Soviet education is designed not only to produce specialists whose skills will be more useful to the State, but also to reshape the character of the person so that it is compatible with Communist ideology. The study attempts to investigate and describe the development of higher education correspondence study in the U.S.S.R. Subproblems investigated involve the relationship between Soviet education and the Central Committee of the Communist Party which actually determines the direction of education, and the relationship between the Soviet higher correspondence education and the economic requirements of national economy. A review of the existing literature from the pre-Soviet period to the present indicates that although there has been a decline in the number of higher correspondence students since 1965, this form of instruction still plays a significant role in supplying the Soviet economy with a great number of specialists. Correspondence students represent over 1.6 million students, one-third of the total higher education students in the U.S.S.R. (Author/JMF)