The Making of the Soviet Citizen: Character Formation and Civic Training in Soviet Education

The Making of the Soviet Citizen (1987) examines the distinctive feature of Soviet education – the crucial importance it gives to the formation of a new type of person, the model socialist citizen. Success in this endeavour is regarded as essential for the creation of the material and spiritual bases of communism, and Soviet educational establishments accordingly devoted immense effort and resources to a programme of character building – vospitanie, moral, social and political development. This collection brings together the results of research devoted to character formation and civic training in Soviet education. The contributors present detailed analyses of the aims and methods of various major components of the vospitanie process and examine the development of their implementation.