Chaos on campus: The 1924 studentproverkain Leningrad

IN SPRING 1921 a series of measures relaxing restrictions on trade and production while eliminating grain requisitions marked the introduction of the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The Communist Party instituted NEP in the hope of securing civil peace and social stability. This 'retreat' from the miltant days of War Communism and the resulting contradictions of ideology, class and policy have made NEP something of an anomaly for historians. Earlier studies concentrated on the development of the state and party apparatus during NEP, and the internal political battles which the dynamics of change produced. These studies have generally viewed NEP not as a distinct historical period but as an intermediary between a state founded on leninist principles and an emerging stalinist system.1 Recent literature has questioned this assumption. Inherent in most of the recent work is the supposition that NEP itself was a distinct historical period with an amalgam of political forces 'from above' and social forces 'from below' providing for a highly complex and often divided society.2 A recent essay by Sheila Fitzpatrick has noted that a fundamental paradox of NEP society was the fluid nature of class definitions set against the tremendous social and political significance these identities carried for the individual.3 This obfuscation of class identity was critical in defining social and political developments in the 1920s. Delineating the role of class and ideology within a revolutionary state which oscillated between a nihilistic rejection of all pre-revolutionary structures and the grudging acceptance of the use of 'bourgeois specialists' became a painstaking process of compromise, dialogue and confrontation during NEP. The bolsheviks required a fresh generation of young specialists, trained to take control of a burgeoning state apparatus, if they were to address the problem of state-building. In order to create this new cadre of trained youth, an effective higher education system was needed. But the network of higher schools and research institutions, like other organisations within the Soviet political economy, had been weakened by the financial austerity and infrastructural decay experienced during the civil war. This article examines the crisis of higher education in the mid-1920s by looking at the contradictory set of agendas pursued through the student proverka (literally 'verification') in 1924, and the effects this purge had on the higher education system during the remainder of NEP. Discussion here centres on the purge as it was implemented in Leningrad, and in particular at Leningrad State University (LGU), the nation's second largest university.4 The goal here is to explain how central and regional state authority-represented in this case by the Communist Party and