Revolution of the Mind

Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918 - 1929

Michael David-Fox

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501705380
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Using archival materials never previously accessible to Western scholars, Michael David-Fox analyzes Bolshevik Party educational and research initiatives in higher learning after 1917. His fresh consideration of the era of the New Economic Policy and cultural politics after the Revolution explains how new communist institutions rose to parallel and rival conventional higher learning from the Academy of Sciences to the universities. Beginning with the creation of the first party school by intellectuals on the island of Capri in 1909, David-Fox argues, the Bolshevik cultural project was tightly linked to party educational institutions. He provides the first account of the early history and politics of three major institutions founded after the Revolution: Sverdlov Communist University, where the quest to transform everyday life gripped the student movement; the Institute of Red Professors, where the Bolsheviks sought to train a new communist intellectual or red specialist; and the Communist Academy, headquarters for a planned, collectivist, proletarian science.

1 /

COMMUNIST INSTITUTIONS
AND REVOLUTIONARY MISSIONS
IN HIGHER LEARNING

From the first tentative innovations of the revolutionary underground to the rise of a unified system of party learning after 1920, the creation of educational institutions under Bolshevik Party auspices underwent a transformation of enormous scale and velocity — one that cuts to the heart of the relationship between Bolshevik missions and party institutions in revolutionary Russia. This historical vantage point affords some unexpected vistas.1 The goals of party education, no matter how often overshadowed by utilitarian political concerns (the desperate need to train loyal party cadres), in a succession of widely differing periods consistently blended visions of long-range transformation with imperatives of the most immediate practical utility. This potent mix, embedded in this learning of a new type, allowed the making of party schools to play a decisive role in broadening the Bolshevik project on the third front.

Yet party education was reborn after 1917 as only one of several educational and academic movements whose various impulses had been well established in opposition to tsarist policies, and which seized the revolutionary moment to expand and institutionalize lower-class, mass, and adult education. In the civil war period, moreover, party education arose as one of the least visionary of several forms of education that became alternatives to prerevolutionary institutions, since short-term crash training programs dominated its agenda. Yet by 1920–21 party learning, from remedial to advanced, was constituted as both a unified academic system and a cultural-ideological movement, as a Bolshevik agenda on the third front was endorsed and linked to party institutions.

Just as revolutionary missions may lead to the creation of new institutions, those new institutions may in turn shape revolutionary missions, channeling and, in a sense, re-creating them. This dynamic, fraught with irony and subversion of intent, was an intrinsic part of the post-civil war rise of communist education as a vehicle for Bolshevik missions on the third front. As new communist institutions became entrenched in the 1920s, codifying their own type of learning and scholarship, and consolidating their own evolving culture and place in the party polity, they increasingly provided the basis for the model that Bolshevism had lacked in higher learning when the revolution carne. Party education was traveling on a trajectory from a vehicle to a shaper of missions, from a revolutionary alternative to apart of the Soviet establishment.

For a crucial period in the 1920s, however, party academia remained an alternative challenge at the forefront of revolutionary missions on the cultural front. The rise of this party system bifurcated higher learning, in policy as in perception, as the Party created Bolshevik equivalents of academies, research institutes, universities, middle schools, and so on. It was party schools — more Marxist, more communist, and more proletaria n than the old institutions — which claimed the mande of revolution. Despite decisive changes the new order had brought to the old universities and VUZy, many policymakers began to analyze higher learning in terms of binary oppositions between old and new, state and party, universities and party schools, bourgeois and proletarian.

In the successive political-cultural shifts of the Great Break, the Great Retreat, and the Great Purges in the 1930s, all of higher education was at least outwardly Sovietized and Stalinized; the dual educational system of NEP lost its significance. With the early Soviet polarity between “bourgeois” and “red” muted if not obliterated, party education no longer commanded its extraordinary position of the 1920s. To be sure, party schools had become a permanent part of the system; in the 1930s, and especially after the reorganization of 1946, party education came to represent a vast training network encompassing higher schools for party cadres and political training for millions of adults. But never again were party institutions in a position directly to rival the conventional higher learning, and to influence the direction of organized intellectual life and central communist missions in so powerful a fashion.2 In this sense, the heyday of Bolshevik party education was when the making of institutions was still intertwined with revolutionary attempts to jettison the old and define the new.

Capri, Bologna, and Longjumeau:
Origins of Bolshevik Culture-Building, 1909–1911

Bolshevik education, given its singular importance for recruitment, inculcating rudimentary theory, and achieving “consciousness,” had roots in practices in the revolutionary movement that predated the notion of an alternative “party” education and, for that matter, the existence of political parties in Russia. The incipient social-democratic movement of the 1880s inherited underground study circles, or kruzhki, as the most durable means of transmitting revolutionary ideas. For generations of expelled students and workers with little formal education, they also provided makeshift apprenticeships in the techniques of agitation and conspiracy.3

The Bolshevik wing of Russian Social-Democracy, formed in 1903 and almost immediately thrust into the Revolution of 1905, faced crisis and attrition in “period of reaction” following the suppression of the revolutionary movement and the Stolypin coup d’etat. Yet just as a system of party education was largely created amid perceptions of a post-revolutionary “retreat” in the 1920s, the first party schools emerged in post-1907 exile to attempt the transformation of workers into party leaders, intellectuals, and agents. The reversal of open revolutionary offensive thus led, in both experiences, to a decisive broadening of Bolshevik revolutionary goals in education, culture, and science.

No matter how short-lived the three party schools of 1909–11 proved, the experience that created them influenced the Bolshevik tradition. The maximalist dreamers of this epoch, the Left Bolshevik (Vpered) group led by the philosopher of proletarian culture, Aleksandr Bogdanov, were effectively defeated by the hardheaded “centrist” Leninists by 1912. But the victors proved susceptible to elements of the cultural dreams of their rivals, just as the Vperedists were no strangers to hard-headed politics and utilitarian cadre production. As a result, the Vperedists’ innovative and organicist missions were wedded to the creation of party schools, even as the creation of party schools became enmeshed in Bolshevik high politics.

The German, French, and Belgian Social-Democratic parties were the first to found “higher party schools,” the Germans in 1905, and this precedent was duly noted by Lenin’s group after it had founded its own school at Longjumeau.4 But the impetus behind the first Bolshevik schools was rooted in Russian circumstances that linked the enterprise not just to politics and culture but also to the making of a new intelligentsia. Such phenomena as the rise of adult education in industrial neighborhoods and the passage of several generations of lower-class revolutionaries through student kruzhki had led to widespread recognition of an intermediate stratum of educated “worker-intellectuals” after the turn of the century, who, by their very existence, bridged the venerable social gulf revolutionaries had so often yearned to span.5 It was a self-educated rank-and-file worker organizer from the Urals known as comrade Mikhail (N. E. Vilonov) who proposed the idea of a “party university” to Maxim Gor’kii in 1908, and the idea gained support among several delegates traveling from Russia to the Fifth Party Conference a short time later.6 Since a central political fact resonating throughout the entire Bolshevik faction in this period was the “flight of the intelligentsia” from the movement in the wake of 1905, calls were widespread to replace the much-denounced fickle intellectuals with a new group of workers educated in Marxist theory and party organizational skills.7 In July 1909 Bogdanov and the engineer-turned-insurrectionist Leonid B. Krasin issued a call for a “new type of party school” that would prepare “reliable and conscious” working-class leaders, endowing them with the knowledge and the discipline of mind that intelligenty received in higher schools.8 From here it was but a step to associating the handful of workers attending the “underground” schools with the birth of “our own” proletarian intelligentsia. Party education began as an attempt to replace wayward intelligenty with reliable workers, a modest effort immediately endowed with grandiose symbolic resonance; it blossomed after 1917 into a quest ultimately to supplant the “old intelligentsia” tout court.

The Leninists and Vperedists teetered on the verge of a split in Bolshevism; Lunacharskii later dubbed it a “semi-schism.”9 Yet the recent rediscovery of the political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of the prewar ferment have identified it as a major development in the history of the revolutionary movement and Russian Marxism. Politically, the phenomenon of “anti-Leninist Bolshevism” has called attention to early Bolshevism’s nonmonolithic character. Philosophically, the new trends embraced by Bogdanov and colleagues gave more weight to the role of consciousness and culture than Lenin’s Plekhanovian orthodoxy.10 Left Bolshevism thus emerged as a Marxist parallel with modernist cultural movements that aimed at a kind of “secular religion of the one.”11 The creed of these innovative Bolsheviks intertwined making revolution with the creation of a collectivist, proletarian culture that would usher in a new kind of art, literature, and science.

Yet these origins of what later became central communist cultural missions in the 1920s have been interpreted, like the NEP era when many of them were mobilized, largely through a constricting choice between counterfactual “alternatives” and the seeds of totalitarianism. Bogdanovism has appealed to some as a lost choice, a libertarian program for worker self-empowerment that contrasts with the authoritarian tutelage of Lenin’s professional revolutionaries; to others, the Vperedist vision of the socialist intellectual, as arbiter of the group’s new theories of collective consciousness and proletarian culture, sowed the seeds of totalitarian domination in realms passed over by the Leninists.12

This rigid dichotomy has slighted both Vperedist and Leninist practice and interaction. Despite the voluminous literature on Bogdanov and Vperedism, the major organizational achievement of the Left Bolsheviks, the party schools at Capri and Bologna, have not been analytically compared to Lenin’s school at Longjumeau. I suggest a degree of cross-fertilization occurred, that distinctively Vperedist innovations passed into and informed Bolshevik traditions even as party education and cultural agendas remained at a nascent stage. I argue that party education, since it in many ways transcended factional lines, was flexible enough to accommodate both ambitions for cultural revolution and the pressing political tasks of providing a crash program for loyal cadres. Not only did such a blend of utopian vision and cadre politics become quintessential Bolshevism; the dual emphasis endowed party education with a lasting importance to those Leninists who emphasized political instruction above all and those former Vperedists who especially yearned for the advent of a new culture through the vehicle of a proletarian intelligentsia.

The two schools for “party propagandists” that the Vpered group organized at Capri and Bologna, and Lenin’s counter-school in the Paris suburb of Longjumeau, despite their brief existence and limitation to several dozen workers sent by party committees in Russia, had a far greater impact than their size or longevity suggest. Lenin attempted successfully to “disorganize” his rivals by provoking splits among their students, by luring them to Paris, and by using all the means at his disposal to have the Capri and Bologna schools branded “factional” and even “anti-party.” This, combined with the Vpered group’s natural inclination to use the schools to train its own loyalists, ensured that party high politics in these years revolved around the schools.13 One result was that party education was assured a place of permanent importance in the Bolshevik tradition.

It was significant for the making of this tradition, however, that Capri, Bologna, and Longjumeau schools were in fact not completely “factional” institutions. The schools were founded amid endless maneuverings and negotiations, which broke down in mutual recriminations, to create a nonfactional “general-party school.”14 As a result both groups attempted to give their own schools an “all-party” rather tha’n just a factional list of lecturers; Lunacharskii, for example, lectured on art and culture at all three institutions.15 Most important, all established educational agendas combining similarly defined realms of party theory, current politics, and practical revolutionary training. The utilitarian and party-political aspects of education were no less present at the Vperedist schools.

None of the schools can be understood without keeping in mind a basic fact later discussed by one of the Capri students, a certain Kosarev: he and his group were being prepared in the space of a few months to set off to do illegal party work in a provincial Russian city, where after three to six months they could expect arrest or at best relocation to a new assignment.16 At a time when the connections of the émigré revolutionaries to the empire were strained, it was obvious that the schools offered a great opportunity to cultivate loyalist followers. One is struck by the repeated assertion that for the Vperedists a major goal behind the schools was to train their own corps of agents (agentura). Lunacharskii later recalled, “Above all Bogdanov wanted to organize this whole top echelon of Vperedism as a strong propaganda center with its own journal and its own agentura. The agentura had to be recruited . . . with the help of these schools.”17 The charge dated back to June 1909, when the Bolshevik Center claimed that “the initiators of this [Capri] school . . . are organizing their own agentura.”18

The accuracy of this accusation was in a sense unimportant, for Lenin not only believed the story but admired the example. In a letter to Rykov in 1911, Lenin enviously referred to the Bogdanovites’ strength in mai...