Administrative Perestroika and Rewriting History: The Dilemma of Glasnost in Soviet Education

The reformist processes of glasnost and perestroikaexacerbated an existing crisis in education in the Soviet Union. Although Mikhail Gorbachev′s initiatives did not elicit a strong response among educators before early 1987, they provoked strong discord over the extent of desirable change in national educational policy thereafter. This conflict merged with a wide‐ranging debate over the rewriting of the nation′s history, especially the version to appear in secondary school textbooks. Seizing both issues, classroom teachers and lowlevel administrators made a sustained effort to increase decision‐making authority at the bottom of the educational apparatus,including at the classroom level. By 1989, these differences had settled into a pattern of ongoing, implacable disagreement.