“Providing Appropriate Conditions for Rural Schooling…” Leonid Brezhnev’s Memorandum to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the State of Rural Schools (April 9, 1973)

Abstract

This paper for the first time introduces Leonid Brezhnev’s analytical memorandum on the problems of rural schools, sent to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in April 1973. It demonstrates that Brezhnev’s school education policy differed significantly from Khrushchev’s reforms. Khrushchev attempted to address social inequality between the city and the countryside, including the quality of school education, through the “proletarianization of students” and the narrowing of educational mobility channels for high school graduates. Unlike Khrushchev, Brezhnev implemented a different approach, which envisioned a significant qualitative improvement in rural schooling by accelerating the construction of schools and boarding schools, providing school buses, and addressing the everyday needs of rural teachers.