"Were we, Communist propagandists, ever really concerned with anything other than the enlightenment of the people"? The question is rhetorically posed by A.V. Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment between 1917 and 1929 in the Soviet Union. Exactly how Lunacharsky and his Commissariat sought to make this possible in the difficult years of revolution, civil war and the NEP is descibed in this book.

Sheila Fitzpatrick has outdone herself in finding material for describing the daily activities, policies, and politics of the Commissariat, in particular focusing on the early period (roughly 1917-1921). She describes the creation of the Commissariat, its staff, and its practical decisions, as well as many philosophical and theoretical discussions about the nature of education and arts in a new, socialist, society. Since the Commissariat was responsible for all forms of education, including academic, as well as all art and literature, it had quite an extensive reach, but perpetual shortages and lack of funding made its work quite difficult. On the one hand, there were the demands of the Proletkultists and the left-wing artist movements, who wanted to impose new forms of culture and art on the new society; on the other hand, there were the practical demands of arranging proper and free education for the hundreds of thousands of school-aged children in the USSR. Then there is the question of the universities, their independence and their curricula, difficult issues fraught with political peril.

Fitzpatrick also pays plenty of attention to describing what kind of people were influential and active in and around the Commissariat, their views as well as their responses to pressing matters and developments as they occurred. Not in the least of course Lunacharsky himself, the perfect example of the socialist intellectual: mild-mannered, academic, tolerant, and inclined to favor experimentation and novelties in the arts, but rather poor at administration and decision-making. Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, also played a major role in the education department, and her influence on Lenin himself is not to be understated. The political tensions are described very well by Fitzpatrick, such as the recurring impatience of more hard-minded Communists such as Preobrazhensky and Zinoviev with Lunacharsky's overly indulgent approach towards rightist academics and pretentious painters alike.

The main downside of the book is that it is too much of a good thing. Fitzpatrick's research is so extensive and in-depth that almost every single meeting and policy decision seems to be described in detail in the book, and at times this gets extremely repetitive and boring. What doesn't help either is the vast amount of names and acronyms to be remembered to understand what is going on. Fitzpatrick has done her best to keep rather dry and often boring material as lively as possible, and various indexes of acronyms, people, and institutions provide an essential help, but the problem remains. The book is only some 300 pages of actual text, but it took me, a very fast reader in English, several weeks to get through it properly. Considering that only one chapter actually deals with the Commissariat during NEP, and everything else is about just four years of its existence, this level of detail is excessive.

On the other hand, once you have read it, you will know everything there is to know about policies on education and the arts in the early USSR. A useful and much more lively companion book, detailing the developments in arts and literature from the point of view of those undertaking it, is Richard Stites' "Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution". ( )