Education in the Soviet Union

Education in the Soviet Union was organized in a highly centralized government-run system. It featured total access to primary and middle education for all citizens and guaranteed (and in many cases obligatory (raspredeleniye, "assignment")) post-education employment for students of institutions of higher and technical education.

The Soviet Union recognized that the foundation of their system depended upon complete dedication of the people to the Soviet state through education in the broad fields of engineering, the natural sciences, the life sciences and social sciences, along with basic education. With Lenin's takeover in 1917, Soviet ideology began to permeate the educational system. While education in the Soviet Union usually varied throughout the course of its history due to ideological changes, also, variations in education depended on a person's geographical location. Often the official stance on education and its institutions differed significantly from what actually occurred, due to what was feasible.

In Imperial Russia, according to the 1897 Population Census, literate people made up 28.4 percent of the population. Literacy levels of women were a mere 13%.

Soviet education in 1930s–1950s was inflexible and suppressive. Research and education, in all subjects but especially in the social sciences, was dominated by Marxist-Leninist ideology and supervised by the CPSU. Such domination led to abolition of whole academic disciplines such as genetics. Scholars were purged as they were proclaimed bourgeois and non-Marxist during that period. Most of the abolished branches were rehabilitated later in Soviet history, in the 1960s–1990s (e.g., genetics was in October 1964), although many purged scholars were rehabilitated only in post-Soviet times. In addition, many textbooks - such as history ones - were full of ideology and propaganda, and contained factually inaccurate information (see Soviet historiography). The educational system's ideological pressure continued, but in the 1980s, the government's more open policies influenced changes that made the system more flexible. Shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed, schools no longer had to teach subjects from the Marxist-Leninist perspective at all.

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