“Knowledge is power”: The rise and fall of Soviet mass enlightenment, 1943-1991

This dissertation examines how the Soviet state shaped its citizens through mass education from 1943 to 1991, focusing on the Society for Dissemination of Knowledge (Znanie). Drawing on extensive archival research across the former Soviet Union, diaries, correspondence, and institutional collections, I show how Soviet citizens engaged with and challenged official ideology through their participation in educational activities. While existing scholarship often portrays late socialist citizens as retreating into private spheres, I demonstrate how Znanie's extensive network of lectures and publications provided spaces for meaningful engagement with ideas of progress, culture, and self-realization. By the late 1970s, Znanie mobilized over three million members who delivered 25.5 million lectures annually, reaching claimed audiences of over one billion people and embodying the Soviet commitment to creating the "well-rounded individual" through mass adult education. The dissertation traces both elite Moscow-level decision-making and grassroots provincial implementation, showing how lecturers navigated between idealistic missions and bureaucratic realities, official scripts and unscripted audience encounters.The irony lies in how the very infrastructure built to defend Soviet humanism became the vehicle for dismantling it. I reveal how Soviet mass enlightenment required massive state institutional and material support—when that supporting state collapsed, enlightenment became just another market commodity competing for profit. Its "universal" appeal had been materially contingent all along. This history offers insights beyond the Soviet context into the structural conditions necessary for mass humanistic education to thrive, with particular relevance for contemporary debates about the retreat of state support for the humanities and the commodification of knowledge.