ABSTRACT
Vladimir Lenin's skepticism about the capacity of schools to affect social change, and cynicism about those who try, has a modern ring, more so than the ameliorationist, Enlightenment-driven views of nineteenth-century Russian reformers to promote science and a modern cast of mind-to transform society. The Minister of Education, Edward D. Dneprov, is an historian by training, steeped in the issues, perspectives, and even rhetoric of the period of Russia's Great Reforms during the 1860s, but also a shestidesiatnik in that he came to political maturity in the era of the Twentieth Party Congress and Khrushchevian reforms. In the summer of 1989 Dneprov attended a conference held in Philadelphia on the Great Reforms in Russian History; by then it had become obvious that his energies were elsewhere. The Soviet school emerged in stages and drew its inspiration from a variety of sources.
