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Как устроить праздник: юбилеи в советских вузах с административной, политической и дискурсивной точек зрения, 1935–1985
Researchers have paid quite a lot of attention to the topic of university jubilees and related official histories of the universities. These works have usually been viewed from the perspective of intellectual history and discourse analysis. Mentioned approaches can be supplemented by the history of institutes and political as well as administrative practices. The article shows it with the example of Soviet university anniversaries of the period1935–1985. The content of academic monographs and journalistic articles on the universities’ histories and jubilees was shaped, to some extent, by the political functions of the holidays and corresponding administrative practices. The key features of the official public narrative about university were based on the bureaucratic worldview, sometimes entire passages were borrowed from internal memos. According to this approach, higher education was no more than a production of qualified cadres for the economy with applied research as the universities’ secondary objective. The influence of the administrative and political components of the anniversaries, however, cannot be understood only as evidence of the lacking university autonomy. During the celebration, universities could pursue their own goals such as securing additional funding or establishing the (symbolic and sometimes real) connection with prerevolutionary and Western universities via shared rituals, images, and networking.
The first part of the article gives a general overview of national anniversaries associated with Lenin, the revolution, and the formation of the USSR. It is shown that these jubilees significantly influenced how Soviet universities celebrated their own anniversaries. The rhetoric and organization of events indicated similarities between public and university celebrations, but at the same time signaled that the former was more important. The article analyzes the mechanisms and practices of organizing universities’ festivities paying special attention to the in many ways the exemplary 200th anniversary of Moscow State University celebrated in 1955.
The study involves a wide range of printed and archival sources from the fonds of the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the RSFSR, trade unions, the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, individual universities, as well as from the editorial archives of periodicals.