Hour Zero – Educational Sciences in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe

Focus of the Book: Educational Sciences at Zero Hour after 1945

The book Hour Zero – Educational Sciences in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe aims to analyse the continuities and discontinuities in educational sciences¹ when formerly independent European countries were absorbed into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence at the end of World War II. We believe that cross-national case studies of “new beginnings” will yield material for more in-extensive transnational comparative analysis. The timeframe covers the period from the gradual seizure of power by communist leaders in the countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe after 1945 to a certain “détente” associated with the death of Stalin and the condemnation of his “cult of personality”² at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1956.³ We delimit our study to the period of 1944/45–1956 (but the periodization may be subject to country specificities). The case studies include Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the former German Democratic Republic and the former republic of Soviet Union – Latvia, as well as countries of the former Yugoslavia (contemporary Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia).

The current academic scholarship on Soviet politics, culture, and education is not lacking. However, the Soviet Union’s influence on a field of educational sciences so important for teachers, students, and general public has not been explored extensively, especially in this specific period, which we have labelled “zero hour”. Some studies on Hungary⁴, Poland⁵, Ex-Yugoslavia⁶, Ex-GDR⁷, and Czechoslovakia⁸ address this period in the history of education and our topic only partially. The studies of Baltic historians of education are collated in the book History of Pedagogy and Educational Sciences in the Baltic Countries from 1940 to 1990: an Overview, published in 2013. One part of that volume is devoted to the development of pedagogy as a scientific discipline in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania under Soviet rule.⁹

However, none of these studies has focused specifically on the period of transformations in educational sciences after World War II, hence the main question we pursue is how to regard “zero hour” – a post-1945¹⁰ period, when the “old” order was dismantled to make way for a new political and ideological system represented by the Soviet Union. We are aware that the terms “new beginning” and “zero hour” require the most careful handling. Although the “new scientific elite” after 1945 wanted to write the “new” educational sciences and staged the “new beginning” in different ways, previous experience in the field was still present and could not simply be erased from educational theory and practice. We refer to these transformation processes of educational sciences, processes of continuity and discontinuity, as zero hour.¹¹

Our studies focus on 1) the relationship between the “autonomy and heteronomy” of educational sciences under the control of state power, including communist ideology,¹² and 2) on the opportunities for and the development of debate in the shadow of the Soviet ideological “pattern”, namely sovietization of educational sciences. We ask to what extent can sovietization processes exhaustively characterize the post-1945 developments in educational sciences, and to what extent were the “autonomous” development processes possible and relevant to national contexts and discourses? We are thus interested in a differentiated analysis of relationship between several trends – continuity and discontinuity, autonomy and heteronomy, and instrumentalization of political power, as well as in our own research endeavours. We ask about the processes of “enculturation” of the “new scientist” in radically changed political and social conditions, and we ask how to reconstruct their “new identity”. We also ask about the rules, norms, and mechanisms of the “new order” that was established in educational sciences after 1945. We ask to what extent the perspective of instrumentalizing educational sciences for the political, economic and social goals or political “mission” of educational sciences of the “new world” is expressed in the educational debate after 1945. In this sense, an important question is to what extent, under ideological (Marxism-Leninism) “control”, educational sciences lose their free critical view and instead prefer scientifically unfruitful dogmatic research methods, thereby experiencing a dramatic decline. This common focus allows us to examine the post-1945 revisions in educational sciences in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe from a transnational viewpoint.¹³

Setting the Context and Some Methodological Considerations

The idea for the book was conceived at a conference in Trnava, Slovakia, in 2019, where the three editors of this book from the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Hungary, who were familiar for years, met up again. We are all historians of education who have studied our national histories and grappled with the challenges of making them understandable to an international audience. After the collapse of the Eastern-European communist regimes, historians of education faced two old challenges: they had to reconstruct their national (educational) histories and, at the same time reconnect with their Western colleagues. The “new” Europeans’ renewed sense of national identity and their enthusiastic presentations were received with some reservations in the West.¹⁴

We are still struggling with the telling of our story. The transnational turn in the history of education is one of the useful approaches, encouraging self-reflection in the research field, research that transcends local and national boundaries, revealing global trends.¹⁵ How do the European countries that were excluded from the global sphere after World War II and remained behind the Iron Curtain, fit into this transnational perspective? We believe that a kind of transnationalism, still called “internationalisation” in the tradition of leftist movements, was also at work in this part of Europe.¹⁶ Moscow was the central actor in the Eastern bloc’s international networks coordinating and monitoring local processes in politics and society, including the educational sciences. Here, we can ask whether this can be called the internationalisation of education or whether the label of colonisation applies there.

Our common interest in incorporating educational sciences within the networks of the Soviet Union inspired us to seek out like-minded colleagues. We conceptualised our project by proposing a series of detailed questions that our collaborators could address in their research.

The first group of questions concerned the continuity and discontinuity of educational life in the interwar period and after 1945 in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe: How justified is the reference to “zero hour” in the development of educational sciences and educational debate? Was it more a desire and goal of the new communist political elite in the field of education and science, or can we talk about the new beginning? What legacy did the interwar left-wing or communist pedagogical debate leave behind in the attempt to sovietize educational sciences after 1945? Can this be considered a continuity, or did communist power after 1945 foster fundamentally different conceptions of the man, of educational goals, and different methods and approaches in educational debate? How did the power struggles in the ranks of communist representation influence the direction of professional educational debate?

The second group of questions addressed the processes of sovietization of institutions¹⁷ after 1945 in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe: What representative institutions of educational sciences were newly established or renewed their pre-war activities? Who led these institutions, and what goals or program did they pursue? What models were essential for their programming and institutional definition? How were they related to Soviet science, e.g., contacts with Soviet educators, visits to Moscow or the USSR and vice versa?

The third group of questions pertained to the sovietization of educational media and the content of educational sciences promoted through subjected media: what topics dominated the educational sciences after 1945, namely were these topics and goals only the result of the exercised political and economic power, or can one consider certain autonomous academic educational debate? What names of Soviet pedagogy became the canon for pedagogy in the countries concerned? When were these works translated, if at all, into the languages of these countries? When and upon whose instigation were “domestic” writings modelled after Soviet educational sciences? Can these products be described as examples of Marxist pedagogy? Did they critically address Marxist philosophy (the teachings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin), or were they rather a list of some dogmatic instructions based on the efforts of communist power to manage and control education in the newly-established regimes? Did these writings lead to a critical analysis of the reference points and goals of Marxist pedagogy, or did they “drain” educational sciences by “stealing” the key questions of its professional education while trying to “publicize” the educational image of the “New (Soviet) Man”? What educational (especially academic) journals were founded, and did they disseminate the canon of Soviet pedagogy?

The fourth group of questions concerned personalities or actors who supported, condemned, or assumed a neutral position in the sovietization of educational sciences in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe: How did the exchange of the main figures of educational sciences in the period under research proceed? Who occupied the position of the “new communist elite” in the field of educational sciences? How was the denunciations or removals of domestic scientific elites of the interwar period handled? By what instruments and using what language was the scientific authority of the interwar domestic actors weakened so they could be replaced by the “new” elite?

We recognise that our sets of questions are wide-ranging and challenging, not answerable in one single study, but hopefully opening doors for further research. The articles collected in this volume are an attempt to explore this broad field from at least some national perspectives. We are grateful to those colleagues who responded to our call and look forward to cooperating with those who will also be inspired by the questions posed.

One Centre, Different Paths: Case Studies from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe

After World War II, the theoretical foundations, concepts and goals of education established in the inter-war debate were repositioned and/or their meanings revised to meet the demands of Soviet authorities. In some cases, in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, it was possible to maintain some continuity with the interwar educational debate, but it also implied the implementation of new goals and content in the educational sciences. This situation was determined by post-1945 political and social changes and driven by the international aspirations of communist power from the Soviet centre (see especially Kestere/Zigmunde), as well as from the “domestic” centres of communist power. The authors of the Latvian case study (Kestere/Zigmunde) used the biographical method to investigate the ambivalence or rewriting of the logic and rules of educational theory and practice, using the example of Soviet “missionaries”. Similarly, complicated examples of the transformation of educational discourse are visible in the cases of Czechoslovakia (Kasper/Kasperová), the former GDR (Wiegmann), and Hungary (Garai/Pimenta/Németh), as well as in the former Yugoslavia, where sovietization took on quite specific forms due to the political relations between Stalin and Yugoslav leader Tito.

The Yugoslavian case represents a specific form of zero hour, as after the rift with the Stalin-led Soviet Union, Yugoslavia followed its own path not only in the political but also in the socio-cultural space. However, as Medveš’ study indicates, the Yugoslavian way was still strongly inspired by Soviet models of educational theory. Marxism-based Yugoslav educational sciences pursued a course that on many levels diverged from the inter-war tradition and was primarily geared towards the political imperatives of the formation of a communist society, rather than trying to find its own path in educational theory. In this respect, the Yugoslav story did not differ so much from those of the other USSR-controlled states in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Control and ideological pressure were exercised by the new domestic elites uncritically following Soviet models (Šušnjara). The Marxist-oriented academic elites were driven more by socio-political than academic and scientific goals. Tito was a strong authority, authoritarian leader and his cult was not unlike that of a Soviet dictator. New institutions (universities, journals, educational research institutes) set the direction of Yugoslav educational thought, but it must always be remembered that different ethno-cultural approaches in Yugoslavia itself differed considerably.

All studies agree that educational research in the countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe after 1945 was increasingly challenged by a fundamentally new political and social agenda, including the collective education of the New (Soviet) Man. According to the ideology of the time, the implementation of this collective education required the revolutionary dismantling of the old orders and erecting new rules of logic into scientific life, the rejection of existing educational traditions and the opening up to “proved” Soviet models. The goals of new communist education should have been achieved, inter alia, by forgetting the “old” rules and logic of educational sciences and advancing new models, namely, forcing the idea that the present is not conditioned by the past but by the achievement of a goal that lies in the future (Stępkowski). Rewriting history according to political agendas, re-evaluating ideas and people – erasing them from history or marginalising them on the periphery, ideologically and/or physically – became a priority.

The new tasks in the field of education required reliable actors who could quickly implement communist plans. This led to the creation of a new educational elite, closely associated with high positions in the political and social hierarchy (Kudláčová, Kestere/Zigmunde). This situation that could be called corrupt, weakened independent scientific approaches in educational sciences and made it easy to substitute educational theory with the ideological dogma of Marxism-Leninism.