This report details the history of making higher education available to young workers and peasants in the USSR since the October Revolution of 1917. The paper is organized into six sections. The first section introduces the paper and outlines the educational system in the Soviet Union, especially the types of higher educational institutions. The second section explains how illiteracy was eradicated in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s--a necessary prelude to making higher education accessible to young workers and peasants. In the third and fourth sections, the history of preparing young workers and peasants specifically for higher education is narrated, with emphasis on factory schools, houses for the communist education of youth, and the "workers' faculties," which were created and flourished during the 1920s to 1940s. The final two sections of the report explain what has been done from the end of World War II to the present to help poor youth gain access to higher education, such as providing access to preparatory departments of higher schools and other forms of preparation and selecting school leavers for admission to higher schools (universities). (KC)