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The Late 19th Century

Directly prior to 1917, tsarist Russia saw changes in the Russian educational system that were later expanded in the early Soviet period. Education began to shift from a privilege for a small, wealthy elite to a service provided to a broader segment of the Russian population, with government funding for education significantly increasing. Reforms led to the expansion of secular elementary schools, which formed part of a program to promote universal education among the peasantry. The Orthodox Church, which had previously held broad influence through its schools based around a religious educational model, began to lose its monopoly on education. Regulations limiting the development of public schools where a religious school already existed were declared illegal in 1897, and at the same time the Orthodox Church was forbidden from opening competing schools where public schools already existed. This limiting of religious education, coupled with the development of the state-funded Zemstva system, helped lay the groundwork for the educational developments carried out in the early Soviet period.

The Inter-Revolutionary and Early Soviet Period

Enrollment in elementary education programs greatly increased in the years leading up to the 1917 revolution. Democratization took hold of secondary schools and universities in Russia. In 1905, secondary school students orchestrated a strike demanding the convention of a Constitutional Assembly, with the support of many teachers. Following the revolution in 1917, The People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) sought to make the educational system in the newly formed Soviet Union a key pillar in the reorganization of society, striving to embody communist principles for education as outlined by Marx and Engels.

The eradication of illiteracy was also an important goal in the newly formed Soviet Union. Likbez (Ликбез), an acronym for the Russian phrase "elimination of illiteracy," was a major campaign to eliminate illiteracy in the Soviet population that ran throughout the 1920s and '30s. Many of the materials in this online collection are directly related to the Likbez project.