Revolution and Rebellion

This article examines the reactions of students to political and social changes in Soviet institutes of higher education during the period of the New Economic Policy (N.E.P.) in Soviet Russia. While the subject has been examined by Soviet historians, previous work has lacked a discussion of dissent, deviant behaviour and socio-cultural conflicts among students beyond the traditional explanation of “counter-revolutionary” versus “revolutionary” students. The contrast of official state policies against continuities and changes in student behaviour reveals fundamental contradictions in the attempts of the Communist Party and the Commissariat of Enlightenment to produce a new generation of politically loyal, socially active and well-trained students. Discussion of student reactions to the state’s attempts to impose greater authority over academic institutions and student lifestyles suggests that generational and cultural gaps were not successfully bridged by the introduction of new ideologies and policies on campus. As the larger political and economic issues always dominated discussion of student issues during this period, the gap between policy and practice indicates that many students had not yet embraced the essential demands of the new Bolshevik educational strategy. Student attitudes toward academic work, their living situation and each other, as well as aspects of state authority in higher schools, are discussed in this context. Student behaviour was often determined by their material situation or peer pressure in a communal living situation. The Communist Party often linked deviant behaviour among students with counter-revolutionary activities. The result of this was a series of purges, the largest occurring in 1924, which changed both the social composition and the attitudes of the student body. By the end of N.E.P., many pro-Bolshevik students had become cynical, ambivalent or even hostile to the regime’s political goals in higher education

Communism · Context (archaeology) · Dissent · Enlightenment · Higher education · Ideology · Period (music) · Political dissent · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Academic Freedom and Politics · Higher Education Governance and Development · Law · Soviet and Russian History