Острова утопии. Педагогическое и социальное проектирование послевоенной школы (1940—1980-е)

This chapter is the first part of a bigger work entitled “Soviet ‘school film’: between the Communist project and the late Soviet utopia of privacy,” which has yet to be published. We propose that the “school-film” genre appeared in the course of updating and refurbishing the stock of ideologically-pointed means by which Soviet elites constructed a set of projective realities acceptable for their primary audiences and exploitable in their managing practices – as a part of the last full-scale Soviet mobilization project known as “the Thaw.” At its birth, the genre was aimed mainly at inculcating the already customary collectivist models of behavior into the audience, as well as at discrediting (no less customary) of any off-public micro-group contexts. In this context, however, these actions were performed using somewhat finer strategies, relying on attempts to build personally oriented empathic ties: “sincerity” (which was to become a legendary shibboleth not only for school films but for all of Thaw culture) basically lay in imitating private empathy regimes. The primary audience of school films was, naturally, teenagers, who were seen as the most appropriate social stratum to be targeted by the new mobilization strategies. The article traces the preconditions that gave rise to school film, as well as the main stages of its early (1960s) development.

This collection is concluded with the afterword written by a well-known Russian pedagogue, educational theorist and journalist, Dr. Evgeny Yamburg (The Russian Academy of Education and Educational Centre # 109, Moscow).