Rabfak (Workers' Faculty)

Origins and establishment

The rabfak grew out of the educational conditions of the years right after the October Revolution. By the 1897 census only 21 percent of the population of the empire was literate, with sharp regional differences. On 2 August 1918 the Sovnarkom of the RSFSR issued a decree on new rules for admission to higher education, which let working people enter without examinations and even without prior documentary proof of education. But the general preparation of most workers and peasants who came in this way was so low that higher education remained out of reach for them. The deputy people's commissar for education, Mikhail Pokrovsky, proposed workers' faculties as a preparatory step, and the Narkompros decree of 11 September 1919 "On the Organization of Workers' Faculties" defined the rabfak as an autonomous educational support institution for preparing workers and peasants for higher education in the shortest possible time.

In 1919 Moscow resolved to open evening courses preparing workers and peasants for higher education at higher schools, schools, and as independent institutions, and the first rabfak was opened on the basis of the evening courses organized at the former Moscow Commercial Institute (later the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy) and at Moscow State University. Teaching was done mainly by young university professors; the courses lasted one to two years depending on prior preparation, were free of charge, and paid a stipend. Forty-five such courses were opened in Moscow alone. In Petrograd the first rabfak opened on 8 December 1919 at Petrograd University, and the rabfak of the Polytechnic Institute, the second in the city and the first attached to a higher technical school, held its first interviews on 15 October 1920.

Admission, study, and financing

The Sovnarkom decree "On Workers' Faculties" of 17 September 1920 gave the system its legal form. Workers and peasants aged 18 and over were admitted by delegation from production unions, factory committees, party rural work departments, and volost, uyezd, and gubernia executive committees. Study in the day division was equated with work in production, counting toward length of service, and students received state stipends. From the 1921/22 academic year the day division ran three years and the evening division four. As a general rule rabfak graduates were enrolled in higher education without entrance examinations, or their final examinations at the rabfak were accepted in place of them. Admission initially required little beyond literacy and the four rules of arithmetic, but the rules gradually tightened. The people's commissar for education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, described the rabfak as a staircase by which a worker and a peasant could, after three years of intensive study, reach the university.

Expansion and its contradictions

Growth brought shortcomings as well. Instead of examinations there were only final conversations with teachers, and admission commissions cared mainly about social origin, often overlooking elementary preparation. Chronic failure produced a high dropout rate, and when the first large group of engineering graduates reached production it turned out they could not replace the old specialists. The state, facing the task of rapid economic recovery, therefore adopted a series of decrees softening its treatment of non-proletarian specialists.

Work with national minorities received particular attention. Until 1924 representatives of national minorities studied mainly at the rabfaks of Moscow and Petrograd, and from the second half of the 1920s national rabfaks and national divisions within general rabfaks were opened. In the 1925/26 academic year about 40 percent of places in higher-education admissions were taken by rabfak graduates. In 1930 the RSFSR had 117 rabfaks (69 day, 48 evening) with 44,930 students, and by the 1932/33 academic year more than 1,000 rabfaks operated in the USSR with about 350,000 students. The Sovnarkom decree of 13 September 1930 attached all existing rabfaks to the corresponding higher-education institutions.

Abolition and afterlife

By the mid-1930s the development of general and specialized secondary education in the USSR made the rabfaks unnecessary, and the last one was closed in Moscow in October 1941. The rabfaks played a decisive role in training a proletarian intelligentsia and in the formation of the Soviet higher school.

In 1969 a party and government decree established preparatory divisions at higher-education institutions. Official acts did not use the old term "rabfak," but the name came back to life in informal speech and then in university documents and the press. Outside the USSR the workers' faculty model also spread after the Second World War to Eastern European countries and to China, Vietnam, and Korea in Asia, and later to Mozambique and Cuba. Each country adapted it to its existing institutions and cultural context.