This dissertation examines the socio-cultural underpinnings of neoliberal educational reforms vis-à-vis the national educational settings in Russia. By drawing upon NVivo-aided Discourse and Frame analysis as a methodological path, this study critically examines a corpus of state laws on education and official government statements from 1991 to 2012 in contrast to contemporary societal discourse on education, where novel and indigenous educational meanings have been contested and re-negotiated. This thesis shows how the conceptual mélange of global neoliberal ideas has been interpreted, institutionalised and resisted in Russia by exploring the semantics of key neoliberal reform ideas - ‘quality assurance,’ ‘educational standards,’ and ‘commercial educational service’ - at the micro-level of policy texts, political debates and public discussions. This thesis shows that having heralded an educational revolution, the official reform narrative rhetorically endorsed neoliberal orthodoxy, while continuing in practice to discursively draw on pedagogical and administrative frameworks which it previously renounced as outdated. In communicating the spirit of radical neoliberal modernisation, the Russian government rhetoric has collectively embraced a number of contradictory concepts, slogans and directives that have never been harmonised in a unified reformatory framework. The study also argues that the public interpretation of neoliberal concepts has been radically different from the intended conceptualisations offered by the global international stakeholders and conveyed by the Russian educational elite. It shows how, when interpreted through the lens of local pedagogical values, the semantics of global modernisation templates, such as ‘educational quality’ and ‘educational standardisation,’ took on unexpected, culturally-specific, meanings. It also finds that the newly introduced principles of entrepreneurship, self-interest, consumer choice, self-responsibility and competition, which underlie the neoliberal economic reform, remained in opposition to fundamental principles of Russian culture, such as communalism, egalitarianism, state paternalism and anti-monetarism. By unpacking opposing ideological and pedagogical frames, this thesis explains the cultural aspects of the widespread public resistance to post-1991 education reform in Russia. This dissertation seeks to enhance the understanding of the policy formulation process and interpretation of global neoliberal ideas from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. By advancing a culturalist approach to policy analysis, the present study addresses an overlooked piece of the long-standing puzzle of perceived post-Soviet educational crisis, supplementing the broader scholarly discussion on the successes and failures of neoliberal reforms in the post-Soviet space.

This thesis contributes to existing discussions of Soviet subjectivity by considering how the efforts of the Party leadership and state agencies to shape personal and collective identities were mediated by the teaching of Russian classics to teenagers. It concentrates in particular on the history of literature course provided by Soviet schools for the upper years. The study addresses the following questions: (1) How was literary expression employed to instigate children's emotions and create interpretive habits as a way of inculcating a Soviet worldview? (2) What immediate effects did the methods have on teenagers? (3) What were the long-term effects of this type of indoctrination? Answering these questions required close reading of material produced by official authorities, such as methodological programmes, teachers' aids, professional journals, and textbooks for class instruction, and also of material produced by those at the receiving end of Stalinist literary instruction, including both sources contemporary to the period under scrutiny (i.e. diaries written between 1936-1941), and later autobiographical material (memoirs, oral history). I argue that for many teenagers growing up during this period, indoctrination in the classroom blurred the boundary between reality and fiction, and provided a moral compass to navigate their social environment, to judge others as well as themselves along prescribed lines, and model their lives on the precepts and slogans of the characters and authors they encountered, particularly the 19th-century radical democrats. Retrospective accounts - interviews, memoirs, and written responses to questions - expose the durability of the moral and ethical lessons derived from Russian classics and reveal the enduring Soviet emotional complex formed by this literary instruction. Investigating the impacts of the study of Russian classics on Soviet recipients, particularly from elite groups such as the city intelligentsia, my discussion highlights the political traction of the literary in, for instance, forming feelings of group belonging and strong emotional responses to differing views. I conclude with a discussion of the relation of this to long-term political effects, including the re-appraisal, in the twenty-first century, of Stalin-era teaching methodology as an effective way of instilling patriotic sentiments in students, and the legacy of Soviet perceptions and practices in the expression of personal and collective identities in the post-Soviet period.