Russian Education Thirty Years Later: Back to the USSR? Elena Lisovskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov Western Michigan University Introduction How and why did Russian education go from the enthusiastic liberalization in the early 1990s to the restoration of a Soviet-style system in the new century? Attempting to answer this question, we reassess and advance a theoretical model that we initially proposed fifteen years ago. 1 The model places educational change in the context of a revolutionary cycle of social transformations. The cycle goes from radical, innovative reforms amidst general societal destabilization to a reac- tionary rehabilitation of the “old-regime” patterns during the restoration of social order and sta- bility. We detected such a trajectory in the educational reforms of the French Revolution, the Russian revolution of 1917, and the revolutionary transition from communism since mid-1980s. In all the cases, radical innovations of the cycle’s first stage succesfuly subverted the old system of schooling. Yet, amidst the revolutionary turmoil, the constructive programs of the radical reform proved difficult to implement. In contrast, the reactionary, “restorative” reforms were more suc- cessfully implemented in the context of greater stability that followed. Observing the realities of the very beginning of this millennium, we concluded that a reactionary phase of the cycle was unfolding in Russia, and that a “conservative-technocratic” project that was to be implemented would partly restore a Soviet-styled education system. The developments of the last decade have validated the predictive power of that theoretical approach. The pendulum of Russia’s educational change has indeed swung from the initial endeavors to decentralize, regionalize, humanize, diversify, and de-ideologize the school to the ongoing restoration of a Soviet-type, state-controlled system, which promotes curricular uniform- ity and ideological indoctrination. Yet, the model was limited by its focus on the social forces, actors and agendas that dominated the political and educational reform field at the very turn of the century and did not fully account for some other crucially important tendencies in the socio- political and cultural environment of educational change that were gaining strength at the time. Some of these tendencies were only beginning to take shape and went mostly unnoticed by social scientists. Other tendencies were clearer to us, yet at the time they were peripheral to our focus on the institutional transformations of schooling. Specifically, the earlier model did not include the following three intertwined contextual fac- tors. First, even though our studies since the 1990s detected a rising wave of nationalism in the ideology of education, our model did not account fully for the fact that educational reforms took place amidst the attempts by Russian elites to define and build a post-Soviet Russian nation. Accounting more fully for the context of nation-building would lead us to a better understanding of the central role of nationalist agenda in the post-Soviet educational project that we at the time defined as merely technocratic-conservative. ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC CONTACT Elena Lisovskaya lisovskaya@wmich.edu Western Michigan University Department of Sociology Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5257. 1 In this paper, presentation of the original model, its theoretical approach and comparative-historical methodology are abbreviated. Limited to the space of a journal article we had to omit most of empirical evidence and references on historical data. For the full presentation of the model, see (Karpov & Lisovskaya, 2005). EUROPEAN EDUCATION https://doi.org/10.1080/10564934.2020.1759098