Social structure of post-war students: experience in processing data from personal files from the archive of the Pskov Pedagogical Institute

Shtatskaya Angelina Mikhailovna ORCID: 0000-0002-7120-070X Assistant; Department of National and Universal History; Pskov State University 180000, Russia, Pskov region, Pskov, Lenin Square, 2, room 121 a.shtatskaya@pskgu.ru

Introduction

In the conditions of the accelerated post-war restoration of the national economy of the USSR in 1945-1953, the state's need for qualified personnel in all sectors of the economy and in the social sphere was especially great, therefore, the country's leadership resumed the course of developing greater accessibility to higher education. Relative to the pre-war 1939, the number of universities in the USSR increased by 18% by 1951, and the number of students doubled to 1.3 million people ^{[1, p. 162]}. With the increase in the number of people with higher education, the social and cultural status of the intelligentsia began to increase, the term "intelligentsia" itself returned to use ^{[2, p. 37]}. The study of the social composition of the post-war students allows us to get closer to understanding what "material" the post-war Soviet intelligentsia was formed from and how it was transformed by the events of the Great Patriotic War. In modern Russian historiography, historians L. V. Silina ^[3], E. O. Yagodkina ^[4] and Yu.A. Rusina ^[5,6] have addressed this topic in one way or another, but the potential for revealing this topic continues to be high.

As part of the study of the social composition of post-war students, the experience of pedagogical universities is interesting, which solved the problem of staff shortages in post-war schools and trained teachers for the education and training of the next generation. An example of such a university is the Pskov State Pedagogical Institute (PSPI), which resumed work and admission of applicants in 1945. The source of information about the social composition of students of the PSPI of the first post-war years are documents from the personal files of students, formed into volumes by year of graduation (from 1948 to 1953). To work on the study, data were collected from 282 personal files of all full-time students of the historical and literary faculties of the PSPI. Based on the collected information, a prosopographic relational database was built in the Microsoft Access 2016 DBMS, containing socio-demographic indicators of students, including information about their social origin. For ease of use of the database, the collected information about students is structured in the form of seven tables connected by a one-to-many relationship from the key field "Code" (student code) (See Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Data schema of the database "Students of the Historical and literary faculty of the PSPI 1948-1953 year of graduation"

The data was entered into the "Social origin" column in four fixed variants using the "Substitution Wizard" tool: "employees", "workers", "peasants", "priests". Further, all the information was calculated and the percentages for each year and for each faculty were determined.

The social origin of the post-war students of the PSPI: the results of the analysis of data from personal files

Of the 282 students, 245 people provided information about their social origin. The sources of information about social origin are personal cards from personal files, in the form of which a separate column "Social origin" was provided, and students' autobiographies, where they indicated specific professions or even the place of work of their parents, which made it possible to determine social origin. In the Soviet years, the "workers" group included all those who were engaged in hired, mainly physical, labor. The second group consisted of peasants. This group included those who were engaged in agricultural activities. Finally, the third group consisted of employees. This group included doctors, lawyers, teachers, administrative staff, etc. ^{[7, pp. 11-12]}.

A frequency analysis of the presented data showed the following data (See Table 1):

Table 1. The social origin of students of the historical and literary faculties of the PSPI 1948-1953.

The ratio of the social groups to which the students referred themselves changed insignificantly from year to year. We see a clear predominance of young people from the families of employees. We also notice an approximately equal number of immigrants from working-class and peasant families in the first post-war graduates (1948-1950) and, since the 1951 graduation, a decrease in the number of students of working-class origin "in favor" of employees. And despite the disgraced position of the servants of the Orthodox Church, two students indicated that their fathers were church deacons ^{[8, L. 32, 87]}. If we talk about the difference in the resulting indicators of the social origin of graduates between faculties, the only noticeable difference is that in the Faculty of Literature as a whole, the proportion of immigrants from peasant families is 5.5% higher for all the studied years.

From the leading position of the category of employees in the social composition of the studied students, it can be concluded that children who grew up in families in which their parents were engaged in intellectual work looked at obtaining higher education and, accordingly, a profession similar to their parents, as an obligatory part of their life path. The massization of Soviet higher education will reach its peak by the mid-1980s, but so far it has only been gaining momentum, so the proportion of immigrants from working-class and peasant families is not yet so high. In addition, tuition at universities in 1940-1956 was paid and amounted to 300 rubles per year. Such expenses were feasible for many families, but for some (especially for peasants) they could become a factor influencing the refusal of admission to university.

It is also interesting that, unlike nationality, which the students indicated infrequently, on the origin, on the profession of their parents, the students themselves, talking about themselves in questionnaires and autobiographies, made a noticeable emphasis. Despite the fact that the USSR Constitution adopted in 1936 declared the granting of equal rights to all citizens of the country, regardless of "social origin, property status and past activities" (Article 135), in practice great attention was paid to social origin and it is not surprising that students separately emphasized the "correct" origin or indicated it automatically having got used to the fact that social origin is an integral part of Soviet civic identification, such as place of birth or surname.

Other information about students' families provided in personal files

Analyzing the information from the students' autobiography, one can note the high social mobility of their parents, who moved from one social class to another during their lives. Fifteen autobiographies indicate that the parents were peasants before the October Revolution, but later they retrained into working professions and professions from the category of "employees". This is an interesting sign of the times, reflecting the level and pace of social mobility and urbanization in the first decades of Soviet power. For example, one of the students pointed out that his father was a peasant before the revolution, but later changed his field of activity and (as of 1948) rose to deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Pskov region. Thus, it often turned out that if the parents were peasants by origin, then their children were already born into a family of workers or employees and indicated the corresponding social origin. This also reflects the fact that despite the resolution adopted in March 1926 by the Central Committee of the RCP (b) "On determining the social status of Communists and those accepted into the Party", which clarified the criteria of social affiliation and stated that social status should now be determined by the main occupation at the time of determination ^{[7, p. 19]}, in practice, in one way or another, the pre-revolutionary labor biography continued to be taken into account.

In those autobiographies, where students also clarified the professions of their parents, they most often indicated the profession of their father. The following professions were represented: a teacher, a doctor, a railway worker, a church deacon, a zootechnician, an accountant, a land surveyor, an electrician, a motorist, a civil engineer, a factory worker, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a soldier, a party worker and others.

Among the official positions of parents of students of the Faculty of History of the PSPI, senior positions were widely represented, especially from Pskov: chairman of the City Executive Committee of Pskov, deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Pskov region, head of the border post (Pskov), head of the planning department of the plant "Nominee" (Pskov), head of transport at the Pskov station, as well as the manager of the regional office of supply and sales in Novgorod, Chairman of the Klyatninsky Village Council of the Mogilev region of the BSSR. There are noticeably fewer people holding senior positions, especially at the regional level, among the parents of students of another faculty of PSPI — literary. If we also correlate this with the above data that there were 5.5% more people from peasant families at the Faculty of Literature than at the Faculty of History, then we can conclude that historical education has a higher prestige relative to philological education due to its characteristic political orientation.

Thirteen students indicated their fathers' membership in the CPSU (b). Twenty-two students made separate notes in their autobiographies that none of their relatives had been repressed and were not abroad. But two students did not hide information about their convicted parents. One of the girls wrote about her father, who was arrested in 1938, and as of the year of writing his autobiography (1947), he was still imprisoned in Vyatlag (Kirov region) ^{[9, l. 110]}. Another student, born in 1924 in Leningrad, wrote that in 1937 her father was convicted, and she and her whole family followed him to a place of exile – Yolotan, Turkmen SSR ^{[8, l. 51]}. Also in one of the autobiographies there is an indirect indication that relatives were subjected to repression: one of the graduates of 1952, who was born in 1930 in the village of Leningradskaya in the Krasnodar Territory, wrote: "In 1932, together with her family, she came to the Kazakh SSR, Akmola region. Shortadinsky district settlement of Novo-Kubanka" ^{[10, l. 138]}. The settlement of Novo-Kubanka was established in 1933 as one of the 292 productive camp sites of Karlag. The lists of the "special category" were formed, including from the village of Leningradskaya ^[11]. Perhaps it did not make much sense to withhold information about convicted relatives, since in the case of verification it could raise additional questions.

The colossal human losses during the Great Patriotic War were not spared by the families of the students of the PSPI. Of the 282 personal files of graduates of the Faculty of History and Literature of the PSPI 1948-1953 studied, 240 cases (85.1%) contain information about the fate of students and/or their family members during the war years. Of these, 30 (12.5%) personal files, namely autobiographies, contain references to relatives who died in the war: 24 students lost their fathers, 5 brothers, 2 stepfathers.

Comparison of indicators of Pskov and Moscow post-war students

The topic of the social composition of post-war students was also addressed at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2008, a study by E.O. Yagodkina on the collective portrait of students of the Moscow State University Faculty of History for 1945-1953 was published, based on socio-demographic data from students' personal files ^[12]. This study showed that the majority of students of the Moscow State University Faculty of History were also from families of employees (45%) and among their parents there were also quite a lot of people who held senior positions (13%) – positions of party workers, heads of enterprises and large departments, employees of ministries, military personnel of the highest rank. We note a similar thing about the Faculty of Economics of the PSPI, but there is a difference in the level of leadership positions held by parents, which is quite understandable, given the different status of the two cities and the level of employment opportunities. It should be noted another difference in the social origin of students from Pskov and Moscow: among the post—war recruitment of the Moscow State University Faculty of History, young people from peasant families were only 6%, whereas historical education in Pskov was more accessible to villagers and many more people from peasant families studied at the PSPI - 22.4%. There was a significant difference in gender the ratio of students of the two universities. More than 40% of the students of the Moscow State University Faculty of History were male, 70% of the students at the PSPI were female, 30% were male.

Conclusion

Based on the results of the analysis of information from the database compiled on the basis of information from the personal files of students of two faculties of the PSPI of the first post-war years of graduation, a lively collective portrait of educated youth of the late 1940s — early 1950s turned out, whose social orientation and life plans are to some extent determined by the social status and level of education of parents. This trend was observed in the following decades. For example, according to a sociological study conducted in the early 1970s, among those wishing to enter a university immediately after graduation, the children of workers made up 36.7%, the children of collective farmers - 7.2%, the children of employees and specialists — 54.6% ^{[13, p. 166]}. But the resulting social portrait of students was influenced not only by this, but also by two other circumstances. Firstly, it is the formal termination of the "class principle" of the selection of applicants since the mid-1930s ^{[13, p. 159]}, when preference was given to immigrants from workers and peasants. Secondly, there was a massive shortage of applicants in the late 1940s in regional universities and a shortage of staff, including teachers. The admission committee of the PSPI was loyal to applicants and accepted all those who passed the entrance exams, despite, for example, the fact that several female students did not hide the fact of political repression against their relatives, and 86 students calmly mentioned that during the war they were forced to live in territories occupied by Nazi Germany. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, as can be seen from the general results of our research, about half of the post-war applicants of the PSPI were residents of the Pskov region, which was completely occupied within its modern borders in 1941-1944. Of course, if not the applicant himself, then one of his relatives could very likely be a resident of the occupied area, and it would be inappropriate to refuse such a large number of applicants to the institute.

In general, the analysis allows us to conclude that the information potential of the materials of the personal files of the university archive is sufficient to study the social portrait of students of the post-war period.