Soviet Power
Makes Culture Within the Reach
of the People

p Pre-revolutionary Russia had produced quite a few great scholars, scientists, writers, composers, painters and actors, who had made a Rreat contribution to the cultural development of the human race. Yet the land as a whole had remained culturally unbelievably backward. According to the 1897 population census illiteracy in the nine and over age-group stood at 76 per cent and among 94 women at 88 per cent, while among the non-Russian peoples, as in Central Asia, only rare individuals were literate. Over forty of the peoples inhabiting tsarist Russia had not even a written language of their own. On the eve of the October Revolution the situation was practically the same. Four out of five children of working families could get no schooling, and only a sprinkling ever went on to higher education.

p The Great October Socialist Revolution cleared the way to cultural development in Russia. It put an end to a reactionary political regime that had blocked the road to education, besides oppressing the masses economically and politically. It put an end to the oppression of national minorities, which had impeded their cultural advancement; it abolished the division of society into social estates and granted women the same rights as men; it separated the church from the state and the school from the church. In a word, it did away with whatever had blocked the road to knowledge. This was the first time in history that a state had set itself and solved the task of making education, science and culture available to an entire people so that all working people might become educated and cultured men and women.

p The Soviet revolution awakened the many varied talents and abilities latent in the people, which the old regime had held in check, and roused the working masses to creative endeavour. In the first months after the establishment of Soviet power working people in town and the countryside began to set up and organise educational councils, community houses, cultural centres, clubs, libraries, reading rooms, lecture centres, etc., and took part in building schoolhouses. Those who were literate joined in the campaign against illiteracy. In the spring of 1918 Lenin noted with satisfaction that the trend towards education and culture among the masses was gathering greater and greater momentum thanks to the reorganisation of the society on Soviet lines.

p During the early years the Soviet Government encountered serious difficulties in this field. The times were generally hard, as a consequence of foreign intervention, the Civil War, economic break-down, etc.; and to make matters worse a considerable section of the old intelligentsia closely tied to the bourgeoisie was either hostile to Soviet rule or had adopted a wait-and-see attitude and was only gradually changing its allegiance in favour of the people. The best of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia however— K. A. Timiryazev, the naturalist, I. P. Pavlov, the physiologist, N. Y. Zhukovsky, the scientist, I. V. Michurin, the biologist, A. A. Blok, V. Y. Bryusov, and V. V. Mayakovsky, the poets, and V. E. Meyerhold, the actor and producer, to name but a fewwere with the Soviet Government from the outset. A preponderant majority of teachers, agronomists, and physicians in the 95 countryside, etc. threw in their fortunes with the people. And in the meantime the workers and peasants had begun to create a new intelligentsia from among their own ranks.

The Communist Party picked well-educated men and women of exceptional organisational talent for work in the cultural field. First to occupy the post of People’s Commissar of Education was A. V. Lunacharsky, a man of encyclopaedic education, brilliant journalist, writer and public speaker. When he left this post for diplomatic work in the early 1930s he was replaced by A. S. Bubnov, long a member of the Communist Party and an eminent historian. N. K. Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and comrade-in-arms, worked in the educational field from the earliest days of Soviet rule to the day of her death (in 1938). A valuable contribution to the development of science was made by A. M. Gorky, who was instrumental in winning many pre-revolutionary scholars and scientists over to the Soviet cause.

Campaign For Complete Literacy

p The first task, in the cultural field, was to end illiteracy. "A communist society cannot be built in an illiterate country,"  [95•1  wrote Lenin. Even in the difficult years of the Civil War numerous courses in reading and writing were set up throughout the land, and workers were given two hours off their jobs, with pay, to attend these. Some 7,000,000, including 4,000,000 women, learned to read and write over the period 1917-20.

p Even greater gains were made in this field after the country turned to the work of peaceful construction, especially under the pre-war five-year plans, the efforts of the government being aided by the people themselves, as in the case of the "End Illiteracy!" volunteer society created in 1923, whose membership, in 1932, topped 5,000,000 men and women actively engaged in teaching reading and writing. Young people, members of the Komsomol in particular, carried on this work in the rural areas; and a great deal was done by the trade unions. This joint effort of government and community brought good results: over 87,000,000 men and women learned to read and write or improved their ability in this respect between 1929 and 1939.

p Meantime secondary school education also made progress. The number of schools and the enrolment, which had begun to grow while the Civil War was still being fought, increased still more rapidly when peaceful construction started, especially in the nonRussian areas. In 1930 the Soviet Government found it possible 96 to introduce universal compulsory elementary education in the various national languages spoken in the USSR, and, later, universal compulsory seven-year schooling. Enrolment in all non- specialised schools stood at 35,552,000 in the school year 1940/41, as against 9,656,000 in 1914, and the teaching staff numbered 1,238,000 as against 280,000. By the end of the 1930s illiteracy in the USSR had been virtually banished.

p The Communist Party and the Soviet Government gave a great deal of attention to improving school instruction, stressing the necessity of establishing a close link between tuition and practical life and showed great concern for the teachers.

There was a tremendous upswing in the publication of books, with the editions of the best ones running into millions of copies. Love of books is a feature with the Soviet people.

People’s Intelligentsia Created

p A signal achievement in the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union has been the creation of a people’s intelligentsia many millions strong, comprising highly trained specialists in all fields of the national economy, culture, public health and government. Pre-revolutionary Russia’s legacy to the Soviet Union comprised 91 higher educational institutions with a student body of 112,000, practically all of them belonging to the propertied classes. The Soviet Government threw the universities and colleges open to the working people, abolished tuition fees, and established scholarships. Workers’ departments were established at universities and other institutions of higher learning as early as 1919, for the purpose of preparing workers and children of working families for higher educational institutions. In 1920/21 there were already 244 universities and other institutions of higher learning with double the enrolment of 1914. A particularly notable spurt in the development of higher education came in the period of nation-wide industrialisation and collectivisation in agriculture, with the concurrent vastly increased demand for trained personnel. In the academic year 1940/41 there were 817 higher educational institutions functioning in the country, with an enrolment of 812,000. Unrestricted access to higher education was afforded women only with the establishment of Soviet power, and on the eve of the Great Patriotic War they accounted for 58 per cent of the student body in the country.

p Before the October Revolution institutions of higher learning existed only in Central Russia, but with the establishment of Soviet power such institutions were opened in all of the national republics and regions, so that higher education became available 97 to the formerly most downtrodden and backward peoples of the country. Graduates of the Institute of the Peoples of the North in Leningrad made the following statement in 1936: "We are the sons and daughters of peoples who had for centuries been downtrodden, humiliated and oppressed... . Our fathers never even dreamed that they might study and acquire culture. . . . Nor could we have received an education if it hadn’t been for the socialist revolution, the Party and the Soviet Government, that have endowed all peoples with the right to work and to education, that have made educated, cultured people out of us whose sole wish today is to be worthy of our great country.”

The Soviet Union has outstripped all the capitalist countries in respect of the scope of higher and non-specialised education. On the eve of the Second World War enrolment in Soviet higher educational institutions was greater than that of 22 European countries put together.

Development of Soviet Science

p The Socialist Revolution opened up broad prospects of development in the field of science. A wide network of research institutes now covers the country. There were 1,821 such institutes in the USSR in 1941, or over six times the number before the Revolution; and over 98,000 research workers, or nearly ten times as many as in 1914. Institutes of this kind now exist in all of the Union and Autonomous republics.

p Notable achievements were registered by Soviet scientists in the 1920s and 1930s. I. P. Pavlov, the well-known physiologist, made an important contribution to modern science by his research into higher nervous activity in human beings and animals and to the entire field of modern medicine. K. E. Tsiolkovsky worked out the theory of rocket propulsion, which served as a starting point for the development of modern rocket aviation and space flight. N. Y. Zhukovsky and S. A. Chaplygin, eminent scientists, discovered the law determining the origin of wing lift and laid the theoretical foundation of modern aviation. Research carried out by Academician S. V. Lebedev enabled the Soviet Union to be the first to organise industrial production of synthetic rubber. Another world “first” was scored in the practical application, in the 1930s, of the principles of radar, thanks to the discoveries of L. I. Mandelshtam, N. D. Papaleksy and other Soviet physicists. The works of Academician A. F. loffe are basic to the modern physics of semi-conductors, which are highly important for technological progress. D. V. Skobeltsin, I. V. Kurchatov and other Soviet scientists made a valuable contribution to the study of the 98 atomic nucleus and cosmic rays. V. G. Khlopin succeeded in obtaining radium preparations in the early 1920s.

Science, in the Soviet Union, became linked increasingly closer to practice, and played an increasingly important role in socialist construction.

Political and Moral
Education of Builders of Socialism

p Since the building of socialism is a conscientious, rather than a spontaneous, process, it is essential that the people should have a clear comprehension of the aims set and the ways and means of their achievement. That is why the Soviet state has been always concerned with the political education of the masses through the use of such cultural and education facilities as clubs, reading rooms, libraries, museums, theatres, etc. It should be recalled that after the Revolution all existing cultural institutions had been thrown open to the people at large and that the Soviet Government opened a great number of new ones. There were 111,000 clubhouses in the Soviet Union in 1939, or 500 times as many as before the Revolution. And 9,000 newspapers were being published, which is ten times as many as in 1914.

p In the political and moral education of the Soviet people an exceptional role belongs to literature and art. Courageous fighters for the revolution, for socialism, vividly depicted by the writer, painter, sculptor, or portrayed by the talented actor, have an uplifting effect on the masses. Soviet literature and art preach the noble ideals of love of the country, endeavour and peace, and hatred of all forms of oppression, subjugation, predatory wars, exploitation of man by man. In Soviet literature and works of art the people are the heroes—the working people, those who make history, builders of the new society.

p Millions of Soviet readers grew fond of such books written in the 1920s and 1930s as M. Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, A. Serafimovich’s The Iron Flood, N. Ostrovsky’s • How the Steel Was Tempered, D. Furmanov’s Chapayev, A. Fadeyev’s The Rout, and others which tell of the heroic deeds of Soviet men and women during the Civil War. Among the many popular writers in the twenties and thirties were M. Gorky, A. Tolstoy, L. Leonov, K. Fedin, I. Babel, V. Mayakovsky, N. Tikhonov, and E. Bagritsky. The best of the Soviet films, such as The Battleship “Potyomkin”, The Mother, Chapayev, Baltic Deputy, and We Are from Kronstadt, blazed a new trail in the art of the cinema. A deserved fame was won by V. Mukhina’s Worker and Collective-Farm Woman sculptural group.

By the end of the 1930s the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union may be said to have been accomplished. The Soviet Union has become a land of universal literacy, an unsurpassed system of education and specialised training, and advanced science and culture.