A history of Russia

forty-two. In 1706 a medical school with a student body of fifty began instruction in Moscow; in 1709 another medical school, this time with thirty students, started functioning in St. Petersburg. Peter I also organized small classes to study such special subjects as Chinese and Japanese and the languages of some non-Russian peoples within the empire. In addition to establishing state schools, the reformer tried to improve and modernize those of the Church. Finally, education in Russia expanded by means of private schools which began to appear in the course of his reign.

Peter the Great's measures to promote enlightenment in Russia also included the founding of a museum of natural science and a large general library in St. Petersburg. Both were opened free to the public. But the reformer's most ambitious cultural undertaking was the creation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Although the Academy came into being only some months after Peter the Great's death, it represented the realization of a major project of the reformer's last years. The Academy had three departments, the mathematical, physical, and historical, as well as a sec-

tion for the arts. The academicians gave instruction, and a high school was attached to the Academy to prepare students for this advanced education. Although the Academy operated at first on a small scale and consisted of only seventeen specialists, all of them foreigners, it became before long, as intended, the main directing center of science and scholarship in the Russian Empire. The enormously important Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. was a continuation of the Petrine Academy. It has been noted repeatedly, sometimes with an unbecoming derision, that Russia obtained an Academy of Sciences before it acquired elementary schools - a significant comment on the nature of Peter the Great's reforms and the role of the state in eighteenth-century Russian culture.

After the death of Peter the Great, there followed a certain decline in education in Russia. Once the government relaxed its pressure, state schools tended to empty and educational schemes to collapse. Church schools, which were much less dependent on the reformer, survived better. They were to produce many trained Russians, some of whom became prominent in a variety of activities in the eighteenth and subsequent centuries. On the whole, however, Church schools served Church needs, i.e., the training of the clergy, and stood apart from the main course of education in Russia. With the rise of the gentry in the eighteenth century, exclusive gentry schools whose graduates were given certain privileges became increasingly important. Peter the Great's artillery and engineering academies were restricted to members of that class, while new cadet schools were opened under Empress Anne and her successors to prepare sons of the nobility to assume the duties of army officers, in contrast to the first emperor's insistence on rising through the ranks. Home education, often by foreign tutors, also developed among the gentry. Increasing attention was given to good manners and the social etiquette that the Russians began to learn from the West at the time of Peter the Great's reforms: the first emperor had a manual on social etiquette, A Mirror for Youth, translated from the German as early as 1717. In the education of the gentry much time and effort were devoted to such subjects as proper bearing in society, fencing, and dancing, as well as to French and sometimes to other foreign languages. As noted in the scheme mentioned earlier, Western manners and fashions came to occupy much of the attention of educated Russians.

While Russian schools showed relatively little vitality or development between the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II, the government did take at least one decisive step forward: in 1755 in Moscow the first Russian university came into existence. Promoted by Ivan Shuvalov and Michael Lomonosov, this first Russian institution of higher learning was to be, all in all, the most important one in the history of the country, as well as a model for other universities. Responsible directly to the Senate and endowed with considerable administrative autonomy, the university possessed

three schools: law, medicine, and philosophy. The school of philosophy included both the humanities and sciences, much as reflected in the range of the present-day degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The University of Moscow started with ten professors and some assistants to the professors; of the ten, two were Russians, a mathematician and a rhetorician. In a decade the number of professors about doubled, with Russians constituting approximately half of the total. Originally instruction took place in Latin; but in 1767 Russian began to be used in the university. In 1756 the university started to publish a newspaper, the Moskovskie Vedomosti or Moscow News. Higher education in Russia, both at the Academy and in the University of Moscow, had a slow and hard beginning, with few qualified students and in general little interest or support. Indeed at one time professors attended one another's lectures! Still, in this field, as in so many others, the eighteenth century bequeathed to its successor the indispensable foundations for further development.

Catherine the Great's reign, or roughly the last third of the century, witnessed a remarkable growth and intensification of Russian cultural life. For instance, we know of 600 different books published in Russia in the reign of Peter the Great, of 2,000 produced between 1725 and 1775, and of 7,500 which came out in the period from 1775 to 1800. Catherine the Great's edict of 1783, licensing private publishing houses, contributed to the trend. The rise of the periodical press proved to be even more striking. Although here too the origins went back to Peter the Great, there was little development until the accession of Catherine II. It was the empress's personal interest in the propagation of her views, together with the interests and needs of the growing layer of educated Russians, that led to the sudden first flowering of Russian journalism. By 1770 some eight periodicals entered the field to comment on the Russian and European scene, criticize the foibles of Russian society, and engage in lively debate with one another, a debate in which Catherine the Great herself took an active part. Societies for the development and promotion of different kinds of knowledge, such as the well-known Free Economic Society, multiplied in Catherine II's reign.

In the sphere of education proper, as in so many other fields, the empress had vast ambitions and plans. Adapting the views of Locke, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau, Catherine the Great at first hoped to create through education a new, morally superior, and fully civilized breed of people. Education, in this sanguine opinion, could 'bestow new existence, and create a new kind of subjects.' The empress relied on her close associate and fellow enthusiast of the Enlightenment, Ivan Betsky, to formulate and carry out her educational policy. To be truly transformed, pupils had to be separated from their corrupting environment and educated morally as well as intellectually. Therefore, Catherine the Great and Betsky relied

on select boarding schools, including the new Smolny school for girls, the first and the most famous state school for girls in the history of the Russian empire.

Catherine the Great, however, was too intelligent and realistic not to see eventually the glaring weaknesses of her original scheme: boarding schools were very expensive and took care of very few people; moreover, those few, it would seem, could not escape the all-pervasive environment and failed to become paragons of virtue and enlightenment. Therefore, other approaches, broader in scope but more limited in purpose, had to be tried. The empress became especially interested in the system of popular education instituted in the Austrian Empire in 1774 and explained to her by Emperor Joseph II himself. In 1782, following the Austrian monarch's advice, she invited the Serbian educator Theodore Iankovich de Mirievo from Austria and formed a Commission for the Establishment of Popular Schools. The Commission approved Iankovich de Mirievo's plan of a network of schools on three levels and of the programs for the schools. The Serbian educator then concentrated on translating and adapting Austrian textbooks for Russian schools, and also on supervising the training of Russian teachers. A teachers' college was founded in St. Petersburg in 1783. Its first hundred students came from Church schools and were graduated in 1786. In that year a special teachers' seminary began instruction. It was to produce 425 teachers in the course of its fifteen years of existence. Relying on its new teachers, the government opened twenty-six more advanced popular schools in the autumn of 1786 and fourteen more in 1788, all of them in provincial centers. It also proceeded to put popular elementary schools into operation in district towns: 169 such schools, with a total of 11,000 pupils began to function in 1787; at the end of the century the numbers rose to 315 schools and 20,000 students.

Everything considered, Catherine the Great deserves substantial credit in the field of education. Her valuable measures ranged from pioneering in providing education for girls to the institution of the first significant teacher training program in Russia and the spreading of schools to many provincial and district towns. The empress and her advisers, it should be noted, wanted to extend enlightenment to the middle class and hoped to see an educated Third Estate arise in their homeland. Furthermore, as we know, the government's limited efforts did not represent all of Russian education. Church schools continued, and education of the gentry advanced in the last third of the eighteenth century. When not attending exclusive military schools of one kind or another, sons of the nobility