The census of 1959 registered the existence of over one hundred peoples and ethnic groups in the Soviet Union. Even if rather arbitrarily we discount the smaller groups of less than 900,000 members each, we have to deal with twenty-odd nations of undisputable significance: from the 114.1 million Russians, who constitute about 55 per cent of the total population, to the 969 thousand Kirghiz in Central Asia, whose share is but 0.5 per cent of the total.' All of them are nations with different languages, literary and historical traditions, often nations separated by different religions; a staggering problem for the educational authorities of the USSR. This article seeks to elucidate some aspects of the education of the nonRussian peoples in the Soviet Union by analyzing the teaching of their religion, their languages, literary traditions, and historical heritage. First, however, a few preliminary remarks on the status of those peoples and Soviet policy toward them. The great numerical imbalance between the Russian people of 114 million and the other peoples of the USSR (the next most numerous nation, the Ukrainians, are 37 million strong, the others have about eight million and under) may suggest a seemingly equitable solution in terms of democratic doctrine: the gradual assimilation of the relatively small minorities to the majority, the Russians. After all, this process has worked fairly well in the United States, where most of the ethnic and racial minorities have adopted the predominant AngloSaxon culture. Both the arithmetic of majorities and trans-continental comparisons, however, are inappropriate in this particular case. For the most part, American ethnic minorities are now loose collections of individuals who are scattered all over the country, desirous of becoming good-or, even better-Americans, and maintaining an increasingly tenuous bond with the old world of their ancestors. Not so in the Soviet