What Was the Russian Empire’s Education System?
In January 1724, in the Senate building in St Petersburg, Peter the Great signed a decree founding the Imperial Academy of Sciences. With the Academy came a university, the ancestor of today’s St Petersburg State University, and with the Academy and the university came the first state-financed secular system of higher learning in Russia. The system that grew from this foundation lasted, with two major breaks (the era of Catherine’s “free” seminaries, and the post-1905 university reforms), until the revolution of 1917 (see Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 5th ed., 1993).
The Petrine foundation
Peter the Great’s instruments were technical: the Naval Academy in St Petersburg (1715), the Engineering School in Moscow (1701), the Artillery School, the Medical-Surgical Academy. They were followed by the Academy of Sciences’ university (1726) and by the secondary school system, the gymnasia and uchilishcha that grew up around it. The system was the result of a Petrine policy of deliberately importing European scientific culture through German, French, and English teachers and through Russian students sent abroad (Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 1976).
The Holy Synod and the parish schools
The Holy Synod, established in 1721, took charge of the elementary and clerical education system. The Synod’s network of dukhovnye shkoly — the lower and higher seminaries — was, until the 1820s, the only real mass system of primary and secondary education in Russia. It trained sons of priests, deacons, and lower clergy for church office, and it produced most of the literate men of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Russia.
The Ministry of Education
In 1802 Alexander I established the Ministry of Education, the first centralised civil authority over schooling. A series of Uchitel’skie statutes and a four-tier system of schools (parish, district, province, university-circling) was set up under the educationalist Nikolai Novikov’s former collaborator, the count Nikolai Mordvinov. The districts were grouped around the universities of Moscow, St Petersburg, Kazan, Kharkov, Dorpat, Vilna, and (briefly) Kazan; the structure of higher education was a self-conscious copy of Napoleon’s French university system (Wortman, 1976).
The Great Reforms and after
The most decisive school reforms came in the 1860s under the minister Dmitry Tolstoy and his successor, Ivan Delianov. The Statute of 1864 created the gimnaziya, a classical eight-year secondary school; the 1872 statute made the real’noe uchilishche, a five-year polytechnic secondary school, into the preferred route for the urban lower middle class; and the 1861 establishment of the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Courses (followed by Guerrier Courses, etc.) opened higher education to women for the first time on a substantial scale (Byford, Turning Points in Russian and Soviet History, 2016).
The numbers grew quickly but unevenly. The 1897 census reported 22 per cent literacy among the empire’s 9-49 age group in the 50 European governorates; in 1917 the best estimate was about 40 per cent. Higher education expanded almost as fast: the student body at the ten Russian universities rose from about 12,000 in 1894 to about 35,000 in 1914, with an additional 8,000-10,000 women in the higher women’s courses and a few thousand more in the polytechnics and commercial institutes.
University life
The universities of the imperial period were small by modern standards. The largest, Moscow and St Petersburg, had about 9,000-10,000 students each in 1914. The University of Dorpat (Yuryev) was the centre of German-speaking Baltic scholarship. Kazan was the eastern centre. The Universities of Kharkov, Kiev, and Warsaw, the Warsaw Polytechnic, the St Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, the Petrovskaya Academy of Agriculture, the Moscow Higher Technical School, and the Commercial Institute were the other major centres.
The universities were politically turbulent. The 1899 temporary regulation sent students into the streets in three years running; the 1905 Revolution began in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev university halls. The University Autonomy Statute of 1904 was a partial concession. By 1914 the universities were the recognised hostels of Russian intellectual life — and the recognised recruiting grounds of the socialist parties.
The non-Russian schools
For the empire’s non-Russian populations, the education system was a deliberate instrument of Russification. From 1835 to 1905 the Polish and Lithuanian primary schools were systematically replaced by Russian-language schools with Russian staff. The Polish Higher School of Warsaw was turned into the Russian Imperial University of Warsaw in 1869. The Finnish school system was preserved by the 1809 settlement; it was a partial target of Bobrikov’s Russification campaigns of 1900-1904 and was fully restored by the 1905 revolution (Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History, 2001).
The legacy
The imperial universities survived the revolution in reduced form: the new Soviet government moved the Imperial University of St Petersburg to Leningrad in 1924; the Imperial University of Moscow was reorganised in 1930; the Imperial University of Warsaw re-emerged in 1915 as the Polish University of Warsaw; the Imperial University of Kazan, Kharkov, Kiev, Dorpat, Tomsk, and Saratov are the ancestors of the post-Soviet universities that bear the same names. The Bestuzhev Courses became the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. The parish school network, a million-strong by 1914, was the model for the Soviet rural school.