Острова утопии - [212]

Maria Mayofis, Ilya Kukulin, “Mathematics schools in the USSR: the genesis of an institution and a typology of utopias”

This chapter analyzes the social, scientific and institutional premises behind the emergence of a system of schools and boarding schools for mathematically gifted children in the USSR. This system was created in 1961 – 63, regardless the very strong egalitarian tendency in Soviet educational policy and public opinion: to create schools for children with remarkable intellectual talents (rather than musical or ballet-related) was considered a manifestation of “dangerous” elitism. Classes in the mathematics schools were taught by the top mathematicians and physicists of the USSR.

Mayofis and Kukulin show that a unique combination of historical conditions contributed to the emergence of mathematics schools: the special character of the development of Russian mathematics in the 20^th century; the successful work of mathematics study-groups and Olympiads for schoolchildren organized in the mid – 1930s; Soviet leaders’ acknowledgement of the significance of mathematics for the success of the USSR in its military-technological rivalry with the US during the Cold War; the rapid development of cybernetics and computer technology in the 1950s USSR; and the 1958 reforms of Soviet school education. Mathematics schools became the center of an infrastructure for the support, development and intercommunication of mathematically gifted children and their teachers. Although it has seen some changes, this infrastructure continues to function to this day.

Reinterpreting collectivism

Alexander Dmitriev (National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow), “A word from the heart and the ‘republican level’: Soviet and Ukrainian contexts for the work of Vasili Sukhomlinsky”

Dmitriev investigates the basic motifs in the work of the well-known Ukrainian educational specialist Vasili Sukhomlinsky (1918 – 1970) in the ideological contexts (from literary to political) of the Ukrainian “Thaw,” analyzing the specific features of Sukhomlinsky’s approach to education and the reasons for his popularity in the late Soviet period. Toward the late 1970s, Sukhomlinsky’s views began to be perceived as an alternative to official pedagogy and the canonized legacy of Anton Makarenko (many of whose positions Sukhomlinsky openly declared to be authoritarian and essentially Stalinist). The polemics around Sukhomlinsky’s ideas – which began during his lifetime, in the late 1960s, and involved Boris Likhachev, Simon Soloveichik and others – turned the Ukrainian educational specialist into an augur of the “pedagogy of cooperation” of the perestroika period.

Daria Dimke (European University at St. Petersburg; Center for Independent Social Research and Education, Irkutsk, Russia), “Young communards, or the Children’s crusade: between declared utopia and real utopia”

Soviet social space had one astonishing quality: while the utopian ideology concealed entirely “earthbound,” often essentially cynical social practices, the world bound by these social practices remained open to the possibility of a utopian project coming to fruition. Dimke examines one case of a realized utopia: the Commune of Young Frunzenists, organized in Leningrad in 1959.

As a rule, realized utopias in Soviet conditions usually ended in conflict. The semiotic structure of this conflict is extraordinarily important, since it helps us to see the specific features of both the world of Soviet life in general, and these realized utopias in particular. The breaking points reveal the essence of the social order and allow us to distinguish the clusters of meanings and practices that bind it together. This article focuses on one of these breaking points, which also sheds light on particulars of Soviet schools and the specific features of the behavior of schoolchildren who in one way or another came into contact with utopian communities. Using the metaphor of diglossia, Dimke looks at Soviet social reality as a world in which everyone ceased to be surprised by the functional non-correspondence and even contradiction between words as a part of public ritual and acts in everyday personal life: for the majority of Soviet citizens, these phenomena belonged to separate planes, which co-existed without intersecting. This metaphor helps both to describe the specific features of 1960s – 70s Soviet social reality and to explain the particulars of the conflict between utopian communities and Soviet society as a whole.

Eszter Neumann (King’s College, London), Melinda Kovai (Károli Gáspár University of Reformed Church, Budapest), “The Memory of a Summer Vacation: Jewish Identity Strategies and Elite Socialization in State Socialist Hungary”

Based on a qualitative research project, this chapter explores the collective memory of a private summer resort in State-Socialist Hungary. The authors argue that the biographical narratives of the participants convey a more general message about the social functions of informal social enclaves and the elite socialization processes in State-Socialist Hungary. The analysis specifically explores the connotations of Jewishness in State-Socialist Hungary and the identity construction strategies of Jewish generations raised after the Holocaust, and also discusses the participants’ reflections about the cultural and social position of their families in the context of their “privileged” access to this exclusive pedagogic space.