Top-down Verbal Messaging: Textbooks

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the state regulation of school textbooks in the context of interwar changes in communist ideology in general and Soviet school policy in particular. Whereas in the 1920s the Communist Party and the State Publishing House (GIZ) were just gradually increasing control and striving for monopoly over the printing press (textbooks included), the plurality of pedagogical publishers and teaching aids used for the new revolutionary teaching in schools remained intact at the local level. In contrast, during the 1930s the State Pedagogical Publishing House (Uchpedgiz), aided and controlled by both Communist Party and Peopleʼs Commissariat for Education, effectively monopolized the textbook segment of the publishing sector. During this period, Soviet pedagogical publications not only lost their regional diversity to the unchangeable universality, but also sacrificed their academic depth to increasing compliance with the communist ideology.