become cultural nationalism, and that in turn would lead to separatism. Always suspicious, the Soviet leadership kept uncovering 'bourgeois nationalists' in union republics and lesser subdivisions of the U.S.S.R. In the crucially important case of Ukraine, for example, the Party apparatus itself suffered several sweeping purges because of its 'deviations.' Moreover, after a controlled measure of Great Russian patriotism and nationalism became respectable in the Soviet Union, Stalin and the Politburo began to stress the Russian language and the historical role of the Great Russian people as binding cement of their multinational state. This trend continued during the Second World War and in the postwar years. Eastern peoples of the U.S.S.R. were made to use the Cyrillic in place of the Latin alphabet for their native tongues, while the Russian language received emphasis in all Soviet schools. Histories had to be rewritten again to demonstrate that the incorporation of minority nationalities into the Russian state was a positive good rather than merely the lesser evil as compared to other alternatives. Basically contrary to Marxism, the new interpretation was fitted into Marxist dress by such means as stress on the progressive nature of the Russian proletariat and the advanced character of the Russian revolutionary movement, which benefited all the peoples fortunate enough to be associated with Russians. But Stalin, and some other Soviet leaders as well, went further, giving violent expression to some of the worst kinds of prejudices. Notably the quite un-Marxist vice of anti-Semitism found fertile soil in the Soviet Union. Yiddish intellectuals were among the groups virtually wiped out by the purges. Jews were generally excluded from the Soviet diplomatic service. Stalin's and Zhdanov's fierce attack on 'cosmopolitanism' after the Second World War seemed particularly difficult to reconcile with the international character of Marxism or with the legacy of Lenin. The Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R. had more than one sound reason behind it.
Education played an extremely important role in the development of the Soviet Union. Educational advances were a most important part of state planning
and made the striking Soviet economic and technological progress possible. As already indicated, education also stood at the heart of the evolution of Soviet society.
Somewhat less than half of the Russian people were literate at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Furthermore, the years of civil war, famine, epidemics, and general disorganization that followed the establishment of the Soviet regime resulted in a decline of literacy and in a general lowering of the educational level in the country. Beginning in 1922, however, the authorities began to implement a large-scale educational program, aiming not only at establishing schools for all children, but also at eliminating illiteracy among adults. By the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, that is, by 1938, a network of four-year elementary schools covered the U.S.S.R., while more advanced seven-year schools had been organized for urban children. The total elimination of illiteracy proved more difficult, although the government created more than 19,000 'centers for liquidating illiteracy' by 1925 and persevered in its efforts. The census of 1926 registered 51 per cent of Soviet citizens, aged ten and above, as literate; that of 1939 81.1 per cent. Projecting the increase, 85 per cent of the Soviet people must have been literate at the time of the German invasion, and almost all at the end of the Communist regime.
The four-year and the seven-year schools became basic to the Soviet system. But ten-year schools also appeared in quantity. This type of school, for boys and girls from seven to seventeen, provides more class hours in its ten years than does the American educational system in twelve. Although in 1940 tuition was introduced in the last three years of the ten-year school, as well as in the institutions of higher learning - and repealed and restored since - an extremely widespread system of scholarships and stipends was used at all times to make advanced education available to those with ability.
After initial experimentation with some progressive education and certain quite radical methods of teaching the young and combining school and life, Soviet education returned to entirely traditional, disciplinarian, and academic practices. The emphasis centered on memorization and recitation, with a tremendous amount of homework. It has been estimated that, if Soviet schoolchildren were to do all their assignments conscientiously and to the full, they would be reading 280 printed pages a day! Soviet schools were especially strong in mathematics and science, that is, in physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy, as well as in geography and drafting. But they also stressed language, literature, foreign languages, and history, together with certain other academic subjects. For instance, six years of a foreign language were taught in a ten-year school. There were no electives. Before he lost power Khrushchev emphasized the need to bring schools closer to life and to combine education in the upper grades with some apprenticeship work in factories and farms. But educational reforms along these lines proved to be abortive. Many students, however, were forced to spend at least two years 'in production,' that is, in factory or agricultural work, before proceeding from secondary to higher education. The Soviet Union also had spe-
cial schools for children with musical and artistic gifts, military schools, and the like. In addition, many boarding schools for the general education of Soviet children were established. They numbered 2,000, with 500,000 pupils, in the autumn of 1961, and were described as the 'new school of Communist society' at the Twenty-second Party Congress. Probably because of their great expense and the generally more modest tone of subsequent leadership, they lost their prominence.
Beyond secondary schools, there stood technical and other special schools, as well as full-fledged institutions of higher learning. The number of these higher schools was constantly growing. While Soviet authorities developed the old university system, they placed much more emphasis in higher education on institutes that concentrated on a particular field, such as technology, agriculture, medicine, pedagogy, or economics. Study in the institutes ranged from four to six years; a university course usually took five years. Applicants to universities and institutes had to take competitive entrance examinations, and it has been estimated that frequently as many as two out of three qualified candidates had to be rejected because of lack of space. The older Soviet students, as well as the schoolchildren, were required to attend all their classes, were in general subject to strict discipline, and followed a rigidly prescribed course of study.
The educational effort of the Party and the government extended beyond schools to libraries, museums, clubs, the theater, the cinema, radio, television, and even circuses. All of these, of course, were owned by the state, were constantly augmented, and were closely co-ordinated to serve the same purposes. More peculiarly Soviet was the practice of constant oral propaganda in squares and at street corners, with more than two million propagandists sponsored by the Party. Bereday has written authoritatively on the spread of education in the Soviet Union, and has compared this spread with the situation in the United States:
… [In 1958] there were in the Soviet Union approximately 110,000 elementary four-year schools, 60,000 seven-year schools, and 25,000 ten-year schools, a total of nearly 200,000 regular schools of general education. There are, in addition, some 7,000 auxiliary special and part-time schools, 3,750 technikums and professional schools, 730 institutes of higher education, and 39 universities. The countryside is dotted by 150,000 libraries, 850 museums, 500 theaters, 2,700 Pioneer palaces, 500 stations for young technicians and naturalists, 240,000 movie theaters, and 70 circuses. A task force of 1,625,000 teachers and other personnel mans this extensive enterprise… Population and school-attendance figures substantiate the ambitions of the Soviet educational plan to reach all the people. The figures now available estimate the situation as follows: 2,500 out of each 10,000 people were in some type of school in 1955-1956; 814 of these were in grades five to ten of the general secondary school, 100 were in professional secondary schools, and 93 were in institutions of higher learning. These figures, which account for one-fourth of the total
population, expand as we single out for consideration only the present younger generation. Approximately 10 per cent of the appropriate age group attend institutions of higher education, the second largest proportion in the world after the United States, with 33 per cent of its youth in colleges. About 30 per cent of the appropriate age group complete secondary education, a close second after the United States, with 45 per cent. At the age of fourteen 80 per cent of the age group are still in school, in the United States some 90 per cent.
Education on the job and by correspondence was also extremely widespread in the U.S.S.R. Moreover, a further expansion and diffusion of education constituted an essential part of the recent five-year plans, although the rate of educational advance slowed down compared to the earlier period, while comparison with the United States was affected by the great expansion of American higher education in the 1960's.
Soviet education, and indeed Soviet culture in general, greatly profited from the prerevolutionary legacy. The high standards, the serious academic character, and even the discipline of Soviet schools dated from tsarist days. The main Communist contribution was the dissemination of education at all levels and on a vast scale, although it
