Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev(New Studies in European History)

Making the Soviet Intelligentsia explores the formation of educated elites in Russian and Ukrainian universities during the early Cold War. In the postwar period, universities emerged as training grounds for the military-industrial complex, showcases of Soviet cultural and economic accomplishments and valued tools in international cultural diplomacy. However, these fêted Soviet institutions also generated conflicts about the place of intellectuals and higher learning under socialism. Disruptive party initiatives in higher education - from the xenophobia and anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism to the rewriting of history and the opening of the USSR to the outside world under Khrushchev - encouraged students and professors to interpret their commitments as intellectuals in the Soviet system in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. In the process, the social construct of intelligentsia took on divisive social, political and national meanings for educated society in the postwar Soviet state.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Part I. Universities and Postwar Soviet Society: 1. Youth and timelessness in the Palaces of Science; 2. University learning in the Soviet social imagination; Part II. The Emergence of Stalin's Intelligentsia, 1948–56: 3. Making intellectuals cosmopolitan: Stalinist patriotism, anti-Semitism and the intelligentsia; 4. Stalinist science and the fracturing of academic authority; 5. De-Stalinization and intellectual salvationism; Part III. Revolutionary Dreaming and Intelligentsia Divisions, 1957–64: 6. Back to the future: populist social engineering under Khrushchev; 7. Uncertain terrain: the intelligentsia and the thaw; 8. Higher learning and the nationalization of the thaw; Conclusion: intellectuals and Soviet socialism; Note on oral history interviews; Bibliography.

About the Author :
Benjamin Tromly is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Puget Sound. His research focuses on higher learning in the Soviet Union after the Second World War.

Review :
'… [a] wide-ranging and clearly argued work … Making the Soviet Intelligentsia raises important questions about how we understand the link between state policy and the 'life of the mind'.' Claire Shaw, The Russian Review 'This welcome study effectively shows the ambiguity of learning and its practitioners … Recommended.' P. W. Knoll, Choice '… the two decades on which Making the Soviet Intelligentsia focuses are among the most interesting and eventful in the entire history of Soviet higher education. This thorough and elegant study does them justice and should remain a key work on the subject for many years to come.' Polly Jones, The Journal of Modern History