Window on Eurasia

Drafting Village Teachers Seen Sealing Fate of Rural Russia

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 30, 2006 – The Russian government’s plan to end draft deferments for those serving as teachers in rural schools, a program
that will yield only about 2,000 new soldiers each year, will contribute
to the dying out of many rural areas of the Russian Federation, according to a leading Moscow specialist.

In an essay in “Novaya gazeta” yesterday, Anatoliy Tsirul’nikov,
a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Education, said that
this proposed change in the draft rules earlier had been rejected not only
by Soviet officials but also by tsarist officials, who believed that the
flourishing of villages was a key to the development of the country.

Were this deferment to be eliminated now, Tsirul’nikov continued, it
would entail three serious losses for the Russian countryside: the loss
of male role models in rural schools, the loss of a rural
intelligentsia, and the loss of the creative potential of villages, all
of which would contribute to additional deaths of Russian villages.

Indeed, this change in the draft pool would hit the schools and the
people they serve with a double whammy: On the one hand, young male
teachers would be forced to leave and few would be likely to return.
And on the other, ever fewer young men would be willing to teach in
isolated areas where living conditions are often harsh.

Why is Moscow considering this step if it has so few clear positive
consequences and so many obvious negative ones? There appear to be
three reasons: First, the worsening demographic situation make young rural
teachers, most of whom are ethnic Russians, an attractive source of new
soldiers for many commanders.

Second, because rural Russia’s share of the population is dropping,
it has less political clout than do urban areas. Consequently, the
proposal to draft rural teachers – whom the media have sometimes portrayed as
draft evaders – helps to make calls for drafting urban groups more
palatable.

And third, the central Russian government at the present time seems
little interested in preserving the villages that historically have
been the seedbeds of Russian culture and civilization, preferring instead to
view urban aglomerations as the true and even inevitable wave of the
future.

But the governments in many predominantly rural regions in the Russian
Federation are not only disturbed by the likely consequences of
drafting teachers – they view this proposed action as an attack on themselves
-- but also taking steps to try to counteract its impact by developing
their own independent programs of rural education.

One of the most successful, Tsirul’nikov says, is in the Sakha
Republic, a region whose efforts have been described by UNESCO as
“the Yakut pedagogical miracle.” He suggests that this “miracle” has
three sources: First, in Sakha, unlike in many other federation
subjects, a commitment to rural education is enshrined in the
constitution.

Second, Sakha has increased funding for education even as the central
government has cut back. And third, it has developed a system of
public-private partnerships that have involved local businesses in the
work of the schools, helping to provide not only equipment and teachers
but clearly defined future jobs.

For many in Russia’s cities, the Kremlin’s proposal to end draft
deferments for rural teachers seems a minor matter, a measure with few
consequences for themselves and a matter of simple justice if urban
residents are going to lose one or another of the channels they have
for avoiding military service.

But for rural Russians – who still form a large fraction of the
country’s population -- it is something very different, another
unfunded liability on a population that is least able to pay and an
attack on the future of Russian villages, whose dying out has not only
disturbed many Russian thinkers but exacerbated the country’s
demographic decline.

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