SOVIETIZATION OF THE USSR’S GERMANS EDUCATION IN THE 1920S-1930S

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of Sovietization of national education in the pre-war period on the example of the German school. The contradictions in school policy are most clearly seen in the 1920s - early 1930s. The right to study in the native language and the development of the school network were accompanied by destructive for Germans laws on separation of school and church, the expulsion of experienced teachers on religious grounds and their replacement by young people brought up in the spirit of atheism and revolutionary ideology. The shortage of textbooks in the native language and the acute shortage of professional teachers remained key problems for German national schools throughout the period under study. As early as 1931, plans to convert all national schools to mother-tongue instruction encountered practices that hindered their implementation or made them unrealistic. In the case of the Germans, this was manifested in the lack of secondary and higher educational institutions for teachers training, and in the poor preparation of school graduates to enter universities. Publishing activities for national minorities were aimed primarily at producing propaganda literature, while the printing of textbooks was relegated to the last priority. Repressions on national grounds destroyed the advanced part of the intelligentsia and teachers. National schools of non-titular peoples were banned in 1938; German schools remained only in the ASSR of Volga Germans until the mass deportation of Germans. Because of the policy of Sovietization, the national school increasingly turned into a mechanism for the implementation of Stalin's idea of internationalization and was used as a tool for developing new consciousness, the center of atheistic propaganda