5
Educating a New Workforce

Most of the qualified workers in the city at the outbreak of the war had been evacuated, many never to return. Those workers who stayed behind had their educations disrupted. Postwar migrants to town were largely unskilled. A severe decline in the skills of the local labor pool was a major price of the war. Something had to be done.
—Vladimir Polozov, 1984

Industrial Modernization

Only five and a half months before Stalin died, Frol Kozlov, then second secretary of the Leningrad regional party committee, strode to the podium of the tenth Leningrad city party conference and declared: "The fundamental content of the work of the Leningrad party organization is to mobilize laborers in the struggle for technological progress."^[1] With these words, Kozlov proclaimed a fundamental principle of a new approach to Leningrad's economic development: the doctrine of ascendent technological innovation.

As we have already seen, Kozlov's endorsement of technological innovation has been repeated by every successive Leningrad political figure of any consequence, with language more enthusiastic than even the usual glowing Soviet litany of praise for science and invention. Indeed, an unquestioning belief in technological progress constitutes a core value in the city's development strategy, a program that features a reorientation of the Leningrad economy around increasingly specialized and sophisticated industries.^[2] Leningrad party leaders have consistently praised and vigorously pursued an economic development strategy rooted in the expansion of communications and interchange between science and industry.^[3] Moreover, production statistics reveal a relative decline in the city's production capacity in light industry.^[4]

The end result, as we have emphasized, has been a sustained effort over at least three decades to concentrate the city's industry in specialized, technologically intensive, and high-quality spheres of heavy-industrial production of the sort represented by machine construction, shipbuilding, precision-instrument making, and radio electronics.^[5]

On the positive side, this policy of economic specialization and innovation encouraged the modernization of many of the city's most important industrial establishments.^[6] Leningrad factories are demonstrably among the most productive and efficient in the Soviet Union, particularly in such vital industries as radio electronics, optics, manufacture of precision machine tools.^[7] Yet, at the same time, Leningrad's share of total national investment has declined steadily throughout the postwar period. Its all-time high was achieved in the Soviet period during the Third Five-Year Plan (1933–1937), when its share was 4.6 percent of national investment funds, from which it declined to 1.9 percent during the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1956–1960), and on down to only about 1 percent during the Ninth and Tenth Five-Year Plans (1971–1975, 1976–1980).^[8] Moreover, several traditional Leningrad industries in light-industrial sectors (those relegated to "Group B" status by state planners) developed at a slower rate than they had previously. Light-industrial production in Leningrad also expanded at a slower rate than the same industries did nationally.^[9]

As we look back across the past three decades or so, there seems to be an air of inevitability in the gradual and sustained redirection of the Leningrad industrial effort. Such an interpretation, encouraged by local political rhetoric, would, however, overlook the innumerable difficulties encountered in attempts to reorient the local economy around a few priority sectors, bringing together both science and industry. These difficulties were the focus of Chapter 4, and they inspired two additional sets of labor policy innovations that will be discussed in this chapter and the next—professional-technical schools and socioeconomic planning.

Modernization and Workers

As we have already noted, World War II marked a momentous demographic watershed in Leningrad history.^[10] During the first 18 months of the city's siege by combined German and Finnish forces, Leningrad's population plummeted by two thirds.^[11] After the war, rural in-migrants and demobilized soldiers replenished the lost population, but the new residents on the whole were less educated, skilled, and disciplined than their prewar predecessors. Consequently, by the mid-1950s, Leningrad's population approached its prewar level, but the new postwar population and workforce were qualitatively different from and

inferior in capabilities to those of prewar times. In the labor market, Leningrad had lost its competitive edge over many other provincial industrial centers.

At the time, Leningrad's senior political leadership apparently was either neglectful of or ill informed about the city's evolving character.^[12] In the Leningrad press of the period, one finds strong endorsements of development strategies predicated on technologically sophisticated production processes. This imprimatur suggests massive ignorance among Leningrad's leaders of the demographic changes that had, in fact, taken place during the 1940s.

Factory managers could not ignore this transformation of their workforce as easily as could planners and politicians. Confronted with a divergence between the needs of the programs being promoted and the active vocational skills of a working population that was not up to the tasks required by those programs, Leningrad industrial managers and factory party officials began advocating measures to alter either the plan or the workforce.^[13] Searching for strategies to maintain the plan and improve the workforce, Leningrad officials soon responded on two fronts. First, the city's political and economic leadership began advocating the massive expansion of the city's factory-based vocational education centers, to retrain experienced workers and educate local youth to fill new factory positions. Second, they began encouraging industrial-oriented sociological research.

The efforts on both fronts paid off over the next decade. An extensive network of vocational education centers transformed the city's education system, and eventually served as a model for a thorough reorganization of primary and secondary education throughout the Soviet Union during the spring of 1984. Meanwhile, the local sociological research community focused its studies to a considerable degree on issues of factory life and worker motivation. These studies supported a policy consensus that came to be shared widely among the Leningrad academic, managerial, and political leadership: namely, that factory managers needed greater flexibility in developing production plans, deploying workers, and creating a local social infrastructure to support productivity. As we shall discuss further in Chapter 6, the resulting attempt to integrate social and economic indicators into factory production plans led to the creation of a system of plant, urban district, city, and regional socioeconomic plans throughout the Soviet Union.

By the 1980s, we can clearly identify Leningrad's skilled and well-educated workforce as a major component of the city's competitive edge over most other Soviet industrial centers. An economic development strategy has come to fruition based on the dominance of a handful of very specialized—within the Soviet context—technologically advanced and critically important industrial sectors, primarily in heavy industry. When evaluated according to its stated goals, this approach to local

industrial and economic development has proven dramatically successful. The city and region are of indisputable importance to the country's overall economic effort. Success was largely attributable to innovative measures taken in the 1960s and 1970s to restructure labor-management relations at factories throughout the city. That restructuring, in turn, was a consequence of changing approaches to secondary and adult education.

Khrushchev's Educational Reform

In April 1958, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee, leveled a blistering attack on the Soviet Union's education system.^[14] Addressing the thirteenth national congress of the Young Communist League (Komsomol), Khrushchev, seeking to combat negative attitudes toward physical labor that had emerged among postwar youth, recommended making admission to higher education easier and reducing education-enforced social stratification.^[15] More specifically, the following September he proposed that continuous academic education, from primary schools through institutions of higher learning, should incorporate compulsory work programs into their normal curricula, thereby reducing the national commitment to academic training.^[16] By November 1958, however, the Central Committee appeared to have put considerable distance between its institututional stance on this subject and that of its first secretary.^[17] Nevertheless, in December, some eight months after Khrushchev's initial onslaught, an educational reform took effect that, though watered down, did increase the hours devoted to polytechnical education at every stage of a student's academic career. An 11-year program incorporating vocational as well as academic training was projected to replace the traditional ten-year primary and secondary general school.^[18]

In July 1959, the Council of Ministers responded to passage of the final reform legislation by establishing a new ministerial level State Committee for Professional and Technical Education, to coordinate programs operated by the councils of ministers of the various union republics (state committees being responsible for activities that cut across the jurisdiction of several ministries).^[19] Subsequent statutes in May 1961 and March 1962 created a network of republic-based professional-technical schools (professional'no-tekhnicheskoe uchilishche , PTU, in the singular) to absorb students completing the obligatory eight-year general school program. Urban PTUs theoretically became tied to future employment sites—a linkage strengthened further in 1966, 1969, 1972, and 1974—offering students four- to five-year secondary education programs combining school with on-the-job training at future employment sites.^[20]

For example, the curriculum for lathe operators, metalworkers, and instrument makers at a secondary-level PTU during the mid-1970s devoted two thirds of total instruction time to vocational training (46.6 percent, on-site production instruction; 4.9 percent, special technologies; 4.6 percent, physical education; 3.4 percent, primary military training; 2.6 percent, examination of materials and machine-building technology; 2.4 percent, drawing and design; 1 percent, labor and production economics; and 0.8 percent, tolerances and measurement), while one third was spent on more traditional academic subjects (7.8 percent, mathematics; 7.1 percent, physics; 5.4 percent, history; 5.1 percent, Russian language and literature; 4.7 percent, chemistry; 1.5 percent, social studies; 1 percent, biology; 0.9 percent, geography; and 0.4 percent, astronomy).^[21] This combination of job-site experience and general academic training offered a more comprehensive educational experience than many workforce training programs in the United States and, despite difficulties at times in classroom implementation, produced a better reputation for vocational education as a means for preparing students for careers as skilled workers than has generally been the case in the United States. Indeed, as British sociologist Mervyn Matthews has observed, by the mid-1970s the network of vocational schools had grown in size and complexity well beyond Khrushchev's initial legislative vision.^[22]

Vocational education was hardly new to the Soviet Union, or to Leningrad for that matter. An extensive network of short- and long-term training programs had emerged during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1940 these special secondary-level technical schools (tekhnikumy ) and primary schools were frequently attached to factories, an institution of this sort being called a plant-factory school (fabrichno-zavodskoe uchilishche , FZU).^[23] These schools were consolidated under the central control of a new Main Administration for State Labor Reserves at that time.^[24] After the war, the importance of vocational training declined in relation to academic specialties, despite a presumption on the part of the worker's state and the leading agency of the proletariat, the Communist Party, that vocational training was ideologically superior. During the brief interlude between Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's educational reform in 1958, officials in Latvia and elsewhere experimented with programs designed to lure graduates of the ten-year general schools into vocational trades.^[25] Against the background of these latter tests, Khrushchev moved to reconstitute Soviet primary and secondary education.

As the level of work skills and general education rose nationwide, vocational education had lost its attraction to many Soviet youth. In Leningrad, the overall erosion of vocational programs had taken place somewhat earlier than elsewhere.^[26] During the academic year 1939/1940, for example, factory training centers (FZUs) enrolled only 15,000

Leningrad youths, as opposed to 55,000 in 1931/1932. By 1982, however, the enrollment figures at the 145 somewhat analogous Leningrad PTUs would jump to over 330,000 annually.^[27] To understand this dramatic reversal, we need to return to the period surrounding Khrushchev's educational reforms of 1958.

Leningrad Responds

In the available Leningrad press, there seems little that differentiates the discussion of Khrushchev's proposed reorganization of primary and secondary schools from the discussion found in other Soviet publications of the period.^[28] Leningraders supported the introduction of a vocational component into the current school curriculum, but so did nearly everyone else, in one form or another. Formal interviews and informal discussions with Leningrad social scientists in early 1984 revealed, however, that the national educational reform in 1958 had come to be perceived as a turning point in that city's faltering commitment to vocational training. Thus, for really the first time it had spurred debates among local leaders about the critical relationship between the shape of educational curricula and the region's ability to meet the labor demands of local industry.^[29] To determine whether this perception of the relationship between national and local events was well founded, we need to consider the state of the Leningrad industrial workforce in the late 1950s. We can then discuss the nature of the subsequent educational effort in greater detail.

As we noted earlier, the city's recent demographic transformation had diminished Leningrad's competitive edge in the national industrial labor market. While metropolitan Leningrad remained one of the most highly populated and urbanized regions in the Soviet Union, the gender, age, and occupational structure of the population did not match the economy's needs. The city's economic development strategy was directed primarily toward heavy industry, whereas the local population was now predominantly female. The population was also aging, and a rapidly increasing number of pensioners had to be supported by the working population. High rates of female participation in the labor force contributed to low birth rates, as did inadequacies in child care and in medical and housing facilities. Despite these conditions, many senior local planners, and nearly all national planners, failed at the time to recognize the growing gap between the city's demography and the dominant pattern of economic development.^[30]

Within less than a decade, however, nearly all local and most national politicians were emphasizing labor shortages whenever they discussed the Leningrad economy. For example, in a 1966 campaign speech for his USSR Supreme Soviet seat from a Leningrad district, the

party's Central Committee secretary, Aleksandr Shelepin, acknowledging a labor shortage in Leningrad, urged employers to hire fewer workers and fully supported the efforts of local officials to deal with the problem in a forthright manner.^[31] A year later, during the RSFSR Supreme Soviet election campaign, Kirill Mazurov, then first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, came to the city to speak to his Leningrad constituents and repeated Shelepin's positions of the previous year.^[32] Meanwhile, in 1963, an article by the chiefs of the Leningrad city party committee's industrial transportation and ideological departments appeared in Sotsialisticheskii trud pointing to a general need to stabilize the local workforce and to do so by developing and fostering a sense of pride and responsibility among all workers.^[33]

In the first half of the 1960s, numerous other speeches and articles complained about labor shortages in Leningrad. The main point is that, by the mid-1960s, the tone of Leningrad economic discussions had changed markedly from the previous decade. Leningrad social scientists such as Vladimir Polozov point to the 1958 educational reform as the single most important event of the period influencing the direction of the discussion of economic and labor issues in Leningrad.^[34] Moreover, at least in Leningrad, support for the initial educational reform proposals, with their strong orientation toward manual labor, quickly translated into support for vocational reform programs.

The data available in the West can neither demonstrate nor discount contentions such as Polozov's. Given the characteristics of the Leningrad workforce, however, and the ambitious development programs being pursued by local planners and politicians, we can only assume that the issue would have arisen at some point in some other guise, even if Khrushchev had never launched his attack on the Soviet educational establishment in 1958. In any event, if Polozov is correct, one should expect vocational education to play a particularly prominent role in Leningrad's efforts to manage the local workforce, and this has indeed been the case for the past quarter-century.

Vocational Education Ascendant

During much of this period, Leningrad politicians gave more vigorous and consistent official public support for vocational education programs than national leaders did.^[35] In fact, many Leningrad leaders came to view vocational education, which offered job skills such as welding, drafting, and bookkeeping, as preferable to traditional academic education oriented toward general introductory training in the humanities and natural sciences.^[36] As a result of such policy preferences, Leningrad vocational education programs have outpaced similar curricula elsewhere in the Soviet Union in (1) the speed with which

new professional-technical schools have been established, (2) the pressure on parents and pupils alike to channel career aspirations into polytechnical professions, (3) the linkages created between professional-technical schools and future employment sites, and (4) the number of students enrolled in vocational programs. By the early 1980s, the Leningrad party organization viewed the vocational school as the city's central institution for secondary-level education.^[37] In 1984, this distinct emphasis on vocational training over traditional academic secondary education that was expressed so clearly in Leningrad came to serve as a model for national educational reforms of that year.^[38] The possible retreat from the 1984 reforms under discussion as this volume goes to press in no way negates the impact of the Leningrad experience on previous policy decisions.

In a pattern that is repeated throughout our various policy studies, scientific research institutions played a critical role in the development of a distinctive Leningrad approach to primary, secondary, and post-secondary adult vocational education. In 1960, the Moscow-based USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences opened its Scientific Research Institute of General Adult Education in Leningrad (see Chart 5).^[39] The new institute immediately began research on professional training for adults, quickly establishing its reputation as the Soviet Union's premier center for the study of advanced vocational education. Three years later, the State Committee for Professional and Technical Education created its own research institute to examine secondary vocational education.^[40] This committee, like the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences before it, chose Leningrad as the site for its All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Professional-Technical Education.

Little is known about the decisions leading to the placement of both research centers in Leningrad. Undoubtedly, many factors influenced the final determination, one of which must have been the intense interest of the city's party leaders in vocational education. Whatever the reason for the final choice, making Leningrad the home of two of the USSR's leading research institutions that were perfecting professional training techniques gave Leningrad's leaders access to a powerful resource for restructuring local education. By the mid-1970s, both institutions employed a combined total of more than 300 researchers. Moreover, the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Professional-Technical Education also housed the Soviet Union's leading research library on vocational education. In any event, installation of both centers in Leningrad clearly reflected the local interest in vocational education by providing invaluable technical support for local politicians and also reinforced local efforts to expand vocational education.^[41]

In moving to implement their programs at the secondary-school level, Leningrad educators did not stop at scientific research. By 1965, already 82 professional-technical schools had opened their doors to

Chart 5.
Structure of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.

more than 35,000 Leningrad students. Over the next 15 years, the number of schools grew by 75 percent, and the number of students attending those schools increased by 158 percent.^[42] It took more than voluntarism on the part of parents and students to achieve this expansion of Leningrad's vocational education programs. Considerable pressure—both positive reinforcement and negative coercion—has been applied to Leningrad children and parents alike.

On the positive side, massive youth rallies—like that held at the mammoth Lenin sports-concert complex in October 1982—brought together thousands of local youth to hear city politicians extol the virtues of vocational education.^[43] Exhortations like this were and are repeated frequently, and the goal of fostering a "healthy relationship to labor" among area youth has become a constant theme in the public addresses of leading Leningrad political figures.^[44] Moreover, negative pressure has also been employed, as Leningrad students have been systematically discouraged from pursuing academic educational goals. For example, on the eve of the 1983 citywide admissions tests to Leningrad institutions of higher learning, a front-page feature article in the city's leading daily newspaper, Leningradskaia pravda , informed applicants that a vast majority of those seeking admission to institutions of higher learning would fail their examinations.^[45] Therefore, the article continued, applicants would be well advised to consider career and educational opportunities that were more readily available through vocational institutions.

Some Leningraders complain privately and with considerable passion that many parents were compelled to send their children to vocational schools upon completion of the standard eight-year general school curriculum, thereby foreclosing numerous career opportunities and ruining lives in a society where a degree from an institution of higher education is a ticket to success. For horrified parents, enrollment of their children in vocational programs precluded receipt of a full general secondary-school degree, thereby eliminating chances for post-secondary education and access to prestigious managerial and academic posts. Vocational education became synonymous in many Leningrad households with the closing down of opportunities for social advancement.

Although we have no direct published evidence of overt coercion by Leningrad educational or political officials, in June 1981 the address of regional party First Secretary Grigorii Romanov to the twenty-fifth regional party conference stopped just short of openly advocating coercion to increase vocational-school enrollment.^[46] In that hard-hitting speech, the first secretary noted with considerable satisfaction that graduates of professional-technical schools accounted for more than half of the workforce of all local labor collectives. "It is the task of party

organizations and pedagogical collectives," Romanov exclaimed, "to persistently inculcate in students the ability to find their bearings in present-day production."^[47] Left unstated, though implied throughout, is a suggestion that such goals can and will be achieved through the forcible enrollment of Leningrad teenagers into vocational education programs.

Whether furthered by coercion or encouragement, Leningrad vocational programs have produced a generation of highly skilled workers. The key to this accomplishment is to be found in the relationship be-tween vocational schools and future potential employers. During the 1970s, vocational programs in Leningrad and elsewhere in the Soviet Union have become more tightly linked to individual factories.^[48] By 1980, students enrolled at Leningrad's professional-technical schools received free room and board, as well as a daily wage based on effort on a factory production line.^[49]

At one vocational school (no. 105) third-year students were fully integrated with work brigades of the Main Leningrad Construction Administration—Glavleningradstroi.^[50]Leningradskaia pravda's educational correspondent reported that such relationships between future employment sites and vocational schools are pivotal to the success of vocational programs, even at such relatively new schools as the three-year-old vocational school no. 137.^[51] Elsewhere, in discussing the connections between school no. 147 and the Skorokhod Association, as well as school no. 6 and the Izhorsk Factory Association, the city's morning paper reported that although students frequently have slightly lower production norms than full-time workers, the gap gradually narrows as a student moves toward graduation.^[52] This report concluded that vocational students are able to move directly onto the production line precisely because they have become accustomed to the rhythm of industrial labor. It concluded that such accommodation results from the direct relationship of successful vocational schools, such as nos. 147 and 6, with factories, such as Skorokhod and Izhorsk.

Thus far we have seen that Leningrad vocational education programs outpaced similar curricula elsewhere in the Soviet Union in the speed with which schools were established, the pressure brought to bear upon parents and pupils alike to channel career aspirations into industrial professions, and the linkages established between schools and future employment sites. Perhaps most important of all, Leningrad remains noteworthy in the proportion of students enrolled in vocational education programs, particularly at the secondary level. By 1984, approximately 40 percent of all Leningrad secondary-school students completing eight-year general-school programs entered professional-technical schools, a rate of entry that remains unsurpassed elsewhere in the Soviet Union.^[53] In all, at that time, 211 city and regional voca-

tional schools were offering training in over 300 industrial specialties and trades.^[54] These educational patterns in Leningrad were serving as a model to be emulated throughout the nation.

Educational Reform Returns

In spring 1984, major revisions in primary and secondary educational programs were discussed in the Soviet Union. Both the draft proposals published in January 1984 and the final resolutions approved that April by the Supreme Soviet and Communist Party Central Committee remain strikingly similar despite one of the most extensive public-policy discussions in recent Soviet history.^[55] In the final analysis, the 1984 reforms seek to accomplish many of the goals first enunciated in 1958 by Nikita Khrushchev: for example, an increase in vocationally oriented education and a concomitant decline in academic training. In this respect the recent reforms more closely approximate the goals Khrushchev set forth in April 1958 than did the enacting legislation in December of that year.

Six major provisions stand out among the measures recommended by the 1984 reforms:^[56]

1. Nine years of compulsory education will be required of all students in both rural and urban settings.

2. A complete primary and secondary school program will require 11 years instead of 10 (the additional year of instruction being gained through a rollback in entry age from seven to six).

3. All educational programs, beginning from a pupil's first year of primary school, will offer vocational orientation curricula, with graduates of a nine-year program becoming eligible for entrance into a professional-technical school (40 percent of all ninth-year students being targeted to enter three-year vocational programs).^[57]

4. The number of classroom hours devoted to academic instruction will be reduced, to provide greater opportunity for vocational training.

5. The school day will be extended through day-care and supervised study programs, thereby reducing the need for parents to leave work early to care for school children during after-school hours.

6. Vocational programs will be devoted to the needs of local industries and not to those of the overall national economy (a relationship to be strengthened by direct linkages between professional-technical schools and local factories).

Several of these objectives have been based explicitly on the previous practices of Leningrad vocational education programs, especially those emphasizing professional-technical over traditional academic skills, reducing the number of classroom hours devoted to academic subjects, extending school hours, and establishing institutional ties between district schools and industrial enterprises. Leningrad vocational schools have also been particularly active in pursuing computer training.^[58] These features of the final reform would appear to confirm the contention of the director of Leningrad's professional-technical school no. 127, who told delegates to the twenty-sixth Leningrad regional party conference in January 1984 that the Central Committee openly and extensively drew on Leningrad's experience during the preparation of the draft reform.^[59] The director's observations were echoed by USSR Deputy Minister of Education Vladimir Korotov during an interview on Radio Moscow's domestic service, as well as by Leningrad Supreme Soviet delegate Boris Zhuravlev in an address to the USSR's leading legislative body.^[60] If implemented in full, the 1984 reform would have shaped the skills of the Soviet population as it enters the twenty-first century. The reorientation and rebuilding of an education system as large, diverse, and complex as the Soviet Union's does not take shape around any single set of experiences. Nonetheless, Leningrad's primary education and, even more so, its secondary education have long provided a de facto model for those who advocate vocation-oriented curricula.

The Leningrad Approach Goes National

To sum up, returning to the era of Khrushchev's initial proposals for educational reforms, we note again that Leningrad's industrial managers and Communist Party officials were then confronting a profound difference between the needs of an economic development policy that assumed complex work skills, on the one hand, and a working population that lacked the requisite skills to fulfill those needs on the other. Seeking strategies to maintain the development policy by ensuring the necessary skills, Leningrad elites began advocating the creation of an extensive network of factory-based vocational education centers to retrain experienced workers and educate local youth for new factory positions. In the past quarter-century those proposed vocational programs have come to fruition. Moreover, this Leningrad strategy emerged at the same time that local Communist Party officials were encouraging the development of a fledgling sociological research community to pursue industrial topics. Chapter 6 explores the consequences of this latter strategy.

The Leningrad approach to vocational education proved so suc-

cessful in the eyes of its proponents that, as we have noted, local social scientists widely credited it during 1984 interviews with having transformed the city's working population and, indirectly, with having helped reorient the local economy around technology-dependent industries. This impact is not negated by the reopening of the educational reform discussion under Gorbachev. Indeed, we may note that, in early 1986, Leningrad city party committee First Secretary Anatolii Dumachev assumed full responsibility for the management of the Soviet Union's entire vocational-technical education program when he moved to Moscow to become chair of the USSR State Committee on Vocational-Technical Education.^[61]