"We Teach Them to Be Free": Specialized Math Schools and the Cultivation of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia

In the 1960s–70s, dozens of specialized physics and math (fizmat) schools mushroomed across the Soviet Union. Thousands of talented students were carefully selected and taught an advanced curriculum by the best teachers, producing several generations of well-educated intellectuals.¹ The government hoped that the math schools would create a cohort of loyal intellectuals who would harness the power of math and science in the service of communism.

In one way, the project was highly successful. According to a 1999 estimate, 80 percent of the country's professional mathematicians were graduates of math schools.² Several Fields medalists were educated at such specialized schools.³ Many former math schoolers applied their skills and knowledge in the computer industry, contributing to both the fame and the notoriety of "Russian hackers." A recent study of Russian computer scientists concludes that "the only elements of the Soviet system that are still directly traceable" to that group "are the schools they frequented (especially the fizmat high schools that specialized in math and physics), the curriculum they followed, the teachers they had, and the Math Olympiads they went to with their fellow math students."⁴ However, math school graduates did not become scientists en masse. Many of them did not adopt Soviet ideals and remained a closely knit but isolated group. Some math schools churned out dissenters and independent thinkers, who were a poor fit for the Soviet system.

Studying and socializing at several top Soviet math schools shaped a distinct identity of the "math schooler." Math school graduates told their interviewers how deeply their learning and social experience at school affected their subsequent careers, making this experience "a mark of identity, not just of professional competence."⁵ Their identity was based on the perception of their school years as "the Garden of Eden," the time when their "life began," "the main, most important three years," and "a paradise from which everything good in life springs."⁶ Those math schools provided outstanding intellectual training and cultivated the habit of critical thinking, yet this explosive combination was a poor ticket into the Soviet elite. While some math schoolers made successful careers, many others were turned down by top universities due to their Jewish background or dissident activity. After college, they were often barred from academic positions.⁷ The pedagogical practices of the math schools proved ambiguous, developing some useful skills yet limiting student experience in other respects.⁸

The phenomenon of Soviet math schools has been the subject of two competing interpretations. Speaking of the "second generation" of specialized schools, Il´ia Kukulin and Mariia Maiofis have suggested that the social and pedagogical concept behind these schools acquired "a distinct oppositional meaning," raising people who were not only thinking in a nonstandard way but who also possessed an inner sense of independence. For them, math schools constituted artificially created "islands of utopia," a social space operating by rules different from those of the larger society. They argued that this phenomenon was not the outcome of a deliberate program but resulted from social and institutional developments and the "ethos of personal freedom, more widespread in math schools than in the Soviet educational system in general, and conditioned, in particular, by the influence of the academic environment."⁹

Alexei Yurchak, by contrast, has viewed similar phenomena not as a form of opposition but as examples of "deterritorialization," by which Soviet citizens led meaningful and creative lives while being simultaneously inside and outside the official discourse. In his conceptual framework, mathematics, as part of "theoretical science," belonged to the realm of "imaginary 'elsewhere,'" which also included ancient language, poetry, and religion.¹⁰ Math school communities look like the groups of free-spirited academics and creative literati, whom Yurchak has described as "an indivisible, if somewhat paradoxical, element of the Soviet state's cultural project."¹¹ The educational policy of the Soviet state, he argues, served the dual goal of bringing up "well-educated and devoted followers of the party," while actively promoting "the types of knowledge, critical judgement, and independent thinking that...