The Uses and Misuses of Tsarist Educational Policy

Abstract

Count Dmitry Andreevich Tolstoi, subject of this new study by Allen Sinel, served the tsarist government as Minister of Education from 1866 to 1880. At the same time he filled the office of Procurator of the Holy Synod, the lay head of the Russian Orthodox church, and at the end of his life (1882-89) he held the most crucial post in the Russian government, that of Minister of the Interior. Tolstoi, clearly, was one of the central figures of late nineteenth-century Russian politics, and his educational policies raise a number of important problems in Russian cultur al and political history. The most fundamental concerns the very role of education in an underdeveloped society with a culture differing from that of Western Europe. For 150 years after regular contacts between Russia and the West began, the Muscovite tsars had attempted to make their country militarily and economically competitive by means of piecemeal borrowing from the West. After the Russian army was soundly defeated by a much smaller Swedish force at the battle of Narva in 1700, Peter the Great turned to a far more radical approach to the problem of Russia's technical and or ganizational inferiority-the thorough reorganization of government and society to bring them into the European eighteenth century. Not content with rebuilding his army and government apparatus on Western lines, Peter also insisted that his nobility adopt Western dress and social customs. He was also responsible for the first effort to establish a state network of schools. At the top of his educational sys tem he planned, in collaboration with Leibniz, a Western-style Academy of Sciences, and at the bottom he instituted a network of "cipher schools" which were to teach "geometry and geography to young men from every class of people." (1) After Peter's death, however, the Academy withered and nearly died, and the cipher schools did in fact fade away, to be replaced by a thin network of schools run by the Orthodox church. (2) Of more lasting importance was the impetus Peter gave to his reformed institu tions and the men who staffed them to fulfill the civilizing mission of bringing Western culture and enlightenment to the people of Russia. By the end of the eight eenth century, the educated Russian noble bureaucrat or officer had succeeded in becoming a citizen of the Enlightenment's Republic of Letters, but at the heavy cost of no longer being able to function at home except as a member of the govern ment; his relationship to his own people was not unlike that of a colonial adminis