Prozhektery: Administrative Entrepreneurs and Education in Russia from Peter I to Putin

When: Thursday, April 21, 4:00 PM

Where: 206 Ingraham Hall

Sponsors: CREECA, the Department of History

About the Lecture: It is traditionally believed that throughout history it was “the state” that stood behind all and any educational innovation in Russia, indeed, it was the state that drove it. This was, allegedly, especially the case under Peter I. Whereas in Western Europe “educational theories and schools of all sorts were usually the results of individual experimentation in pedagogical techniques,” in Russia “it was the emperor, and the emperor alone, who initiated serious educational activities” (Black, Citizens for the Fatherland). My forthcoming monograph questions this assumption by exploring the role of administrative entrepreneurs, or “projectors,” in building new organizational forms in Russian schooling under Peter I and his immediate successors. The new forms of schooling were neither the fruit of forceful efforts by the omnipresent reforming monarch himself, nor they were somehow automatically brought into existence by the needs of modernization and the pressures of war and technological change. Instead, the introduction of new institutions and organizational forms was driven by the efforts of individuals and groups to implement their personal initiatives: projects driven by career, material, or ideational considerations, or, usually, by a mixture of these. It is the competition between such projectors and their agendas that defined the institutional landscape of education in the early modern era. This argument, arguably, applies to other periods as well. Rather than assuming that it was the abstract “state” that drove modernization of education in the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, it we should look at the ways in which enterprising individuals and groups using the “state” as a platform for implementing their own projects.

About the Speaker: Igor Fedyukin is an Associate Professor of History at the National Research University–Higher School of Economics in Moscow and, in 2015/16, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His research focuses on history and politics of education, and his forthcoming monograph explores the role of administrative entrepreneurs, or “projectors,” in building new organizational forms in Russian schooling under Peter I and his immediate successors. Fedyukin received his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He was a director for policy studies at the New Economic School in Moscow in 2007–2012 and a deputy minister of education and science of Russia in 2012–2013. Fedyukin has held appointments as a Diderot Fellow (2010–2012) and Directeur d’Études Associés (June–July 2015) at the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris and a visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna (May 2015).