Paper long abstract:

In the Soviet Union, schools were one of the most fundamental and universal sites for training citizens. The country invested considerable resources for educating and preparing the next generation, a process was tightly bound with institutions of participatory citizenship and patriotism. The post-Stalin period saw several major curricular changes in Soviet schools. The most significant, the “Law on the Strengthening of the Relationship of the School with Life and on the Further Development of the System of Public Schools in the USSR” of 1958–59, ended the universal mandate on native language education and enabled parents to choose the language of school instruction for their children, with major consequences for native-language education in some republics, particularly Kazakhstan. Yet this was far from the only important reform. This paper also considers the introduction of local history and geography in 1959 and other smaller administrative changes in subsequent years, which suggested subtle negotiations of Soviet identity. This paper considers these reforms and changes from the perspective of post-Stalin Central Asia, drawing on textbooks and archival materials from the Kazakh SSR (and possibly other republics), showing that these curricular changes reflected larger changes in the conception of Soviet citizenship, particularly for non-Russian peoples. In particular, the paper focuses on the tension between all-union policies, which implicitly relegated non-Russian languages to a second class-status, and local initiatives, which centered national narratives within a larger all-union framework. As this paper demonstrates through cases drawn from Central Asia, changes in educational curriculum embodied and reflected the ambivalences inherent both to nationalities policy and the theory and practice of Soviet citizenship.