Article 19 of Nikita Khrushchev's Theses “On the strengthening of the relationship of the school with life and on the further development of the system of public education in the country,” approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on November 12, 1958 and published two days later, dealt with the question of the language of instruction in schools of the multiethnic and federal Soviet Union. This article, which was inserted into the theses at a late stage in the drafting process, was to provoke the most widespread confrontation between Khrushchev and the leaders of the republics of the USSR during his period of office, contributing to purges in two of them, Azerbaijan and Latvia. The text of Article 19 reads:

In spite of the several ambiguities and contradictions contained within this article, it was widely understood as undermining the very Leninist principle which it took as its starting point, namely, that every child should receive school instruction in his or her native tongue. By adopting the “democratic” measure of allowing parents a choice over this, Khrushchev provoked a severe reaction from some of the leaders of the Soviet republics, several of whom saw the preservation of the national language as central to their roles.

The question to be addressed here is why there was so much opposition, and how it worked out in different cases. In answering these questions, this article draws on recent literature which underlines the flexibility and contingency in center-republic relations. Influential studies from the first decade after the end of the USSR have described center-republic relations in terms of a set of nationality policies, which had a prescriptive if shifting character; or in terms of an original disposition on the part of the Bolsheviks which privileged national minorities to an excessive degree; or as structurally determined once the ethno-federal format for the USSR had been constitutionally enshrined.Footnote ² More recent studies of individual cases challenge these approaches by revealing an undefined gap in center-republic relations, leaving some of the most important issues of nationality status open to negotiation. The findings of these studies undermine the privileging of “nationality policy” as the key to understanding the status and experience of non-Russians in the Soviet Union. Rather, the decisive factor becomes the relative ability of competing factions to wield influence or call in favors. Thus, Timothy Blauvelt has shown that the status of Mingrelian as a nationality was the subject of negotiation between Georgian central and regional elites.Footnote ³ Similarly, Indrek Jääts describes the outcome of negotiations over the status of the Komi-Permiak in the 1920s as determined by the relative balance of influence of opposing sides rather than by any intrinsic merits of the case or appeals to a defined policy.Footnote ⁴ These negotiations took place within generally-understood parameters, while Khrushchev's move in 1958 sought, whether intentionally or not, to shift those parameters by tackling the long embedded Leninist (in the sense that it was genuinely associated with Lenin) principle of mother-tongue education. Reactions to Khrushchev's proposals therefore provide a key case study for the limits to which the center and republics could go in competing for authority.

Khrushchev's reform of education received immediate attention internationally for its radical approach to schooling.Footnote ⁵ The significance of Article 19 did not take long to get out, as émigré contacts learned of widespread opposition to the proposal to change the rules in regard to national schools, and the proceedings of the USSR Supreme Soviet on December 22, 1958 were published soon afterwards, including the speeches of Ukrainian, Armenian, and Georgian delegates in opposition to Article 19.

Yaroslav Bilinsky's seminal article on Article 19 has been the standard reference for scholars since.Footnote ⁶ While Bilinsky's account can be challenged only in minor details, the availability of Soviet archival materials allows for a much more detailed picture of the introduction of Article 19 to emerge, as well as the debates surrounding it and the nature of opposition to the change in the Soviet republics. Drawing on archives in Estonia, Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine, this article uncovers and analyzes a number of facets which locate the fate of Article 19 at the core of center-republic relations in the later Khrushchev years.Footnote ⁷ The centrality of these debates was already recognized by Bilinsky, but a number of new findings are highlighted here. First, the problem identified by Khrushchev “that in the area of language study in the schools of the Union and Autonomous Republics children are considerably overloaded” was widely recognized, but a majority of Union Republics and many of the Autonomous Republics and regions of the RSFSR indicated clear support for an alternative solution to this problem—namely, that this overload should be addressed by adding an extra year of study in all schools outside the RSFSR as well as non-Russian schools within the RSFSR. Second, opposition to this aspect of the school reform went well beyond speeches in the Supreme Soviet and took on a variety of forms in different republics. Third, republican leaders took advantage of a public consultation exercise proposed by Khrushchev himself in order to mobilize opinion against Khrushchev's proposal. Fourth, legislation that was eventually introduced in each republic in line with Khrushchev's theses did not mean that the principle of parental choice and the dropping of the study of one language was actually implemented everywhere.

The school reform was implemented at the height of the Khrushchev “thaw,” a year after, as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Khrushchev had defeated his conservative opponents in the leadership. Khrushchev's victory owed much to the support of Ukrainian and other non-Russian delegates in the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU, who now enjoyed levels of self-governance in the republics that had not been seen since the 1920s. Whether Khrushchev meant to provoke this constituency or not, Article 19 had the effect of sparking a struggle between the national leaders in the republics and the central leadership in Moscow. The episode therefore serves to illuminate both Khrushchev's designs for the ethnoterritorial organization of the USSR and also the stances and attitudes of the non-Russian leaders in the republics.

The nature of these attitudes is so little understood that there is not even a generally-accepted word to describe them. In a recent book, Serhii Plokhy has described the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Petro Shelest, appointed by Khrushchev in 1963 and dismissed by Leonid Brezhnev in 1972, as “the nationally-minded party boss of Ukraine.”Footnote ⁸ This is a safer term than “nationalist,” which implies a consistent, ideologically-driven approach of supporting the cultural and material interests of one particular nation. The behavior of somebody like the leading Latvian communist Eduards Berklāvs (more on him later), who took measures to exclude non-Latvians from obtaining residence in Riga among other things, might well be characterized as “nationalist.” But a much broader phenomenon of “nationally-minded behavior” characterizes the actions of many of the republican leaders.

This behavior is far from being fully explained by scholars. Saulius Grybkauskas has suggested a realistic explanation of the behavior of the Lithuanian leaders of the Lithuanian Communist Party: by presenting themselves as the only possible intermediaries between the Soviet state and a population strongly imbued with nationalist feelings from the interwar years and resentful of the Soviet occupation, they made themselves indispensable to the regime. Their own national mindedness was thus an integral part of the picture they wanted to present to Moscow.Footnote ⁹ It might be added that this picture would also appeal to their local constituency. Other realist explanations focus on the privileged status that party bosses could enjoy in their own republics, as is suggested, among others, by Valeriy Tishkov.Footnote ¹⁰ But the possibility that republican leaders were genuinely nationally-minded should not be ruled out, and the recent emphasis in historical research may give us some pointers as to how emotional dispositions may guide actions. As Ronald Suny has put it, emotions “add an essential connection between structure and action that purely structural or strictly rationalist explanations leave out.”Footnote ¹¹ The two most nationally-minded republics of the 1950s, and those which most openly resisted Khrushchev's school language reform, were Azerbaijan and Latvia. The communists in the former had always held a special status in the Soviet Union as the leaders of the first predominantly Muslim republic, while many of the Latvian leaders had been active in the partisan movement against the German occupation, in contrast to their neighbors in the Estonian Communist Party, most of whom had developed their political careers in Russia.Footnote ¹² The contrast in response to the 1958 law between those republican leaders who opposed it does suggest that issues of background and disposition influenced both discourses and actions.

From 1953 until the end of the 1980s, there were no large-scale open debates on the CPSU's nationality policy, as there had been in the early 1920s, and it is difficult to define any clear “nationalities policy” associated with Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev did refer to the “merger” of nations (sliianie) as the outcome of the “growing together” of nations (sblizhenie), and this envisaged result of the progress of socialism was referred to in the new party program of 1961. Prior to the program's launch, however, Khrushchev was at pains to make clear that this was a vision rather than a statement of intent, and there were few signs of any active policy in this direction.

Even so, such talk would have been more or less unthinkable at the start of Khrushchev's tenure as General Secretary. Almost immediately after Stalin's death, Lavrentii Beriia established the general (though not universally applied) principle that the First Secretary of each republican communist party would be a national of that republic, thus further embedding nationality in an institutional form in the administration of the Soviet federation. At the same time, Beriia also took measures towards the de-Russification of universities in Ukraine and Lithuania and the wider deployment of local languages in the struggle against “bourgeois-nationalist propaganda.”Footnote ¹³ Although following his arrest Beriia was himself charged with encouraging bourgeois-nationalist elements in the republics and inflaming hostility towards Russians, these principles were not reversed and Khrushchev himself was responsible for further measures that favored non-Russian nationalities.Footnote ¹⁴ Most notably, the early years of his ascendancy are associated with the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, the rehabilitation of peoples deported from their homelands by Stalin and Beriia during the Great Patriotic War, and the promotion of non-Russians, especially Ukrainians, who had worked under Khrushchev during his time in the republic, to the Central Committee and other leading party-state bodies.

These moves played a significant part in securing support for Khrushchev, first in his rivalry with Malenkov and in 1957 in his defeat of the conservative “anti-Party group.” In the absence of any unambiguous identification of Khrushchev with clearly-articulated principles of nationality policy, these measures appear to have had a purely political and opportunist character. The same may be true of his first engagement with the issue of the language of education in schools. Shortly after Beriia's arrest in 1953, Khrushchev set up a commission to look into the concerns of Abkhaz parents about the absence of opportunities for their children to study in their mother-tongue, a move which seemed calculated to undermine the legacy of Beriia and his supporters in Georgia.Footnote ¹⁵ The sovnarkhoz (Council of National Economy or Regional Economic Soviet) reform of 1957 gave further authority to the republics, especially the larger ones like Ukraine, who now had a much greater say in the organization of their economies within the overall parameters of the central plans.Footnote ¹⁶ Remedying Stalin's mistreatment of the republics was a central theme of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization and, all in all, until 1958 Khrushchev's inclination was to devolve more decision-making to the republics rather than take it away.

Nevertheless, while most republics continued to support Khrushchev politically, if he was expecting the eternal gratitude of the non-Russian populations of the USSR he was to be severely disappointed. Even before Khrushchev's Secret Speech denouncing Stalin in February 1956, there were growing signs of increasing disaffection in the Baltic Republics, where much of the local population had never come to accept Soviet rule. The Secret Speech and, more markedly, the invasion of Hungary later in 1956 gave further impetus to the nationalist movement in all three Baltic Republics, expressed in the form of graffiti and leaflets and even occasional demonstrations protesting the invasion while also calling for the removal of Russians from their republics.Footnote ¹⁷ More dramatically, the denunciation of Stalin and references to Georgia in the Secret Speech led directly to a series of demonstrations in Tbilisi and other cities in Georgia, which culminated in the shooting of unarmed demonstrators on March 9, 1956.Footnote ¹⁸

While the CPSU leadership could respond to these manifestations of popular nationalism with a combination of repression and concessions, of an altogether different order were the growing signs of nationally-minded behaviors on the part of communist leaders in the republics. The leaders of the Georgian Republic escaped blame for the Tbilisi events, but in neighboring Azerbaijan the leadership was getting out of hand. In August 1956, the Azerbaijan Supreme Soviet passed a law making Azeri the sole official language of the republic. While this brought Azerbaijan in line constitutionally with Georgia and Armenia, it was immediately viewed with suspicion in Moscow.Footnote ¹⁹ In Estonia and Latvia, meanwhile, official discrimination had reached the highest levels of the communist leadership, with accusations abounding of deliberate attempts to alienate recent immigrants and discrimination against Russians in employment and housing allocation.Footnote ²⁰

Popular displays of nationalism in the USSR had clearly been fueled by the Secret Speech and the invasion of Hungary. But the growing evidence of national mindedness among leading communist officials in the republics would have been more disturbing for the Kremlin leadership. In a repeat of a pattern seen in the 1920s, republican and regional leaders appeared increasingly as defenders of a national constituency rather than the local implementers of the CPSU's Marxist-Leninist policies.

From this perspective, Khrushchev's surprise decision to include Article 19 may have been partially motivated by a desire to flush out recalcitrant, or nationally-minded, republic leaders. Ever since the first Soviet constitution of 1918, after all, language policy had been the most important preserve, by law, of the Autonomous and Union Republics. The preservation of local languages and opposition to linguistic russification had been at the core of Lenin's nationality policies, while Stalin had done little more than tinker with this principle by passing into law the compulsory study of Russian, which had become standard practice already.Footnote ²¹ Given that leaders in Azerbaijan, Latvia, and elsewhere had already taken measures to strengthen the status of local languages and other markers of national identity, it is not surprising that they should react negatively to the move, whatever Khrushchev's actual intentions.

In both the Union and Autonomous Republics and regions of the RSFSR, there had been overwhelming support for an alternative solution to the question of languages in national schools prior to the publication of Khrushchev's theses. The rationale behind making changes to do with the language of instruction in the context of a broader reform of education was that, in the non-Russian republics, children were being taught in their own language and therefore had to learn a second language—Russian for the non-Russians, or the local language for Russian pupils—as well as a compulsory foreign language. Russians in the RSFSR, by contrast, were taught in Russian and learned only the one foreign language. Thus in the republics, pupils were in effect studying one more language as an extra subject.

One aspect of Khrushchev's proposals was to standardize the length of the compulsory first stage of middle education to an eight year period (age seven to fifteen, typically). Previously, the length of this stage had varied from seven to nine years. Notably, in the Baltic Republics nine years was the norm, which helped to accommodate the additional language. This flexibility was now being removed. Given that a fully standardized curriculum was being introduced across the USSR under the new proposals, the additional language subject could be taught either at the expense of hours devoted to other subjects, or else would result in a significant extra burden on school children. In Khrushchev's vision of the new Soviet man and woman, either option would interfere with the essential scientific education and work experience for school students which were at the core of his education reform.

This was a genuine problem, and one which was already recognized in many republics. But Khrushchev's solution—dropping the second Soviet language—was not the only proposal on offer. While Article 19 came as a surprise, most of the other major provisions had been well signaled during a prolonged consultation on the proposed law. Laurent Coumel has shown that the first draft of Khrushchev's theses was substantially toned down from his original radical vision. Mid-ranking officials in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU (CPSU CC) and educational specialists were able to intervene successfully to challenge a number of key provisions.Footnote ²² Further input was available from the mass consultation exercise conducted by Khrushchev immediately after the theses were announced. According to one official, in the RSFSR alone 200,000 meetings were held involving 13 million people in discussion of the theses in December 1958.Footnote ²³ If the purpose of this exercise was both to present a veneer of popular endorsement for the project and to generate some enthusiasm for its implementation, it could equally well be manipulated by republican and other regional authorities to express opposition to particular aspects of the theses. Thus the reports emanating from the consultation exercise in Estonia, as well as articles and letters in the Estonian press, unrelentingly emphasized public opposition to any change from the present system when it came to the question of mother-tongue education and the need for citizens of all nationalities in the republic to master both the Estonian and Russian languages.Footnote ²⁴

Khrushchev introduced Article 19 in the teeth of a remarkably consistent message which was coming from all of the national republics and regions of the USSR. In addition to the public consultation exercise conducted after the publication of Khrushchev's theses, there were earlier consultations conducted through the CPSU organizations in each of the republics, Autonomous Republics, and autonomous regions of the USSR. The response from Georgia, dated September 10, 1958, stated: “Given that, in the conditions of the national republics, young men and girls ought, along with study of the basics of chemistry [and so on] … to learn their mother language and literature, and the history and geography of the given republic, the Commission considers it appropriate to propose for Georgia a 9-year period of study.”Footnote ²⁵ The response from Estonia echoed this: “Furthermore, in schools in the Estonian SSR pupils learn three languages (Estonian, Russian, and a foreign language) and in that connection one more year of study time is needed than in schools of the RSFSR, where pupils learn only two languages.” It goes on to specify that “we need to set the same nine year period of study in all of the schools of the republic, that is as with schools where Estonian is the language of instruction, so also in schools with Russian as the language of instruction. That gives schools with Russian as the language of instruction the possibility of spending the necessary number of hours on the study of Estonian.” It was not just in languages that pupils in Estonia faced a possible extra burden, but in culture as well: “The study of the literature of the native land ought to be closely linked to the study of Russian classical literature and the literature of other peoples of the USSR.” The teaching of history should start with the history of the home republic in grade 4, moving to the history of the USSR, including the home republic, in grades 5–9.Footnote ²⁶

Although this implied an emphasis on Estonian history ahead of USSR history, in language and literature there was an asymmetry which was the other way around. In the detailed Estonian proposals for the curriculum structure under a 9-year school, pupils in Russian language schools would devote, after the second grade, one more hour a week to Russian language and literature than their equivalents in Estonian language schools would spend on Estonian language and literature. Conversely, pupils in Estonian language schools would spend one hour a week more on Russian language and literature than pupils at Russian language schools would spend on Estonian language and literature.Footnote ²⁷ Estonia at this time followed the “Leninist principle” that all children should receive school education in their mother tongue, so the assumption here was that one type of school catered to Russian pupils, while the other catered to Estonian pupils. Thus an acknowledgement of the greater body of Russian than Estonian literature was implied in the greater length of time given over to the study of Russian in both types of schools. A similar asymmetry is found in the proposals submitted from Moldova, although here it was in the framework of an 8-year school.Footnote ²⁸

The submission from Lithuania simply assumed a 9-year system, while Latvia made the case for an extra year based on the calculation that 1,200 hours were needed for the study of an extra language (this exceeds the hours proposed for the study of Russian in Estonian and Lithuanian schools, but not by much).Footnote ²⁹ Tajikistan was then working on a 7-year system and welcomed the increase to eight years, but pointed out that in the last four grades under their proposals less time would be devoted to political economy, history, physics, chemistry, and physical culture because of the extra time devoted to Russian.Footnote ³⁰ Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Ukraine did endorse the 8-year school, but this involved devoting less time to the study of a non-Soviet foreign language and other subjects than in the proposals based on a 9-year school.Footnote ³¹

Support for an extra year of school was also evident in the Autonomous Republics of the RSFSR. A report from a Russia-wide meeting on restructuring the Middle School, held in Moscow from July 31 to August 2, 1958 indicated that many participants felt that national schools should move to a 9-year system so that locals could master Russian to a high level without losing out in other subjects, while other delegates believed that this requirement could be met within the 8-year system.Footnote ³² A series of statements from the Autonomous Republics and regions, immediately before or soon after the publication of Khrushchev's theses, showed how widespread support for the first option was. Yakutia, North Ossetia, Chechnia-Ingushetiia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, and Buriatiia all indicated a preference for a 9-year system, while the statement from Dagestan noted that “many teachers want a [additional] preparatory year.”Footnote ³³ High-level official endorsement for this position was provided in the form of a report signed by RSFSR Minister of Education E. Afanasenko and President of the Academy of Pedagogical Science I. Kairov. This report supported the introduction of the 8-year school only with the proviso that RSFSR Autonomous Republics be allowed to extend the period of study by a year.Footnote ³⁴ From all of the opinions expressed from across the USSR only one, from Dagestan, mentioned (without endorsing) an alternative solution to the problem of over-burdening (peregruz) in the 8-year school—dropping the compulsory non-Soviet foreign language.Footnote ³⁵

Reports coming in after the campaign of public discussion held at the end of November 1958 were just as consistent. Kazakhstan now saw the situation as a choice between two alternatives—drop the non-Soviet foreign language or extend school to nine years in the republics.Footnote ³⁶ The report from Ukraine noted that there was high demand from Ukrainian parents for their children to go to Russian-language schools since Russian was the language of higher education and of economic institutions, but all the same they defended the principle that children should learn both Ukrainian and Russian. The Kyrgyz Republic somewhat perversely issued a proposal to reduce the number of hours devoted to Russian language, while only Uzbekistan showed some support for Khrushchev's proposals, agreeing that Uzbek should not be compulsory in Russian schools but maintaining that Russian would remain compulsory in Uzbek schools, which strictly speaking was against the stipulations of Article 19.Footnote ³⁷

Azerbaijan, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Armenia all remained firmly committed to three compulsory languages and a 9-year school system in their republics, while Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Kazakhstan all expressed some opposition to Article 19. The arguments given for these positions did not vary much and followed two tacks: the practical need to be able to communicate both locally and at the all-Soviet level, and the beneficial effects that knowledge of both languages by all pupils in the republics would have on national relations.Footnote ³⁸ National languages were an important element of national culture and, as the report from Ukraine admitted, needed careful nourishing where those languages were young and lacking deep roots.Footnote ³⁹ Russian, in the words of Kazakhstan's rapporteur, was “the language of progress, civilization, international communication between peoples, and of strengthening the friendship of peoples”; or, in the more succinct Armenian summation, “Russian is the language of October.”Footnote ⁴⁰

In the consultations that preceded publication of Khrushchev's theses, amid the welter of proposals for the new school reform to include the proviso that the eight years of middle school could be extended to nine years in the non-Russian republics and regions, there is not one mention of the idea of dropping the compulsory learning of a second Soviet language. It was, in fact, simply assumed that in each republic three languages—Russian, the republic national language, and a foreign language—would each continue as either the language of instruction or a taught subject for every pupil. Dropping a foreign language was occasionally suggested, but dropping one of the Soviet languages (with the exception of Uzbekistan noted above) was not. Even republics like Kazakhstan that endorsed the proposed 8-year system sent detailed submissions on how three languages could be studied in such a system, at the expense of other subjects. The problem, as recognized in the Theses, was how to accommodate these subjects in a curriculum that was designed for only two languages. A practical solution to this in the form of an extra school year, a system that was already working in the Baltic Republics, had widespread support across the Soviet Republics and the RSFSR.

And yet Khrushchev chose to adopt an entirely different solution to the problem of work overload, one which apparently had played no part at all in the discussions leading up to the publication of the Theses. Even after Khrushchev's “voluntary principle” had been advanced as a solution, support for maintaining the compulsory learning of both the local language and Russian in the republics was unanimous.

For the larger non-Russian groups and their leaders language was, naturally enough, one of the key markers of their national status, which for the titular nations in the republics was a fairly privileged one. Upsetting the principles of language policy, whether out of naïveté or deliberate provocation, was therefore bound to evoke storms of protests. This it did, among the representatives of almost all of the republics attending the session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR which debated the new education law on December 22, 1958.Footnote ⁴¹ The main objection seemed to be not, as some commentators have stated, that it would allow parents of any nationality to send their children to Russian-language schools; rather, it was that it would no longer be compulsory for children at non-titular schools to learn the titular language of the republic.

Most interpretations of Khrushchev's Article 19 suggest that it was intended to pave the way towards the linguistic Russification of the USSR, but the evidence for this is circumstantial.Footnote ⁴² While Khrushchev's motives remain unclear, there was a variety of responses from the republics which opposed this aspect of the reform. The understanding that the new system “ought to be settled in each Union Republic in conformity with its economic and cultural development,” together with Khrushchev's call for broad public discussion of all aspects of the proposed reforms, seems to have led republican leaders and citizens to believe that it would be permissible to drop or modify Article 19 in each republic.Footnote ⁴³ In both Estonia and Latvia, counter-proposals were officially advanced to extend the period of school study by a year. These proposals were almost identical to each other, and would allow children to continue being taught Estonian, Latvian, or Russian as a second language as well as a third foreign language.Footnote ⁴⁴

The law passed by the Supreme Soviet of Latvia on March 17, 1958 did not stipulate the total length of school attendance, nor did it include the principle of parental choice in the study of a second language. In part, these omissions are explained by unfortunate timing. When the leading body, known at the time as the Buro of the of the Latvian Communist Party, met to discuss the law five days before it was voted on by the Latvian Supreme Soviet, Latvian CC Secretary Arvīds Pelše reported that he had been unable to receive clarification on these questions from the Secretariat of the CPSU CC in Moscow because a key official was away on a trip to Paris.Footnote ⁴⁵ By the end of May the Latvian leaders had been forced to amend their education law to bring it in line with Khrushchev's theses. But even then, in explaining this change of tack, education minister Samsons insisted that “refusal of compulsion in the teaching of languages does not mean that we should diminish our attention to these languages. In fact, they should be taught even better and more than previously, because everybody needs knowledge of Latvian and Russian for their work and studies in our Republic.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The clear implication of this was that, whatever the legal situation, schools would continue to ensure both languages were taught to children. This was an open and brazen declaration of intent that, in practice, nothing would change with regard to the compulsory study of languages.

The course of events was similar in Azerbaijan, where the new education law failed to make the study of Azerbaijani optional, and it took two months of intervention by the CC CPSU secretariat before a special resolution corrected the discrepancy with Khrushchev's theses.Footnote ⁴⁷ Azerbaijan and Latvia were, ultimately, the only republics to fail altogether to enact the appropriate legislation on this matter, and by the end of 1959 there had been wide-scale purges of the top political leadership in both republics. The initial refusal to implement Article 19 in full was only one, and not the most serious, of a number of charges raised in the course of these purges. It is the only charge that both had in common, however, and was the nearest in time: most other charges went back to 1956. From the language of official discussions about the fate of both republics, it is clear that the refusal to comply with Khrushchev's theses on this point was the final straw prompting action against their leaders.Footnote ⁴⁸

In a series of articles and a book, William Prigge has argued that Khrushchev played no role in the initiation of the Latvian purge, and indeed was ready to defend the careers of the leader of the Latvian “national communists” Eduards Berklāvs and others. According to this interpretation, Khrushchev was outmaneuvered by a combination of Russian military leaders based in Latvia, Latvian Buro member Arvīds Pelše, and a Kremlin faction headed by Mikhail Suslov.Footnote ⁴⁹ The main sources for this argument, the memoirs of another Latvian national communist, Vilis Krūmiņš, and later recollections of Berklāvs, are inconsistent and inconclusive. Prigge's conclusion rests crucially on the assumption that Khrushchev had been unaware until the summer of 1959 of the charges of nationalism levelled against Latvian leaders, which seems unlikely given that Khrushchev had himself been following Latvian affairs since the summer of 1953, including the welter of reports that were being sent to the CC CPSU in 1956 and 1957.Footnote ⁵⁰ Prigge also plays down the significance of the education reform in the Latvian purge of 1959, yet this was specifically referred to at the meeting of the Presidium of the CC CPSU at which Khrushchev confronted Latvian leaders on July 1, 1959.Footnote ⁵¹ While Prigge's extensive study reveals important details of the different forces at work in resolving the question of national communism in Latvia, the matter of Khrushchev's personal involvement remains an open one.

Certainly, the documents pertaining to both the initial CC CPSU investigation of Latvia and the transcripts of the Presidium meetings discussing both Latvia and Azerbaijan, as well as the timing of the purges, suggest that Article 19 played a decisive role in the fall of the political leaderships of both republics.Footnote ⁵² While Azerbaijan and Latvia pushed the limits of defiance too far, defense of the interests of the republics and, in particular, of their titular nationalities, did not have to end in such open confrontation. In Estonia, identical objections to Article 19 were raised as in Latvia, and the same counterproposals were discussed. Estonian leaders were even in a mood to go further and complain about the failure of Russians in the republic to get acquainted with the local language and culture. Thus, the Chair of the Estonian Republican Council of Trade Unions, Leonhard-Friedrich Illisson, noted sarcastically at a plenum of the Estonian CC that “perhaps it is right that, in Russian schools of the Estonian SSR, Estonian literature and geography is studied to the same extent as it is in Sakhalin.”Footnote ⁵³ The consultation campaigns and discussion in newspapers suggest that feelings against Khrushchev's proposal were running especially high in the republic.Footnote ⁵⁴ Here, however, the official approach was much more tactful than in neighboring Latvia. On February 20, 1959, First Secretary of the Estonian CP Ivan Käbin wrote to CC CPSU secretary N.A. Mukhtidinov, explaining in reasoned and respectful terms the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia's request for the republic to be allowed to retain the compulsory 3-language system in schools and to retain an extra school year. He laid great stress on the fact that this was the clear and overwhelming wish of both Russian and Estonian citizens of the republic (for which there was a great deal of evidence in the form of letters sent to Sovetskaia Estoniia), and took care to emphasize the unique situation in Estonia so as not to appear to be attacking in general the principles embodied in Article 19.Footnote ⁵⁵

No response to this letter has emerged, but clearly the request was declined. The law passed by the Supreme Soviet of Estonia on April 23, 1959 affirmed the role of parental choice in the teaching of a second language, in line with Khrushchev's theses. The law also stated that “instruction in all schools of the Estonian SSR is carried out in the mother-tongue of the pupils,” albeit reference to the desire for “more thorough learning of Russian in Estonian schools” is not balanced by anything equivalent regarding Estonian in Russian schools. A further nod to Russia's leading role is given in the overall preamble to the law, which points to “the fraternal help of other peoples of the USSR and especially the great Russian people… .”Footnote ⁵⁶ The penitential pro-Russian tone suggests a slap on the wrist may have been administered. But the rewards for compliance were substantial: Käbin, appointed first secretary in 1950, stayed in that post until 1978, when he was semi-retired to the honorable position of Chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Estonia. During his term of office, in spite of his originally Russified background, Käbin earned a reputation for skillful and successful defense of the republic's interests and the promotion of the cultural demands of the Estonian nation. Not least of these achievements was the preservation, in practice, of the predominance of Estonian-language over Russian-language schools and the teaching of Russian or Estonian as a second language in all schools.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine was quicker off the mark in raising objections to Article 19. On October 30, 1958, before the official publication of the theses, first secretary N.V. Podgorny sent a note to Suslov defending the status quo on the question of the language of instruction and the compulsory study of Ukrainian or Russian as a second language. In practice, parents already had a choice over which type of school their children should attend, but the study of both Russian and Ukrainian was compulsory. National languages played an essential role in the development of national cultures, but the danger with opening up everything to parental choice was that parents who wanted their children to progress through higher education or special institutes would focus solely on the Russian language, to the detriment of national languages and cultures. Conversely, children taught exclusively in the national language would be cut off from the rest of Soviet life. Podgorny also made the argument that language policy in the Soviet Union was observed closely by the rest of the world, and any change might reflect badly on Soviet conditions.Footnote ⁵⁸

The Ukrainian CC proposed a new version of Article 19, which included as original formulations:

This was followed by a longer report sent on December 8, in which exactly the same arguments were made but were presented as the overwhelming opinion of Ukrainian society as elicited through the public consultation campaign initiated by Khrushchev in November. The report added the argument that the practice in Ukrainian schools at that moment showed that learning a second language did not overload children, and moreover insisted that learning a foreign (a third) language would aid understanding of the cultural level of workers abroad and of world culture generally.Footnote ⁶⁰

These suggestions were rebuffed and the appropriate law enacted in line with Khrushchev's theses. Ukraine, having offered a detailed counter-proposal in December 1958, toed the line like Estonia and fully adopted Khrushchev's proposals into the republic's legislation. Here, however, implementation of the law became an object of greater controversy, as parents sought to take advantage (in their own view) of the provisions of Article 19 and were able to get their complaints heard at the highest level. On September 15, 1959, two senior officials in the CC CPSU Department for Science, Higher Education, and Schools–V. Kirillin and N. Kuzin—sent Suslov a report on violations of the education law in Ukraine. They gave details of several areas where parents had been refused the right to send their children to Russian language schools; in some Russian schools, first-year classes had been converted to Ukrainian language classes; children of Ukrainian parents or mixed parentage had been turned away from Russian language schools and told they could only study in Ukrainian schools; in certain regions the number of Russian schools had been drastically cut and new Ukrainian schools opened; there were cases where Russian schools were being transferred to inferior buildings and were working on more shifts than Ukrainian schools; and children in Russian schools were still being forced to study Ukrainian against their wishes. The Ministry of Enlightenment of the Ukrainian SSR had done nothing to correct these violations except when the CC CPSU had intervened directly in specific cases.Footnote ⁶¹

Clearly the CC department had been dealing with a large number of such complaints, and the circulation of this report to the top figures in the CPSU indicates the seriousness with which it was treated. The biggest volume of specific complaints came from Crimea, which had joined the Ukrainian SSR only in 1954, and where the obligatory study of Ukrainian against the wishes of parents and teachers served to confirm the fears of Ukrainization first aired at the time of Crimea's incorporation into Ukraine.Footnote ⁶² The Crimean obkom did respond to open violations of the education law, but only reprimanded those responsible.

Podgorny sent the CC CPSU a robust rebuttal of Kirillin and Kuzin's criticisms, many of their facts were wrong, especially about the closure of Russian schools, which were in fact seeing a rapid growth in numbers. Numerous complaints came from areas where only a handful of parents had asked for one of the obligatory languages to be dropped, the requests had only been made on the first day of the school year, and it was simply not practical to arrange alternative subjects. There were some Russian schools located in inadequate buildings, but so were many Ukrainian schools, and there were 4,000 substandard school buildings in the republic overall. In total, the number of Russian language schools had risen by 150 over the previous school year, while the number of Ukrainian language schools had fallen by fifty-nine.Footnote ⁶³ In sum, there were a number of teething problems at the very beginning of the first school year after the reforms, but the extent of violations had been greatly exaggerated and the vast majority of parents were satisfied with the way things were.

Whichever account one believes, it seems clear that the Ukrainian authorities were intent on maintaining the status quo as far as possible, claiming the support of an overwhelming majority of parents for the study of three languages, and thus able to argue that the passing into law of Khrushchev's theses had little impact on the actual situation of languages in schools. The vigilance of the CC CPSU meant that Ukraine could not altogether ignore the implications of the new measures, but skillful maneuvering and delaying tactics could achieve a lot. Certainly the fortunes of Podgorny, promoted to full membership of the Presidium the following year, did not suffer from his championing of the three language system.

A year later, a parallel report on Belarus by one of the authors of the Ukraine report, Kirillin, raised similar charges against local authorities. Citizens complained about the lack of access to schools with Russian as the language of instruction. In a number of regions, schools had not introduced a single parallel Russian language class at year one, as promised in the Belarusian law, and hundreds of parents had lodged requests for their children to be excused from studying the Belarusian language at Russian schools.Footnote ⁶⁴

These reports from Ukraine and Belarus also show how simple it was to avoid Khrushchev's stipulations at the republican and local levels. Failure to invest in the new type of school or the setting of local curricula effectively restricted parental choice. Harry Lipset showed a decade after the school reform that it had minimal impact on the situation of national schools in the Union Republics: enrolment in national schools continued at least at the same levels, while publication of school books in the non-Russian languages of the USSR expanded in most cases. According to Lipset's estimates, the number of pupils studying in non-Russian languages fell only modestly, from 35% of the total in 1954 to 33.1% in 1964.Footnote ⁶⁵ The situation was different in the Autonomous Republics and regions of the RSFSR, in most of which Russian came to predominate as the language of instruction. But this process was already well underway in advance of the adoption of Khrushchev's 1958 theses.Footnote ⁶⁶ Resistance in the republics to the enforcement of a school system restricted to instruction in one language and learning of a second language meant that the problem of overload in non-Russian schools remained. In 1964, the Minister of Education of Lithuania complained that the heavy emphasis in the curriculum on Russian language and literature was met … by an increase in class hours per week and a reduction of school time in some general education disciplines. As a result, an already large load on the children has become even larger…the contents of secondary education must undoubtedly be basically alike and common for all schools of the country. At the same time the school curricula of the Union Republics must reflect nationality features.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The contradictions contained in this statement sum up accurately the general approach to the reform in many republics—to pay lip service to the demand for a standardization of schools across the Soviet Union while ensuring in practice that differences remained in the republics.

Thus, Article 19 of Khrushchev's Theses on Education provoked widespread opposition in the republics, was connected to leadership purges in two of them, and was implemented in law but widely ignored in practice elsewhere. If the aim had been linguistic Russification of the USSR, at least in this it did not succeed in the Union Republics, although the change may have had a deeper impact in the national areas of the RSFSR.Footnote ⁶⁸ Naturally the final outcomes may not have been foreseen by Khrushchev and if his intention had been simply to change the way in which schools operated in the republics, then it would not have been the first or last time that an initiative of his ended in failure. But opposition to the change was led, with a greater or lesser degree of determination, by nationally-minded republic leaders. Transcripts of discussions at sessions of the Republic Supreme Soviets, Communist Party Central Committees, and local party meetings, as well as coverage in the media, underscore the extent to which emotional arguments about the value of local cultures and languages were deployed as widely as the more practical arguments about the needs of communication. For example, a meeting of Communist Party activists held in Riga on November 20, 1958 was replete with comments like: “every citizen should know both languages”; “understanding of both languages strengthens the historic development of friendship between the Latvian and Russian peoples”; “a decline in the study of the Russian and Latvian languages will not aid the strengthening of the friendship of peoples, but rather the reverse.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Khrushchev's education reform called for a wholesale restructuring of the Soviet education system to get away from what was considered the stale content of the Stalinist curriculum and to provide Soviet citizens with the skills needed to meet the challenges of the new technological era, which was so central to Khrushchev's vision of the development of socialism. The most radical proposals involved including hands-on work experience in factories or farms in the later years of school education, and it was these aspects which received the most attention in the central Soviet press and which were the source of numerous complaints later on.Footnote ⁷⁰ Article 19 was a minor part of the overall reform, but it did provoke some of the fiercest opposition.

The archival material presented in this article highlights a number of important aspects to this dispute.

• • Prior to the publication of Khrushchev's theses, there was overwhelming support from the leaderships of almost all of the Union Republics and a majority of the Autonomous Republics for retaining the principle of mother-tongue education, with either Russian or the republic language as a second language, plus one foreign language; this approach was to be retained within the framework of a middle school curriculum that ran for one year longer than for Russian students in most of the RSFSR (nine years instead of eight).

• • Khrushchev ignored these proposals in his published theses, advancing instead the possibility of dropping the study of one of the principal languages, while at the same time introducing the “voluntary” principle whereby parents could choose which language of instruction their children could be taught in.

• • This move was interpreted by many of the republican leaders, especially in the western republics of the USSR, as a violation of the long established “Leninist” principle of mother-tongue education.

• • Republican leaders were able to mobilize public opinion, through the mass consultation campaign that Khrushchev himself had called for, to reinforce their position of opposing Article 19.

• • Republican legislatures were left to promulgate their own education laws and in doing so displayed varying degrees of resistance. This resistance ranged from outright refusal to implement the provisions of Article 19 to introducing appropriate legislation while failing to provide full implementation in practice.

• • The republics which showed most open resistance to the implementation of Article 19—Azerbaijan and Latvia—were subjected to wide-ranging leadership purges in the summer of 1959.

• • Elsewhere, accusations against republic authorities for failure to implement in full the spirit of the change were met with robust denials.

• • In practice, the provisions of Article 19 had little immediate impact on the language of instruction in schools of the Union Republics of the USSR, but may have altered the situation in the Autonomous Republics and regions of the RSFSR.

Comparison of both the similarities and differences in the course of official opposition to Article 19 of Khrushchev's theses in Latvia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, and Ukraine leads to important conclusions. First, in all four cases, similar objections were raised, and it was clear that the republican leaders felt an affinity to the dominant nationality and its cultural and linguistic status. Second, even if they shared a common starting point, republican leaders had different options open to them, and tactful and diplomatic dealing with Moscow could ensure not just survival, but a fairly wide leeway for implementing policies favorable to the preservation of the language and culture of the titular nationality. Third, the lengths to which republican leaders were prepared to go in defiance of Moscow were considerable, suggesting either a strong emotional attachment to the principle of national education among senior communists, or an awareness of the unpopularity of such changes among the broader population, or both. Fourth, the selective punishment of republican leaders and the occasional but not wholehearted intervention against individual abuses elsewhere was characteristic of Khrushchev's approach to managing the national question by monitoring and circumscribing the activities of republican leaders without prescribing any meaningful nationality policy. The outcome of the Battle for Language and other local engagements was a victory for Khrushchev to the extent that it tightened up the limits of this circumscription, set examples, and drew lines not to be crossed. The limits were broadened again under Brezhnev, but not removed altogether, as the demotion of Petr Shelest in Ukraine in 1972 illustrates. Ultimately, Khrushchev won the battle but not the war. The more passive forms of resistance adopted in Estonia, Ukraine, and elsewhere allowed a breed of republican leader who considered and represented themselves as a national leadership to consolidate and develop. In many cases, their “nationally-minded” successors were to evolve into fully-fledged nationalists under the impact of Gorbachev's perestroika.

The Battle for Language took place in the gap that was left open by an ill-defined center-periphery relationship. By, on the one hand, publishing his theses for discussion and, on the other hand, encouraging a public debate on the theses, Khrushchev, wittingly or not, brought the negotiations that typified center-periphery relations very much into the open. It was this that leant the debate over Article 19 a particularly intense character. Since Stalin's death, authority over local affairs had swung in favor of the republics, and had strengthened as recently as the sovnarkhoz reform of 1957. Now, the republican leaders who had increased their authority since 1953 felt a possible swing of the pendulum against them. Those who responded with outright defiance, in Latvia and Azerbaijan, paid for it. Polite negotiation did not lead to any formal change of heart, but seems to have allowed republics to avoid the spirit, if not the letter, of the new laws. Thus the Battle for Language circumscribed new, if still vague, boundaries for negotiation which were to characterize center-republic relations until the mid-1980s.