History of Education

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Ascent into Darkness: Escalating Negativity in the

Administration of Schools in the Kirov Region,
1931–1941

Larry E. Holmes

To cite this article: Larry E. Holmes (2006) Ascent into Darkness: Escalating Negativity in
the Administration of Schools in the Kirov Region, 1931–1941, History of Education, 35:4-5,
521-540, DOI: 10.1080/00467600600715059

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 History of Education,
Vol. 35, No. 4–5, July–September 2006, pp. 521–540

Ascent into Darkness: Escalating

Negativity in the Administration of
Schools in the Kirov Region, 1931–1941
Larry E. Holmes
History
10.1080/00467600600715059
THED_A_171473.sgm
0046-760X
Original
Taylor
402006
35
lehviatka@bellsouth.net
LarryHolmes
00000July
and
&ofArticle
Francis
Education
Francis
(print)/1464-5130
2006 Ltd (online)

Reporting within the administration responsible for primary and secondary schools in the Kirov region from
the early 1930s to 1941 followed a script of escalating negativity in which the higher the chain of command,
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

the more negative the assessment. School directors wrote positive quarterly and annual evaluations. District
and municipal departments of education, however, composed a negative account. Their bosses at the regional
level produced even harsher evaluations. This ascent into darkness had another, still bleaker, dimension. The
party’s district committees demanded and received from school directors and local departments of education
harsh assessments. These committees then drew a still more negative picture in their reports to the party’s
Regional Committee, further embellished by that committee’s Schools Department when composing its
official accounts. All reports, therefore, had little to do with the real situation—good or bad—prevailing in
schools but everything to do with the bureaucracy’s scripted version of reality.

In their public reports, institutions prefer positive accounts that focus on achieve-
ments and ignore shortcomings. During the 1930s, the Soviet educational bureau-
cracy behaved no differently. Public releases emphasized over and again the
increasing number of schools, teachers and pupils and the resulting spread of knowl-
edge. Yet internal records rendered a far different account of the state of schools and
schooling.
This article is about a distinctive feature of that internal reporting, one that I call
escalating negativity, a phenomenon by which the higher the chain of command, the
more negative the assessment. The phenomenon, no doubt, has characterized most
modern bureaucracies. Agencies below have portrayed themselves favorably while
their governing bodies have looked for something amiss, if only to justify their super-
visory function. At the same time, administrative units, so preoccupied with the
dismal side of things when eliciting and reading reports from below, have rendered a
more balanced account as a form of self-protection when reporting to their own
superior agencies.
My interest in administration as a process rather than as structure follows the lead
of recent scholarly literature on the subject. In a controversial study, J. Arch Getty
found a bureaucracy so insubordinate, disorganized and cumbersome that it

ISSN 0046-760X (print)/ISSN 1464-5130 (online)/06/04/50521–20

© 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00467600600715059
 522 L. E. Holmes

provoked the terror unleashed against it.1 Oleg Khlevniuk has described in detail
Moscow’s commissariats fighting amongst themselves over funding and turf.2 S. A.
Shinkarchuk and V. P. Makarenko have emphasized, as this article does, the bureau-
cracy’s thirst during the 1930s for negative information.3 Historians have also
discussed in various ways the relationship between the center and periphery. Roberta
Manning has pointed to the limits of the former’s power in a rural district in Smolensk
province, Getty and Peter Solomon to the resistance below to initiatives above, and
James Harris to the relative autonomy of regional leaders even as they convinced
Moscow to inflate plans for investment in industry and construction in their own
region.4 All of these studies, however, and several additional items by Moshe Lewin
to be discussed below, are orientated toward an evaluation of the making and imple-
mentation of policies adopted by the Kremlin. This article, by contrast, examines the
way in which multiple local, municipal and regional state and party organs functioned
and interacted by focusing on their periodic reports to each other. Nevertheless, at
the article’s close, I will venture some suggestions on how these reports reflected and
shaped decisions made in Moscow.
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

Good, Bad, Worse

Escalating negativity was a dominant feature in the administration of education in the
Kirov region during the 1930s. At the lowest level, school directors wrote positive
quarterly and annual evaluations. The accentuation of the positive ended there.
District and municipal departments of education ignored these reports or selectively
picked out what could be construed as derogatory and then compiled their own
accounts featuring the negative with some positive mixed in. Their bosses at the
regional level demanded even harsher evaluations but in their own reports to the
center’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) spoke of progress as well as

1
Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985: 199, 206.
2
Khlevniuk, Oleg. Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politbiuro v 30-e gody. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
Tsentr “Rossiia Molodaia,” 1993. Khlevniuk, Oleg. Politbiuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v
1930-e gody. Moscow: Rosspen, 1996.
3
Shinkarchuk, S. A. Obshchestvennoe mnenie v Sovetskoi Rossii v 30-e gody. Po materialam severo-
zapada. Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta ekonomiki i finansov,
1995. Makarenko, V. P. Biurokratiia i Stalinizm. Rostov-on-Don: Izdatel’stvo Rostovskogo Univer-
siteta, 1989. For a similar argument, see Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror,
Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
4
Manning, Roberta. Government in the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi
Raion in 1937. Carl Beck Papers, no. 301. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1984. Manning,
Roberta. “Peasants and Party: Rural Administration in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World
War II.” In Essays on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism, edited by John W. Strong. Columbus, OH:
Slavica Publishers, 1990: 224–44. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges. Solomon, Peter H., Jr. Soviet
Criminal Justice under Stalin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Harris, James R. The
Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1999.
 History of Education 523

failure. Narkompros, in turn, insisted on still gloomier accounts. Thus the canvas
initially presented by school directors in pleasant hues darkened progressively as
district departments of education, then the regional department of education and,
finally, Narkompros copied over it with their own morbid strokes.5
This ascent into darkness had another, still bleaker, dimension. The party expected
a preoccupation with the negative when hearing reports from any of the agencies
involved, whether the school below or the regional department of education above.
Educational officials obliged with assessments for party organs far harsher than
anything they had submitted to their own superiors in the state’s chain of command.
Escalating negativity thereby produced a jungle of scripted contradictory reports.
School directors told their district department of education one thing and their local
party organs another. Heads of district departments of education mixed successes
with failures when addressing the regional department of education but accentuated
the negative for their party cells and local party committees. Kirov’s Municipal
Department of Education demanded faultfinding from its own subordinate depart-
ments of education within the city, combined negative with positive images in reports
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

to the regional department of education, and danced almost exclusively with the
dismal in its accounts for the party. The Regional Department of Education required
from district departments a sharp focus on problems allegedly bedevilling schools and
schooling, while it presented a more balanced account to Narkompros. At the same
time, it embellished gloom and doom in its own reports to the Schools Department
of the party’s regional committee. Moscow’s Narkompros wanted to hear more from
Kirov about failures and in a predatory fashion demanded precisely such from its
regional department.
To be sure, making reports and moving information were not the only functions of
the educational administration. That bureaucracy oversaw the repair and construc-
tion of schools, the distribution of available syllabi and textbooks and instruction in
the classroom. And certainly the administration needed to know about problems
confronting schools, which were serious enough without any escalation of the nega-
tive. In 1932, a pupil slipped a state inspector a note complaining that the school’s
cafeteria served ‘some kind of broth’ (kakoi-to bul’on) that cost 25 kopecks without
bread.6 When in 1936 Narkompros suggested that schools draw up contracts with
local collective farms to guarantee the provisioning of free services and firewood,
Kirov’s Regional Department of Education informed Moscow that local soviets and
prosecutors strictly forbade the practice as a violation of law. Narkompros responded

5
The relationship between Narkompros and the central party and state apparatus is an aspect of
escalating negativity that is beyond the limits of this article. For an indication of the Central Com-
mittee’s emphasis on the negative and Narkompros’s effort to present itself and the schools in a
more favorable light in 1931 see my Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School No. 25, 1931–1937. Pitts-
burgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999: 10–11. For the same situation in 1936 and 1937,
see my “Magic into Hocus-Pocus: The Decline of Labor Education in Soviet Russia’s Schools,
1931–1937.” Russian Review 51, no. 4 (October 1992): 545–65 (see pages 560–64).
6
GAKO (State Archive of the Kirov Region), f. R-1864, op. 1, d. 91, l. 146.
 524 L. E. Holmes

that schools might induce a collective farm’s general assembly to become the school’s
sponsor thereby making any assistance legal and at once both voluntary and
obligatory.7 Peasants, of course, did not prove so gullible. Few schools possessed
sufficient pens, pencils, textbooks, copybooks (notebooks), blackboards and erasers
(if only a rag). They even lacked kerosene to provide light during the dark days of
Kirov’s winter when the sun barely rose above the southern horizon. One school
burned straw to keep teachers and pupils momentarily warm.8
However, as this article makes clear, the bureaucracy’s reports had little to do with
the real situation prevailing in schools and any effort to improve upon it. They had
everything to do with a continuous replay of roles assigned to agencies seeking, as I
will discuss below, a perfect world of the future and its necessary opposite, an infernal
past and present.

Why Kirov?
I chose the Kirov region not because of the typical or exceptional nature of its bureau-
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

cracy but because of the wealth of documentation from the 1930s that has been
preserved and made accessible in its archives. Such a rich and open repository for that
period is rare but essential to an examination of local and regional administration.
Terry Martin has written of the presence of what he calls soft-line and hard-line insti-
tutions in the party-state apparatus, the former seeking to make Moscow’s policies as
attractive as possible, the latter, often party and secret police organs, promoting core
Bolshevik principles. A balanced view of Bolshevik policy and practice, Martin has
observed, requires a focus on both.9 Kirov’s archives allow precisely that.
Prior to 1934 both the Kirov province and its capital were named Viatka, the city
located about 850 km northeast of Moscow. In 1929, the Soviet government abol-
ished the area as an administrative entity placing it in a huge province governed from
the city, Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky after 1932), after which it was named. Within days
of the assassination on 1 December 1934 of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, the party’s
Leningrad boss who had been born in Urzhum, 195 km south of Viatka, the city was
renamed in his honor. On 7 December, Moscow re-created the Viatka province, now
called, like its capital, Kirov, with 58 districts (raion) and the city of Kirov as its basic
administrative units.10 In June 1936, the city was subdivided into Stalin, Molotov and

7
See the correspondence between Narkompros and Kirov’s Regional Department of Education
in GAKO, f. R-2333, op. 1, d. 49, ll. 35, 46.
8
See the report in 1938 from the head of the department of education in Viatskie Poliany district,
350 km south of Kirov, in GASPI KO (State of Archive of the Social and Political History of the
Kirov Region), f. 1290, op. 2, d. 255, l. 9.
9
Martin, Terry. “Interpreting the New Archival Signals: Nationalities Policy and the Nature of
the Soviet Bureaucracy.” Cahiers du monde russe 40, nos 1–2 (January–June 1999): 113–24. I will
leave it to other scholars to probe other regional archives in order to determine the extent to which
escalating negativity prevailed elsewhere.
10
The region had 17 additional districts located in the Udmurt Autonomous Republic. Two years
later that republic became an independent territorial unit.
 History of Education 525

Zhdanov districts. The 1926 census put the population of Viatka province at
2,208,900 with 93.6% classified as rural. The largest city was Viatka with 62,100
inhabitants. In 1939, the province’s population had increased slightly to 2,283,600
with a little more than 15% deemed urban. Since 1926, the population of its capital
had more than doubled to 143,600 people.11
The multiplicity of the party’s and state’s institutional actors in the province offers
a wide variety of options for organizing a study of them and their interaction. I have
chosen a focus on each successive administrative layer beginning with schools. Such
an approach precludes the drawing of a neat monochromatic diagram of a finely
tuned bureaucracy. It does, more appropriately, in my opinion, foreground the
disorder and turmoil that characterized the administration of schools in Kirov in the
1930s.

The Institutional and Ideological Context

Escalating negativity resulted from several factors, the first institutional, the second
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

ideological, dominant in Soviet life since 1917. First, educational administrators

reported to party organs that insisted on the negative. Marxist-Leninist doctrine had
always required a negative assessment of the bureaucracy as a necessary evil; such
criticism was now elevated into a ritual.12 Anything else, above all from party
members who served in the bureaucracy, meant that they were insufficiently demand-
ing of themselves and of others. Second, a quest for perfection necessitated an iden-
tification of obstacles, especially in the realm of education. Schools held a special
place of prominence in the grand Soviet effort for the total transformation of the
human being and society. The first Commissar of Education, Anatolii Vasil’evich
Lunacharskii, pledged to take ‘fresh small hearts and bright little minds’ to produce
that ‘true miracle, a real human being’.13 As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, at
its inception Narkompros launched an ambitious program to create a decentralized,
free and experimentalist educational system with a school largely devoid of home-
work, examinations, grading marks and formality between teacher and pupils.14
Because of its sweep and intensity, this campaign for a new school begged simulta-
neously a recognition of all that was wrong with schooling in the past and an acknowl-
edgement of the inevitable failures in the present. As Moscow soon came to learn, the
nation’s teachers preferred to focus their instruction on the three Rs in the elementary

11
200 let Viatskoi gubernii, 60 let Kirovskoi oblasti: Statisticheskii ocherk. Kirov: GIPP “Viatka”,
1996: 34–35. Figures for the province are based on the territory of the Kirov region in the 1990s.
12
On the importance of a ritual of self-criticism, see Getty, J. Arch. “Samokritika Rituals in the
Stalinist Central Committee, 1933–1938.” Russian Review 58, no. 1 (January 1999): 49–70.
13
Speech delivered on 22 May 1923 in Tomsk, published in Anatolii Lunacharskii on Education:
Selected Articles and Speeches. Moscow: Progress, 1981: 160, 167–69.
14
For an extended discussion of educational policy and practice from 1917 to 1931, see
Holmes, Larry E. The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–
1931. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
 526 L. E. Holmes

grades and on the usual subject-matter fare in the secondary school relying in the
process on homework, marks and the familiar cycle of dictation, memorization and
drill.
Beginning in 1931, the party’s Central Committee, often in conjunction with the
USSR’s Council of Peoples Commissars, abruptly changed policy with decrees
requiring the restoration of a traditional school system dependent on a predetermined
body of knowledge, obligatory subjects and textbooks, grading marks for each pupil
in each subject and annual promotion examinations. This dramatic shift in policy,
however, meant no less faith than before in the power of schools and schooling to
transform the present into the perfect world of the future. Perfection now meant
unprecedented uniformity. The highest party and state organs imposed a list of
permissible textbooks, set the length of the lesson, and determined the type of pencils,
pens, ink and chalk suitable for classroom use. Narkompros filled in the details for a
perfect discursive world of rules and regulations. It limited the amount of homework
that could be assigned to each grade; prescribed the correct posture for pupils when
seated at their desks; and demanded over and again 100% coverage of all children
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

eligible for school, 100% attendance and 100% promotion of students from one
grade to the next.
Such highly centralized systems have historically been plagued by resistance from
below.15 Soviet administration was no exception, leading, as Moshe Lewin has
described it, to an ‘impossible Stalinism’ and ‘institutional paranoia’. The more
Moscow experienced difficulties in governing, the more it centralized its power,
but the greater the concentration of power, the more ineffective and impossible its
ability to govern. The proposed cure was the disease.16 My examination of
educational administration in Kirov has led to an even gloomier conclusion. The
ambitious goal of absolute uniformity required the discovery and rooting out of
present imperfections and, when it became evident that reality defied this ambi-
tion, the discovery, even invention, of monumental errors by those allegedly
responsible for failure.17

15
See studies of modern bureaucracy: Crozier, Michel. The Bureaucratic Phenomenon. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1964. Beissinger, Mark. Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and
Soviet Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. See also James C. Scott’s critical
evaluation of ‘high modernist ideology’ and his corresponding emphasis on the importance of infor-
mal processes and local improvisation in his Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
16
Lewin, Moshe. “Russia/USSR in Historical Motion: An Essay in Interpretation.” Russian Re-
view 50, no. 3 (July 1991): 249–66 (see pages 261, 263) and Lewin, Moshe. “Bureaucracy and the
Stalinist State.” In Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, edited by Ian Kershaw and
Moshe Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 71–72.
17
For a full discussion of this striving to create the perfect world, corresponding negativity, and
the inevitability of failure, see Holmes, Larry E. “School and Schooling under Stalin, 1931–1953.”
In Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia: Legacies and Prospects, edited by Ben Eklof, Larry E.
Holmes and Vera Kaplan. London: Frank Cass, 2005: 79–85.
 History of Education 527

The School: Administrative Schizophrenia

A Discourse of Success
All schools were required to submit quarterly and annual reports in multiple copies:
one for the school to keep, one for the district department of education, still another
in the case of Kirov’s schools for the Municipal Department of Education, and yet
another for the local party organization. In most cases, this meant painstaking
reproduction by hand of reports containing such basic information as the number of
students, faculty and support staff; the size of the facility; the attendance and pass rate
of pupils; and an evaluation of instruction in each grade and subject. All of these
items, irrespective of the year or school, had a numbing sameness. After taking note
of shortages of all manner of material and human resources, school directors made
every effort to accentuate the positive. It was their opportunity to tell a good story and
they certainly knew how to tell it. Their teachers felt the same way and contributed
to the tale of success with positive periodic assessments of their own work. Few of
their reports have survived the intervening years, whilst those from directors exist in
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

abundance.18
Kirov’s Elementary School No. 14 reported that during the second quarter of the
1936–37 academic year it had successfully instructed its pupils in ‘a hatred of the
damned past’.19 When three of its German teachers in succession were arrested by
the secret police in 1937 and 1938, the city’s Secondary School No. 3 made no
mention of the problem and, rather, insisted that instruction in the language
acquainted pupils with the life of the German proletariat and growth [sic] of the
German Communist Party.20
School directors made it a consistent point to wax enthusiastically about their
implementation of Moscow’s curricula and syllabi even when those items changed
abruptly and were not supported by corresponding literature and textbooks. Several
schools purportedly had successfully used the new curricula for the 1931–32 and
1932–33 academic years even though they had been issued late and then modified.21
Kirov’s Turgenev School No. 10 asserted it had experienced no problems with the
new curriculum for 1935–36. The city’s Elementary School No. 15 claimed to have
taught third- and fourth-grade history in the third quarter that year despite the
absence of textbooks.22

18
Teachers’ assessments have not survived because as a rule they were not forwarded to depart-
ments of education and individual schools neglected to keep this part of the script. See surviving
reports in 1933 from teachers at Viatka’s Korolenko Seven-Year School No. 4 in GAKO, f. R-1171,
op. 4, dd. 4, 5, 7.
19
GAKO, f. R-1969, op. 1, d. 47, l. 5.
20
See the school’s reports in GAKO, f. R-1969, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 1–10, 14–34, 43, and d. 165, ll.
30–44.
21
For 1931/32 in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 53, l. 6 and for 1932/33 in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2.
d. 79, ll. 27–27 ob.
22
For School No. 10, see GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 325, ll. 22–23 and for School No. 15,
GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 344, l. 1.
 528 L. E. Holmes

At Kirov’s flagship school, Model School No. 9, its director, Sergei Nikolaevich
Kornev, presented all the necessary information, and more, in magnificent abun-
dance. His reports were impressive by their very appearance, typed, organized and
large, standing in sharp contrast to the comparatively meager and handwritten output
on cheap paper from other schools. They did not depart, however, from the standard
positive assessment. Kornev began with a list of the school’s teachers in whose classes
all pupils had passed and those students who had achieved nothing less than an
‘excellent’ grade in all their subjects. Kornev emphasized over and again his teachers’
willingness to work extensively with pupils experiencing difficulties by holding extra
sessions after regular hours and by visiting them at home.23
During the late 1930s, to be sure, Kornev and his fellow directors gave somewhat
more play to the negative side of school life in response to state and party directives
that made teachers and pupils more directly responsible than before for a school’s
imperfections. Reports now listed by name pupils who performed poorly in class,
smoked and stole. Individual teachers too were named for poor instruction and failure
to show up at school or in class precisely on time.24 Yet directors placed all such
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

negative information in a small section while the bulk of each report, as before,
accentuated the positive.

A Discourse of Failure
When these same school officials reported to a party cell or to the district’s party
committee, they delivered a very different message, one that spoke of failure as well
as of success. In those isolated cases where schools had the minimum of three
communists required to form a cell, directors rendered to it anything but a glowing
assessment so typical of their reports to district departments of education. They
highlighted pupils’ poor academic performance and conduct, poor instruction by
teachers, shortages of everything from academic materials to firewood, and weak or
non-existent extracurricular circles.25 When a few directors provided a different,
more positive account, the party cell at their school or at the district department of
education let them know it preferred otherwise. In 1937 the cell at Nema district’s
flagship secondary school reminded a hopeful director, Filipp Petrovich Shishkin, of
the essential features of school life: dirt in the school, pupils’ uncultured speech,

23
For reports from School No. 9 from 1933 to 1937, see GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, dd. 127, 194,
263, 264, 302, 326 and op. 11, dd. 8, 11, 12.
24
See Kornev’s reports from 1938 to 1941 in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 11, d. 24, ll. 3 ob.–4 and d.
27, ll. 1a–8, 48 and d. 41, ll. 1–3, 67–68.
25
The minutes of cells’ sessions rarely included a summary of a director’s report. I infer its con-
tent from remarks that followed including the director’s response to questions and criticism. See in-
formation on directors’ reports in Kiknur, Makar’e, Kil’mez’, Urzhum, Khalturin, Nema and
Kumeny districts in GASPI KO, f. 700, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 22–22 ob and d. 4, ll. 1 ob.–2 and d. 6, ll. 43
ob.–49, 51 ob., 53; f. f. 2393, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 27–29 ob. and d. 6, ll. 3 ob., 8; f. 4464, op. 1, d. 4, ll.
1 ob.–4; f. 4603, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 26–28 ob. and d. 2, ll. 63, 69, 73 and d. 4, ll. 28–32; f. 1889, op. 1,
d. 5, ll. 30 ob.–31; f. 1673, op. 1, d. 6, l. 42; f. 4000, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 17, 19–21.
 History of Education 529

interruptions of lessons by rowdy pupils and excessive drinking by Shishkin himself.26

On 23 June 1940, the cell at a secondary school in Urzhum chastised the school’s
director, Kollerov, for a report accentuating progress. He learned his lesson and at
subsequent sessions underscored the negative.27
Events at School No. 9 illustrate the party’s penchant for negativity. At its begin-
ning as a model institution in the fall of 1933, the school had a sufficient number of
communists to form a party cell. While Kornev, a non-communist, managed to avoid
making formal reports to it, the cell rendered its own negative assessment, one sharply
at odds with his glowing accounts to the municipal department of education. As part
of the party’s purge underway nationwide in 1933 and 1934, the school’s cell met on
26 August 1934. There its head, Mariia Fedorovna Lezhnina, a teacher of biology,
evaluated the school’s recent activity. In sharp contrast to what Kornev told the
municipal department, Lezhnina pointed to delays in payment of salaries, a lack of
support by the school’s factory patrons, a shortage of furniture and ink, tardy repair
of the school’s building, the absence of proper materials and equipment for the
school’s shops and its biology and history rooms, and disinterest by parents in the
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

school’s academic and financial affairs. The school admittedly had worked well with
some of the weaker pupils and provided communist instruction, especially through its
voluntary societies. However, Lezhnina returned to the negative in her point-by-point
summary at the end of her presentation.28
That same day, a Purge Commission, organized by Viatka’s Department of Educa-
tion to examine the credentials and performance of party members at the department
and in the city’s schools, met to discuss School No. 9.29 There Kornev admitted that
his school had its problems but insisted here, as he had in his annual report to the
Municipal Department of Education, that the school’s administrators, teachers and
pupils had performed ably and would continue to do so. The Purge Commission
turned a deaf ear to Kornev’s account, repeating word for word Lezhnina’s harsh
summary.30 However, Kornev was soon rid of his troublesome cell. While Lezhnina
remained at School No. 9 until the fall of 1936, fellow communists left, leaving less
than three full-time faculty members to form a party cell or the two necessary for even
a party group. For the remainder of the decade, Kornev could rest easier with his
positive accounts submitted to Kirov’s municipal department.

26
See the cell’s sessions of 11 December 1937 and 24 April 1938: GASPI KO, f. 1673, op. 1, d.
1, ll. 19 ob.–20; d. 4, ll. 9–9 ob. At the latter session, Shishkin claimed he had not had a drink for
two months.
27
See information on Kollerov’s reports of 16 November 1939 and 17 May, 23 June and 7 April
1940 in GASPI KO, f. 4603, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 26–28 ob. and d. 2, ll. 63, 69, 73 and d. 4, ll. 28–32.
28
For Lezhnina’s report: GASPI KO, f. 100, op. 5, d. 219, ll. 78–83.
29
This Commission usually consisted of three individuals: Liamin, Kulikov, Sennikov. They
probably came from outside the region. I have been unable to find biographical information on
them.
30
For the Purge Commission’s findings: GASPI KO, f. 100, op. 5, d. 219, ll. 92–94.
 530 L. E. Holmes

The District: A Drumbeat of Negativity

District departments of education had fewer opportunities to highlight progress.
Local party committees and the Regional Department of Education demanded from
them a relentless drumbeat of negativity. The party’s committee for the Omutninsk
district habitually criticized the local department of education and its schools for a
host of failures from poor instruction to incomplete enrollment of school-age
children.31 When, on 20 June 1940, the Kyrchany district’s party committee found
nothing else to dwell upon, it excoriated the local department of education for the
absence in its schools of a perfect pass rate.32
Heads of district departments of education dutifully told the local party committee
of inadequate instruction, discipline and coverage.33 When they did otherwise, the party
rebuked them. The career of one department head, Aleksandr Alekseevich Derzhurin,
illustrates the point well. In 1934 Derzhurin, a former teacher, left his current position
as head of the Culture and Propaganda Department of the party’s committee in Falenki
district to become the chief of the local department of education. He served in that
capacity until his transfer to the same post in the Urzhum district in August 1936.34
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

In Falenki, Derzhurin performed as expected for the district’s party committee by

hammering away at the negative.35 However, he took an entirely different approach
on 1 September 1934 when addressing an open meeting of his own department’s party
cell attended by 10 individuals affiliated with the party and 120 others, many of them
teachers not formally associated with the party. Speaking more to his teachers than
the party committee’s membership, Derzhurin emphasized schools’ achievements.36
Party members responded with the customary emphasis on the negative.37
Three years later much the same scene occurred in Urzhum when on 3 Septem-
ber Derzhurin gave a positive account to a closed session of his department’s party
cell.38 His listeners preferred the negative and said so with a rush of criticism of the
district’s schools. They forced Derzhurin to admit that he had found the positive by
a narrow focus on schools’ performance on the opening day of the academic year.
The cell then adopted resolutions critical of the department and of schools’

31
See sessions of the Buro of 9 August 1936 and 3 March, 7 May and 17 August 1937 in GASPI
KO, f. 1450, op. 1, d. 110, l. 151; d. 154, l. 65 and l. 117; and d. 155, ll. 70–70 ob. For sessions of
the department’s party cell of 9 September 1937 and 17 March 1938, see GASPI KO, f. 3236, op.
1, d. 9, ll. 55–55 ob. and d. 12, l. 7.
32
GASPI KO, f. 730, op. 13, d. 3, ll. 155–56.
33
See reports in 1940 and 1941 by the head of Pizhanka’s department of education, Grigorii
Romanovich Kolyshnitsyn, in GASPI KO, f. 706, op. 1, d. 264, ll. 39–40; d. 267, ll. 8–9, 83–84,
148 and op. 2, d. 5, ll. 13–14, 39, 61.
34
See biographical information in GASPI KO, f. 1281, op. 1, d. 90, ll. 3–4 ob.
35
See Derzhurin’s reports in March 1934 and in March and August 1935 in GASPI KO, f. 1281,
op. 1, d. 113, ll. 40 ob.–41 and f. 2171, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 8, 13.
36
GASPI KO, f. 1281, op. 1, d. 90, l. 1 ob.
37
GASPI KO, f. 1281, op. 1, d. 90, l. 1 ob.
38
GASPI KO, f. 4639, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 75–75 ob.
 History of Education 531

performance.39 Tension between Derzhurin and his department’s party cell contin-
ued the next year. Derzhurin continued to insist that he, his department and his
schools performed ably in spite of shortages of funds, equipment, teachers’ apart-
ments and materials for repair of physical facilities, the fault, implicitly, of local
governing bodies. In response, the cell went over the familiar grocery list of errors by
the department and schools.40 Derzhurin weathered the assault but subsequently
showed due respect for the negative side of schooling until his transfer in 1940 to
head the department of education in the distant Kai district, 200 km northeast of
Kirov (now Verkhnekamensk district), presumably a demotion, where he played it
safe in his reports to the district’s party committee by consistently speaking of the
sordid side of school life.41
After demanding from educational officials a preoccupation with the dismal, the
party’s district committees proceeded to compile uniformly negative reports for the
party’s regional committee. According to these accounts submitted in the early and
mid-1930s, schools were places of horrible instruction, moral depravity, hooliganism
and political apostasy. Dirt was everywhere—in corridors, classrooms and pupils’
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

notebooks. Pupils played cards, drank, smoked and destroyed school furniture. They
drew the fascist swastika on erasers, lapel buttons, school walls and desks, and muti-
lated portraits of Soviet leaders displayed in school corridors. School directors and
officials at the local department of education lacked the will and the ability to cope
with such unruly behavior.42 Although with less shrillness after early 1938, party
committees throughout the remainder of the decade highlighted the negative, usually
without a nod to the positive.43
The reports of the department of education for Kirov’s Stalin district illustrate
escalating negativity remarkably well. At once this district department compelled
criticism from below, rendered a correspondingly harsh yet mixed assessment for
higher state agencies, and reproduced the thoroughly negative script required by

39
GASPI KO, f. 4639, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 78–78 ob.
40
See meetings of the department’s party cell on 3 May, 8 August, 16 November 1938 and 20
January 1939 in GASPI KO, f. 4639, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 43–44, 70 ob.–76, 87 and f. 4639 op. 1, d. 3,
ll. 7–8 ob.
41
GASPI KO, f. 1922, op. 1, d. 1, d. 398, ll. 66–66 ob., 104 ob.–105 ob.
42
See, for example, reports to the Schools Department in 1936 by party committees in Kil’mez’,
Falenki, Zuevka, and Kumeny districts: GASPI KO, f. 1255, op. 2, d. 383, l. 31; d. 382, l. 28; d.
383, l. 39; d. 383, l. 170. See also resolutions in 1936 of the Buro of party committees, resolutions
routinely submitted to the regional party committee, of Verkhovinsk, Biserovo, and Sarapul districts
in GASPI KO, f. 1255, op. 2, d. 383, l. 165; d. 382, l. 121; d. 382, l. 36.
43
See reports from 1939 to 1941 from the party committee in Omutninsk district in GASPI KO,
f. 3236, op. 1, d. 17, ll. 1–1 ob. and f. 1450, op. 1, d. 221, l. 2 and in Kumeny district in GASPI
KO, f. 2202, op. 1, d. 113, ll. 46–47 and op. 2, d. 19, ll. 9–12. These committees might occasionally
exculpate themselves and their local departments of education by blaming the regional department
of education for shortages of human and material resources. Yet such a ploy nevertheless reinforced
the negative. See such efforts in 1937 by the party committees in Slobodskoi, Shurma and Uni
districts: GASPI KO, f. 988, op. 1, d. 239, l. 174; f. 1290, op. 1, d. 205, l. 89; and f. 1290, op. 1,
d. 223, l. 256.
 532 L. E. Holmes

party organs.44 From its founding in mid-1936, the Stalin department treated its
subordinate schools harshly, dissatisfied with the accentuation of the positive that it
heard from below. In early 1939, the department’s head, Anastasiia Gavrilovna
Savinykh, searched for the negative in reading a positive report on the second quarter
from the director of Elementary School No. 12, Avgusta Petrovna Lobovikova.
Unable to find what she was looking for, Savinykh wrote on the report’s last page,
‘Nothing on extracurricular work’.45 In fact, Lobovikova had discussed extracurricu-
lar activity, but not under any eye-catching heading.46 In the fall of 1940, Savinykh
launched a similar faultfinding mission when reading an account from Secondary
School No. 3 on its work in the first quarter of the academic year. She underlined in
red pencil the occasional admission of inadequacy: a less than perfect pass rate; failure
to use visual aids when appropriate; poor work with the slowest pupils; and missed
opportunities to cooperate with parents.47
However, in its periodic communications to the district soviet and Kirov’s Munic-
ipal Department of Education, the Stalin district department of education presented
a more balanced assessment. While it acknowledged the usual myriad problems from
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

poor instruction to less than perfect coverage and pass rate, it repeatedly told of its
schools’ ‘high academic and political standards’ (nauchnost’ i partiinost’), to use the
favorite phraseology of the day, the result of the department’s efforts to inspect
schools, retrain teachers and enroll all children. Any failures resulted largely from
factors beyond the department’s control: shortages of academic materials and equip-
ment; textbooks and syllabi overburdened with material; and incorrigible parents who
refused to compel their children to attend school.48
At the same time the department embraced only the negative when reporting to its
party cell or to the district’s party committee, an assessment made all the gloomier by
the discussion and resolutions that followed. In this rendering, schools suffered from
a multiplicity of shortages; offered unappetizing fare in cafeterias and buffets; taught
most subjects and especially Russian language poorly; failed to quash frequent
outbursts of irresponsible behavior by pupils; and proved unable to elicit the involve-
ment of most parents.49

44
Of all district departments of education, whether in or outside the city of Kirov, this department
has left the most detailed paper trail.
45
GAKO, f. R-1969, op.1, d. 169, l. 17.
46
GAKO, f. R-1969, op.1, d. 169, l. 16 ob.
47
GAKO, f. R-1969, op. 1, d. 279, ll. 89–99.
48
These quarterly and annual reports submitted from early 1937 to early 1941 may be found in
chronological order in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, dd. 324, 419; f. R-1969, op. 1, dd. 155, 156, 187;
and f. R-1969, op. 2, d. 15a. For reports to the soviet from 1937 to 1941: GAKO, f. R-1969, op.
1, d. 13, ll. 145–145 ob.; d. 67, ll. 1–1 ob.; d. 177, ll. 5, 61–61 ob., 86, 145; d. 178, l. 137; and d.
187, ll. 27–28. See also GAKO, f. R-1969, op. 2, d. 10, ll. 2, 8, 14 and op. 3, d. 168, ll. 10–10 ob.
49
See reports by the district’s head from 1937 to 1941 in GAKO, f. R-1969, op. 1, d. 51, ll. 1–9
ob., 11 and d. 178, l. 131. For reports to the department’s party cell in 1937, see GASPI KO, f.
1447, op. 1, d. 63, ll. 62–62 ob., 68.
 History of Education 533

Viatka and Gorky: Subservient Negativity

The antagonistic relationship between schools and district departments of education
was reproduced at a higher level between the municipal department located in Viatka
and the regional department of education situated until December 1934 in Gorky
about 425 km to the southwest. Since the late eighteenth century, the city of Viatka
had been the capital of a province of the same name. As noted previously, in 1929
Moscow abolished the area as an administrative unit, placing it in a huge province
governed from the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, renamed Gorky in 1932. Consumption
by its larger neighbor did not sit well with many citizens in the former provincial capi-
tal. Their number included officials in Viatka’s Municipal Department of Education,
too quick, in Gorky’s opinion, to defy the new authority.50
In June 1933, the municipal department’s deputy head, Vershinin, and his chief
inspector for schools, Viktor Petrovich Brytkov, came to Gorky to deliver a mixed
assessment of their department’s work. Schools had their shortcomings, but any
problems were primarily the fault of the Gorky regional department, which had failed
to provide adequate funds and academic materials.51 Viatka’s report displeased
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

Gorky’s officials in two ways. First, the subordinate municipal department dared to
blame its superior for any failures. Second, Viatka had not shown proper concern for
the dismal side of school life and corresponding self-criticism. The regional depart-
ment’s deputy head, Vladimir Dmitrievich Mazurov, creatively combined the two by
declaring that Viatka’s rosy assessment was part of its rejection of Gorky’s leadership
and an attempt on its part ‘to become an independent region [krai] within the
region’.52
A stubborn Vershinin continued to insist that despite difficult conditions the
municipal department and its schools performed well.53 By this time the regional
department’s head, L. A. Tsekher, had heard enough. The municipal department had
concealed its and its schools’ failures. Tsekher henceforth wanted obedience and its
corollary, self-criticism, from Viatka, otherwise ‘we will have reason to come to Viatka
to make you understand that the Municipal Department of Education is part of the
[Gorky] region’.54
Several months later, the regional department again made it abundantly clear that
it put a premium on the negative. During the 1933–34 academic year, school directors
submitted a series of reports on physical education to Viatka’s Municipal Department
of Education. As in their quarterly reports, directors typically emphasized the positive

50
As pointed out in the introduction, Viatka regained its former position in late 1934. This history
is not lost on contemporary officials and citizens in Kirov who fear the absorption of their province
by the recently created super-region governed from Nizhnii Novgorod. Considerable subterranean
grumbling to that effect erupts at soccer matches in Kirov featuring teams from the two cities.
51
See the full report in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 78, ll. 37–44.
52
GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 78, ll. 42–42 ob.
53
GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 78, l. 42 ob.
54
GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 78, l. 43 ob. Fireworks also erupted over the dispatch to Gorky not
of the head of the municipal department but of his deputy.
 534 L. E. Holmes

with considerable attention in this case to the enthusiastic participation by pupils while
they, the directors, ignored the obvious problems of lack of space, equipment and
trained teachers.55 The municipal department in December prepared its own
assessment for the Regional Department of Education based on 12 of its secondary
schools. As expected, it rendered a more negative evaluation by calling attention to
inadequate funding and a resulting lack of equipment. Yet it also took note of the
positive, emphasizing the participation of pupils in a wide variety of activities.56
The Regional Department of Education had an entirely different perception and
demanded a far more grim evaluation. It wanted a focus not on a few secondary
schools where the situation might be better, but on the district’s elementary
schools where, it assumed, conditions would be far worse.57 Duly instructed, the
municipal department’s head, Anatolii Stepanovich Reshetov, ordered his inspector
for physical education and renowned local skier, Semen Apollonovich Shirokshin,
to prepare another report. On 4 February, Shirokshin bypassed the municipal
department and submitted his findings directly to the regional department with a
carbon copy to Reshetov. Not one of the district’s 63 elementary schools had a
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

special teacher for the subject, almost all of them lacked adequate facilities and
equipment, and many pupils and teachers avoided extracurricular physical activ-
ity.58 While the municipal department duly met expectations with Shirokshin’s
report, in subsequent communications it returned to its old ways by speaking of
positive as well as negative developments. Its schools performed reasonably well in
the face of shortages of teachers and supplies and an outbreak of typhus and diph-
theria in early 1934.
With the formation of the Viatka province in December 1934, Viatka’s Municipal
Department of Education became largely autonomous from the Regional Depart-
ment of Education, now also located in the city. When the municipal organ did
submit its reports to the regional department, it spoke of the familiar mix of success
and failure, attributing the latter largely to Narkompros’s poor textbooks and
syllabi.59 The regional department took the reports in its stride. It did not, however,
take such a benign attitude toward departments of education beyond the capital.

The Region: Forms and the Red Pencil of Negativity

Once in place, Kirov’s Regional Department of Education developed a thirst for nega-
tive information from outlying districts. It turned to the party’s organs, a trustworthy

55
See an entire folder of such reports in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 195, ll. 33–104.
56
GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 195, ll. 24–27.
57
See the response of the regional department’s inspector for physical education, in GAKO, f. R-
1864, op. 2, d. 195, l. 23.
58
For Reshetov’s order, GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 195, l. 23 and Shirokshin’s report, l. 19.
59
See reports in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d. 80, ll. 234–235; d. 78, ll. 2–3; d. 110, ll. 28–40; d.
115, ll. 41, 60–66; d. 128, ll. 1–57; and d. 185, ll. 77–84. For blame assigned to Narkompros, see
especially the department’s report on the 1938–39 academic year in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. 2, d.
324, ll. 420–21.
 History of Education 535

source, as we have seen, of gloom. In June 1938 Kirov distributed a form to the party’s
district committees designed to elicit details on the presumed failure of schools to
prepare for the upcoming academic year. It contained blank spaces for the percentage
of construction and repair not yet completed and for the amount of firewood and
academic materials not yet on hand.60 With such data and an expansive interpretation
of it, the regional department blamed district departments for corporal punishment,
poor instruction, pupils’ misconduct, and shoddy repair and construction of school
buildings.61
Receipt of negative information on the state of education in a particular school or
district caught the eye and drove the pen of officials at the regional department. In
November 1938, the department received a 32-page double-spaced report by a
commission on the state of education in a secondary school in Iaransk district. Some-
one at the department underlined in red pencil the negative. Regarding instruction in
history, for example, the reader found noteworthy comments that pupils were poorly
acquainted with the classics of Marxism-Leninism, did not know the Bolshevik posi-
tion toward the liberal bourgeoisie in 1905, and could not tell of the significance of
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905). In presenting the Russo-Japanese War, a teacher

had failed to mention the heroism of Russian soldiers and sailors.62 After receiving
just such information on a single district or school, the regional department
frequently issued a broadside in multiple copies to all departments condemning
allegedly ubiquitous poor instruction, inadequate coverage, and improper conduct by
teachers and pupils.63
The regional department found such damning material essential when preparing its
reports for the regional party committee. There the department repeated over and
again that schools lacked everything from pens and pencils to materials for repair and
provided shoddy instruction. Their pupils smoked, drank, sang counterrevolutionary
songs, engaged in sexual activity (sometimes with male teachers) and tore portraits of
leaders.64

Moscow Demands Gloom and Doom

While the Regional Department of Education compelled negative information from its
district departments and provided it on demand for the region’s party committee, it
mixed such gloom with promise when reporting to its own superior, Narkompros. In
its quarterly reports in 1936 and 1937, for example, years when self-criticism was at

60
See the copy sent to the Verkhovinsk party committee: GASPI KO, f. 2084, op. 2, d. 23, l. 37.
61
For many such orders in 1937: GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 2.
62
GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 81, ll. 96–128, especially l. 105.
63
See directives by Dmitrii Vasil’evich Vaneev, head of the regional department, in February,
March, and April 1941 in GAKO, f. R-1864, op. l/s, d. 226, ll. 8, 19 and f. R-1970, op. 2, d. 11, ll.
33–34.
64
See reports to the regional party committee from February to September 1935 in GASPI KO,
f. 1255, op. 1, d. 581, ll. 6–11, 66–68 and f. 1255, op. 1, d. 588, ll. 36–40 ob., 58–61.
 536 L. E. Holmes

a premium, the department, while mentioning shortages, poor academic performance,

and improper behavior by teachers and pupils, called attention to achievements. Most
teachers taught well and regularly read the classics of Marxism-Leninism; pupils stud-
ied diligently, behaved in and out of class and kept neat notebooks; and schools provided
ample opportunities for pupils’ extracurricular activities.65 It blamed Narkompros for
any academic shortcomings. Moscow’s commissariat had made too many changes in
the curriculum from year to year and issued syllabi that required the learning of too
much material in the time allotted, the result of ‘ill-conceived bureaucratic thinking’
(neprodumannaia kabinetnaia mysl’). It demanded an end to such ‘baseless schemes’
(prozhekterstvo).66
The regional department’s reports from 1938 to 1941 continued to provide a rela-
tively balanced assessment. While acknowledging that schools failed to enroll each
and every child eligible and that both pupils and teachers lacked proper discipline, the
latter coming to work late and without proper preparation, the department neverthe-
less emphasized progress in enrollment and in pupils’ and teachers’ performance.67
As before, it found Narkompros to blame for most academic shortcomings, the result
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

of Moscow’s failure to provide syllabi, textbooks and teachers manuals in sufficient

quantity and quality.68
The regional department’s efforts ran afoul of Moscow’s expectations. Much like
the regional department’s own attitude toward its district departments, Narkompros
wanted little else but the negative from Kirov and corresponding self-criticism. In
February 1935 it required that Kirov compile a report on the poor conduct of pupils.
It left no doubt that it wanted a focus on the negative: smoking, drinking, hooliganism
and counterrevolutionary activity.69 Later that year, on 7 December, Narkompros
wanted information on schools in Murashi district, 118 km north of Kirov. Narkom-
pros already knew what it wanted to hear, but it desired the gory particulars anyway.70
On 4 March 1940, Narkompros responded critically to the Regional Department’s
report on schools in the first half of the 1939–40 academic year. It wanted more
depressing details on shortages of teachers, directors and deputy directors; a poor
pass rate in schools; shoddy inspection; inadequate coverage of school-age children;
and teachers’ reluctance to study the Short Course, the official party history first

65
See a series of such reports in 1936 and 1937 in GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 21–22 ob.,
42–48, 149–56, 222–24, 348–53; and d. 8, ll. 44–44 ob.; d. 12, ll. 1–22, 126–34; d. 74, ll. 7–30;
and d. 77, ll. 3–9. Also: GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 49, ll. 160–166.
66
See the department’s comments on the 1937–38 curriculum in GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 12,
l. 12.
67
See reports in GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 12, ll. 36–83, d. 137, ll. 1–, and d. 197, ll. 1–180.
It was proud to say that teachers successfully expanded their political knowledge by reading the
Short Course.
68
See the report on the 1937–38 academic year in GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 12, ll. 36–37,
50, 53 and for the 1939–40 academic year in GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 137, ll. 16 ob., 24–25,
28, 49.
69
GAKO, f. R-2333, op. 1, d. 46, l. 15.
70
On the order of December 7, 1935: GAKO, f. R-2333, op. 1, d. 8, l. 588.
 History of Education 537

published in serial form in Pravda in late 1938.71 Narkompros responded in much the
same way to the department’s evaluation of the 1939–40 academic year. It ignored
much of the report to call attention to the poor pass rate, the high number of dropouts
and the considerable number of teachers who had not yet been accredited. It knew
well that conditions and realities precluded anything much better, but nevertheless
demanded a focus on failure.72
When faced with such a menacing Narkompros, Kirov’s Regional Department of
Education followed orders and accentuated the negative. In February 1935, it quickly
provided evidence to match Narkompros’s preconceived conclusions: Kirov’s chil-
dren smoked, drank, brawled, stole, engaged in sexual intercourse, defaced portraits
on school walls of Lenin, Zhdanov and Stalin, and sang counterrevolutionary songs.
Moreover, they committed the worst sin of all, suicide.73 It was easy enough for the
department to provide such information for it forwarded little other than the
uniformly negative report it had recently compiled for the regional party committee.

Power Politics
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

The very process of reporting, its discourse of escalating negativity, articulated, even
as it reinforced, a hierarchical structure and became what Michel Foucault has called
one of the ‘technologies of power’. The very demand for negative information, irre-
spective of real conditions, was an act of coercion. Anything else from Viatka’s
Department of Education in 1933, as we have seen, was regarded by Gorky’s regional
authorities as an act of insubordination. Local party officials took the same attitude
toward the occasional head of a district department of education such as Derzhurin
who might underscore the positive. While administrative bodies expected, as a matter
of course, their subordinate agencies to say something positive as a means of self-
protection and promotion, they criticized the effort and in a ritual exercise of power
demanded more negativity.
Administrators in Kirov were certainly aware that they engaged in grand theatre.
They knew that within a short span of time they said one thing then another depending
on their target audience. The effort by some heads of district departments of education
to be more positive than the system would allow indicated uneasiness with the script.
Unfortunately, I have access neither to their official or private correspondence nor to
diaries, if they exist at all, that would reveal the extent to which these and other admin-
istrators internalized a bureaucratic culture that featured at its core self-criticism and
escalating negativity. Several studies by Jochen Hellbeck suggest that Soviet citizens

71
GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 135, ll. 131–35. Narkompros also demanded information on
instruction in singing, art, mechanical drawing and physical education, subjects it well knew were
poorly taught.
72
GAKO, f. R-2342, op. 1, d. 135, ll. 425–25 ob.
73
For the department’s response, GAKO, f. R-2333, op. 1, d. 46, ll. 24, 30–31. Later that year
the department moved rapidly again with a similar report for Narkompros: GAKO, f. R-2333, op.
1, d. 8, ll. 588–89.
 538 L. E. Holmes

could make an ‘all-embracing and unconditional commitment to public values’ and

achieve a ‘fusion of personal and social identity’.74 Getty could not say whether leading
Bolsheviks believed in their own rituals of self-criticism, but he did offer that as ‘priests
of any religion’ they could not escape ‘manufactured symbols of discourse’.75
This article has focused on reporting within the educational bureaucracy, a process
in which teachers played little if any visible role beyond their own periodic reports to
school directors, items, which as pointed out above, have not survived. Teachers gener-
ally had only a limited voice in the administration of schools. School directors manip-
ulated the agenda at meetings of a school’s pedagogical council where rarely anything
but technical academic and bookkeeping matters were discussed.76 The teachers’
union did little more than organize special vacations for a few and coerce all of its
members to undertake political study and engage in civic (social) work from liquidating
adult illiteracy to helping with the sowing and harvest campaigns. Higher authorities
controlled the agendas at district teachers’ conferences and only a select few teachers
attended regional or national conclaves. However, teachers and, to a lesser extent,
parents and pupils contributed to the steady flow of negative information through
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

letters of complaint and denunciation submitted directly to Moscow and to regional

authorities in Kirov and elsewhere.77 While their authors hammered away at familiar
and real problems from arrears in salaries to shortages of everything from pencils to
paper, they embellished and invented as they went, often portraying a Manichean
world of good and evil in which they, the authors, represented what was right, their
enemies what was evil, and the individual to whom they appealed what was virtuous.
No doubt, an avalanche of such negative information affected the formation in
Moscow of educational policy. As I have pointed out elsewhere, knowledge of the
unpopularity among teachers, parents and pupils of the progressive curriculum of the
1920s and of the labour portion of the curriculum in the early and mid-1930s led to
the adoption of a more traditional approach and the abolition of labour in 1937.78 We
know that news, often exaggerated, of poor conduct, ineffective instruction and

74
Hellbeck, Jochen. “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9.” In
Stalinism: New Directions, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick. New York: Routledge, 2000: 95. Hellbeck,
Jochen. “Self-Realization in the Stalinist System: Two Soviet Diaries of the 1930s.” In Russian
Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, edited by David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis. New
York: St Martin’s Press, 2000: 228, 234.
75
Getty, “Samokritika Rituals”, 65.
76
See a recognition of this state of affairs in Narkompros’s directives on pedagogical councils of
9 May and 16 December 1939 in Sbornik prikazov i rasporiazhenii po Narkomprosu RSFSR no. 9
(1939): 3–5 and no. 1 (1940): 12–13 and a piggyback directive from Kirov’s Regional Department
of Education of 5 February 1940 in GAKO, f. R-1969, op. 1, d. 178, l. 13.
77
For treatment of letters from Soviet citizens generally, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasants:
Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994: 110, 148–51, 200, 327. See also a number of articles in Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Robert
Gellately, eds. Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997. I have discussed briefly teachers’ letters in Stalin’s School, 136.
78
Holmes, Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 69–83, 137–40. Holmes, “Magic into Hocus Pocus”,
545–65.
 History of Education 539

rampant disorder prompted Stalin to insist on educational policies that placed a

premium on uniformity and discipline. Stalin probably dictated the drafts of major
educational decrees of the 1930s; he certainly edited them meticulously, even chang-
ing their punctuation as he went.79
As a process in the administration of schools in the Kirov region, escalating nega-
tivity preceded and continued unabated after the worst period of the terror from 1937
to early 1938. While there is, therefore, no cause-and-effect relationship between the
two, a flow of negative information and corresponding self-criticism, denunciations
and scapegoating, as several historians have pointed out, fuelled the terror and
contributed to the decimation of regional bureaucracies.80 As might be expected, in
1937 and 1938 prominent educational administrators in the Kirov region, including
successive heads of the municipal and regional departments of education, were
arrested and imprisoned as enemies of the people. Yet remarkably and atypically, all
of them survived the experience to return in 1940 to positions of authority where they
once again took up the script of escalating negativity.81
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

Conclusion
In May 2001 at Kirov’s former party archive I read a paper on the administration of
schools in the Kirov region in which I focused on the subject of escalating negativity.
At its close, several people in the audience observed that, although my presentation
was not without interest, I had said nothing about schools and precious little about
the educational bureaucracy. Iurii Mikhailovich Golovinin, former teacher, local
educational official and retired head of Kirov’s Regional Department of Education,
articulated this view especially forcefully. Several days later he came to the archive
with information to provoke a more proper examination. He brought a diagram that
displayed in hierarchical fashion state and party organs responsible for education, a
set of questions directing my attention to the relationship between administrative
bodies above and teachers below, and a list of the party’s and state’s key decrees
during the 1930s on schools and schooling.
Iurii Mikhailovich was quite right. I had hardly mentioned schools, bypassed
Moscow’s decrees and provided a picture of educational administration far more
complex than my critic’s diagram. I am grateful to him and others in my audience
who helped me understand that my work then and now was neither about schools nor
even about the bureaucracy as usually understood. Rather I have focused on the

79
For an account of Stalin’s interest in education and his dictate of educational policy in the
1930s, see Holmes, Stalin’s School, 71–75.
80
On negative information as a factor see: Lewin, “Bureaucracy and the Stalinist State”, 65; and
Harris, The Great Urals, 148, 167, 172. On decimation see: Colton, Timothy J. Moscow: Governing
the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995: 288–89;
Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian–Russian Borderland, 1870s–
1990s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 220–23; Harris, The Great Urals, 188–89.
81
Perhaps access to secret police records in Kirov will reveal an explanation for this amazing
development.
 540 L. E. Holmes

discourse of reporting. In these reports, administrators showed little interest in assess-

ing the very real problems confronting pupils, parents, teachers and administrators
and in finding a way to help. Rather, they generated scripted reports of limited value
then or now in measuring the successes and failures of schools.
Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kirov region could have administered schools better if
it had been immune to the blight of escalating negativity. A preoccupation with
negativity precluded a continuation of a trend that Don Rowney found in the late
tsarist and early Soviet period, toward a bureaucracy that addressed professionally the
problems and needs of state and society.82 We should, however, resist the temptation
to condemn in a smug or condescending way this pervasively dysfunctional element
in Stalinist administration. To be sure, the quest for a perfect society and a Commu-
nist Party obsessed with self-criticism were special factors that made escalating
negativity in Kirov a virulent phenomenon that contributed to the terror of the mid-
1930s. Yet I suspect that to varying degrees escalating negativity permeates every
modern bureaucracy.
History of Education 2006.35:521-540.

Acknowledgements
Research for this article was supported by the University of South Alabama (Mobile,
Alabama), the Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad
program, and the International Research and Exchanges Board (with funds from the
United States Department of State through the Title VIII Program and the National
Endowment of the Humanities). I greatly appreciate the help of the archivists at the
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’ no-politicheskoi Istorii Kirovskoi Oblasti (GASPI
KO) and Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kirovskoi Oblasti (GAKO).

82
Rowney, Don K. Transition to Technocracy: The Structural Origins of the Soviet Administrative
State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.