Finding teachers for schools in the Southern Urals: training and cadre assignment policies after the Great Patriotic War (1945-1956)

The article deals with the state’s educational strategy after the Great Patriotic War. These are actual problems for both domestic and foreign historiography. The author draws on archival and historiographic sources that shed light on how schools were provided with staff in the RSFSR, and particularly in the Southern Urals, during late Stalinism and Khrushchev’s “Thaw”. The paper analyzes the main measures taken by the administrative apparatus of the region to restore the network of higher and specialized secondary educational institutions, and to solve the problem of the lack of teachers. As a result of the comprehensive measures during the first decade after the Great Patriotic War, and with the help of graduates from pedagogical educational institutions, the quality of teachers changed for the better. Many teachers who lacked appropriate education and did not wish to improve their qualification were replaced. The article furthermore studies the reasons for the large turnover rate among teachers. Pedagogical institutes and secondary educational institutions in the Bashkir ASSR as well as in the Kurgan, Orenburg and Chelyabinsk Regions were transformed in accordance with the ongoing social, political and economic changes. The author identifies the factors that influenced the reorganization of the teacher training institutes and the optimization of pedagogical schools in the broader region. The article reconstructs how the Party and State administrative apparatus in charge of Russia’s educational system functioned, and determines the degree of its efficiency. Special attention is paid to the ambiguous demographic processes leading to partial or complete “hidden” unemployment among teachers in 1953-1957. The author concludes that under “regulated bureaucratic pluralism”, the supreme bodies of state and educational administration were unable to rationally use the reserve of teachers in the face of an expected demographic decline.