INSTITUTE OF RED PROFESSORS

The Institute of Red Professors (Institut Krasnoy professury, or IKP) was founded by government decree on February 11, 1921, in order to train a new generation of Marxist cadres for careers in education and elsewhere in the Party, state, and scientific establishment. Along with the Communist Academy, the IKP was launched as an alternative to the "bourgeois" Academy of Sciences and universities that the Bolsheviks had inherited from the old regime. Headed between 1918 and 1932 by Mikhail Pokrovsky, the IKP was formally affiliated with the Commissariat of the Enlightenment. In practice it was also subordinate to the party's Central Committee—specifically, the Politburo, Orgburo, Secretariat, and department of agitation and propaganda.

At its launch the IKP was designed to be an interdisciplinary body. But by 1922 it had been divided into three departments—history, economics, and philosophy—that were augmented in 1924 by a preparatory program for less-qualified students. Four more departments were added in 1928 that concerned party history, law, literature, and the natural sciences. After an abortive merger with the Communist Academy between 1930 and 1931, the IKP was broken up into separate institutes devoted to history, Communist Party history, economics, philosophy, and the natural sciences. These divisions, in turn, were quickly flanked by six more institutes after the IKP assumed responsibility for the Communist Academy's graduate program in 1931.

Although the IKP was initially designed to be an elite institution of the red intelligentsia, it was transformed in the mid-1920s by repeated reorganizations, the dismissal of former Trotskyites and Mensheviks, and ongoing efforts to proletarianize the IKP community as a whole. Personal ambition and the turbulence of the so-called cultural revolution between 1928 and 1932 further divided the IKP. Although wholly Marxist, the faculty and student body split repeatedly along generational, class, and educational lines during these years. These tensions led faculty and students to seek positions elsewhere, a trend encouraged by the Sovietization of the universities and the Academy of Sciences that was underway at this time. Indeed, the Stalinist co-option of these educational institutions—facilitated by a merciless purge of the old bourgeois professorate—left the IKP without a clear mandate and ultimately led to its closure in 1938.

Over the course of its existence, the IKP was frequented by both party officials and Marxist scholars. Some of the most prominent among them included Vladimir Adoratsky, Andrey Bubnov, Nikolai Bukharin, Abram Deborin, Sergey Dubrovsky, Emilian Yaroslavsky, Bela Kun, Nikolai Lukin, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Nevsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky, Yevgeny Varga, and Vyacheslav Volgin. IKP graduates who went on to serve in prominent positions in party, state, and scientific institutions included Grigory Alexandrov, Isaak Mints, Mark Mitin, Militsa Nechkina, Anna Pankratova, Boris Ponomarev, Pyotr Pospelov, Nikolai Rubinshtein, Arkady Sidorov, Mikhail Suslov, Pavel Yudin, and Nikolai Voznesensky.

See also: academy of sciences; communist academy; education

bibliography

David-Fox, Michael. (1997). Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Fox, Michael S. (1993). "Political Culture, Purges, and Proletarianization at the Institute of Red Professors, 1921–1929." Russian Review 52(1):20–42.

David Brandenberger