'Both Teaching and No Preaching': Male Teachers in the Diaries of Soviet Teenage Boys, 1937–1941

• In Event: The Teacher: Charismatic Intellectuals in Academic and Literary Institutions in Soviet Russia

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the images of male teachers in schoolboys’ diaries written in the second half of the 1930s across Soviet Russia. I analyze how the diarists described their teachers, both in terms of appearance and personality, and identify the cultural patterns and ideological concepts that informed their preference for a charismatic teaching style which was able both to uphold discipline and to transform the learning process into an engaging witty performance. I specifically focus on male student–teacher dynamics as I am interested in how the ideas of Soviet masculinity contributed to adolescents’ perception of intellectual and moral authority, often associated with the teacher figure in the Stalinist school.
While scholars such as Larry Holmes, Ben Eklof and especially E. Thomas Ewing studied “the making of the Soviet teacher” as well as the realities of the teaching career and individual professional trajectories in the 1930s, the reaction of “the classroom” to the prescriptive images of good and bad teachers along with their real-life counterparts remains majorly overlooked. I draw on a varied selection of diaries by teenagers from different backgrounds to provide a nuanced overview of their opinions on teachers, depending on family history, class, and social environment. I argue that by judging the teacher’s character, teenagers formulated their ideal of a Soviet adult, with the emphasis on the virtues of kul’turnost’ and obrazovannost’, while the assessment of teaching choices and class management helped them adopt and practice the values of Stalinist society.

Author

• Ekaterina Zadirko, U of Cambridge (UK)