Culture for the Proletariat: Adult Education
Vperedists arrived at their cultural platform in part because they believed that the Russian intelligentsia was not a reliable partner for the working class. Suspicions between the workers and the intelligentsia, indeed between educated society and the lower classes in general, were deeply rooted in Russia, and the failure of the Revolution of 1905 only increased this tension. Many intellectuals were leaving politics altogether. Some began to attack the ethos of the old intelligentsia, including its traditional sense of moral responsibility for the lower classes.[22] Artists and writers who had once been concerned with social and political problems in their work began to pursue new aesthetic approaches, such as modernist writing and abstract painting, which were much less accessible to popular audiences.[23] The intelligentsia seemed confused and divided over what, if any, its social role should be.
Workers' organizations and left-wing political parties interpreted these changes in the simplest way: bourgeois intellectuals, frightened by the revolution, had abandoned the lower classes.[24] This generalization was not entirely unjustified. Many intellectuals did indeed give up illegal underground activity in the years of repression, a shift felt keenly by the workers in these movements.[25] Nonetheless, not all intellectuals lost their sense of social obligation. Instead many turned away from revolution and embraced legal activity, both cultural and educational. Members of the intelligentsia
[22] Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism , 1917–1922 (New York, 1986), pp. 8–10.
[23] For the debate on modernism see Jeffrey Brooks, "Popular Philistinism and the Course of Russian Modernism," in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies , ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford, 1986), pp. 90–110.
[24] See, for example, the complaints of workers in the Bolshevik press, reprinted in S. Breitenburg, ed., Dooktiabr' skaia Pravda ob iskusstve i literature (Moscow, 1937), pp. 31–32.
[25] See the comments of the Bolshevik worker and Proletkult organizer Aleksandr Samobytnik-Mashirov in A. Mashirov, "Zadachi proletarskoi kul'tury," Griadushchee , no. 2 (1918), pp. 9–10.
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organized and staffed the numerous adult education courses, people's universities, educational societies, libraries, and theaters that multiplied in cities and villages between 1906 and 1914. Through their work they created a much richer and more complex network of educational experiences for the lower classes than had existed before the Revolution of 1905.
The intelligentsia's involvement in workers' educational programs had begun in the mid-nineteenth century with the Sunday school movement. Inspired by the writings of a Kievan educator, university students and other intellectuals had opened Sunday and evening schools for the urban lower classes in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and several other Russian cities. These programs were staffed by sympathetic intellectuals who frequently devised their own curricula. The study plans varied greatly from place to place, ranging from simple literacy programs to rather elaborate training in the social and natural sciences. From these first experiments a whole complex of evening classes and weekend schools emerged.[26]
In the late nineteenth century more comprehensive educational programs began to take shape, modeled on some of the longer running Sunday and evening schools and inspired in part by English experiments in workers' adult education.[27] The Revolution of 1905 gave an enormous boost to these efforts, and new schools opened in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1906 and soon thereafter in over twenty cities, including Ufa, Baku, Warsaw, and Tomsk. These institutions, called "people's universities," were sponsored by a variety of local groups and relied on the services of the local intelligentsia. For example, the Kuban People's University in Ekaterinodar was staffed by local doctors, lawyers, and gymnasium teachers.[28]