Educational Environment and Hierarchy within the Deportee Community in Western Siberia (1940-1950s)

Abstract

The article - through the analysis of state educational policy, educational spaces and practices of employment of deportees in the educational sphere - attempts to characterize the heterogeneity of the status ‘special contingents’ in the context of a special administrative regime. It is established that the educational environment of the 1940-1950s has evolved considerably as compared to the period of ‘dispossession’ of the early 1930s: since the 1937 school year children of special settlers were formally educated on a common basis (in schools, colleges and universities); as distinct from the 1930s, no attempt had yet been made to use literature in national languages and establish any national schools for deportees; teachers-representatives of the ‘punished peoples’ were to teach their compatriots only in Russian; in the mid-1950s ‘significant drawbacks’ in the education of ethnic deportees were acknowledged (those were mentioned short before the lifting of restrictions on the special settlements in view of the need to ‘fix’ the repressed people in the areas of their forced settlement). There was a general vector of development of the educational environment: the wave of ethnic deportations and the increase in ethnic diversity of the special settlements were accompanied by increased unifying trends in education - which resulted from the refusal to take into account any national features of ethnic deportees. The ambivalence of the government’s actions regarding the educational environment of the special settlements was explained by the desire of the Soviet system to transform the ‘suspicious’ population into loyal individuals who would work in state indicated territories and have only those professional knowledge and skills that were required by the state. Analysis of a set of documents relating to the history of the settlements suggests that state educational policy in the special settlements supported the hierarchy of ‘contingents’ and ‘in-contingent’ groups established by administrative and operational methods (socially dangerous and socially close), the position of which was determined by the opinions of the authorities regarding the degree of loyalty of a particular category of special settlers. The Germans and Kalmyks were considered to be ‘more loyal as compared to other special contingents’ and could get employed in educational institutions, while ‘less loyal ones’ (‘the Baltic contingents’, deportees from the North Caucasus, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian Nationalists) were virtually deprived of this opportunity. The government’s ‘bottleneck policy’ inflicted significant damage on the deportees: the general level of education of the special settlers was reduced to the pre-war level; disparities in the proportions of different specialists, especially those to engaged in the humanities, occurred.