Human Rights in Russia by Mary McAuley

Author:Mary McAuley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Human rights and Civil liberties law, Current Affairs, Russia, European history, Political Oppression and Persecution, Political leaders and leadership, Violence in society, Entrepreneurship, Economic growth, Cold War
ISBN: 9780857739315
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

Education, education, education

At the 2004 conference Korotaev, asking to be forgiven, claimed that the reason so many participants advocated education or enlightenment was that

We are the direct descendants of the Russian populist intelligentsia which considered its function to be that of educating the ‘dark people’ [temnyi narod] and leading it to a shining future. We should not deceive ourselves, that's the only reason why we are interested in what the people think, certainly it's not because of what they think.

Some probably were offended and, I would add, a belief in educating the masses was very much part of a Soviet mind set too. At the conference the experts recommended focusing on human rights education for students and school children because they had grown up in a post-Soviet environment, were open to new information, and not burdened with worry over everyday issues. And, indeed, they had been a target group since the early nineties.

In 1991, a group, mostly schoolteachers, members of Memorial, began to gather school children and students to talk about Stalinist repression, they then set up a Youth Centre on Human Rights. They moved on to visiting schools, and organizing discussions on human rights. The leader of the Centre was a teacher, Vsevolod Lukovitsky, and Elena Rusakova, a social psychologist, was an active participant. The Centre's members undertook these activities in their free time; they did not set up an office. Beginning with a small grant from Soros, they began to prepare materials for teachers, and for school children, and in 1998 produced a textbook that received Ministry of Education approval. By this time they were in demand as teachers of new role playing and interactive methods of teaching human rights. One city that they visited, as trainers, was Perm where an NGO, the Centre for Civic Education, headed by Andrei Suslov, a young historian from the Pedagogical University, a specialist on Stalinist repression, was teaching human rights. Suslov's group too produced a textbook, drawing on the Lukovitsky materials, and over the next few years held three-day seminars for school teachers, either in Perm or in the region's towns. Perhaps 25 teachers would attend, 250–300 over the course of the year.

The early years of the new decade witnessed conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, the Youth Centre for Human Rights fell out of favour with the authorities. A revised version of their textbook failed to get ministerial approval in 2000, making it difficult for teachers to use it. In 2001, with youth organizations coming under scrutiny in the search for ‘extremists’, the Centre's name and its juridical address as the Memorial offices was sufficient to send the police to Memorial to look for young extremists. Lukovitsy and his colleagues set up a new organization, with a suitably neutral name, the Humanist Research and Methodology Centre, but found that schools, regional educational authorities and pedagogical universities were less and less willing to work with them. The Centre joined in a successful campaign against compulsory religious and military education in schools

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