LOCATION AND SECTORAL DEVELOPMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN SIBERIA

I. F. Livshits

(Presented by the scientific seminar of the Department of Scientific Communism)

Among the factors determining the progressive development of Soviet society, an ever greater place is occupied by the level of general and specialized education of the population. Education and social progress, as the classics of scientific communism repeatedly pointed out, are inseparable, and the scientific and technological revolution increases the significance of this factor. Therefore the study of the social aspect of the entire system of education, or of its individual stages, and the identification of trends in the development of the Soviet school are of theoretical-cognitive and practical interest.

One of the fundamental sources of scientific-technological and social progress has become higher education. It is generally recognized that, thanks to the advantages of the socialist social system, it has received unprecedented development in the Soviet Union.

At the same time, in the system of higher education there are a number of unresolved tasks and contradictory phenomena that diminish its creative role in the process of the formation of communism. This is an inhibiting cause, restraining, among other things, the intensification of social production. The improvement of the work of higher education follows from the very essence of the decisions of the September Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (1965) and of the Twenty-Third Congress of the CPSU.

The subject of the present article is the disclosure of certain trends in the development of higher education in Siberia, which are being realized on the basis of and in close connection with the accelerated growth of the productive forces. The expansion of higher education has become, in essence, a component part of the policy of the Communist Party in this process. Among the many social problems of higher education in Siberia, its location and sectoral development acquire current significance. In them the regularities of the formation of communist social relations are substantially manifested. The article analyzes the development of the leading branches of higher education—university and technical.

The necessity of such a study is dictated by the fact that the transformation of Siberia into the most important economic region of the Soviet Union is connected with a number of regional features and difficulties. The unique natural wealth of this region, which can yield a colossal economic effect on the scale of the entire country, is still being developed insufficiently. There exists a disproportion between the development of the extractive and processing industries. For example, Siberia, harvesting 21.3% of all timber in the Union, produces from it only—

...as much as 2.5% in cellulose, and less than 3% in paper, relative to the national level. The colossal savings obtained in the extraction and production of raw materials are lost in transport costs and in waste¹.

A serious brake on the exploitation of natural resources and on the development of a multi-branch processing industry is the acute shortage of labor resources. Attempts to solve this problem to some extent through population migration from West to East have not produced significant results. According to the economist V. I. Perevedentsev, there is a considerable outflow of population from Siberia. Moreover, this negative tendency is developing upward because of the substantial difference in the complex of living conditions between the western and eastern regions of the country².

The accelerated development of Siberia’s productive forces can be ensured on the condition that expenditures of living labor are reduced. This presupposes, first, the saturation of production with modern technology. V. I. Lenin drew attention to this aspect already at the beginning of Soviet power. “The exploitation of these natural resources,” Lenin wrote, “by means of the latest technology will provide the basis for an unprecedented progress of the productive forces”³. Second, it presupposes the creation of stable cadres of high qualification. Consequently, what is at issue is the conditions for the maximum intensification of social production. It follows from this that the general tendency toward an increase in the share of engineering and technical workers among production personnel must be expressed in Siberia to a considerably greater degree than in the western regions of the country. Therefore the task of the further development of higher education in Siberia, as the principal source for training highly qualified cadres, has not lost its urgency.

In the postwar decades, higher education in Siberia underwent fundamental quantitative and qualitative shifts. They were prepared by the entire course of the country’s socioeconomic transformations on the basis of socialism and, in particular, by the cultural revolution.

In the prewar five-year-plan periods, a beginning was made in overcoming the historically formed unevenness in the territorial distribution of higher education among the regions of Russia. If before the revolution, over the enormous territory from the Urals to the Far East, there were only 4 higher educational institutions with a student contingent of 2.5 thousand people⁴, then in 1940 in Siberia and the Far East there were 57 higher educational institutions, in which 27,083 students were enrolled⁵. This was a vivid confirmation of the correctness of the theoretical predictions of Marxism-Leninism. In his principled dispute with the enemies of the socialist revolution, V. I. Lenin showed that the proletariat, having taken state power into its own hands, would create the necessary political and economic prerequisites for bringing the broad masses of the people into culture, into the administration of the national economy and the state⁶.

The socialist state, having carried out the cultural revolution and trained cadres of the Soviet intelligentsia, thus brought culture and civilization to regions where, according to V. I. Lenin’s definition, there reigned “...patriarchalism, semi-savagery, and the most genuine savagery”⁷.

During the years of the Great Patriotic War there was further progressive development in the economy of Siberia, especially in its western part. Siberia, together with the Urals, played a decisive role in the economic victory over the enemy. In this great achievement, the higher school of Siberia also found its place.

The intensive development of the economy continued in the postwar years. If by 1952 the gross industrial output of the RSFSR, compared with 1913, had increased 27-fold, then in Western Siberia it had increased 171-fold, and in Eastern Siberia 39-fold⁸. Major structural shifts took place. The share of machine building, metalworking, and chemicals in the total volume of industrial output increased. New branches of industry grew more rapidly than the traditional ones—coal and metallurgy. This can be seen in the economy of Kemerovo Oblast. If, for example, coal industry output grew from 1940 to 1955 by 3.6 times, then machine building and metalworking grew almost 27 times⁹. The composition of engineering and technical personnel did not correspond to the increased level of production. In the postwar years, positions of engineering and technical workers were filled mainly by practical workers. In the same Kemerovo Oblast, the staff of engineering and technical workers was only 35 percent supplied with certified engineers and technicians¹⁰. There were not enough specialists in many engineering specialties. There was a particular need for designers, technologists, and builders. The situation was similar in other regions¹¹. Meanwhile, the inflow of specialists from the western regions in the postwar years was insignificant. At the same time, the process of re-evacuation after the war led to a major reduction of qualified personnel in all spheres of the national economy and culture¹².

The shortage of qualified personnel held back the technical re-equipment of industry, the development of the productive forces of a number of national regions, and led to a slow pace in conducting geological exploration work in promising areas of Siberia. An insufficient number of teachers and medical personnel created great difficulties in the development of the network of schools and medical institutions. All this hindered the transformation of Siberia into the country’s most important economic region. Therefore, the problem of accelerating the development of higher education in Siberia became urgent and went far beyond the bounds of a local task. The necessity of solving it was insistently pointed out in the materials of party conferences of various oblasts of Siberia held in 1948–1949¹³.

As the natural resources of Siberia were drawn into economic circulation, as industrial complexes developed, and as new lands were brought under cultivation—

the geography of higher education expanded. The training of personnel for Siberia chiefly outside its borders is a negative phenomenon, both economically and socially. As numerous documents and statistical data show, personnel trained in the European part of the country to a considerable extent do not become established there¹⁴, which has a very adverse effect on the development of production.

The social aspect of the present problem is significant. The proper location of higher educational institutions makes higher education accessible to all strata of the working people in the country’s most remote regions, which is an important condition on the path of Soviet society’s movement toward social homogeneity.

In the postwar period, a policy was pursued of creating new higher-education centers, expanding the network of educational institutions, and increasing the number of students in them. Higher education grew especially intensively after 1954. This was determined by the decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU of August 30, 1954, “On improving the training, distribution, and use of specialists with higher and secondary specialized education.” It provided for: “...above all, the development of the network of higher and secondary specialized educational institutions in the region of the Urals, Siberia, the Far East, and Kazakhstan”¹⁵. The task of expanding the training of specialists in the eastern regions was set in the decisions of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU¹⁶.

An idea of the growth of higher education in Siberia may be obtained from Table 1.

Table 1

Dynamics of the Development of Higher Education in Siberia¹⁷

As follows from Table 1, higher education in Siberia grew considerably faster than the average for the republic. This applies not only to the prewar period but also, and this is especially important, to the contemporary period. If from 1958 to 1966 the number of students in the republic increased by a factor of 1.8, then in Siberia it increased by a factor of 2.8. The higher rates in the development of higher education in Siberia are a condition for finally overcoming, in the near future, the differences in the coverage of the Siberian population by higher educational institutions, as compared with the central regions of the country. In the 1965/66 academic year, on average in the republic there were 186 students per 10,000 population, while in Siberia there were 165¹⁸.

The higher educational institutions of Siberia developed as large educational establishments. If in 1949 there were 700 students per higher educational institution, then in 1964 there were 4,600 (the average size of a higher educational institution in the Russian Federation was 5,100 students).

Before the revolution, as is known, Siberia had one university city—Tomsk. In 1965, higher educational institutions and their branches were located in 25 cities¹⁹.

Thus, the advance of higher education into the remote regions of the country became the most important tendency and regularity of its development, reflecting the intensive growth of the productive forces in the eastern regions. In its territorial expansion, higher education increases the real possibility for broad strata of working people to obtain higher education. This is in full accord with the process of the cultural revolution at the stage of the full-scale construction of communism and is a substantial factor in finally overcoming unevenness in the economic and cultural development of the country’s remote regions.

The location of higher education cannot be considered apart from the economy and culture. The development of the productive forces in Siberia determined the need for intensive growth, above all, of universities and higher technical educational institutions.

University education is one of the leading forms of higher education. As the tasks of social and scientific-technical progress grow and become more complex, the significance of universities increases. The objective process by which science is transformed into a direct productive force has immeasurably increased the role of natural science in the sphere of production. Universities, by developing the fundamental sciences and training cadres of natural scientists, contribute to the acceleration of scientific and technical progress. To the same extent, they provide personnel for those spheres of social activity that carry out the scientific direction of society. The training of personnel for scientific institutions and higher educational institutions constitutes an important task. Therefore the traditional notion of universities as forges of cadres primarily for secondary schools has become obsolete.

As early as 1958, of the 426 graduates of Tomsk State University, 138 persons were assigned to research institutions and higher educational institutions of Siberia, 164 to plants and to geological, meteorological, and agricultural institutions, and 124 persons to schools²⁰. Irkutsk University graduated 456 persons in 1958, while only 103 persons were placed at the disposal of the Ministry of Education of the RSFSR²¹. This process is intensifying.

The training of specialists by universities mainly for production and scientific institutions testifies to their new na—

meaning. The new functions of universities are also confirmed by the expansion of specialties and specializations, which reflect the process of differentiation and integration of science.

After the war there existed an underestimation of university education in Siberia, which continued until 1956. No new universities were opened, and the existing old universities—Tomsk and Irkutsk—did not expand significantly. Characteristic in this respect is the reply of the USSR State Planning Committee to the demand of the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR concerning the development of the leading educational institution of Eastern Siberia—Irkutsk State University—increasing the number of students, opening new specialties and scientific institutions, and, in this connection, substantial capital construction. “Establishing a contingent of students in the amount of 3,500 persons for Irkutsk University for 1956,” stated the reply of the deputy chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee, “at the present time (meaning 1949.—I. L.) is not called for by necessity”²².

The incorrect view of university education was overcome. The strengthening and expansion of universities was carried out. The role and importance of Tomsk and Irkutsk state universities in the development of science and in the training of personnel for all branches of the national economy and culture increased. Tomsk State University became a leading center in the development of solid-state physics.

The emphasis shifted toward expanding natural-science departments and faculties. Already in 1960 more than half of specialists were being trained in the natural and exact sciences²³. This tendency in university education intensified in connection with the opening in 1959 of Novosibirsk State University. NSU is an institution of higher education of a special type. It was founded on the basis of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and organizes the instruction of students according to a fundamentally new method, under which the entire system of education has one goal—to instill in students the skills of independent work.

Alongside the fact that the theoretical aspect predominates in the training of the specialist, the student spends a significant part of his time in academic research institutions and laboratories. In essence, though not legally, a merger of scientific institutions and the educational institution has taken place. It is reinforced by such an important factor as the participation of the leading scientific forces of the academic institutes in teaching. In 1964 the university’s teaching staff included 25 academicians and corresponding members, 40 professors who were doctors of science, and 150 docents who were candidates of science²⁴.

This so-called “Siberian experiment” is important everywhere, but especially for Siberia. The discrepancy in personnel in higher education is so great that it is already today a major brake on its further development. Therefore overcoming the gap between higher educational institutions and scientific-research institutions is an urgent task.

A specific and fundamentally important phenomenon was the opening of Yakutsk State University. The training of national personnel in other republics rendered substantial assistance to the Yakut people in the development of the economy and culture²⁵. This also created conditions

training specialists on a broad scale with its own resources, in accordance with the needs of the national economy.

The Sixteenth Party Conference of the Yakut ASSR, held in March 1949, set major tasks for the development of the republic’s productive forces, which were based on the presence of rich natural resources. The absence of a local engineering and technical intelligentsia impeded the development of the economy. This situation served as the basis for the conference’s decision on the need to train engineering and technical personnel and specialists of other profiles from among the local indigenous population²⁶.

Yakutsk University, founded in 1956, embodied in its organizational structure the directives of the party conference. It is a multi-profile educational institution in which all the principal branches of higher education are represented. Alongside the traditional university faculties, it includes engineering and technical, agricultural, and medical faculties.

The creation of multi-profile universities in the autonomous republics is an effective condition for the development of the economy and culture of the national regions, an objective basis for the realization of two interrelated tendencies in the national question.

University education, having become significantly widespread, did not exhaust the potential possibilities for further development. This is evidenced, in particular, by the intensive growth of the administrative, industrial, and cultural centers of Siberia that do not have universities. These include such cities as Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, Kemerovo, and Barnaul. A real prospect for the further development of university education is indicated by the opening, at the beginning of the 1963/64 academic year, of a branch of Novosibirsk State University in Krasnoyarsk. On the basis of the Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences, the training of specialists in computational mathematics, biophysics, and solid-state physics was begun here²⁷.

The higher technical school grew even more intensively. This can be judged by such objective criteria as the absolute growth of the student contingent in technical higher educational institutions and the increase in the share of the technical school within the entire system of higher education. To confirm this, we cite the following table (see the table on p. 33).

It follows from Table 2 that both in the number of higher educational institutions and in the student contingent, technical education developed much more intensively than higher education as a whole. If, for Siberia as a whole, the number of higher educational institutions increased by 78% compared with 1940, then the number of technical higher educational institutions increased 2.6 times. The total number of students grew over the same period 8.8 times, and in technical higher educational institutions by more than 22 times. The share of higher technical education amounted in 1940 to slightly more than one-fifth of all students, and in 1964 to about one-half²⁹.

But this conclusion would be incomplete, since a significant proportion of engineers are trained by agricultural and economic higher educational institutions, and partly by universities. In the 1958/59 academic year, in agricultural

in Siberian higher educational institutions about one-third of the total number of students studied in faculties of agricultural mechanization³⁰). The training of engineering personnel in agricultural higher educational institutions is increasing. Thus, there are all grounds for the conclusion that in the 1964/65 academic year more than half of all students enrolled in higher educational institutions of Siberia were preparing for engineering activity. In other words, higher technical education became the dominant direction in the system of higher education.

Table 2

Dynamics of the development of technical higher educational institutions of Siberia²⁸)

The determining development of higher technical education is a highly progressive phenomenon. It reflects the most important regularity in the development of the productive forces, which consists in the resolution of the dialectical contradiction between their material elements and the producers themselves. On the basis of the resolution of this contradiction, the equipment of labor steadily rises, its character changes, an organic union of mental and physical labor in productive activity takes place, new combinations appear in the correlation of various types of social labor, and its further division occurs.

Overcoming the contradiction between the elements of the productive forces gives rise to the need to raise the cultural and technical level of the producers and, as was indicated at the beginning of the article, this finds its expression in the steady growth of engineering and technical workers in the sphere of production.

As a result, all this leads to an increase in the productivity of social labor. Thus, the emergence of highly productive earth-moving machinery, operated by highly qualified workers and engineering and technical personnel, made possible and very profitable the development of open deposits of coal minerals in Siberia. This determined a gap in labor productivity between old and new coal regions in favor of the new ones (between the Donbass and Kuzbass, the Donbass and the coal deposits of Eastern Siberia) by 4–5 times³¹).

The development of higher technical education is an indispensable condition for the accelerated transformation of science into a direct productive—

³⁰) Archive of the Central Statistical Administration of the RSFSR, 1958, Department of Cultural Statistics, file 23, sheets 1–190.
³¹) Izvestiya Sibirskogo otdeleniya Akademii nauk SSSR, 1964, social sciences series, issue 2, p. 5.

…force, since under the conditions of the contemporary scientific and technological revolution there is, in essence, a unification of natural science and technology. The realization of the fundamental discoveries of the natural sciences is ultimately determined by the technical level of production. This is, above all, the instruments of labor, which, in Marx’s words, constitute the bony and muscular system of production,^32 and engineering and technical personnel capable of solving the problems posed by science and technology.

It is also necessary to emphasize the circumstance that, as all branches of the national economy become industrialized, higher technical education becomes an important factor in the development not only of material production, but also of the service sectors.

The tendency toward the mutual penetration of different branches of education has noticeably intensified. Along with the broad introduction of mathematical and physical research methods into all fields of knowledge, technical training is being incorporated into university, agricultural, pedagogical, and even partly medical education. University and technical education are undergoing a process of convergence. In university education, while the theoretical aspect remains dominant, technical knowledge and skills are acquiring ever greater importance. This is connected with the convergence of science and production and with the growing process of industrialization of science itself. At the same time, in the new specialties of technical higher educational institutions the share of fundamental disciplines is increasing. This is becoming a most important tendency, since it is a basic condition for solving technical problems.

Naturally, the broad range of higher technical education testifies to the new purpose and new functions of the higher technical school. In its structure and specialization it must reflect the constantly growing needs of production, science, and the service sphere. Proceeding from this premise, the most progressive type of technical educational institution is the multi-profile higher educational institution. It is economical. It meets the requirements of the development of scientific and technological progress. It trains specialists for production who have a broad outlook, and it has the possibility of concentrating highly qualified personnel, creating full-fledged departments and scientific structural units of higher educational institutions—problem laboratories and research institutes. The progressiveness of this type of technical higher educational institution can be seen in the example of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute.

TPI is steadily increasing its scientific potential, essentially becoming an educational-scientific institution. The objective tendencies characteristic of modern science are expressed quite clearly in the institute. This has been reflected in the organization of 8 problem laboratories and 6 research institutes, which develop complex themes in which the collectives of many departments of the higher educational institution participate. Naturally, this direction in the development of the institute has changed the content of the educational process, strengthening the scientific-theoretical and experimental side of teaching. Whereas previously the imparting of research skills to students had an episodic character, in recent years it has become an organic component of the entire system of engineer training.

The development of TPI as an educational-scientific institution made it possible continuously to improve the structure of the higher educational institution in accordance with the requirements of production and the tasks of scientific and technological progress. In the first postwar decade, emphasis was placed on training personnel for the mining industry. In 1952, the proportion of students in mining special—

^32 See K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 191.

...specialties amounted to 40% of the total student body, while in 1960 it was only 7%33).

Beginning in 1945, with the opening of the electrophysics faculty, the institute gradually changed the profile of its training of engineers. This is evidenced by the faculties that were organized at the institute over the last 15 years—the physics-and-technology, radio-engineering, electric-power, heat-power, automation and telemechanics faculties, the faculty of automatic systems, and, finally, the new electrophysics faculty created at the end of 196534). In essence, the institute began to train personnel for new technology, for modern branches of production.

It is necessary to keep in mind one more very important aspect. The opening of new sectoral technical higher educational institutions is most favorable when they are created on the basis of polytechnical institutes. This is also shown by the experience of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute, which served as the basis for the creation of 8 sectoral institutes.

Polytechnical higher educational institutions underwent considerable development. Before 1957 there was only one higher educational institution of this type in Siberia—the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute; now there are six: the Altai, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kemerovo, Omsk, and Tomsk polytechnical institutes.

This is almost one fourth of all the polytechnical higher educational institutions of the Russian Federation.

The necessity of creating polytechnical higher educational institutions can be considered through the example of Eastern Siberia, where by 1956 there were only two technical higher educational institutions—the Mining and Metallurgical Institute in Irkutsk and the Siberian Forestry Engineering Institute in Krasnoyarsk.

The profile of these higher educational institutions reflected the narrowness in the development of the krai’s productive forces. Production was essentially limited to the development of raw-material resources. From the second half of the 1950s, new progressive branches of industry began to develop and emerge on the basis of the krai’s richest raw-material resources—power engineering, chemicals, nonferrous metallurgy and especially the aluminum industry, the pulp-and-paper, woodworking, and construction industries. Multisectoral machine building was being created. Coal mining developed at a modern technical level, and logging operations were carried out35). Fixed assets introduced in 1963 in Eastern Siberia amounted to more than 2 billion rubles and had doubled in comparison with 1958 (on average for the Union, this growth over the corresponding years was about 50%36)). Production of prefabricated reinforced-concrete structures and components from 1958 to 1962 increased more than threefold37). This created an objective basis for the further development of the krai’s economy.

To avoid a discrepancy between the great prospects for economic development and the training of engineering personnel, the government adopted measures to expand the network of technical higher educational institutions in Eastern Siberia. The Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk polytechnical institutes were organized, training specialists in geology, mining, metallurgy, machine building, power engineering, and construction.

33). I. F. Livshits, “The Tomsk Polytechnic Institute in the Postwar Period,” Cultural Construction in Siberia in 1917–1960, Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, 1962, p. 217.

34). The electrophysics faculty, created in 1945, was reorganized in 1950 into the physics-and-technology and electromechanical faculties.

35). Party Archive of Krasnoyarsk Krai, fond 26, inventory 14, file 16, sheets 13–14; Party Archive of the Irkutsk Regional Committee of the CPSU, fond 127, inventory 56, file 54, sheets 8, 11.

36). The National Economy of the USSR in 1963, Statistical Yearbook, 1965, p. 448.

37). The National Economy of the RSFSR in 1962, Statistical Yearbook, 1963, p. 108.

Polytechnic higher educational institutions organize the training of engineering personnel in accordance with the sectoral development of production in a given territory or oblast, orienting themselves toward the leading branches. This does not negate the need to create sectoral higher educational institutions, which, to an even greater degree than polytechnic institutes, cannot be local in character, but must be concentrated in places where a particular branch of production is most heavily concentrated and must train the appropriate personnel for many regions of the country. In accordance with this methodological approach, and taking into account other factors (the availability of teaching staffs, material facilities, traditions, etc.), a number of sectoral higher educational institutions were opened in Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Norilsk—the Novosibirsk Electrotechnical Institute, the Tomsk Civil Engineering Institute, the Tomsk Institute of Radio Electronics and Electronic Engineering, the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals, and the Norilsk Industrial Institute. The implementation of the decisions of the September Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee will increase the importance of sectoral higher educational institutions.

Along with the opening of new institutes, corresponding work was carried out on the relocation of higher education.

The development of higher educational institutions, especially in Western Siberia, historically took shape in such a way that certain specialties, faculties, and even institutes, while possessing highly qualified personnel and an appropriate material base, turned out to be territorially detached from production bases. This applied chiefly to the higher educational institutions of the city of Tomsk^38). The mining faculty of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute was transferred to the Kemerovo Mining Institute, and the Tomsk Institute of Railway Transport Engineers—to the city of Omsk.

Thus, the results achieved in the development and distribution of higher education in Siberia are so significant that they provide grounds for establishing an optimistic forecast for the further expansion of higher education. It is dictated, as was emphasized at the beginning of the article, by the economic and social process of Siberia’s transformation into the country’s most important economic region.

The intensity of this process will depend to a considerable extent on the strengthening of the existing network of higher education and on the organization of the training of specialists in a number of new fields.

It is necessary first of all to eliminate the negative phenomena connected with the localistic tendencies of the former sovnarkhozy.

The sovnarkhozy played a certain positive role in expanding higher technical education. On their initiative, and with their organizational and material support, new specialties, faculties, and even higher educational institutions were opened^39). At the same time, they pursued a line toward parallelism in the development of higher education, toward turning higher educational institutions into local educational establishments. This was manifested especially in the training of personnel for the construction industry. Instead of expanding and strengthening sectoral construction institutes, a course was taken toward creating construction faculties in a large number of technical higher educational institutions that had neither the personnel nor the appropriate traditions nor the material base for this. In 1965, civil engineers were being trained in two specialized higher educational institutions (the Novosibirsk and Tomsk civil engineering institutes) and in 11 other non-construction institutes according to uniform

^38) Current Archive of the West Siberian Council for the Coordination and Planning of Scientific Research in Technical and Natural Sciences of the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education of the RSFSR, Transcript of the Council meeting of 25/X-1962, p. 4.

^39) Archive of the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR, fond 2, inventory 1, file 6, sheet 353; file 9, sheet 15, etc.

profiles—for industrial and civil construction³⁰. Naturally, such an approach sharply reduces the quality of training engineering personnel and increases its cost.

Although, on the whole, as was emphasized, useful work was carried out in relocating higher educational institutions, faculties, and specialties and in bringing them closer to production, nevertheless this process has not been completed, and in individual cases damage was done to sectoral higher educational institutions.

In a number of institutes that had been successfully developing as sectoral ones, additional specialties and faculties were opened that ran counter to the established specialization. This is clearly seen in the example of the Krasnoyarsk Forestry Engineering Institute, which was transformed into a technological institute in connection with the opening of chemical specialties. Such an approach led to the infringement of the institute’s forestry faculties. The training of specialists for an extremely important branch of the national economy declined³¹.

The training of personnel for light and food industry deserves the most serious attention. The weak development of these branches of the economy in Siberia is explained to a considerable extent by the insufficient staffing of enterprises with engineering personnel.

The training of specialists for light and food industry was underestimated. It has begun to be addressed to some extent in Siberia only in recent years. A number of specialties have been organized at the Altai Polytechnic Institute and the Omsk Agricultural Institute, and the East Siberian Technological Institute has been created in Ulan-Ude. It has a construction faculty and a number of mechanical specialties not connected with the institute’s profile.

Engineers for light and food industry must be trained in large numbers in specialized institutes or faculties and in the most diverse specialties. This will help improve the complex of living conditions for the population of Siberia, with all the consequences that follow from this.

As has been pointed out, the narrowest point of higher education in Siberia is the acute shortage of professorial and teaching staff. It is enough to note that many higher educational institutions organized in recent years do not have professors and doctors of sciences on their staffs.

Thus, great results have been achieved in the development of higher education in Siberia. They must be reinforced by a substantial improvement on the qualitative side. This is not only a regional but an all-Union problem, as follows from the very essence of the decisions of the XXIII Congress of the CPSU and the resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR “On Measures to Improve the Training of Specialists and to Improve the Management of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education in the Country” (1966).

“Of special importance are the improvement of the structure of higher educational institutions and their location; as well as forms of instruction, an increase in the share of qualified professorial and teaching staff, and the improvement of the material and technical supply of higher educational institutions. All this will result in raising the quality of specialist training and increasing the scientific potential of higher educational institutions, which is an indispensable condition for the growth of their role in solving the strategic tasks of communist construction and, in particular, in the successful transformation of Siberia into the country’s most important economic and cultural region.”

1. Izvestiya Sibirskogo otdeleniya Akademii nauk SSSR, social sciences series, issue 2, 1954, p. 10. ↩

2. V. I. Perevedentsev, Contemporary Migration of the Population of Siberia, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Institute of Economics, author’s abstract of a dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Economic Sciences, Moscow, 1963, pp. 8, 21. ↩

3. V. I. Lenin had in mind the ores of the Urals, the fuel of Siberia, the oil of the Caucasus, forest wealth, hydroelectric resources, raw materials for chemistry, etc. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 36, p. 188. ↩

4. The National Economy of the RSFSR in 1959: Statistical Yearbook, Moscow, 1960, p. 521. ↩

5. Calculated from materials of the archive of the Central Statistical Administration under the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, Department of Cultural Statistics, 1940, file 42, sheets 1–31. ↩

6. See V. I. Lenin, vol. 45, p. 381. ↩

7. V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 43, p. 228. ↩

8. The National Economy of the RSFSR in 1962, Statistical Yearbook, Moscow, 1963, pp. 54, 55. ↩

9. The National Economy of Kemerovo Oblast. Statistical Collection, 1958, p. 25. ↩

10. I. F. Livshits, “Training Engineering Personnel in the First Postwar Decade,” in Party Organizations of Western Siberia in the Struggle for the Construction of Socialism and Communism, Novosibirsk, 1961, p. 34. ↩

11. Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee, fond 17, inventory 6, file 46, leaf 53. ↩

12. Ibid., inventory 6, file 1369, leaf 23. ↩

13. TsPA, fond 17, inventory 5, file 860, leaf 40; inventory 6, file 46, leaf 276; inventory 7, file 951, leaf 38, and others. ↩

14. TsGAOR USSR, fond 9396, op. 1, file 912, leaf 67; Party Archive of the Irkutsk Regional Committee of the CPSU, fond 127, op. 61, file 55, leaf 97. ↩

15. Directives of the CPSU and the Soviet Government on Economic Questions. Gospolitizdat, 1958, vol. IV, p. 298. ↩

16. Ibid., p. 580. ↩

17. The National Economy of the RSFSR in 1965. Statistical Yearbook. Moscow, 1966, pp. 469–470; current archive of the Central Statistical Administration under the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, 1967, Department of Cultural Statistics, grouping of educational institutions by branches of the national economy and culture at the beginning of the 1966/67 academic year, pp. 1–73. ↩

18. Calculated from the statistical yearbook The National Economy of the RSFSR in 1962, Moscow, 1963, pp. 12, 14, 501, 502. ↩

19. See Handbook for Applicants to Higher Educational Institutions of the USSR, Moscow, 1965, pp. 314–349. ↩

20. TsGAOR USSR, fond 9396, inventory 1, file 867, sheet 198. ↩

21. Party Archive of the Irkutsk Regional Committee of the CPSU, fond 127, inventory 55, file 107, sheet 2. ↩

22. TsGAOR USSR, fond 9396, inventory 1, file 231, leaf 75. ↩

23. Calculated from the book Higher Education of the USSR, statistical collection, Moscow, 1961, pp. 178–187. ↩

24. Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1964, No. 6, p. 15. ↩

25. P. I. Shadrin, Higher Education in Yakutia, Yakutsk, 1964, p. 40. ↩

26. TsPA, fond 17, inventory 7, file 3140, sheet 32. ↩

27. Vestnik Akademii nauk SSSR, 1964, No. 6, p. 15. ↩

28. Includes higher educational institutions training personnel for industry and construction, transport, and communications. Archive of the Central Statistical Administration of the RSFSR, 1940, Department of Cultural Statistics, file 42, sheets 1–31. Archive of the Central Statistical Administration of the RSFSR, 1945, Department of Cultural Statistics, file 14, sheets 1–47. Archive of the Central Statistical Administration of the RSFSR, 1958, Department of Cultural Statistics, file 79, sheets 1–70. Current Archive of the Central Statistical Administration of the RSFSR, 1965, Department of Cultural Statistics, grouping of educational institutions by branches of the national economy and culture at the beginning of the 1964/65 academic year, pp. 1–73. ↩

29. Calculations were made on the basis of the tables cited above. ↩

30. Calculated from the handbook for applicants to higher educational institutions of the USSR, Moscow, 1965. ↩

31. Party Archive of the Krasnoyarsk Territorial Committee of the CPSU, fond 26, inventory 14, file 20, sheets 54, 55, 69, 161, 163. ↩