Enterprisers

<em>The Enterprisers</em> traces the emergence of the modern school in Russia during the reigns of Peter I and his immediate successors up to the accession of Catherine II. Creation of the new secular technically-oriented schools based on the imported Western European blueprints is traditionally presented as the key element in Peter I's transformation of Russia. <p/>The tsar it is assumed needed schools to train officers and engineers for his new army and the navy and so he personally designed these new institutions and forced them upon his unwilling subjects. In this sense school also stands in as a metaphor for modern institutions in Russia in general which are likewise seen as created from the top down by the forceful state in response to its military and technological needs. <p/>Yet in reality Peter I himself never wrote much about education and while he championed learning in a broad sense he had remarkably little to say about the ways schools and schooling should be organized. Nor were his general and admirals including foreigners in Russian service keen on promoting formal schooling: for them practical apprenticeship still remained the preferred method of training. <p/>Rather as Fedyukin argues in this book the trajectories of institutional change were determined by the efforts of administrative entrepreneurs-or projecteurs as they were also called-who built new schools as they sought to achieve diverse career goals promoted their own pet ideas advanced their claims for expertise and competed for status and resources. By drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival sources Fedyukin explores the micropolitics behind the key episodes of educational innovation in the first half of the eighteenth century and offers an entirely new way of thinking about Petrine revolution and about the early modern state in Russia.<br>