Builders and Deserters: Students, State and Community in Leningrad, 1917-1941

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

Because the ultimate goal of the Bolshevik Revolution was not just to
transfer control over the means of production but to create a new
humanity, its supporters always put particular emphasis on the theory
and practice of socialist pedagogy, making this an obligatory area of
study for those wishing to understand what the Soviet experiment was all
about. According to the author of this look at Soviet higher education
before World War II, postsecondary students in the formative decades of
the USSR constituted part of a new social and political elite; and the
universities and institutes that served them were nurseries for a new
type of citizen. At the same time, their experiences were those of the
people as a whole, and thus provide a barometer for a society caught in
a whirlwind of conflicting values and aspirations. Konecny draws his
sample of student experience from Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s second
city.

Builders and Deserters uses a range of hitherto inaccessible sources
(in particular, university newspapers and documents from Party archives)
to illustrate the effect on Leningrad students of the major upheavals of
the interwar era (civil war, the New Economic Policy, the radicalism of
the first five-year plan, and the conservatism of the 1930s), and also
to explore certain themes in depth. These include the specific
ideological demands placed on the new political elite, their reactions
to changing pedagogical fashions both inside the classroom and on
work–study programs in villages and factories, and the various forms
of social disorder that persisted in the student community despite
stringent positive and negative reinforcement of socialist models of
behavior.

At his best, Konecny succeeds in bringing out the living voices of his
subjects. At other points, readability could have been improved by
reorganizing the thematic material to fit the overall chronological
framework. The text is also marred by sloppy translations (especially
those of the captions of the otherwise fascinating cartoons from student
and other newspapers). Still, Konecny does an admirable job of helping
us understand a complex and important topic.