning of a qualitatively different system of national education. The Party’s
support for the FZU campaign at the 1930 Party Congress also reinforced the
Komosomol’s expectations for the FZU model to become the main educational
venue of the first socialist state.27
During this period, the public discourse on the New Man underwent a notable
contraction. Privileging visions of the ‘complete erasure of difference between
the personal and the collective’, journalists, educators, and party and Komsomol
workers simplified the New Man ideal. The conversation about the emergent
generation of ‘collectivist’ youth was no longer burdened with questions of socialist
individuality. This trend was vividly captured in the media and the industrial novel
of the time which presented a socialist hero as someone happily dissolved in the
collectivist momentum of industrial construction. Semen Nariniani, a Komsomol
journalist covering proletarian and peasant issues produced one such hero:
Aleksandr Linkov, son of a steel founder, a steel founder himself, a Komsomol
member, and a student of the ‘Hammer and Sickle’ Factory School.28 On all
accounts, Linkov was a New Man. His biography captured the New Man’s desired
affiliation with working-class origins and, even more importantly, consistent
belonging to different micro and macro collectives: a proletarian family, the steel
industry, a foundry worker crew, a proletarian youth organization, and a factory
school. What the biography symptomatically left out was Linkov’s individuality.
There was nothing innate or unique to Linkov that he owned regardless of his place
in numerous collectives. In the early 1930s, the illustrated magazine Ogonek offered
numerous visualizations of this aggrandized vision of the collective. For example,
one photograph from 1931 depicts a Komsomol meeting at the Moscow Brake
Plant. Filling up a small room, the Komsomol group projects tight internal unity
and a shared purpose while featuring no one in particular except the collective
itself (see Figure 1). Celebrating the seemingly complete triumph of the 1920s
Bolshevik vision of socialist modernity, heroes like Linkov and their collectives
soon collided with the social realities of a modernizing Russia.29

27
On the Komsomol’s FZU campaign, see RGASPI files: ‘Informatsionnoe soobshchenie’, Jan.–March 1928, fond 1,
opis 23, delo 825, 67–73; ‘O materialnom polozhenii shkol FZU’ [report to the Party Central Committee], 25 July
1932, op. cit., delo 1006, list 49–50; ‘Sekretno: o sryve straitelstva FZU na novostroikakh’ [letter to the Soviet of
People’s Commissars, Molotov], 27 June 1932, op. cit., 56–58; V. Kozlov, ‘Sterzhnevaia zadacha’ in Aleksandr Kosarev,
Sbornik vospominanii (Moscow, 2002), 67–69; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet
Union 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979), chs 3, 9, 10.
28
Sem. Nariniani, ‘Zhizn na proverke’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 21 July 1933, 3; also see, N. Ivushkin, ‘Novoe pokolenie
Moskovskoi organizatsii,’ Komsomolskaia pravda, 28 September 1931, 3; E. Kriger, ‘Liudi – sobytiia, liudi – geroistvo,’
Komsomolskaia pravda, 7 Sep. 1931, 1; ‘Iacheika so srednim obrazovaniem’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 7 Nov. 1932,
5. The most extreme representations of such a work-dissolved character come from V. Kataev’s 1932 novel Vremia,
Vpered! [Time Forward!] in V. Kataev, Povesti I rasskazy (Moscow, 1947) and N. Pogodin’s plays: 1929 Temp [Tempo]
(Moscow, 1931) and 1931 Poema o topore [Poem of the Axe] (Moscow, 1932).
29
Nariniani, op. cit.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   327

Figure 1. ‘A Komsomol meeting of efficiency enthusiasts at the Moscow Brake Plant’, Ogonek, 4
(392), 10 Feb. 1931, 5. With permission from Ogonek/Kommersant.

The 1930s: in search of a new language of socialism

The history of the ‘New Soviet Person’ – an ideological project that parted ways
with the Bolshevik tradition – does not begin until the mid-1930s. Its impetus
resided in the Stalinist industrialization which commenced the half–a-century-
long transformation of the Soviet Union’s societal landscape. The emergent
prominence of the multi-faceted figure of the middle-class specialist growing
at a rate surpassing that of workers – increasing from 11 million in 1941 to 35
million in 1983 – constituted one of the most consequential social dynamics.30
Already before the war, the needs of the industrial society under construction
threw into sharp relief the categorical importance of socio-professional groups
whose educational and working routines had little in common with the Bolshevik,
proletariat-styled vision of industrial modernity. In the 1930s, the discussion of
this non-proletarian way of living was centred around its earliest, disconcerting
incarnation: the first post-revolutionary generation, emerging from the rapidly
expanding school system and entering a society characterized by the 1936 Soviet
Constitution as ‘socialist’. The problem with young people whose numbers grew
at a record speed from 12 million in 1931 to 32 million in 1940 was that, despite
the seemingly unstoppable polytechnic momentum of the late 1920s and early

Lewin, The Gorbachev, op. cit., 46; on the making of the professional middle-class into a mass class, see Lewin’s
30

chs 3 and 4.
328   A. KRYLOVA

1930s, they ended up never leaving the ‘four walls’ of their classrooms. Nor did
their educational and professional priorities necessarily include plans of joining
a proletarian collective. In no-one’s most wishful dreams, in other words, could
these young people born and raised under the Soviet rule claim to embody the
‘New Man’ ideal.31
The fate of the ‘New Man’ project was sealed by the 1930s decrees on education
that overturned key principles of the 1920s polytechnic ideal moulded after
the proletarian, labouring collective. The headquarters for formulating the
new national policy on education had moved to the Party Central Committee.
Addressing the catastrophic shortage and poor preparedness of managerial,
technical, and professional cadres, the Party leadership turned to more traditional
and cost-effective forms of schooling; classroom-based competitive and
rigorously academic education, presided over by the teacher, was brought back.
Programmes in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, history, and geography
were systematized and expanded at the expense of labour instruction.32 In 1937,
the little that was still left of 1920s polytechnic aspirations – the token once-a-
week labour class – was removed from the school curriculum of the first socialist
country of the world! This way, the most powerful message as to where the new
educational priorities lay was delivered.33
As a result of the new direction, the Party’s earlier commitment to proletarian-
polytechnic education, still stated in its Program, was effectively reneged on.
In academic literature, this turn towards classroom-based, book-centred, and
discipline-reinforcing education has long been a subject of a critical commentary
that left unexamined the qualitative reconfiguration of the very notion of the
individual and his or her relationship to the collective that informed the policy-
shifting decrees.34 Having articulated an education principle without relying on
Bolshevik-Marxist rationales of the 1920s, the authors of those documents – I.V.
Stalin being their most relentless editor – began feeling their way toward a new
official language that no longer collapsed the notions of the socialist collective
and socialist individuality.35

31
‘Pokolenie velikogo budushego’, editorial, Pravda, 29 June 1935, 1; ‘Povsednevno pomnit o shkole’, Komsomolskaia
pravda, 20 Sep. 1931, 1.
32
Between 1931 and 1937, the Party Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars issued nine decrees,
among them: the September 1931 Decree on Primary and Secondary Schools; the August 1932 Decree on School
Curricula and Regime in Primary and Secondary Schools; the February 1933 Decree on Textbooks for Primary and
Secondary Schools; the May 1934 Decree on the Structure of Primary and Secondary Schools of the USSR; the
May 1934 Decree on the Teaching of Civic History in the Schools of the USSR; the September 1935 Decree on the
Structure of Learning and Rules of Conduct in Primary, Incomplete Secondary, and Secondary Schools in Pravda,
see: 5 Sep. 1931, 1; 28 August 1932, 1; 16 May 1934, 1; 4 Sep. 1935, 1; 5 July 1936, 1.
33
The March 1937 Decree abolishing labour instruction was never made public; Larry E. Holmes, ‘Magic into hocus-
pocus: the decline of labor education in Soviet Russia’s Schools, 1931–1937’, The Russian Review, 51 (Oct. 1992),
545–65.
34
See Fitzpatrick, Education, op. cit., ch. 10; E. Thomas Ewing, The Teachers of Stalinism. Policy, practice, and power
in Soviet schools of the 1930s (New York, 2002), 7; Larry E. Holmes, ‘School and schooling under Stalin, 1931–1953’
in Ben Eklof, Larry E. Holmes and Vera Kaplan (eds), Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia. Legacies and
prospects (London, 2005).
35
On Stalin’s style of editing, ‘line by line, letter by letter, comma by comma’, see Holmes, ‘Magic’, op. cit., 561.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   329

The discursive dissonance that the early 1930s educational rulings introduced
into the mainstream celebration of socialism was staggering. The 1932 Decree on
the Structure and Curriculum in Primary and Secondary Schools published in all
central newspapers is a case in point. Most striking were the document’s silences.
There was no mention of the school as a ‘conduit of ideological, organizing, and
educating influence of the proletariat on semi-proletarian and non-proletarian
layers of labouring masses’ – a routine quotation in documents on education
before 1932. There were no references to the New Man as the principle ideal of the
epoch. Polytechnic education, still mentioned, was the last item on the Decree’s
agenda. The school’s mission to step outside its walls and to merge with the
proletarian collective now entailed ‘excursions … to the electric station, factory,
collective farm’. Specifically rejected by the Commissariat of Enlightenment in
its 1918 founding documents, this excursion-based approach de facto turned the
working class and its factory into a sightseeing trip for school teenagers.36
The new agenda of the socialist school now consisted of simply ‘providing
children with actual, lasting, and systematic knowledge of the fundamentals of
sciences, factual knowledge, habits of correct speech, writing’. Stating that the
school’s core mission was to prepare ‘well-educated people’ for technical and higher
education, the decree not only clearly indicated its intent to turn the school into
an expedient launching ground for badly needed, middle-class careers. Indeed,
the language of ‘actual, lasting, and systematic knowledge’ and ‘well-educated
people’ unburdened with class imperatives also signalled a paramount ideological
development: the possibility of discussing socialist education without relying
on the class category as the primary marker of socialist subjectivity. As if this
was not enough, the accompanying criticism of routine disregard of ‘individual
learning needs’ of students was paired with demands for ‘individual and systematic
attention to progress of each pupil’. As a result, the document posited the figure
of an individual child with his or her needs and peculiarities as being discernible
from – that is, existing parallel to and prior – the collective. The perspective on
education that had been theorized out of existence for over a decade was, a result,
reintroduced.37
Having removed the Bolshevik-Marxist lingua franca from its educational
documents and flagged the anything but unproblematic concept of ‘individual’,
the Party Central Committee undoubtedly disrupted the Bolshevik master
narrative. However, for the time being, it did not possess a comparable story to
offer in its place to describe the socialist modernity that was to emerge out of the
reformed school. In its educational decrees, the Central Committee posed more
disconcerting questions than ready-to-use answers. That is, if the New Man project
was neither any longer relevant nor realizable for a good portion of the ‘first, truly

36
‘Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) ob uchebnoi programme I rezhime v nachalnoi I srednei shkole, ot 25 Avgusta 1932 g.’,
Pravda, 28 Aug. 1932, 1.
37
ibid.
330   A. KRYLOVA

socialist generation’, what new ideal packaged in what discursive system was there
to fill in the cultural void in the master narrative of socialism?
In the early 1930s, there was not even an immediately apparent term to address
those young representatives of industrial socialism. In fact, the first half of the
decade was spent groping for a word, a concept that could describe the youth who
witnessed the 1930s grand industrial effort from within the walls of Soviet schools.
Unable to fit these young people into a proletarian profile, journalists writing
for such colossuses of official press as the Party’s Pravda, the Young Communist
League’s all-union Komsomolskaia Pravda, and Izvestiia – the mouthpiece of the
Soviet government – initially resorted to uncommitted and vague terminology.
In Pravda and Izvestiia editorials, in particular, which usually offered concise
explications of complex dilemmas of the day, school children and school graduates
were discussed under abstract rubrics of the ‘young generation of the Soviet Union’,
the ‘generation of a country building socialism’, the ‘generation of literate and
cultured people’, or simply ‘our children’.38
Prominent pedagogical and polytechnic journals were in no position to offer
help in this quest. Committed to 1920s educational objectives, their editors and
contributors tried to negotiate a compromise with the new course. Between 1933
and 1935, a prospect of a compromise was unambiguously discouraged when key
Marxist pedagogical journals including On the Road to the New School ceased
publication.39
During the pre-war decade, the literary profession did not offer much help either
with figuring out how to address the first generation of the land of socialism’s school
youth. The main literary event of the 1930s, the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers that
announced the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers spoke the Bolshevik lingua
franca without fail. Some orators ‘spoke Bolshevik’ masterfully and others, like
Isaac Babel, spoke it well enough to declare the goal of their gathering as helping
writers to ‘follow the leading [proletarian] class’ in its construction of socialism.40
At the Congress, the ‘Soviet’ was used synonymously with ‘proletarian’, invoking
the proletariat’s world-revolutionary mission. Or, as Aleksei Stetsky, the head of the
Department of Culture and Propaganda of the Party Central Committee, succinctly
explained: ‘To become a Soviet writer [means] to come to the proletariat.’ Following
this logic, world-renowned proletarian writer and chairman of the Congress
Maxim Gorky, in his opening speech, called for the creation of ‘soviet-proletarian
literature’ that would seek to capture the making of the New Man as ‘organized by
labour processes’ and ‘growing only under the conditions of collective labour’.41

38
‘Molodomy pokoleniiu – bolshevitskoe vospitanie’, Pravda, 29 Aug. 1932, 1; ‘Sdelaem nashu shkolu obraztsovoi’,
Izvestiia, 4 Sep. 1935, 1; V. Ketlinskaia, ‘Bogatstvo I nasledniki’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 24 Aug. 1934, 2.
39
Among the discontinued journals were the Commissariat of Enlightenment’s Pabotnik prosveshcheniia [The Worker
of Enlightenment] and Za politekhnicheskuiu shkolu [For the Polytechnic School], the Polytechnic Institute’s
Polytekhnicheskoe obuchenie v shkole [Polytechnic Education at School], see Holmes, ‘Magic’, op. cit., 556–60.
40
Isaac Babel’s speech, Pravda, 25 Aug. 1934, 4.
41
Aleksei Stetsky’s speech, Pravda, 1 Sep. 1934, 4; Maxim Gorky’s Opening Speech, Pravda, 19 Aug. 1934, 3–4;
also, speeches by writer Leonid Leonov, Pravda, 22 Aug. 1934, 3; writer and party administrator Vladimir Stavsky,
Pravda,1 Sep. 1934; party administrator Pavel Yudin, Pravda, 4 Sep. 1934.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   331

Predictably, the initial job of building a new discursive paradigm to address

school youth fell on journalists who, struggling with the limitations of the
Bolshevik lingua franca, were charged with reporting on the reformed school on
a daily basis. In the mid-1930s, they finally began calling the school generation
of the country of socialism ‘Soviet’ and assigned them the formerly unknown
identity of ‘New Soviet People’. By doing so, as I show below, they drastically
expanded the connotations of the terms ‘Soviet’ and ‘socialist’ and embarked on
a long journey of writing a new master narrative of socialist modernity, attending
to the complexities of its emergent social and professional structures.
For the first time, ‘Soviet’ as a signifier for school youth separated from the
proletarian world of production and, at the same time, a term synonymous with
socialism was tried out in a Komsomolskaia Pravda poll of teenagers from the
Soviet Union and France. As editors of Komsomolskaia Pravda explained, eleven
school children of each country, ‘coming from similar social backgrounds’ and all
between eleven and fifteen years of age, were asked about their life goals. Published
and discussed between November 1934 and January 1935, this well-prepared
propagandistic project, to be further developed in Pravda in May 1935, treated
‘Soviet schoolchildren’ as the incarnation of socialism and, as such, counterpoised
them to capitalist youth.42
However, the counter-examples turned out to have something in common.
Betraying no defensive intonations and to the accompaniment of journalists’
proud admiration – ‘Just look at them!’ – the ‘Soviet children’ reported dreams
of professional ambition that did not carry a trace of the ‘proletarian’ ideal as a
concept or a life goal. The majority (eight out of eleven) saw their ‘Soviet’ futures
unfold in institutions of higher education and careers as engineer-inventors, pilots,
coaches, doctors, writers, actresses, and ballet dancers.43
Wishing for middle-class careers and, even more importantly, failing to
attribute any special significance to working-class career choices marked a crucial
development in the 1930s mainstream discourse on socialist modernity. As this
first survey already captures, ‘Soviet children’ of socialism and their journalists had
little use for the familiar Bolshevik-Marxist discourse on class that used ‘class’ as
the core signifier of one’s identity and ‘proletariat’ – as the ultimate measuring rod
of an individual’s socio-historical value. Implicit in their answers to the question
about future occupation, there was a different – ‘Soviet’ – notion of ‘class’ that
carried strong functionalist and thus markedly non-Marxist undertones. No class
or occupational group, doing its share in the complex social division of labour,
represented an ideal type to be imitated by all. Consequently, it was education,

‘15 voprosov sovetskim detiam’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 29 Nov. 1934, 5; also ‘Deti otvechaiut vzroslym. Anketa
42

frantsuskogo zhurnala “Russie d’aujourd’hui”’, Pravda, 6 May 1935, 6.

‘15 voprosov’, op. cit.; for more on teenagers’ aspirations to become engineers, teachers, military specialists, doctors,
43

painters, architects, scientists, actors, writers in mainstream press, see ‘Vypuskniki leningradskikh shkol tovarishchu
Stalinu’, Izvestiia, 29 June 1936, 1; ‘Deti otvechaiut’, op. cit., ‘Vystuplenie Ani Mlynek’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 3
June 1935, 2; ‘Pismo vypusknikov moskovskikh shkol tov. Stalinu’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 2 June 1935, 1.
332   A. KRYLOVA

culture, skills, and professional choices that constituted social capital and bestowed
status and value.44
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the fact that a novel discourse on socialist identity
was entering the mainstream of official culture and that the Bolshevik-Marxist discourse
on ‘class’ was losing its former militant monopoly is to note that the two Soviet working-
class schoolchildren who participated in the survey and who modestly wanted to
become metal turners were no longer singled out or praised as ideal specimens of
new humanity either by the journalists or the readers who subsequently wrote to the
newspapers about the poll.45 Less than three months after the monumental ode to
the proletariat at the Congress of Soviet Writers, Komsomolskaia Pravda, followed by
Pravda and Izvestiia, featured teenage students for whom becoming a turner was no
longer a statement of one’s human essence but an occupational choice.
Party and state officials welcomed the reinvention of the term ‘Soviet’ and the
invention of ‘Soviet youth’ identity, these badly needed solutions to the signifying
problem. In the summer of 1935, Party leaders tried out the concept of ‘Soviet
youth’ during an unprecedented government reception of the first graduating
class of the ten-year school in the Column Hall of the House of the Soviets. In its
coverage of the reception of quintessentially classroom youth heading for more
classroom learning in institutions of higher education, Pravda editorials coined
the social identity of the new ‘Soviet person’. The newspaper called upon its readers
to ‘have a look at the Soviet youth, at the Soviet children’, these ‘true new people
… inoculated with qualities of the Soviet person’.46
Alexander Kosarev, representing the Komsomol organization he had led since
1929, disrupted the reception’s spirit of adoration. He devoted his supposedly
celebratory speech to stating what, in the opinion of his organization, the new
‘Soviet’ hero lacked. In a proletarian lingua franca hardly appropriate for the
event, he disputed the de-proletarianization of the socialist project that the school
graduates epitomized. He asked his audience:
And what about the factory?! Do you know what an amazing school it is? No, you don’t.
I advise you, I advise you from the depth of my heart, to go through this school. You
are young, you are not in a hurry, and you have lots of time to enroll in a university. A
portion of you must come to the factory, to learn the wisdom of life there, to fathom
proletarian discipline.47
In 1935, Kosarev’s speech, largely omitted from Pravda, was not yet a nostalgic
lamentation.48 It related Komsomol leaders’ and rank-and-file activists’

44
The argument here is about plurality of class discourses in mid- and late-1930s Stalinist culture. It parts with
two influential accounts that posit the 1930s ‘class’ discourse as either ‘deemphasized’ but still situated within the
Bolshevik tradition or replaced with the pre-revolutionary category of ‘estate’; see respectively, Hoffmann, ‘Was
there a “Great Retreat”’, op. cit., and Fitzpatrick, ‘Ascribing class’, op. cit.
45
‘15 voprosov’, op. cit.; ‘Vypuskniki leningradskikh shkol’, op. cit.; ‘Deti otvechaiut vzroslym’, op.cit.; also, letters
to Komsomolskaia pravda by schoolchildren Kolia Kuznetsov, V. N. Buianov, Vladimir Starukhin, V. Agapova,
Komsomolskaia pravda, 1 Jan. 1935, 4.
46
‘Pokolenie velikogo budushchego’, Pravda, 29 June 1935, 1; also, ‘Pervye vypuskniki desiatiletki’, Pravda, 2 June 1935,
6; ‘Nasha shkola okonchila desiatiletku’, Izvestiia, 30 May 1935, 4; ‘Prazdnik vypusknikov’, Izvestiia, 2 June 1935, 1.
47
‘Vchera v Kolonnom zale’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 2 June 1935, 1.
48
See ‘Pervye vypuskniki’, op. cit.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   333

uncoordinated but steadfast commitment to the proletarian origins of their

organization and resistance to the novel faces and meanings of socialist modernity.
Until 1936, school graduates had been effectively prevented from joining the
Komsomol, constituting less than 6.5% of the organization’s membership.49 The
Komsomol’s obstruction of the unavoidable change in its social composition and
proletarian profile became a public issue in 1936. The Party Central Committee
imposed on the Komsomol a dramatic reworking of its founding documents
and institutional practices, still saturated with Bolshevik-proletarian ideals and
metaphors. Stalin painstakingly monitored the de facto reform of the Komsomol
organization. As archival documents show, in early 1936, he hand-edited a draft of
the new Membership Rules of the Young Communist League written by Aleksandr
Kosarev and his Central Committee. In his editorial corrections, he consistently
crossed out the Marxist vocabulary and proletarian metaphors that Kosarev
copied from the old rules. Stalin wrote ‘nonaffiliated’ in place of ‘proletarian’ and
‘labouring’ in place of ‘class conscious’.50
Two months later, at the Tenth Komsomol Congress that gathered to adopt the
new Membership Rules, Stalin referred to those ‘labouring’ young people who now
epitomized the new face of the Komsomol and the Soviet Union’s future as ‘Soviet’.
Having wiped the Bolshevik language out of Komosmol documents and opened
its ranks to all ‘Soviet’ young people regardless of social origin, Stalin conclusively
updated the social profile of the organization from being a self-acclaimed proletarian
organization to becoming an organization of ‘Soviet youth’. The master narrative of
socialist modernity that accompanied the transformation changed too. No longer
was joining the Komsomol organization tantamount to ‘coming to the proletariat’.
Instead, foreshadowing the kind of revisions to be applied gradually to the Soviet
state’s founding documents over the next thirty years, the Komsomol organization
was to remake itself in the image of the ‘New Soviet Person’.51 The question that
came to occupy the rest of the decade was what exactly the new identity entailed
for thinking about socialist individuality and collectivity.

The personalized socialist self of the ‘New Soviet Person’

In the mid-1930s, a substantial amount of ideological work was in store for the
Komsomol organization, journalists, and educational theorists before young
people lacking in the proletarian-class profile and named ‘Soviet’ had their new
and ‘Soviet’ socialist identity institutionalized and articulated. After the Congress,
the Komsomol became a different organization in less than half a decade. Its
social composition, ideological-educational priorities, institutional routines
and interactions with the Soviet school changed dramatically, to acquire the

49
For a compilation of published statistics, see Ralph Talcott Fisher, Pattern for Soviet Youth. A study of the Congresses
of the Komsomol, 1918–1954 (New York, 1959), 409.
50
‘Ustav VLKSM’, draft, RGASPI, fond 1, opis 23, delo 1157, 64.
51
‘Da zdravstvuet sovetskaia molodezh!’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 22 April 1936, 1.
334   A. KRYLOVA

contours of its post-war operations. The Great Purges undoubtedly facilitated

this process of institutional reorientation by physically removing Komsomol,
state, and professional elites of the 1920s that had created, popularized, and
enforced the Bolshevik-Marxist script of socialist modernity. Between 1937 and
1938, Kosarev and his Central Committee were eliminated. The new leadership’s
immediate task consisted of bringing school and white-collar youth into the ranks
of the Komsomol organization. By 1939, the number of school-based Komsomol
members increased almost six times and reached 1,500,000.52 The change of
the Komsomol’s day-to-day activities was equally impressive. The new Central
Committee now made it its business to conduct careful surveys of grade inflation
in Soviet schools and monitor students’ time devoted to study. Collected data on
new Soviet people was reported to the Party Central Committee. The Komsomol
line toward FZU education underwent a corresponding change. No longer were
FZU schools, steadily losing hours devoted to general education, treated as a
training base for new humanity. In a FZU school, working-class youth became
skilled workers, not ‘new people’.53
Changing one’s organizational and institutional routines called for a new
ideological language. An institution in transition, the Komsomol was aided
by the mainstream press and its flagship newspapers, Pravda, Izvestiia, and
Komsomolskaia Pravda, in finding the words to engage the reformed school and
the new, Soviet face of socialist modernity. New newspaper rubrics appeared that
featured young journalists who made the school their expert topic; teachers who
discussed new pedagogical approaches to the ‘New Soviet People’; and party and
educational theorists who explicated differences between the 1920s and 1930s
pedagogical theories. Schoolchildren and school graduates themselves, this army
of new Komsomol recruits that was changing the organization’s culture from
within, were also accorded multiple opportunities to explicate their personal and
professional aspirations via surveys, autobiographical essays, and diaries reprinted
by newspapers. By the end of the decade, the press amassed a huge archive, to
be explored below, of school-based documentary articles, investigation reports,
sketches, short stories, and teenagers’ personal narratives.54 Together with the
‘new Soviet person’, there thus also appeared a new Soviet journalist, a new Soviet
teacher, and a new Soviet educator-theorist heeding ideological demands of the
52
Fisher, op. cit.; ‘Zavershit povorot v rabote komsomola’, Pravda, 28 May 1937, 1; also F. Vigdorovich, ‘Peredovuiu
sovetskuiu molodezh – v komsomol’, Pravda, 5 March 1936, 3.
53
See the Central Committee’s recommendations, surveys, and communications with the Party Central Committee,
RGASPI: ‘Zamechaniia TkK VLKSM k proektu ustava srednei khkoly RSFSR, 11 April 1938’, fond 1, opis 23, delo
1315, 2–9; ‘O zagruzhennosti dnia uchashchikhsia ucheboi I obshchestvennoi rabotoi, 10 November 1940’ [surveys
of Moscow and Tula secondary schools], delo 1423, 67–69; ‘O nauchnykh sorevnovaniiakh sredi shkolnikov, 13
Septemner 1940’, delo 1427, 32–36; ‘Dokladnaia zapiska sekretariu TsK VKP(b) A. A. Zhdanovu, 23 May 1941’, delo
1470, 89–97.
54
In addition to materials used below, see typical editorials and feature articles: L. Sosnovskii, ‘Na roditelskom sobranii’,
Izvestiia, 4 June 1935, 3; ‘Dnevnik Toni Shatrovoi’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 18 March 1936, 2; ‘Prazdnik moskovskiikh
detei’, Izvestiia, 30 June 1936, 4; A. Bubnov, ‘Proverochnye ispytaniia v shkole’, Pravda, 19 May 1937, 4; A. Markova,
‘Na shkolnye temy’, Izvestiia, 22 July 1938, 3; S. Kolosov, ‘Chest sovetskogo shkolnika’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 14
Nov. 1938, 3; S. Sovetov, ‘Shkola I pedagogika’, Izvestiia, 21 July 1939, 3; V. Khandros, ‘Kultura sovetskogo shkolnika’,
Pravda, 23 May 1940, 2.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   335

moment and building together, concept by concept, trope by trope, a new master
narrative of socialist subjectivity.
The story that emerged out of this collective effort brought back the components
of the turn of the century progressive education reform movement that, throughout
the 1920s, had been explicitly rejected as a starting premise for Marxist pedagogy:
namely, the child’s innate interiority with rudiments of individuality, as being
objectively there and distinct from his or her social milieu. In striking contrast
with the proletarian-socialist biography of the 1920s, life stories of Soviet teenagers
in the mainstream press started with accounts of searching for inborn peculiarities
or, in the new language of the period, ‘innate gifts’, ‘predispositions’, and ‘nature-
given abilities’. ‘Nature’ played a crucial role in narratives by and about Soviet
young people, challenging ‘class’ as the organizing centre of socialist identity.
It handed out gifts, enabling or disqualifying, regardless of class belonging and
served as an individualizing mechanism of the human predicament.55 In their
autobiographical essays that Pravda reprinted in 1935, Soviet teenage students, for
example, chose to narrate their lives as gradual discoveries – sometimes effortless
and exciting, sometimes frustrating and torturous – of what gifts nature had in
store for them. In a manner typical of his contemporaries, Vitalii Moskalev, the
seventeen-year-old son of an accountant, organized his autobiographical essay like
a journal of self-exploration, closely observing the manifestations and progress
of his innate ‘inclinations’ since the age of thirteen:
I have felt love toward nature since childhood. At the age of 13, my inclinations towards
natural sciences, mainly biology, geology, and astronomy, manifested themselves. …
My interest in natural sciences grew gradually. At the age of 15, it reached a high point
and acquired a more concrete form: I focused my studies on biology. Since the age of
16, I have felt a strong striving toward research and scientific work. Because of it, I felt
compelled to apply to a circle of young biologists at the Zoo. … After the graduation I
intend to apply to the biology department of the Moscow State University.56
The new biography, predictably, made little use of the previous decade’s familiar
tropes of ‘transformation’ of the self by means of the collective. In it, the individual
with his or her nature-given difference, with or without the collective, seemed
to constitute a new starting point in the socialist journey toward self-realization.
Weaving together tropes of innate ‘inclinations’ and self-discovery, the New Soviet
Person story unequivocally foregrounded the notion of human nature as existing
before class and presented individual difference as a given and unavoidable.
By following the teenagers into schools, Soviet journalists launched an
investigation of this new territory of socialism that empowered young people
like Moskalev. Journalist and writer Lev Kassil who covered the topic for Izvestiia
marvelled at the display of professional ambition and intellectual confidence by

55
‘Sovetskaia shkola I Komsomol’, Pravda, 7 Feb. 1936; N. Sats, ‘Tsentralnyi detskii teatr’, Pravda, 28 Feb. 1936;
‘Schastlivoe detstvo’, Izvestiia, 29 June 1936; ‘Prazdnik molodosti I sily’, Izvestiia, 12 July 1937; A. Krylova, ‘Nashi
deti’, Izvestiia, 18 July 1939.
56
Essay by Vitalii Moskalev, Pravda, 9 May 1935, 2; also, under the ‘Shkola okonchena, – chto dalshe?’ rubric, see
autobiographical essays by Vasilii Mironov and Nikolai Mikhailov, op. cit.
336   A. KRYLOVA

his young interlocutors. The role models they picked exemplified new forms of
self-fashioning. As early as 1935, Kassil reported that Soviet teenagers – crossing
class lines, historical epochs, and national borders – wanted to paint like Russian
pre-revolutionary painters, to write novels like French novelists, and to become
the best and prize-winning mathematicians and physicists of the world. How was
one to realize such remarkable goals? A careful management of time opportunely
divided into ‘personal’ (lichnoe vremia), ‘school’, and ‘leisure’ time was the answer.
According to teenagers, the notion of differentiated time that posited the ‘personal’
as a distinct dimension of one’s life under socialism was taught at school.57
Before long, journalists began to formulate new questions about the psychological
price of Soviet teenagers’ ambition. A leading expert on youth issues at Komsomolskaia
pravda, young journalist Elena Kononenko was among the first to draw attention to
the flipside of the modern preoccupation with one’s nature-assured individual self:
pervasive anxiety among the recently designated Soviet people. Many children, noted
Kononenko, feared that their search for an innate gift would not yield a desirable
outcome. To her, worrying about one’s ‘mediocrity’, ‘stupidity’, and ‘talentlessness’
appeared so rampant among Soviet schoolchildren that she turned a meeting with
a teenager paralyzed by ‘disappointment in himself ’ and suffering from depression
into a regular plot of her 1936–37 essays.58 Though it is difficult, given the limits of
our academic interpretive paradigms, to account for a young Soviet person obsessed
with his or her self to the degree of depression, such young people exemplify the
cultural power of the emergent discourse of the New Soviet Person to turn its master-
referent – the Soviet school teenager – into a prisoner of its imperatives.
Either empowering or debilitating, the imperative for having a nature-given,
unique, and personalized socialist self entailed a far-reaching reconfiguration of
the relationship of the socialist individual to the collective. How were these new
Soviet people to navigate between the demands of their individual inclinations
and the needs of the collective good? As more reports, surveys, and questionnaires
from the school grounds appeared, it became apparent that a new ritual of pledging
one’s investment in the collective or what was now more often referred to as the
‘social good’ was in the making. Utilizing new figures of speech, young people
proudly stated that they did not want to ‘live only for themselves’. Yet in this
socially-minded vision, Soviet youth did not claim the intention of becoming
one with the collective either. Their language was different. They wanted to be
‘useful’ (byt’ poleznym) to society; they were prepared to ‘pay their debt’ back to
the Party and society for the time they had spent on individual development; they
felt ‘responsibility to the collective’.59

57
Lev Kassil, ‘S konveiera!’, Izvestiia, 30 May 1935; personal accounts by school teenagers: Shura Titova, ‘Rosli vmeste
s shkoloi’; Sonia Levnova, ‘Bykhod v zhizn’; Kolia Gromov, ‘Fakt, dogoniu!’, Izvestiia, 30 May 1935; also ‘Prazdnik
vypusknikov’, Izvestiia, 2 June 1935; Elena Kononenko, ‘Podrostki’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 28 Jan. 1936, 3.
58
E. Kononenko, ‘Mechty o slave’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 5 Aug. 1937, 3; ‘Podrostki’, op. cit.
59
See school teenagers’ essays and letters: Nikolai Mikhailov, Pravda, 9 May, 1935, 2; ten graduates of Moscow school
#5 of the Proletarsky district, Komsomolskaia pravda, 1 June 1935, 2; V.N. Buianov, Komsomolskaia pravda, 1
January 1935, 4; ‘Iz shkoly – v zhizn!’, Pravda, 10 June 1937, 1.
 SOCIAL HISTORY   337

The very possibility of voicing one’s relationship to the collective in terms of

‘usefulness,’ ‘debt’ and ‘responsibility’ constituted, I argue, a marked development
of the public conversation about socialism. In a society where, less than a decade
previously, the dictum of the collectivist man was often understood as a synthesis
of personal and collective aspirations (that is, an erasure of difference between
the two) while the possibility of ‘individuality’ was preconditioned on the vague
notion of one’s ‘merger’ with the collective, an imperative to be ‘socially useful’
without the imperative of ‘deriving’ one’s self from the collective proposed a
relationship between the socialist individual and his social milieu that parted
with the radical philosophical underpinnings of the Bolshevik-Marxist agenda.
The notion of ‘being socially useful’ no longer implied that the personal and the
collective (or the social) were, in the best-case scenario, identifiable or merge-able,
nor that the personal was a derivative of the collective.
A dynamic site of construction of the new socialist language and personality,
the reformed school was of course not the sole maker of the New Soviet Person
vision. Nor were the journalists covering the Soviet classroom, disseminating and
developing its new languages and values. By the end of the decade, the discipline
of pedagogy began to play a critical role. In particular, the new journal, Soviet
pedagogy that, in January 1937, crowned the Party’s educational initiatives of the
decade stood at the centre of thriving theoretical production.60 The two pillars of the
emergent theoretical edifice which retained their centrality in Soviet pedagogical
literature for the rest of the Soviet period were the imperative of ‘individual
approach’ and the re-imagination of the school collective as a ‘differentiated group’
encompassing, in the language of one Pravda editorial, the diversity of children’s
‘[nature-given] abilities, character, and [levels] of development’.61
In other words, the discursive gap between the 1920s pedagogical theory and
the late 1930s theorizations was stunning, akin to the discursive break in Party
educational decrees. Criticizing 1920s pedagogical thought for imposing the
‘reign of depersonalization’ and ‘over-estimating the value of productive labour’,
new theorists from the ranks of the academically accomplished but publically
unknown scholars such as professors N.K. Goncharov (deputy chief-editor of
Soviet Pedagogy), E.N. Medynskii, N.A. Petrov, and Ia.B. Reznik now articulated
the method of ‘individual approach’ as the main mechanism ‘for uncovering
students’ innate abilities [sposobnosti] and developing their well-rounded
personalities [lichnosti]’.62 In accordance with it, the mighty ideal of the New Man
the ‘collectivist’ was no longer a stated goal. Echoing surveys of school teenagers
and newspaper coverage of the New Soviet people generation, the stress was put

60
The journal idea was called for in the Party Central Committee Decree (4 July 1936) as an urgent measure to ‘restore’
the discipline of pedagogy: Pravda, 5 July 1936, 1.
61
‘Sovetskaia shkola I Komsomol’, Pravda, 7 Feb. 1936, 1.
62
N.A. Petrov, ‘K voprosu o pedagogicheskom znachenii lichnogo primera uchitelia’, Sovetskaia pedagogika, 2 (1937),
40–41; E.N. Medynskii, ‘20 let sovetskoi shkoly’, Sovetskaia pedagogika, 3 (1937), 14; N.K. Goncharov, ‘Rol klassnogo
rukovoditelia v vospitatelnoi rabote shkoly’, Sovetskaia pedagogika, 4 (1937), 40.
338   A. KRYLOVA

on the child’s ‘individuality’ (lichnost) not as a post-condition but, as one teacher

explained his understanding of the concept, as the child’s ‘inner-world’ to ‘be
taken into consideration’ and ‘aided’ by the instructor. In the centre of Soviet
pedagogical work, confirmed Reznik, there stood the student whose ‘individual
difference would be wrong to ignore’ and whose ‘intellectual abilities … will,
character, emotion predispositions are to be studied’ throughout the school years.63
The notion of the ‘collective’, too, underwent a serious modification. The
emergent Soviet pedagogy did not need the Bolshevik-Marxist elaborate theory
of the proletarian collective. Yet it did not banish the category of the ‘collective’ as
a constitutive experience in the making of the socialist, well-rounded individual.
The notion was imaginatively re-theorized as a ‘differentiated group’. ‘In class’, M.D.
Osiptsev, director of one Moscow school explained the new pedagogical principle,
‘one strives to instruct not some average student that does not exist in nature but
to address a concrete, differentiated group of students’. If a socialist collective was
akin to a differentiated group then socialist individuals formed collectives while
retaining their individual differences.
The earliest visual representations of such differentiated collectives of socialism
can be found in Pravda in May and June of 1935 when the newspaper covered
the first graduates of the ten-year school. For example, one such photograph
captures ‘A’ students of Moscow school #12 who form a loose group as they face
the camera. It is in fact their faces with their irreducible individuality that make
the photograph and stand for the students’ different intellectual and professional
aspirations described in the caption. The photograph’s very composition, in other
words, underscores a novel meaning of the collective on the scale of a modern
socialist society that depends on the recognition and realization of individual
differences (see Figure 2.)
At the school level, teachers translated these new ideals into an everyday
language of instruction. In their essays to professional journals, they described
their innovative methodological approaches that asked students to participate in
‘collective-based’ forms of studying as well as develop habits of what was called
‘self-reliant work’. Outlining different combinations and rotations of ‘collective-
based’ and ‘self-reliant’ classroom study, teachers recorded how they created
regular opportunities for their students to enter collective routines, exit them,
and focus on their individual assignments and work on their own.64
Such profound revisions of rudiments of socialist ideology did not marginalize
the political currency of such well-established values of socialist upbringing as, to
cite Medynskii, a ‘Communist worldview’, the ‘Bolshevik character’, ‘deep devotion
63
M.D. Osiptsev, ‘Shkola imeni Radishcheva’, Sovetskaia pedagogika, 3 (1937), 101–102, 110; Ia.B. Reznik, ‘Individualnyi
podkhod k uchashchimsia I borba s neuspevaemostiu’, Sovetskaia pedagogika, 1 (1941), 11, 12; also N.K. Goncharov,
‘Rol klassnogo rukovoditelia v vospitatelnoi rabote shkoly’, Sovetskaia pedagogika, 4 (1937), 40; L.A. Gordon,
‘Potrebnosti I Sovetskaia pedagogika, interesy’, 8–9 (1939).
64
Osiptsev, op. cit., 100–104; for more examples, see P.I. Plotnikov, ‘Organizatsiia samostoiatelnoi raboty uchashchikhsia’,
Sovetskaia pedagogika, 4 (1937); M.P. Ivanova, ‘“Sekrety” moego uspekha’, Sovetskaia pedagogika, 5 (1939);
T. Fedorovskii, ‘Uspevaemost uchashchikhsia I umenie samostoiatelno rabotat’, Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie
[Pedagogical Education], 2–3 (1937).
 SOCIAL HISTORY   339

Figure 2. ‘Ten-graders and “A” students of Moscow School # 12, Leninskii District’, Pravda, 9 May
1935, 2.

to the cause of the working class and its advanced squad, the Communist Party’ –
in or outside the classroom.65 On the surface, it might indeed appear that nothing
fundamental had changed. But underneath those manifest pronouncements
made on behalf of the New Soviet Person, everything was changed. In fact, those
pronouncements acquired a new meaning because the underlying building
blocks of socialist subjectivity that sustained them – the class, the individual,
the collective – acquired new connotations and acknowledged a differentiation
between an individual and his or her social milieu.
The romance with the proletariat of the previous decade was not, strictly
speaking, erased from this emergent cultural formation. School children studied
the history of the proletarian movement and the Great October Revolution,
visited factories along with movie theatres, museums, and skating rinks. The
1920s proletarian ideal was in the process of becoming akin to a sightseeing trip,
a museum piece, a homework assignment to be visited, consumed, prepared, and,
until 1937, practised once a week, but not to be lived.

Conclusion
The cultural terrain of the pre-war Soviet Union with which this article concludes
is a messy one: as it should be, since culture is a messy site, especially at times
of accelerated social transformation. In this account, the Soviet society speaks

Medynsky, op. cit., 34–35.

65
340   A. KRYLOVA

more than one language of socialism and is caught up in an anything but unified
process: a conceptual crisis of one cultural paradigm – the Bolshevik one – and
an uneven and drawn-out articulation of another – the New Soviet Person. The
resultant histories of the New Man and New Soviet Person cultural projects thus
deprive ‘socialism’ in its Soviet context of its fundamental connotations and turn
the pivotal term of modern Russian history – ‘Soviet’ – into a historical question.
As a result, I do not posit the 1930s as a Bolshevik/post-Bolshevik divide.
Rather, I argue that the decade of the 1930s constituted launching grounds not
only for a profound social transformation but also, necessarily, for an epistemic
shift in Soviet people’s normative expectations of socialism that took half a century
to unfold. At no point should the ‘shift’ metaphor be read literally, that is, as a
sudden replacement of the New Man ideal with the New Soviet Person project. The
stress here is placed on the emergent plurality, troubling to such contemporaries
as Kosarev, of the ways an individual could imagine his or her relationship to
the socialist construction in the 1930s Soviet Union. Thanks to it, the Soviet
Union’s socialist experiment is rescued from the straitjacket of the Marxist-
Bolshevik romance with the proletarian ‘collective’ posited as a precondition of
the ill-defined and under-theorized socialist individual. The emergent socialist
subjectivity articulated and decreed around the notion of the New Soviet Person
offers an example of an individualizing discursive practice that reconfigured the
very meanings of the socialist individual and the collective and postulated the
individual as a distinct entity in relation to his or her social milieu. No longer
can a scholar presume that an invocation of the individual in the realms of the
1930s Soviet educational reforms, journalism, youth policies, and Soviet pedagogy
has to imply an a priori subversive practice, incompatible with Soviet notions of
collectivity and social mindedness.
Furthermore, the reconceptualization of the cultural dynamics of the 1930s that
has been proposed here allows historians to begin drawing meaningful connections
between the epistemic developments analysed above and the concurrent
reorientations within the realms of Soviet law, trade, and consumption, namely,
the codification of Soviet citizens’ right to ‘personal property’ under socialism
and the recognition of socialist consumption as an ‘individualizing experience’.66
It also offers a new historical viewpoint for furthering our understanding of post-
war cultural phenomena: Soviet citizens’ peculiar skill to assign critical value
to individual self-realization and autonomy while managing a socially minded
outlook, as several scholars working on Soviet literature, journalism, and personal
narratives have noted. So far, these findings have figured in academic literature
as historical orphans – largely unaccounted developments, loosely attributed to
liberating influences of the Second World War, the 1950s to 1960s De-Stalinization

Cowley, op. cit., 114–15; Randall, op. cit.; Hessler, op. cit.
66
 SOCIAL HISTORY   341

policies, or to the inherent resistance of human nature.67 What the history of the
‘New Soviet Person’ as a post-Bolshevik script suggests, however, is that ‘culture’
did not wait for Stalin to die and that post-war cultural languages have their roots
in the pre-war decade of the 1930s. It also introduces vital historical complexity
into current academic and popular debates about social justice, economic
responsibility and individual self-realization – debates that have invariably been
informed by an explicit or implicit comparison between socialist and capitalist
systems.

Acknowledgements
For their critical insight and generosity in critiquing this article in its numerous drafts over
the course of several years I thank Geoff Eley, Alexander Etkind, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter
Holquist, Yanni Kotsonis, Marixa Lasso, Benjamin Nathans, Nora Fisher Onar, Roberta
Pergher, David Shneer, Andrew Sloin, Bill Schwarz, and Ronald Suny. A crucial portion
of research and writing was accomplished during two subsequent terms at the School of
Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ and at the National
Humanities Center, NC. I am grateful to the two institutions for their support.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Pinsky, op. cit.; Huxtable Simon, ‘In search of the Soviet reader: the Kosygin reforms, sociology, and changing
67

concepts of Soviet society, 1964–1970’, Cahiers du monde russe, 54 (2013/3), 623–42; E.Yu. Zubkova, Obshchestvo
i reformy, 1945–1964 (Moscow, 1993); Haimson, op. cit.