Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 20 – Following the
Bolshevik revolution, Lenin disbanded the ministry of education and created in
its stead, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, a structure that was more
concerned about promoting an ideological message than with the development of
scholarship.
Now, with the appointment of Olga
Vasilyeva yesterday as minister of education, the Kremlin appears to have
decided to do much the same thing, a prospect that has already disturbed, even
enraged liberals but that Russian nationalists and the Orthodox Church are
welcoming with enthusiasm (vestnikcivitas.ru/news/3996).
Writing in “Vzglyad,” Petr Akopov
argues that “the replacement of the minister of education is not an ordinary
shift of one bureaucrat for another” but rather means that “a second agency of
the so-called social block is now headed not by a bureaucrat but by someone for
whom meaning is more important than form” (vz.ru/politics/2016/8/19/827764.html).
Until her appointment yesterday, he
continues, Vasilyeva was known only by a narrow circle of historians of the
Russian church and by those who studied under her at the Russian Academy of
Economics and State Service and at the Sretensk Spiritual Seminary. But now her
writings have attracted the attention of all those concerned with the future of
the country.
Some of her remarks are truly
disturbing – she has praised Alexander III to the skies and said that the
number of victims of Stalin’s GULAG has been “exaggerated” – and she has been
criticized for that. But what is important about her appointment is what it
says about where Vladimir Putin wants to take the country not just in the
immediate future but long term.
What is happening with her
appointment, Akopov says, is “historically logical.” Ideologically motivated people, “people with
clearly expressed patriotic views,” are displacing the technocrats and thus are
now in a position to promote their views among all strata of the Russian population. They are people, he says, “who are certain of
Russian strengths.”
While Akpov certainly does not
intend it, his comments about Vasiliyeva’s appointment and how the echo the
Stalinist period are even more worrisome. He notes that she has studied “the
period when Stalin restored the patriarchate and returned to the Church part of
the churches” which had been closed and against whose priests the Bolsheviks
had visited repression.
That period, the Moscow commentator
says, was the first when the Russian leadership tried to bring back together
the reds and the whites. “Now,” he writes, “Russia is experiencing a period
that is in many regards similar,” one in which “the russophobic liberal years”
are being replaced by patriotic ones with a positive image of all of Russia’s
history.
Akpov suggests that it was certainly
“not accidental” that Vasiliyev moved into the government’s department of
culture in 2012 and into the presidential administration a year later,
precisely the time when Putin was launching his “sgtruggle for the past, that
is, for the future of Russia.”
If she remains true to her calling,
Akopov argues, then “in our schools will take place a revolutionary turn to the
side of enlightenment” rather than education. And he points out that “earlier,”
that is in the 1920s, what is now called a ministry of education was called the
commissariat of enlightment.
Serious scholarship, support for
teachers, and “the rebirth of the best traditions of the higher schools” are
all important for Russian education. “But,” and this is the important thing as
far as Akopov and presumably Vasilyeva’s sponsors are concerned, “without an
understanding of who we are, where we have come from and where we are going,
all this will be senseless.”
There is of course one difference from Putin and Vasilyeva’s
ministry of enlightenment Lenin and Lunacharsky’s commissariat of enlightenment
and Putin and Vasilyeva’s variant. The former
was charged with fighting the obscurantism and backwardness of Russian Orthodox
civilization; the latter is clearly intended to promote exactly those values.
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