«GREAT TURNING POINT» OF 1929 IN THE SYSTEMOF THE PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT OF EDUCATION

Abstract

On the basis of the archive documents the author examines the governmental campaign of 1929 to change radically the style and methods of work of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. The article describes the main areas of this campaign, such as: «state machinery purge» that meant the replacement of both the people in charge of the People’s Commissariat of Education and the local authorities of the public education with the experienced Communist Party and Soviet functionaries. The introduction of the new methods was based on the idea of inculcating more representatives of the working class into the leading body and structures of the state of the proletariat dictatorship (‘orabochivanie’). That idea was represented in a so called «Lenin’s will»; all-Russian «cultural campaign» - mass movement for liquidation of illiterateness.