Culture for the Proletariat: Adult Education

Vperedists arrived at their cultural platform in part because they believed that the Russian intelligentsia was not a reliable partner for the working class. Suspicions between the workers and the intelligentsia, indeed between educated society and the lower classes in general, were deeply rooted in Russia, and the failure of the Revolution of 1905 only increased this tension. Many intellectuals were leaving politics altogether. Some began to attack the ethos of the old intelligentsia, including its traditional sense of moral responsibility for the lower classes.^[22] Artists and writers who had once been concerned with social and political problems in their work began to pursue new aesthetic approaches, such as modernist writing and abstract painting, which were much less accessible to popular audiences.^[23] The intelligentsia seemed confused and divided over what, if any, its social role should be.

Workers' organizations and left-wing political parties interpreted these changes in the simplest way: bourgeois intellectuals, frightened by the revolution, had abandoned the lower classes.^[24] This generalization was not entirely unjustified. Many intellectuals did indeed give up illegal underground activity in the years of repression, a shift felt keenly by the workers in these movements.^[25] Nonetheless, not all intellectuals lost their sense of social obligation. Instead many turned away from revolution and embraced legal activity, both cultural and educational. Members of the intelligentsia

[22] Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism , 1917–1922 (New York, 1986), pp. 8–10.

[23] For the debate on modernism see Jeffrey Brooks, "Popular Philistinism and the Course of Russian Modernism," in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies , ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford, 1986), pp. 90–110.

[24] See, for example, the complaints of workers in the Bolshevik press, reprinted in S. Breitenburg, ed., Dooktiabr' skaia Pravda ob iskusstve i literature (Moscow, 1937), pp. 31–32.

[25] See the comments of the Bolshevik worker and Proletkult organizer Aleksandr Samobytnik-Mashirov in A. Mashirov, "Zadachi proletarskoi kul'tury," Griadushchee , no. 2 (1918), pp. 9–10.

organized and staffed the numerous adult education courses, people's universities, educational societies, libraries, and theaters that multiplied in cities and villages between 1906 and 1914. Through their work they created a much richer and more complex network of educational experiences for the lower classes than had existed before the Revolution of 1905.

The intelligentsia's involvement in workers' educational programs had begun in the mid-nineteenth century with the Sunday school movement. Inspired by the writings of a Kievan educator, university students and other intellectuals had opened Sunday and evening schools for the urban lower classes in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and several other Russian cities. These programs were staffed by sympathetic intellectuals who frequently devised their own curricula. The study plans varied greatly from place to place, ranging from simple literacy programs to rather elaborate training in the social and natural sciences. From these first experiments a whole complex of evening classes and weekend schools emerged.^[26]

In the late nineteenth century more comprehensive educational programs began to take shape, modeled on some of the longer running Sunday and evening schools and inspired in part by English experiments in workers' adult education.^[27] The Revolution of 1905 gave an enormous boost to these efforts, and new schools opened in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1906 and soon thereafter in over twenty cities, including Ufa, Baku, Warsaw, and Tomsk. These institutions, called "people's universities," were sponsored by a variety of local groups and relied on the services of the local intelligentsia. For example, the Kuban People's University in Ekaterinodar was staffed by local doctors, lawyers, and gymnasium teachers.^[28]

[26] On the Sunday school movement in St. Petersburg see Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg , 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971), pp. 160–99.

[27] See Ia. V. Abramov, Nashi voskresnye shkoly: Ikh proshloe i nastoiashchee (St. Petersburg, 1900); and E. N. Medynskii, Vneshkol'noe obrazovanie: Ego znachenie, organizatsiia i tekhnika (Moscow, 1918).

[28] V. M. Riabkov, "Iz istorii razvitiia narodnykh universitetov v gody sotsialisticheskogo stroitel'stva v SSSR," in Klub i problemy razvitiia sotsialisticheskoi kul'tury (Cheliabinsk, 1974), pp. 35–36; and Medynskii, Vneshkol'noe obrazovanie , pp. 266–70.

Along with the popular universities there were also new art and music schools open to the general population. The People's Conservatory in Moscow, founded in 1906, was richly endowed with an excellent musical staff. Among the teachers were Aleksandr Kastalskii and Arsenii Avraamov, who would become important organizers of Proletkult musical training.^[29] People's theaters, first begun in the late nineteenth century, also mushroomed in the years after 1905. These drama circles aimed to acquaint the lower classes with the best of Russian playwrights, including Gogol, Tolstoy, and especially Ostrovsky.^[30] Although these programs made some concessions to popular tastes, such as incorporating folk music into conservatory curricula, inevitably the intellectual organizers conveyed their own standards of excellence.

Another educational forum were "people's houses" (narodnye doma ). Before the Revolution of 1905 the houses were largely used as organizational centers for cultural activities in city districts and towns. After 1905 they began to take on a more independent educational function. Like people's universities, they were sustained by many different local groups. Zemstva and cooperative organizations were by far the most common sponsors, and the government contributed money from its Trusteeship of the People's Temperance, founded with funds from the liquor monopoly.^[31] Organizers hoped that the friendly and comfortable clublike atmosphere of the houses would make education more appealing to the local population. The most famous of these institutions was the

[29] N. Briusova, "Massovaia muzykal' no-prosvetitel' naia rabota v pervye gody posle Oktiabria," Sovetskaia muzyka , no. 6 (1947), pp. 46–47; and Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia , rev. ed. (Bloomington, 1983), p. 5.

[30] Gary Thurston, "The Impact of Russian Popular Theatre, 1886–1915," Journal of Modern History , vol. 55, no. 2 (1983), pp. 237–67.

[31] Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature , 1861–1917 (Princeton, 1985), pp. 313–14.

Ligovskii People's House, run by the Countess Panina in St. Petersburg. Opened in 1891 as a cafeteria for students, it was taken over by the Imperial Technical Society and transformed into a night school. In 1903, when Countess Panina took control, the center greatly expanded its activities, adding a theater, art classes, and much more extensive educational programs.^[32] Several worker activists involved in the Petrograd Proletkult had had some contact with this cultural center.

The public served by these varied cultural institutions was diverse, reflecting the organizers' desire to reach "the people." It included workers, peasants, and the poorer townspeople. Fees were kept as low as possible, and some events were free. Although the regime hoped cultural offerings would divert the lower classes from political action, it was not always confident they would do so. Despite close government scrutiny, it proved difficult to separate politics from cultural work. Socialist teachers found opportunities to convey Marxist and other critical ideas in their classes, and working-class pupils learned to use cultural centers as a shield for clandestine political work.^[33]

A popular educational press, which took root in Russia between 1905 and 1917, also propagated the cause of adult education. Publications such as Herald of Knowledge (Vestnik znaniia ) and New Journal for Everyone (Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh ) gained large followings, especially among culturally ambitious white-collar employees.^[34] The editors, who were themselves intellectuals, aimed to provide a general overview of the most pressing scientific, social, and cultural issues of the day in an easily accessible format. Thus these journals served as guides for those interested in self-education. Although they attracted a readership among clerks, skilled

[32] Medynskii, Vneshkol'noe obrazovanie , pp. 102–3.

[33] See the memoirs of socialist teachers in one of Moscow's best-known schools for workers, E. M. Chemodanova, ed., Prechistenskie rabochie kursy: Pervyi rabochii universitet v Moskve (Moscow, 1948), pp. 13–140.

[34] Brooks, "Popular Philistinism."

workers, and primary school teachers, their simplified approach to complex issues earned them the scorn of many intellectuals, who believed their offerings were at the level of "third-rate people's universities."^[35]

The intellectuals involved in these varied programs had many different motives. Some, especially after the experience of 1905, were frightened by the specter of a revolution by the "dark," uneducated Russian masses. Others hoped to combat the danger of a rising popular culture of adventure novels and tabloid newspapers, which offended many intellectuals' cultural values.^[36] Political activists believed they could divert legal programs to further the revolutionary cause. But no matter what their immediate motivation or their political persuasion, they were all continuing an intelligentsia tradition of enlightenment and propaganda that had begun much earlier in the nineteenth century. These new institutions were a forum where the "culture bearers" could pass their burden on to the people and in the process help to shape the people's cultural heritage.

Clearly, most of these intellectuals had different goals than the Vperedists. They understood "culture" as the finest products of Russian and European civilization, not as a class ideology. They wanted to enlighten all of the laboring masses, not the industrial proletariat alone. Regardless of their political beliefs, they felt that the transmission of high culture was the single most important step toward positive social change. Yet despite these fundamental disagreements, both Vperedists and the reform-minded intelligentsia shared common ground. Both were convinced that education was essential for emancipation and that intellectuals had a role to play in the process of enlightenment. Although their emphasis was very different, both found value in Russia's cultural heritage. Thus it is not surprising that many of those who took part in adult educational projects offered their services to the Proletkult

[35] Ibid., p. 99.

[36] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read , especially pp. 295–352.

after the October Revolution. There they continued the task of bringing culture to the masses, now rechristened as the proletariat.