Patriotic Education in Contemporary Russia

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

1.1 The problem

1.2 The approach

1.3 Book structure

2. Legislative and Institutional Backgrounds of Public Policy for Patriotic Education

2.1 A Brief History of Public Policy on Patriotic Education in the USSR and Russia

2.2 Governmental Programming for Patriotic Education on the National Level

2.3 Regional and Local Programming for Patriotic Education

2.4 Conclusion

3. The Model of Patriotic Education in Schools: USSR to Russia

3.1 The Rise and Fall of Soviet Patriotic Education: 1930s–1980s

3.2 The Decline of Patriotic Education: 1980s–1990s

3.3 The Basics of Succession

3.4 Conclusion

4. Historic Elements and Structures in Contemporary Patriotic Education

4.1 The Substitution of the Conceptual Basis

4.2 Memorialization

4.3 Youth Organization(s)

4.4 Patriotic Content of School Subjects

4.5 Pedagogical Tools

4.6 Conclusion

5. Novel Elements of Patriotic Education in Contemporary Russia

5.1 New Targets

5.2 New Connotations

5.3 New Agents

5.4 Conclusion

6. Conclusions: Social Roots of the Making of Citizens

Bibliography

Copyright

Last Page

Foreword

I first met sociologist Anna Sanina when she gave a talk on Patriotic Education as a visiting Fulbright Scholar at my university. In the beginning, I wasn’t quite sure what she meant—the US had scrapped most official “civics” programs before I got to public school, and I was unaccustomed to thinking about patriotism in education. Sanina began with the idea that although Americans tend to think we do not have patriotic education, we do—and as I watched her talk, I realized she was right. Learning to be a US citizen is so ubiquitous in schools that it is almost invisible—and yet, from the pledge of allegiance to the military recruiter to the anthem at the football game, our schools are steeped in what Sanina calls “the patriotism of everything.” Thus this monograph, while focusing on patriotic education in Russia, also holds a mirror to other societies where patriotism is created at the crossroads of education and society.

Examining the operations of patriotism can be startling in itself, since patriotism can feel so very natural; as Benedict Anderson wrote, “in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender.” (Imagined Communities, rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1991, p. 3.) Love for the nation can feel inborn, and there is a relationship to the “homeland” that is deeply instinctual—a love for the language, architecture, people, even the trees and sky of one’s environment. But patriotism, as Sanina points out, is a constructed formation that connects identity, community, country, and state in an emotional complex. Specifically, in this work she questions how that love for the homeland is rerouted “to maintain citizen loyalty not to a country, but to a state and its authorities.” This process of the socialization, as Sanina describes, is produced in educational systems that are embedded in other social structures, from the family to the community to the government. And the story of how these structures have interacted with education in Russia, which has seen such dramatic change since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, is a fascinating one.

Sanina’s study begins with a mystery: How is it that patriotic education has grown seemingly spontaneously in post-Soviet Russian schools without a strong ideological framework or an effective government supported system? To answer this question, Sanina uses Pierre Bordieau’s concept of habitus to approach the question as a sociological one, with “its roots in the social values, attitudes and behavior of educational agents and wider society.” Combining research from historical archives, sociological data, and personal interviews, Sanina focuses on how multiple factors have contributed to a contemporary patriotic education program that is as rich in emotional power and impact as it is poor on planning and a coherent philosophical framework. Using a multi-faceted approach, this study is a compelling analysis of the everyday enactment of patriotic education that has risen from the ashes of the Soviet Union in an emerging Russia very much in-flux.

The development of Patriotism and Patriotic education has been explored in an interdisciplinary network of fields that coalesce primarily in political studies. Sanina’s work draws on important studies that have gone before, such as Marlène Laruelle, Anatoli Rapoport, Jussi Lassila, and Alexei Yurchak. But Sanina is a sociologist, and her grass roots, community centered approach brings new light to the issue. Working in a realm that is ever changing (and where gathering empirical data is difficult and often inconclusive), the author keeps a steady hand in presenting and discussing the connections between inner emotions and social, educational, and political spaces. Her deliberate reliance on interviews and first hand accounts grounds her arguments in lived experience and give the reader a window into the real human situation of a society that has undergone drastic change.

The fall of the USSR and the sudden dismantling of society was dramatic. I remember arriving in Russia in 1993 and finding myself surrounded by the debris of the recently shattered Soviet Union. Improvised flea markets had buckets of ‘baby Lenin’ pins, schools were still festooned with dusty red and gold banners, and bewildered people showed me their childhood photos in Pioneer uniforms. On Victory day, memorializing the defeat of the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War, veterans marched, proudly wearing medals bestowed by a state that no longer existed. Lenin still lay entombed in Red Square, but I heard an (unsubstantiated) rumor that there was talk of selling him to Spain. The USSR was for sale at every Metro station in Moscow—Soviet uniforms, hats, medals, money, books, and whole sets of Soviet Encyclopedias. An entire way of being in the world was suddenly obsolete, and the new way forward was not yet evident.

Reading Sanina’s book, I am finally able to understand what I was seeing: The dismantling of the “patriotism of everything.” As Sanina details, patriotic education was taught as a unified, mandatory subject during the Soviet era, backed by a strong ideology and resting on highly emotionalized methods such as the memorialization of historical events and student clubs that kept children involved and invested. Sanina describes the role of “military-patriotic” education, which sought to develop citizens with a love for the country and the willingness to defend it against enemies. Teachers deeply embraced a mission not only to teach subjects, but to develop the whole human being as a healthy, moral, patriotic Soviet citizen. And although the Soviet model was met with growing cynicism in the 1980s, teachers continued to embrace their mission as moral-patriotic guides. In her interviews, Sanina found that teachers would move into the post-Soviet era with this mission intact.

In the post-Soviet era, which saw a period of chaotic change, patriotic education re-formed itself—remarkably, as Sanina describes, not from the top down, but from the ground up, as teachers continued to feel the need to provide patriotic education in communities that expected them to do so. A fascinating aspect of this book is the exploration of how this process, embedded in societal expectations, has both persisted and changed. Without any effective state programming, using those same Soviet structures such as memorialization and student clubs, patriotic education has developed with an emphasis that combines military training, the Orthodox church, and national pride.

This is a highly focused and well-researched monograph that offers cogent analysis of the everyday practice of patriotic education in contemporary Russia. Sanina’s work is important for understanding today’s Russia, where the changing and often improvised approach to education can take startling turns. She has managed to capture a very confusing moment in time and tease out important elements to make a comprehensible study. Her study also sheds light on the processes of the past twenty years, as various organizations have experienced mixed to no success in creating western-style civil-democratic education in the FSU. I am reminded of Levin in Anna Karenina, who argues that European birches don’t take well to Russian soil; in other words, American institutions barged in with well meaning plans, but without understanding the deep layers of the society they intended to change. By revealing the underlying processes of patriotic education at work, Sanina sheds light on some of the deep layers of society that have been poorly understood.

Sanina’s study has challenging implications not only for Russia but for other societies as well. Her conclusion discusses the implications of an uncontrolled approach to patriotic education, and points out the social divide between those who enact patriotic education and those who would look at it critically. While the processes Sanina describes are specific to Russia, her study ask for a closer look to the ways in which patriotic education functions at the intersections of personal, familial, community, and government structures, a function of social being which it both reflects and reinforces. States have many different ways of constructing citizens, some more organized, others more subtly. In the United States, the “patriotism of everything” has been so diffuse that it has been hard to see until recently, and this study could help to understand why such catastrophic divides in the understanding of patriotism have arisen in different sectors of American society. For no matter how it feels, patriotism is not completely “natural”—it occurs at the intersections of the emotional and the ideologic. Sanina’s study gives us more tools to think about how patriotism is constructed, and how that understanding can lead us to an informed future.

Anna Oldfield

Conway, SC USA

Acknowledgements

To be honest, I never planned to write a book about patriotic education. The idea of this study suddenly and discreetly sprang to my mind with the assistance of many people, to whom I am now very grateful and indebted.

It all started with my participation in the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program, which gave me a fascinating opportunity not only to plunge into the true research environment of Indiana University, but also to travel, to meet many great scholars, and to finally see apparently familiar things from a different angle. I owe my deepest gratitude to Joel Ericson, Elena Shabashova, Cecilia Kocinski-Mulder, and many other people whom I do not know, for managing and coordinating this program and for supporting intercultural communication around the world. I am also grateful to my colleagues from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Alexander Khodachek, Valentina Kaysarova, Leonid Limonov, and Nadezhda Bebbukina, who supported my decision to participate in this program and made my being away smooth and communicatively lossless.

At Indiana University, I benefited from many candid and frank discussions with Sarah Phillips, Mark and Veronika Trotter, Svitlana Melnik, Miriam Shrager, Maria Shardakova, Roman Zlotin, and other members of the Russian and East European Institute. They not only generously shared their ideas and thoughts, but made me feel at home in the United States. I also want to thank Ashlyn Nelson for her great lectures on Public Program Evaluation that brought a significant governance-related perspective to my study.

I was honored to present the ideas of my research at George Washington University, Coastal Carolina University, and Harvard. I thank Marlène Laruelle, Tripthi Pillai, Stephanie Plant, and Nina Tumarkin for organizing and moderating my talks and for providing an encouraging environment for discussions. I am grateful to all faculty, researchers, and students who attended my lectures. Their comments and questions played a major role in shaping this study. I would like to thank Samantha Proulx and Ashley Canter, students of Coastal Carolina University, for their careful attention and genuine interest in Russian culture, society, and politics.

I extend my gratitude to helpful colleagues and good friends Regina Smyth, Darla Domke-Damonte, Rowenna Baldwin, Alyona Vandysheva, Vlada Baranova, Ivan Kovalyov, and Yanina Grusman, whose valuable ideas, clever recommendations, and relevant information really helped at different stages of initiating, developing, and revising this book. I owe my greatest thanks to Nina Tumarkin, Jussi Lassila, Anna Oldfield, Markku Kangaspuro, Marlène Laruelle, Sarah Phillips, Anatoli Rapoport, Ali Farazmand, Raffaele Gareri, Donata Delfino, and Eugenia Kutergina for critical readings of this manuscript, whether in part or in whole, and for making essential comments and suggestions.

I am grateful to my students, who were sometimes even more interested in this subject than I, for helping me in finding information and gathering and analyzing data: Daria Migunova, Daniil Zuev, Ksenia Lekomtseva, Nurlan Dzhafarli, Oleg Obidovskiy, and Anastasia Kozlova. I’d also like to thank Anna Polyanskaya, who patiently regarded my long explanations and finally painted an excellent picture for the cover of this book.

I am eternally grateful to all the respondents who gave their time, shared their experiences, and allowed me to access information I would never find even in the cleverest books. I am particular grateful to the teachers of Anninskaya school, who were not only the pioneer respondents in the pilot stage of this study, but also gave me a perfect education that in the long run led to this manuscript.

I finally have an opportunity to thank Saint Petersburg State University for bringing me to the wonderful cognitive world of investigations, questions, and puzzles. I am especially grateful to Ludmila Volchkova, Vera Minina, Elena Ostrowskaya, Dmitry Ivanov, and Sergey Damberg, talented teachers and passionate scientists who taught me to write and to think sociologically.

In the end, this book would not have been possible without the participation of Sarah Torbeck, who did a very careful and extensive job proofreading this text. I am grateful not only for her very professional work, but also for her emotional support and for cheering me up. That was very helpful.

I consider it an honor to work with Jakob Horstmann, Andreas Umland, and Valerie Lange from ibidem Press. I am grateful for their interest in the topic, for an offer to write a manuscript about patriotic education, and for an excellent collaboration.

My greatest debt incurred in writing this book, as well as all my love, is to my family. They patiently supported me during the intensive, nervous, and significantly underestimated time of contacting, interviewing, writing, and revising the text. My spouse Alexey served in multiple roles as a proponent, a critic, a collaborator, a sounding board, and a shoulder to cry on. I am also grateful to you, Masha, for coming into my life and giving significant meaning to everything I do... but in particular, for those (few) nights that you finally slept, giving your Mommy a chance to write some more pages and to finally drink her morning coffee.

I want to thank my amazing parents Zoya and Georgiy, first of all, for making me a teacher's child who probably unconsciously understood the spirit of the Russian educational system and the nature of teachers’ habitus even before going to the nursery. They formed a significant part of my vision and taught me the value of hard work. Without the support and encouragement they have given me throughout my life, I would never have gotten to where I am today.

1. Introduction

1.1 The problem

Discussions about patriotism and patriotic education have arisen in many countries all over the world and in different historical periods. At present, there are plenty of debates about whether or not patriotism should be promoted in schools and how it is related to civic education and nation-building.1 These discussions are of a very complicated nature because they touch on the issues of civic and national identities, civil rights and civic duties, nation-building, and priorities of raising the younger generation. The focal point of these discussions, the concept of patriotism, is itself ambiguous and ideologically loaded. Whether it is discussed within political, social, or ethnic discourse, patriotism is usually addressed either as something unconditionally necessary for the people or as something almost intolerable and obscene.

At its core, patriotism is a philosophical concept. It reflects emotions of love for a particular place, i.e. a region or a country, and a readiness to support the community of people associated with that place.2 Years of debate led to the formation of many concepts of patriotism, justifying the distinction between blind and constructive patriotism,3 active and passive patriotism,4 and blind and symbolic patriotism.5 Despite being constantly criticized and questioned, patriotism nevertheless never disappears from political discourse and public discussions. In spite of globalists’ predictions about citizens without citizenship and civilians without patriotism,6 today’s complicated and interconnected world has not reduced the individual’s need for identification with a country.7 In the globalized world, the “mother country” is still a conventional home for many people. It symbolically embodies their belonging to the family, the community, history, and traditions. Feeling connected to a particular country supports the emotional need to come back “home” and ensure that it is safe and sound. This provides an important basis for answering questions about identity and destiny, encourages a sense of security, and enables a mental defense against the incessant threats of a complicated contemporary world.

However, the sophistication of the concept of patriotism, as well as its utilization in the construction of national ideology, is sometimes reflected in misleading terms: The country is associated with the state, or even with the state authorities. In contrast to the support of the community, the merits of state authorities may not be obvious to the people; hence, the perceived necessity of patriotic education, which is most commonly established and developed to maintain citizen loyalty not to a country, but to the state and its authorities. Patriotic education could be defined as a systematic and state-guided process of establishing the unquestioning and uncritical awareness of certain national values and the behaviors that maintain them. Traditionally, inculcating a spirit of patriotism in the younger generation has been the responsibility of the school, mostly because this educational institution “deals with the socialization of the young into adults and the differential transmission of the cultural heritage of a society from generation to generation.”8

In the framework of patriotic education, the concept of patriotism is often embedded in political doctrines and overwhelmed by political meanings. The ruling authorities commonly try to use it for political mobilization and as a tool to signify their position in society. In this respect, patriotism is an overwhelming concept. Any social meanings that may accompany it are buried under its ideological and political tensions. That is why, despite the continual discussions on patriotic education in many corners of the world9 and its development as an international research subject, it is so complicated to study anything related to patriotism from a sociological point of view.

In some countries, the practice of deploying the ideological dimension of patriotism has become so inherent and historically ingrained that the political and social structures of patriotism are tightly intertwined with each other. The Russian Federation is illustrative of such a situation. Political studies and journalism devoted to understanding patriotism in Russia commonly report that current trends in the development of Russian patriotism suggest ideological reinforcement that aims to disarm any form of criticism, diversity, or officially unapproved distinction, and to promote certain values and attitudes toward the state as well as toward other states perceived as enemies. Expressly or implicitly, they criticize the power elites for ideologizing Russian society and for controlling such an intimate sphere as the education of children. Although this awareness is often justifiable, it is not accurate to attribute all of these tendencies to a master plan of the elites.

Interpretations of patriotism depend not only on the patriotic agenda of the authorities, but also on the cultural and educational experience of the individuals, their family history, culture, and social environment. In other words, the formation of patriotism is played out not only ideologically or politically, but also at the social and even individual level. For some people, patriotism can remain deeply personal throughout their lives, while for others, patriotism is suggestive of ideological manipulation and political violence.10 In any case, the social meanings of patriotism will differ between “state patriotism”11 and “state-sponsored patriotism.”12 The concept of patriotism has “extensive use” in society, showing a great adaptability to both individual needs and collective uses.13 That is why its development in the form of patriotic education “does not necessarily lead to increased engagement in support of the authorities” and “does not guarantee blind faith in the state.”14

A particular field of patriotism formation is established within the social structure of educational systems and the activity of teachers, school administrators, and local educational authorities. A study of these agents, their attitudes, intentions, and values may uncover the hidden social structures of citizen-raising that are not as obvious as the ideological and political processes. Ro­wenna Baldwin, referencing Ulf Hannerz,15 suggests that while the educational system could be considered a facilitator of meaning between the state and citizens, it is still involved in the “wider process of the production, representation and reception of ideas of the nation, both in the present and in the past.”16 This is especially true for Russia, since Russian teachers perceive education as made up of two equally important components: academic education (obrazovanie) and upbringing (vospitanie). As Anatoli Rapoport highlights,

Russian pedagogical tradition assumes that both of these components, although practically interdependent, can develop independently through their specific forms and methods. Clearly, academic education is focused on providing students with knowledge and skills, whereas moral education (upbringing) is focused on moral development through teaching values and manners. The Russian term for moral development translates to spiritual development, though the expression is almost completely deprived of its religious connotation.17

Today, there are 42,500 public schools in Russia, attended by 14.5 million students. In addition, there are about 50,000 public kindergartens, attended by 7 million pupils under 6 years old.18 Almost all of these children, both in kindergartens and public schools, are included in the process of patriotic education. Compared to Soviet times, these modern processes are fragmentary and poorly integrated into the educational system, but the way in which they are developing is very illustrative. School-based patriotic education in contemporary Russia is an actual example of how specifically social structures can rebuild a political institution. In the 1990s, it seemed as though the historical model of Soviet patriotism would never return; however, in this century, its revival is becoming more and more apparent. It turns out that the model’s long-term preservation within school structures did not require a regulatory framework, clear institutional structure, or money. The Soviet model of patriotic education was preserved by teachers and school administrators, who considered it an indispensable part of their work. Patriotic education, having hidden at the margins of teachers’ values and attitudes for the last 20 years, can now easily grow into a giant formal structure. For this to occur requires the assistance of the Russian state, which is already organizing youth movements, establishing all-Russian patriotic lessons, and setting the rules for national celebrations. The initial stage of these processes, however, developed inside the educational institutions.