Schooling in the Migrant City

One mark of modernity in the late-nineteenth-century Russian city was literacy, and schooling was the principal tool for its achievement. The assumption that a modern city, in order to function, needed a population that had ready access to print culture was a generally shared culturist attitude among Russian elites.^[35] City dwellers occupied a special position in educational affairs because literacy was so closely associated with urban employment and urban cultural activities. In contrast to squalor and drunkenness the urban school represented sobriety and industriousness. In the midst of poverty and insecurity it held out the promise of an improved living and a better social position. In cities that were deeply divided between the Westernized culture of the elites and the folk culture of the migrants, the school appeared to be the means both to open channels of communication between these two cultures and to form a common set of beliefs by which the urban population (or a substantial portion thereof) could find common cause.

Despite fears of the subversive effects of popular schooling, tsarist officials gave strong support to urban elementary and secondary education. Intellectuals volunteered considerable time and effort to spread literacy among the laboring population. The merchant and activist municipal factions, although deeply divided on other issues, united on the urgent need to finance elementary public schooling. This consensus emerged in a Moscow duma motion in 1863. It proclaimed that "there is not a single public need that can compare with the need for public education. Every other need

[34] "Otchet o sostoianii Khersonskoi eparkhii za 1890," TsGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 1369, 28-29.

[35] The meaning I give to Russian culturism closely resembles the definition proposed by Jeffrey Brooks, who emphasizes the importance of "shared literary values" in defining a "cultural identity" among educated Russians. For educated Russians service to the people necessarily meant the diffusion of these values and this identity into whatever social context their work took them; see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, 1985), 317-18. My focus on urbanism places special stress on the contentious role of culturism when confronted with other modes of cultural representation in the urban community.

can be postponed for a time in view of the unsatisfactory state of municipal revenues, but this need is not deferable."^[36]

In a country where elementary schooling had remained a low priority in public affairs until the mid nineteenth century and where the laboring population of the cities was expanding at a rapid rate, the success of the campaign for mass schooling depended on considerable financial and human investments. In the next half-century the results of urban education did not meet the high expectations of educators. However, we ought to measure the success of this endeavor in terms of popular need as well as in terms of culturist hopes. Efforts to expand and improve urban schooling began in the reform years in both the Ministry of Education and the municipalities. Tsarist urban educational policies changed dramatically in the reign of Alexander II. Under the 1785 statute, municipalities had had the right to fund district schools, but a lack of interest in the inflexible and formalistic study program had made these schools solely a state affair. Urban literacy instruction was carried out in the so-called free schools or by tutoring. These informal measures appear to have been relatively effective in spreading learning among the commercial classes, but could not meet the needs of migrant cities in the industrial age.

Two factors altered this situation in the reform years. First, the Ministry of Education prepared a new statute on urban elementary education. Introduced in 1872, it permitted the formation of several types of schools, which were intended, in the words of the minister, to "satisfy the needs of the local urban population." These schools varied widely in academic rigor and in the number of teachers. The range extended from "one-class" schools offering the most basic program of instruction to the advanced (and expensive) "four-class" schools. The choice of program was intentionally flexible to allow municipalities "in the large and rich cities" to form schools with "a greater number of classes and in the poor and small towns fewer classes."^[37] In addition, the ministry proposed that the municipalities assume the funding of the state's schools. Curricular decisions remained the prerogative of the ministry but by comparison with the prereform era the municipalities enjoyed far greater flexibility in choosing the type of elementary school that they judged to be appropriate to their community. In effect, the ministry sought to enroll the best people of the cities in support

[36] Quoted in Walter Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study in Municipal Self-Government" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1964), 430.

[37] "Otchet ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia," TsGIA, f. 733, op. 167, d. 62 (1870), 94-96; the discussions leading to the 1872 statute are examined in Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dimitry Tolstoi (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 215-25.

of its campaign for schooling and expected these people to find the means to pay for that campaign. The ministry also had need of the participation and funds of other groups, both private and public. In addition to the municipalities, the financial patrons of regular schools included merchant societies, factory owners, and individual businessmen. In the 1880s and 1890s the state made a particular effort to develop the parish schools that were run by the Orthodox church. Culturist critics condemned the elementary schooling of the church for its mediocrity, but it did become a real force in the campaign to spread urban learning.^[38]

Second, in the 1860s a spontaneous movement for the expansion of formal elementary schools appeared in provincial towns throughout the country. Even before the ministry altered its statute on urban education, municipalities had begun to fund a large number of new elementary schools; most of these schools were the basic one-class variety; their numbers increased at a rate of thirty to forty per year. The readiness to expand urban schooling continued to the end of the century, although the movement slowed appreciably as a result of the 1880s depression. On average fifty to sixty new one-class schools were added each year (see chart 1).^[39] Moscow had fifty-five municipal schools by 1882 and Saratov had a total of twenty. The numbers increased in the late 1890s but comprehensive data are not available for the years after 1893. Kharkov's merchant party, elected in 1893, doubled the number of elementary schools. Saratov's duma, which the provincial governor claimed was filled "primarily with trading people," transformed most of its schools into the elaborate four-class variety and enrolled 4,500 pupils. At the end of the decade one local writer affirmed that 90 percent of school-age children were in the town's schools.^[40] Once a distant dream, universal schooling became the official goal of Moscow's duma: in 1896 it passed a resolution in support of universal primary education for the city's children.

The impulse behind the drive for urban schooling was both visionary and practical. By the close of the nineteenth century elementary education appeared to be an essential part of reshaping popular urban culture. In the mid 1890s a Moscow school inspector could hope for widespread support for his call for universal literacy. He claimed that popular ignorance was no

[38] The only balanced study of the parish school movement is Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools (Berkeley, 1986), chap. 6.

[39] The trend for other types of elementary schools would probably vary, but the measure provided by the growth of one-class schools represents the most comprehensive common indicator of increased municipal involvement in public schooling.

[40] "Nachal'noe narodnoe obrazovanie v Saratove," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 21 (1899):52-53.

Chart 1.
Growth of Urban Schooling: Number of New Municipal One-Class Schools, 1860-93
Note: In 1856, there were 492 schools; in 1893, 2,227. Source: F. A. Fal'bork and V. I. Charnoluskii, eds.,
Nachal'noe narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1900), l:x, table 1.

longer nourished by "sorcerers, magicians, religious dissenters, [and] wanderers [stranniki , that is, religious zealots]" but warned that it had found new sources in "the taverns, the village kulak, the factory, the inn, and other products of contemporary economic relations." The result, he warned, was "degeneration and decay."^[41] His apocalyptic version of modernity echoed the uneasiness among elites in the West and in Russia at the consequences of industrialization and urbanization. As much as the Kherson bishop or the visitors to Khitrovka, this Moscow educator was very aware and fearful of the strangeness of the city that was taking shape about him.

Moscow's duma, like those of other migrant cities, heeded this and similar calls (although we need not presume that it accepted the doomsday part of the argument). Smaller towns, however, lacked the resources and the commitment to undertake an educational crusade. In 1890 the Ministry of Education admitted that nearly half of the old district schools (approximately four hundred) had not been taken over by municipalities. It attributed this failure primarily to the "insufficiency of funds" of many towns.^[42] It omitted to mention that the relatively ambitious curriculum of the district schools entailed an expense that the leaders of small towns judged to be an extravagance. The old informal methods, or the simple one-class level of schooling, sufficed for these town elders and presumably for their small electoral constituency.

In the migrant towns, however, economic opportunities provided a powerful incentive for expanded elementary education. There was a strong demand for free public (or parish) schooling. One simple indicator of this demand was the number of unsatisfied school applications in large urban centers. Although the evidence is incomplete, the figures suggest that the interest in elementary schooling was growing rapidly, more so than the financial support that municipalities were willing or able to commit to this activity. In Moscow in 1877 there were six hundred more admission requests than there were openings, and in 1890, despite a sevenfold rise in municipal expenditures on schooling, there were 2,600 excess admission requests. At the end of the 1890s Kharkov's schools, which had doubled

[41] Cited in Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 108; as Robert Nye has pointed out, in the late nineteenth century in Western Europe "degeneration" became a very fashionable code word to decry the conditions of the urban masses; see Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984), esp. 330-32.

[42] Otchet ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia za 1890 (St. Petersburg, 1894), 190-91.

in number since 1893, still had to refuse admission to five hundred children.^[43]

The testimony of school directors and instructors, which was collected in a survey by the Petersburg Literacy Committee in 1894-95, reveals the social pressures behind the increase in the number of requests for public schooling. In words that echoed those of many other reports a Moscow priest who directed a large parish school concluded that "the huge demand for the creation of free schools" was caused by the "great size and the poverty of the parish's population."^[44] The unstated expectation of the parents who sought to enroll their children was that the basic numeracy and literacy taught by these schools would serve to open access to employment for their offspring. For these parents the city was a place of work, harsh competition for well-paying jobs, and new opportunities for the educated. Second-guild merchants claimed that their "large families and extreme poverty" made financial aid indispensable from their merchant society, to whom they sent many petitions requesting support.^[45] Their appeals reveal more about their eagerness for formal learning for their sons than about their standard of living. Their alleged "extreme poverty" bore no resemblance to that of the migrant laborers.

Unsatisfied demands for schooling and appeals for aid are indicators that the settled urban population had new hopes for the future and that these hopes centered on their children's educational preparation for work. Such sentiments probably had more influence on decisions to expand the number of urban schools than the dramatic warnings from the educated elite of the dire effects of ignorance. The combination of popular support and official encouragement brought action from municipal dumas. By the turn of the century several thousand elementary schools (primarily of the one- and two-class variety) with over one-half million pupils existed in urban Russia.^[46]

The manner in which learning worked its way from classrooms and instructors into popular culture depended less on curriculum and adminis-

[43] E. A. Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie v 70-80-kh godakh XIX veka" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1956), 217, 255; Novoe vremia , 18 December 1899.

[44] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f., 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 321.

[45] Cited in V. I. Laverychev, Krupnaia burzhuaziia v poreformennoi Rossii, 1861-1900 (Moscow, 1974), 65.

[46] Nachal'noe narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii , ed. F. A. Fal'bork and V. I. Charnoluskii (St. Petersburg, 1900, 1:vii; this four-volume publication summarized the essential quantitative results of the survey (based on over thirty thousand replies) but omitted the perceptive comments of the respondents, which were often included in the completed forms.

trative regulations than on the social dynamics of urban society. Ben Eklof, who has studied Russian peasant schooling, reminds us that the acquisition of literacy and formal schooling are separate phenomena, that the ability to learn is not identical with basic reading, and that parents as well as teachers are influential actors in setting the content and the extent of school learning that is transmitted to the pupils.^[47] I take these warnings seriously in examining urban schooling even though there were substantial differences in the social and economic contexts of urban and rural schooling. Our knowledge of the concerns of pupils and parents comes largely from the testimony of teachers and the statistical data that the Ministry of Education collected. The extensive survey of elementary education, which was conducted by mail in 1894 by the Petersburg Literacy Committee, permitted instructors throughout the country to make clear their own ambitious plans as well as the support or opposition they encountered within their communities. These somewhat random clues indicate that at the level of elementary schooling educational authorities and urban parents had substantially different expectations.

Urban schoolteachers were both agents of the tsarist educational system and, to some extent at least, proselytizers in their own right. They created a set of sometimes contradictory objectives for their pupils. Echoes of the values of the Russian intelligentsia sounded in the words of one Moscow school instructor who was an avowed enemy of scholasticism. He defined the goal of teaching, which he presented as the true ambition of his pupils, as "a level of development necessary for an understanding of the surrounding world [priroda ] and for a critical [soznatel'nyi ] understanding of books."^[48] His idealism, which supposed that his pupils would become participants in an interactive cultural environment, bore only a remote resemblance to the prescribed curriculum of these schools. It reflected the view, which was widespread in Russia and the West, that cultural uniformity was desirable. Confronting popular dialects and urban jargon, the teachers hoped, in the words of a Moscow girls' school teacher, to teach uncultured youth not only "to speak and write Russian correctly" but also "to understand literary Russian speech."^[49] In this sense elementary schooling and literacy meant basic acculturation into the world of the intellectuals.

At another level the teachers' proselytizing sought a unity based on

[47] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , esp. chap. 1.

[48] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 158.

[49] Cited in Christine Hinshaw, "The Soul of the School: The Professionalization of Urban Schoolteachers in St. Petersburg and Moscow" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1986), 123.

national identity. This political mission, which was also common to public schooling in Western nations, assumed special importance to authorities in the Russian cities because of their fears of social conflict and political subversion. The school curriculum invariably included Orthodox teaching and, usually, elementary Russian history; these were the means to transmit the two official virtues of piety and patriotism. They constituted the essence of learning for the instructor—cleric in a Kiev parish school. He affirmed his commitment to teaching his pupils the "national language" and to conveying to them that "the most holy duty of a well-raised person is faith in God, lofty patriotic sentiment toward the throne and the fatherland, [and] the spirit of love toward one's neighbors and one's family."^[50] His language, which sounds stilted and arrogant to our skeptical era, echoed the official nationalism of the tsarist government. Although backed by the power of state and the authority of tradition, it was as remote from the mechanical exercises involved in numeracy and literacy as was the cultural idealism of the Moscow instructor.

Urban social conditions played a decisive role in determining the impact of elementary learning. Schools were part of a community whose members were deeply divided by rank and wealth. Powerful voices among tsarist educators spoke in favor of schooling according to social standing. It was evident in the comments of the director of a Voronezh one-class school, who was convinced that "because almost all the pupils belong to families of artisans and peasants, the students of the school fully satisfy them."^[51]

These varied educational objectives provide one indication of the competing cultural agendas for the Russian city. Schooling proposed language skills and basic concepts with which educated Russians (in their capacity as officials, intellectuals, or radicals) could hope to form a common discourse with an urban population whose social conditions and awareness of their own place in society were in rapid flux. At the same time it provided, at a very basic level, practical and vocational skills that offered immediate occupational rewards in economically dynamic urban centers. For many Russian townspeople these two objectives were of unequal importance.

The indirect evidence we possess on popular educational goals suggests that none of these authoritative opinions expressed the dominant attitude of townspeople toward elementary education. When the opportunity arose to place their offspring in more advanced schools, parents seized the chance—very different behavior than most rural families, who appear to

[50] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 445, 82.

[51] Ibid., d. 321, p. 19.

have been convinced for both cultural and economic reasons that only the most essential learning was desirable.^[52] By the 1890s a skeletal framework of a "ladder" of urban education was in place. Indicating the openings for his graduates, a Kiev teacher in a one-class school cited an array of possibilities that included "the two-class school, the artisan school, the medical orderly school, and, for the best students, the realshule [technical] secondary school]."^[53] That these schools represented real opportunities to townspeople is apparent in the enrollment figures. One of the best networks of secondary technical schools were the railroad institutes: over thirty of these institutes were founded in the 1870s and 1880s. The director of the Kiev railroad school, proud of the fact that all his teachers were gymnazium graduates, remarked in 1894 that every year his institution of 250 pupils had to turn away from fifty to one-hundred applicants.^[54]

These figures, although minute in proportion to the population of youth in a city like Kiev, suggest that families in the migrant cities were aware that education promised economic and social advancement. At some level economic need and social constraints led parents to set a limit to such hopes. A note of fatalism appears in the judgment of a Moscow director, whose pupils' future beyond his school appeared determined by the urban world to which they belonged. "The poor parents," he forecast, "will place their boys in apprenticeship, traders will put their boys in commerce, and the well-off [sostoiatel'nye ] will put their children in other educational institutions."^[55] Prospects for new and better jobs were present in the migrant cities thanks to the multiplication of public services and economic activities. The inspirational motto for this open door to the future was the urban intellectual's exhortation to his son to "study or you won't find decent work" (at least such was the analysis of a rural schoolteacher contrasting rural and urban attitudes toward schooling).^[56] Popular literature imitated and shaped reality in this respect. The success of the Russian translation of Smiles's inspirational book, Self-Help , is one indication. Another indication is found in the popular novels of the late century, which contained, in Jeffrey Brooks's careful reading, a prominent theme of "education for concrete practical aims."^[57]

The hope that successful pupils would find "decent jobs" was under-

[52] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 440-41.

[53] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 445, 15.

[54] Ibid., 174-75.

[55] Ibid., d. 575, 193.

[56] Cited in Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 253.

[57] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read , 282.

mined by social conservatism and cultural prejudice. Anti-Semitism restricted to a handful the number of pupils from the Yiddish elementary schools in the Pale of Settlement who could hope to enter more advanced (Russian) public institutions. Urban schooling was as diverse as the population that was moving into and through the cities and was as much subject to these influences as it was a force in its own right. By the late century the composition of urban elementary schools resembled the social profile of the typical migrant city; among the 8,500 pupils in Moscow's schools in the mid-1880s nearly 40 percent came from the petty bourgeoisie and almost as many came from the peasantry.^[58] Both families and teachers set clear limits to the formal learning of children from these groups. One cleric-instructor claimed in the mid 1890s that, because his new parish school experienced an "enormous influx of parents seeking to enroll their children," the "common people" [prostoi narod ] were aware of "the necessity of studies."^[59] Implicit in his observation was the expectation that education would not alter the lowly social standing of his pupils.

Cultural conservatism and poverty meant that the restrictions on learning for girls were more confining than those for boys. In the mid-1890s Moscow's school population included as many girls as boys, but girls remained tightly bound to the family and there were few occupations for which elementary education could prepare them. An Ekaterinoslav instructor of a one-class girl's school explained that her "poorer" graduates "satisfy themselves with this level of education" but added that those who entered the advanced school in town "take the special sewing section."^[60] Employment in positions such as seamstress, governess, or instructor in a girl's school was the best that girls could hope for. The genteel poverty offered by these trades was a more dignified status in the community than that of their families—most schoolgirls were from the petty bourgeoisie—but it represented a paltry reward by comparison to the possibilities increasingly available to boys. Gender was an obstacle to schooling itself; girls continued to assume special family responsibilities. In the opinion of one Moscow teacher, the girls were frequently absent from class because they lacked "warm clothes and [because they had] to replace their mothers in caring for younger brothers and sisters." Another teacher attributed their responsibilities at home to "sick or drunk adult members of the

[58] "Vedomost' o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 3-4 (1886):154-55.

[59] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 211.

[60] Ibid., d. 371, 22.

family."^[61] Boys were spared this duty because they were not constrained by the family domain.

The indifference on the part of many parents toward "higher culture" set the limits to the boys' contact with formal schooling. Eklof argues that the low percentage of graduates from rural schools was not the result of the need for child labor but because the full program of studies was irrelevant to peasant occupations.^[62] Ironically, a similar condition emerged in the cities, albeit in a very different context and to a lesser degree. Although urban schools were able to attract a large and growing proportion of school-age children, at the end of the century they were nonetheless unable to hold more than half of them until graduation. However, the situation appears to have been an improvement over the 1870s. In 1878 a Ministry of Education survey of urban schools found that the schools in the major cities lost three to six times as many pupils as they graduated.^[63] The result was that the large majority of pupils, whose ages clustered between eight and eleven, were in the class sections that covered the first two years of study. In that period they acquired what an educator from the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don called "the rudiments of reading and writing."^[64] Thus, for many Russian townspeople the urban print culture signified little more than the acquisition of basic numeracy and literacy.

Undoubtedly, parents' decisions to limit their children's education involved calculations of relative opportunity costs. In explaining the high dropout rate, educators and pupils often referred to poverty, but this explanation carried with it the parents' perception of their current needs and the future prospects of their offspring, on whom they relied for security in their old age. When asked why they did not complete their schooling, a majority of young Moscow workers polled at the turn of the century referred to a parental decision; at times they explained the decision on the basis of "poverty," but more often they associated it with the parents' will.^[65] As in rural areas, formal elementary schooling in the cities did not by itself disrupt family and social patterns of behavior and attitudes. As a consequence, both the critical reading faculties that the Moscow factory

[61] Ibid., d. 575, 128, 157.

[62] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , chaps. 11, 12.

[63] "Otchet ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia," TsGIA, f. 733, op. 117, d. 68 (1878), 311: the end-of-the-century data come primarily from my reworking of the archival data in the 1894 survey for urban schools in Moscow, Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, and Voronezh provinces.

[64] Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 25 (January 1903):69.

[65] Cited in Rashin, Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii (Moscow, 1958), 592.

instructor sought and the elaborate piety and patriotism that the cleric-teacher preferred had little chance of shaping the malleable minds of their young pupils.

Having acquired the rudiments of reading and writing, town youths had an increasingly diverse and rich print culture available to them. To the extent that publications in the cities were accessible to this minimally educated public—a topic I discuss later—a close tie existed between the learning conveyed by formal schooling and the urban literary culture in the cities. The culturist aspirations of educators worked their influences on youths in school, but an increasingly varied array of readings outside the classroom were also important. When one instructor noted that many of the parents of the pupils in his factory school "subscribe to magazines and newspapers," he unwittingly identified a key explanation for the presence of those pupils in his class.^[66] Urban schooling was a part of a larger process of cultural adaptation to the new city. Those families with newspaper and magazine subscriptions had found one means by which to expand their own horizons as well as those of their children. In their own way they had entered the world of print culture; by sending their offspring to the factory school, they were ensuring that their children would be part of that world too.

Those who placed their hopes for the future in an enlightened city promoted cultural activities that made education accessible to adults. The movement for literacy schools, which was directed at the laboring population, was funded and led by volunteers. Like other popular causes in those decades, this movement attracted educated Russians who were aware that their cultural activities were pathetically meager when compared with both the need for action and their own idealistic language. An easy target for cruel satire, their work reveals a great deal about the efforts to reshape urban culture. Volunteer cultural work attracted some of the civic activists, particularly in the field of teaching the skills associated with basic literacy. This area served as a test of the commitment of educated Russians to social progress. In the early 1860s, when municipal support for elementary schooling first appeared, a movement for adult literacy schools also emerged.

This first period of volunteer schooling revealed the traits that would characterize the movement throughout its existence. The campaign was the product of a cultural vision that, in the words of one young idealist, literacy

[66] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 574, 232.

would let a "beneficial light" shine on the people.^[67] Just what this light would reveal depended on the political persuasion of the volunteers. Some were openly hostile to the tsarist regime. In 1862 this hostility led the tsarist government to ban the movement it had authorized just two years previously.

During their brief existence the two hundred literacy schools sustained the hope of their own organizers and teachers that this form of idealism met popular needs and united the urban masses and educated society. One of the women teachers recalled later that volunteer teaching of basic numeracy and literacy constituted "the very first outlet for our aspiration for work, the public good, [and] contacts with the people."^[68] Although her vision drew no distinctions between classes of people, literacy schools served the laboring population of the capitals and the provincial centers. They met on workers' one free day of the week and received the title of Sunday schools. For their part, the pupils fixed the goal of this schooling as the acquisition as quickly as possible of the "rudimentary skills" for life in the city. The disparity between the idealism of many teachers and the vocational objectives of the students was enormous.

Despite tsarist fears of political subversion, the authorities were not prepared to ban entirely volunteer efforts to raise urban literacy levels. In 1874 the government reauthorized the literacy schools; its readiness to take this step suggests that the tsarist regime placed a high priority on the diffusion of basic literacy skills among the population. The Ministry of Education reorganized the rules on the organization of the schools to control the suspicious enthusiasm of the volunteer teachers while still tolerating their presence. The hostility of the authorities remained a serious obstacle to volunteer schools; in 1889 Moscow's authoritarian governor-general, for reasons that are not clear, forced the city duma to close nine of the existing fifteen adult schools.^[69] Sporadic tsarist repression did not dissuade the volunteers, and in fact it may have encouraged them. Both the government and the volunteers shared a conviction that a literacy movement was a necessary part of the campaign to spread elementary education among the population.

Although tsarist regulations made no distinction between city and coun-

[67] TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 1, d. 74 (1862), 191; see also Reginald Zelnik," The Sunday-School Movement in Russia, 1859-62," Journal of Modern History 27 (June 1965): 151-70.

[68] Z. Bazileva, "Arkhiv semei Stasovykh," in Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia (Moscow, 1965), 439.

[69] L. F. Pisar'kova, "Deiatel'nost' Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy v oblasti meditsiny, narodnogo obrazovaniia i obshchestvennogo prezreniia posle 1892," Problemy istorii SSSR 7 (1978): 137.

tryside, the centers of volunteer work were once again the provincial capitals. At times factory owners promoted adult education for their workers, but most often literacy committees took the initiative. The leader (until its forced reorganization in 1895) was the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee. By the end of the century there were almost three hundred schools in seventy-five cities, and total enrollment was estimated to be fifty thousand pupils. St. Petersburg and Moscow were the most active centers of the literacy movement, each with over twenty schools.^[70] The literacy campaign, although numerically small in comparison to public schooling, played a significant role in raising urban literacy and in encouraging hopes for an enlightened urban population.

Idealism was once again a powerful motivation for the organizers and teachers. If the attitude of one participant in the Kharkov literacy committee is representative, to become a volunteer was to prove one's rightful place among "the best representatives of the intelligentsia." In his opinion, "Among former and present inhabitants of Kharkov [every name] known for scientific or public activities" was present on the list of members.^[71] The Kharkov committee's membership had known both lean and prosperous years. The latter came at the beginning of its existence and at the end of the century, when it counted almost seven hundred members.^[72] Its activities, which were typical of the provincial centers, included the founding of both a men's and a women's school. The women's school was specifically intended for girls working in clothing enterprises "because a large portion of the girls of the poor urban population choose the sewing trade."^[73] This type of activity was "small deeds" without bureaucratic interference; it was visible evidence that intellectuals and the urban poor could find a common cause.

The lofty ideals of the organizers of the adult literacy schools were far removed from the practical concerns of the pupils. The evidence suggests that most of the adult pupils shared the same single-minded concern for the acquisition of rudimentary skills that the school children in elementary public schools exhibited. The 1894 survey cited earlier contacted some of these schools. The director of one Moscow women's literacy school made the somewhat disabused judgment that "very many [pupils] are satisfied with acquiring the ability to read 'any' little book, to write notes, to cal-

[70] L. M. Ivanov, "Ideologicheskoe vozdeistvie," in Rossiiskii proletariat: Oblik, bor'ba, gegemoniia , ed. L. Ivanov (Moscow, 1970), 331-32.

[71] A. Didrikhson, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel'nosti Khar'kovskogo obshchestva rasprostraneniia v narode gramotnosti (Kharkov, 1911), 9.

[72] Ibid., 243.

[73] Ibid., 59.

culate bills, [and] to do arithmetic; [they] leave school after one or two years." He also noted that his two hundred pupils were largely migrants (three-fourths belonged to the peasant estate), some working in factories, others in workshops, and that they possessed the rudiments of learning before joining his school.^[74] For the migrants, schooling was part of an effort to find for themselves as secure a place as possible in their new urban world. The great majority of the pupils in the literacy schools were young; in the mid 1880s only 15 percent were over seventeen years old.^[75] The effort to create an integrated urban literate culture reached those whose first priority was to acquire early in life the skills that would be most useful for a successful career in the city.

The encounter with the volunteer teachers left an abiding impression on a few of the pupils. One worker, who recalled that most of his young Petersburg factory friends preferred recreation to learning, recorded his own astonishment that "people of another world [sreda ]" would "teach for free, that is, solely for the sake of bringing knowledge to the people."^[76] In that encounter his search for enlightenment led him into the Marxist revolutionary movement. In the same spirit, another Petersburg worker noted in a school essay that as a result of his education he was able to see "with more open eyes how people of other lands live and work."^[77] He expected that this understanding would become a guideline to social and political action. It was a hope that some of their teachers were more than willing to satisfy. These cultural ambitions exceeded by far the goal of most pupils to learn to read "any little book." But both objectives were capable of remaking, in different ways, urban popular culture.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Russian migrant cities were centers of intensive educational activity. The spread of formal schooling was the most important part of this process. Officials, civic activists, and intellectuals endeavored—albeit with very different goals—to incorporate the largest possible proportion of townspeople into a print culture. The goals of those who organized the campaigns to spread the basic skills of learning are relatively easy to discern. However, it is far more difficult to assess the impact of the acquisition of these new cultural tools on millions of individuals. The subject, one that extends far beyond the scope of this study, is explored very thoughtfully in Eklof's examination of rural school-

[74] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 2-9.

[75] "Vedomost' o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 3-4 (1886): 158-59.

[76] I. V. Babushkin, Vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1925), 35-36.

[77] Cited in I. A. Shuster, Peterburgskie rabochie (Leningrad, 1976), 54-55.

ing. He points out the problematical significance of the simple measure of literacy (that is, the ability to read) in assessing the significance of changes in literacy rates. Nonetheless, literacy figures remain the only quantitative indicators that are capable of summarizing such a massive process.

These indices suggest that by century's end the majority of the urban population had access to some form of print culture. The 1897 census found that 60 percent of the population of migrant cities was literate, a substantial increase from the mid century. Literacy varied enormously among age and social groups. Many adult migrants were illiterate and, especially in the reform years, the intensive migration from the countryside to the cities had undoubtedly slowed the increase in literacy levels. There is good reason to believe, however, that by the close of the nineteenth century rural families understood that basic literacy and numeracy were a valuable skill for urban migration, and many found schooling for their offspring.^[78] To judge by the conscription reports and by the factory records of young workers (most of whom were migrants), by the 1890s literacy had spread among almost all young men in the cities.^[79] The migrant cities in these crude terms were becoming places where the printed word could reach most of the adult population.

Whether or not this access to the world of print culture entailed a fundamental change in beliefs and learning skills is a question that cannot be answered with certainty. The evidence is scanty and contradictory. Urban daily life offered both practical and leisure-time inducements for the urban population to use the rudimentary skills that they acquired in elementary education. Scholars have subsequently confirmed what firsthand experience revealed, namely, that "achievement in handling the tools of reading and writing is one of the most important axes of social differentiation in modern societies."^[80] The retention of literacy and numeracy was a perennial problem among the rural population, but it does not seem to have been an issue among the urban population. The return to the village of the successful urban migrant was potentially an ample reward for literacy. In the city, proof that literacy and numeracy were rewarded in both work and leisure was everywhere available. In this sense cultural modernity was present among the urban population.

Tsarist officials, religious leaders, and educators were deeply divided on

[78] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 268.

[79] "Gramotnost' i stepen' obrazovaniia prizyvnykh," Sbornik statei po voprosam otnosiashchimsia k zhizni russkikh gorodov 11 (1901): 258-61; S. V. Bernstein-Kogan, Chislennost', sostav i polozhenie Peterburgskikh rabochikh (St. Petersburg, 1910), 66.

[80] Jack Goody, "The Consequences of Literacy," in Literacy in Traditional Societies , ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 58.

the question of the moral efficacy of schooling and literacy. No educated Russian aware of the migrant strangers in their city would mourn the decline of superstition as a result of education (if indeed such were the case), but what was its effect on religious faith? Formal learning had its own practical rewards, but could it counteract the forces of the tavern and the brothel to instill the desirable personal traits of sobriety and industriousness? The debates about learning and popular culture in the cities touched on issues of personal conduct, labor relations, and public morality. Although some cultural leaders found hope in the spread of schools and popular reading materials, others sounded a somber note. They worried that "decay and decadence" would overwhelm their crusade for enlightenment.

More sanguine observers, however, stressed the spiritual benefits of learning. The bishop of Saratov seemed to have constructed his own ideal "city on a hill" when in 1896 he contrasted the "simple, childlike faith" of the "rural, illiterate population" and the heightened "level of religious knowledge" of the Bible, the liturgy, and church ritual that he attributed to the "literate [urban] population."^[81] In personal accounts of the impact of schooling on urban youth, some instructors echoed this optimistic view. According to the cleric-instructor in one southern town, the parents of pupils in the parish school were "very pleased that their children can read and sing at church services, and [they] require them to read at home."^[82] Thus, learning and urban religious practice were compatible. One instructor of a factory school in a provincial town in Moscow province noted in the 1894 survey that schooling appeared to him to "diminish drunkenness" and to augment his students' interest in "reading more books on religious subjects."^[83]

Whatever the veracity of such judgments, they reflected a deeply embedded assumption about print culture. Like the radical intellectual who brought socialist doctrine to pupils in a literacy school or the factory manager who was convinced that literacy, sobriety, and industriousness formed a single personality type, no one spoke out against education; all assumed that the processes of learning were part of the transformation of urban culture as a whole. They were as preoccupied with the moral impact of education as they were concerned about the strange, threatening world

[81] "Otchet o sostoianii Saratovskoi eparkhii za 1896," TsGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 1636, 20.

[82] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 448, 3-4.

[83] Ibid., d. 574, 227-28.

of ignorance and decadence in slums such as Khitrovka. Despite evidence that the cultural values and social relations among the urban population could not be controlled, other movements in addition to the campaign for schooling attempted to guide cultural change in the Russian migrant cities.