This book provides a comprehensive survey of the successes and failures of education and training in the Khrushchev and Breshnev years. The author gives an objective assessment of the accessibility of the main types of institution, of the contents of courses and of Soviet attempts to marry the functioning of their education system to their perceived economic and social needs. In addition the book has many useful and original features: For ease of analysis it summarises in diagram form complex statistics which are not usually brought together for so long a time period. It provides a systematic account of educational legislation; Matthews’ comparison of series of official decrees will allow subtle shifts in government policy to be accurately charted. Particular attention is also paid to a number of issues that are often neglected: the employment problems of school and college graduates; the role and professional status of teachers; political control and militarisation in schools; the close detail of higher education curricula; and the rate of student failure. Of special value is the chapter on those educational institutions which are often omitted from Western studies and which are hardly recognised as such in most official Soviet sources.

A history of Soviet education policy 1921-34, this is a sequel to the author's highly praised Commissariat of Enlightenment.

This book, published in 1937, reported on a four week visit to Moscow in 1936 to study the making of Moscow as a showpiece Soviet capital. At its core was the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow but the book was a study of planning in the Soviet rather than the Western sense. Thus it covered many aspects of the city’s social and economic life including industry and finance, education and housing production as well as governance and town planning. Much first hand detail is included, based on the visit and the authors’ meetings with Soviet officials and citizens that illustrate various points, usually in praise. The book made a significant contribution towards the growing arguments in 1930s Britain and other parts of the Anglophone world for a bolder, more comprehensive and more state-led approach to planning. In turn these arguments had an important impact in shaping the policies adopted in the 1940s.

Stalin’s Niños examines how the Soviet Union raised and educated nearly three thousand child refugees of the Spanish Civil War. An analysis of the archival record and numerous letters, oral histories, and memoirs uncovers a little-known story that describes the Soviet transformation of children into future builders of communism and reveals the educational techniques shared with other modern states. Classroom education taught patriotism for the two homelands and the importance of emulating Spanish and Soviet heroes, scientists, soldiers, and artists. Extra-curricular clubs and activities reinforced classroom experiences and helped discipline the mind, body, and behaviours. Adult mentors, like the heroes studied in the classroom, provided models to emulate and became the tangible expression of the ideal Spaniard and Soviet. The Basque and Spanish children thus were transformed into hybrid Hispano-Soviets fully engaged with their native language, culture, and traditions while also imbued with Russian language and culture and Soviet ideals of hard work, comradery, internationalism, and sacrifice for ideals and others. Throughout their fourteen-year existence and even during the horrific relocation to the Soviet interior during the Second World War, the twenty-two Soviet boarding schools designed specifically for the Spanish refugee children – and better provisioned than those for Soviet children – transformed displaced niños into Red Army heroes, award-winning Soviet athletes and artists, successful educators and workers, and in some cases valuable resources helping to rebuild Cuba after the revolution. Stalin’s Niños also sheds new light on the education of non-Russian Soviet and international students and the process of constructing a supranational Soviet identity.