A history of Russia
Page 80
The four-year and the seven-year schools became basic to the Soviet system. But ten-year schools also appeared in quantity. This type of school, for boys and girls from seven to seventeen, provides more class hours in its ten years than does the American educational system in twelve. Although in 1940 tuition was introduced in the last three years of the ten-year school, as well as in the institutions of higher learning - and repealed and restored since - an extremely widespread system of scholarships and stipends was used at all times to make advanced education available to those with ability.
After initial experimentation with some progressive education and certain quite radical methods of teaching the young and combining school and life, Soviet education returned to entirely traditional, disciplinarian, and academic practices. The emphasis centered on memorization and recitation, with a tremendous amount of homework. It has been estimated that, if Soviet schoolchildren were to do all their assignments conscientiously and to the full, they would be reading 280 printed pages a day! Soviet schools were especially strong in mathematics and science, that is, in physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy, as well as in geography and drafting. But they also stressed language, literature, foreign languages, and history, together with certain other academic subjects. For instance, six years of a foreign language were taught in a ten-year school. There were no electives. Before he lost power Khrushchev emphasized the need to bring schools closer to life and to combine education in the upper grades with some apprenticeship work in factories and farms. But educational reforms along these lines proved to be abortive. Many students, however, were forced to spend at least two years "in production," that is, in factory or agricultural work, before proceeding from secondary to higher education. The Soviet Union also had spe-
cial schools for children with musical and artistic gifts, military schools, and the like. In addition, many boarding schools for the general education of Soviet children were established. They numbered 2,000, with 500,000 pupils, in the autumn of 1961, and were described as the "new school of Communist society" at the Twenty-second Party Congress. Probably because of their great expense and the generally more modest tone of subsequent leadership, they lost their prominence.
Beyond secondary schools, there stood technical and other special schools, as well as full-fledged institutions of higher learning. The number of these higher schools was constantly growing. While Soviet authorities developed the old university system, they placed much more emphasis in higher education on institutes that concentrated on a particular field, such as technology, agriculture, medicine, pedagogy, or economics. Study in the institutes ranged from four to six years; a university course usually took five years. Applicants to universities and institutes had to take competitive entrance examinations, and it has been estimated that frequently as many as two out of three qualified candidates had to be rejected because of lack of space. The older Soviet students, as well as the schoolchildren, were required to attend all their classes, were in general subject to strict discipline, and followed a rigidly prescribed course of study.
The educational effort of the Party and the government extended beyond schools to libraries, museums, clubs, the theater, the cinema, radio, television, and even circuses. All of these, of course, were owned by the state, were constantly augmented, and were closely co-ordinated to serve the same purposes. More peculiarly Soviet was the practice of constant oral propaganda in squares and at street corners, with more than two million propagandists sponsored by the Party. Bereday has written authoritatively on the spread of education in the Soviet Union, and has compared this spread with the situation in the United States:
… [In 1958] there were in the Soviet Union approximately 110,000 elementary four-year schools, 60,000 seven-year schools, and 25,000 ten-year schools, a total of nearly 200,000 regular schools of general education. There are, in addition, some 7,000 auxiliary special and part-time schools, 3,750 technikums and professional schools, 730 institutes of higher education, and 39 universities. The countryside is dotted by 150,000 libraries, 850 museums, 500 theaters, 2,700 Pioneer palaces, 500 stations for young technicians and naturalists, 240,000 movie theaters, and 70 circuses. A task force of 1,625,000 teachers and other personnel mans this extensive enterprise… Population and school-attendance figures substantiate the ambitions of the Soviet educational plan to reach all the people. The figures now available estimate the situation as follows: 2,500 out of each 10,000 people were in some type of school in 1955-1956; 814 of these were in grades five to ten of the general secondary school, 100 were in professional secondary schools, and 93 were in institutions of higher learning. These figures, which account for one-fourth of the total
population, expand as we single out for consideration only the present younger generation. Approximately 10 per cent of the appropriate age group attend institutions of higher education, the second largest proportion in the world after the United States, with 33 per cent of its youth in colleges. About 30 per cent of the appropriate age group complete secondary education, a close second after the United States, with 45 per cent. At the age of fourteen 80 per cent of the age group are still in school, in the United States some 90 per cent.
Education on the job and by correspondence was also extremely widespread in the U.S.S.R. Moreover, a further expansion and diffusion of education constituted an essential part of the recent five-year plans, although the rate of educational advance slowed down compared to the earlier period, while comparison with the United States was affected by the great expansion of American higher education in the 1960's.
Soviet education, and indeed Soviet culture in general, greatly profited from the prerevolutionary legacy. The high standards, the serious academic character, and even the discipline of Soviet schools dated from tsarist days. The main Communist contribution was the dissemination of education at all levels and on a vast scale, although it should be remembered that imperial Russia was, on the whole, moving in the same direction and that given a little more time it would have established universal schooling. Many observers noted that Soviet students studied with remarkable diligence and determination. That probably stemmed both from the old tradition, which held education in high esteem, and from contemporary conditions of life: education provided for Soviet citizens the only generally available escape from the poverty and drabness of the kolkhoz and the factory. If generous subsidization and energetic promotion constituted the main Soviet virtues in education, the all-pervasive emphasis on Marxism was the chief vice. While a detailed criticism of the Soviet school system must be left to DeWitt, Lilge, Kline, and other specialists, it is important to realize that Soviet Marxism distorted whatever it touched and that, therefore, the quality of Soviet education and culture frequently deteriorated in direct proportion to its proximity to doctrine. For this reason Soviet mathematics, in schools or universities, is vastly preferable to Soviet history, and Soviet chemistry to Soviet philosophy.
Soviet Culture
Soviet science, scholarship, literature, and arts reflected the same traits of the Soviet regime as education, from which, in any case, they cannot be entirely separated. The Soviet performance in all these fields is noteworthy for its vast scope, liberal expenditure of funds, extremely thorough organization, co-ordination, and planning, and ubiquitous party control. All Soviet intellectuals were in effect employed by the state. Even when their income depended primarily on royalties, their books could not be published nor their music played without official authorization. The quality of Soviet creative work ranged from some brilliant develop-
ments in science and excellent compositions in music to the dreary poverty of "socialist realism" in literature and its virtually unrelieved worthlessness in painting and sculpture. But in almost all fields, fruitful as well as barren, the stifling grip of the Party and its ideology left its mark.
Science and Scholarship
For a variety of reasons, science was a privileged area of Soviet culture. It was obviously and immediately useful and, i
ndeed, indispensable if the U.S.S.R. were to become the military, technological, and economic leader of the world. It was fully endorsed by Marxism, which prided itself on its own allegedly scientific character. In fact, some writers have commented on an almost religious admiration of science and technology in the Soviet Union, an expression in part of the old revolutionary titanism and determination to transform the world. Yet science, while subject to the dialectic, lies on the whole outside Marxist doctrines, which concentrate on human society, and thus constituted a "safer" field in the Soviet Union than, for example, sociology or literature. Not that it escaped the Party and the ideology altogether. Communist interference with science included such important instances as Soviet difficulties in accepting Einstein's "petty bourgeois" theories, as well as Trofim Lysenko's virtual destruction of Soviet biology, particularly genetics, together with the elimination of a number of leading Soviet biologists, notably Nicholas Vavilov. Lysenko, an agricultural expert and a dangerous quack and fanatic, claimed to have disproved the basic laws of heredity and obtained Party support for his claims: Lysenko's theories gave Marxist environmentalism a new dimension and made a Communist transformation of the world seem more feasible than ever - the only trouble was that Lysenko's theories were false. But Einstein's views had to be accepted, at least for practical purposes; and even Soviet biology staged a comeback, although it took many years and several turns of fortune finally to dispose of Lysenko's authority. Moreover, thousands of scientists, in contrast, for example, to writers, could continue working in their fields more or less undisturbed. And science especially profited from the large-scale financing and organization of effort provided by the state.
The Sputniks, the shot at the moon, the photographing of the far side of the moon, and Soviet astronauts' orbiting of the earth, together with atomic and hydrogen explosions, have emphasized the achievements of Soviet applied science, and in particular Soviet rockets, missiles, and atomic and space technology* In these fields, as in others, the Soviet Union profited from the prerevolu-
*Soviet "firsts" in space include: first earth satellite, Sputnik I, launched October 4, 1957; first satellite with animal aboard, Sputnik II, November 3, 1957; first moon rocket, Lunik I, January 2, 1959; first photographs of hidden side of moon, October 18, 1959; first retrieval of animal from orbit, August 20, 1960; first launching from orbit, Venus probe, February 12,
(continued)
tionary legacy, especially from the continuing work of such scholars as the pioneer in space travel Constantine Tsiolkovsky, 1857-1935. The contributions of espionage and of German scientists brought to the U.S.S.R. after the Second World War are more difficult to assess. The state, of course, financed and promoted to the full all the extremely expensive technological programs referred to above. It also organized, in connection with the five-year plans, a great search for new natural resources, vast geographic expeditions, and other, similar projects. The work of Soviet scientists in the far north acquired special prominence. The Academy of Sciences continued to direct Soviet science as well as other branches of Soviet scholarship.
While Soviet applied science has now received perhaps too much praise in the press of the world, the over-all excellence of Soviet science has on the whole not yet been sufficiently appreciated. With theoretical physicists like Leo Landau, experimental physicists like Abraham Joffe and Peter Kapitza, chemists like Nicholas Semenov, mathematicians like Ivan Vinogradov, astronomers like Victor Ambartsumian, geochemists like Vladimir Vernadsky, and botanists like Vladimir Komarov - to select only a very few out of many names - the Soviet Union had outstanding scientific talent, while the scope of its scientific effort exceeded that of all other countries except the United States.
Soviet social sciences and humanities did not compare with the sciences. The dead hand of Soviet Marxism stifled virtually all growth in such fields as philosophy and sociology. Moreover, the official ideology proved to be remarkably barren, with the result that even Marxist thought in the U.S.S.R. was crude and undeveloped compared to certain Western and satellite varieties. Clearly, and for a number of good reasons, the best talent went into science. To be sure, there were important variations in the Soviet control of scholarship and the results achieved.
Thus, until the early and middle thirties, Mikhail Pokrovsky's negativistic school held sway in history. A convinced Marxist, Pokrovsky took an extremely
(continued)
1961; first man in space, Lieut. Col. Iurii A. Gagarin, April 12, 1961; first double launching with humans, Major Andrian Nikolaev, August 11, 1961, Lieut Col. Pavel Popovich, August 12, 1962; first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, June 16, 1963; first triple-manned launching, Col. Vladimir Komarov, space commander, Konstantin Feoktistov, scientist, Dr. Boris Egorov, physiologist, October 12, 1964; first man to walk in cosmic space, Lieut. Col. Aleksei A. Leonov from Voskhod II (flight commander, Col. Pavel Beliaev) March 19, 1965; first flight around the moon and return of an automatic space craft, Zond 5, September 15-22, 1968; establishment of first orbital experimental station during flight of Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 spaceships, January 1969; first self-propelled automatic laboratory on the surface of the moon, Lunokhod-1, November 17, 1970; first manned research station, Salyut, in circumterrestrial orbit, June 7, 1971; first soft landing on the surface of Mars and transmission of video signal to Earth by Mars-3 probe, December 2, 1971; first soft landing on the sunward surface of Venus by Venera-8 probe and transmission to Earth of atmospheric and surface measurements for 50 minutes, July 22, 1972. The Soviet Union also announced the first loss of a man in actual space flight, Col. Vladimir Komarov, Soyuz 1, April 24, 1967.
critical and bitter view of the Russian past, in effect declaring it of no importance. With the Soviet consolidation and turn to cultural conservatism in the thirties, Pokrovsky and his school were denounced, and the authorities began to promote intense work in the field of history and in such related disciplines as archaeology. In particular, Soviet historians turned to collecting and editing sources. Some valuable work was also done in social and economic history, with at least one Soviet historian, Boris Grekov, originally a prerevolutionary specialist, making contributions of the first rank. Yet in general, in spite of the change in the thirties and a certain further liberalization following Stalin's death, Soviet historiography suffered enormously from the Party strait jacket, most especially in such fields as intellectual history and international relations.
Linguistic studies followed a somewhat different pattern. There Nicholas Marr, 1864-1934, an outstanding scholar of Caucasian languages who apparently fell prisoner to some weird theories of his own invention, played the same sad role that Trofim Lysenko had played in biology. Endorsed by the Party, Marr's strange views almost destroyed philology and linguistics in the Soviet Union, denying as they did the established families of languages in favor of a ubiquitous and multiform evolution of four basic sounds. The new doctrine seemed Marxist because it related, or at least could relate, different families of languages to different stages of the material development of a people, but its implications proved so confusing and even dangerous that Stalin himself turned against the Marr school in 1950, much to the relief and benefit of Soviet scholarship.
Most areas of Soviet scholarship, however, profited much more by Stalin's death than by his dicta. From the spring of 1953, Soviet scholars enjoyed more contact with the outside world and somewhat greater freedom in their own work. In particular, they no longer had to praise Stalin at every turn, prove that most things were invented first by Russians, or deny Western influences in Russia - as they had had to do in the worst days of Zhdanov. Entire disciplines or sub-disciplines, such as cybernetics and certain kinds of economic analysis, were eventually permitted and even promoted. Yet, while some of the excesses of Stalinism were gone, compulsory Marxism-Leninism and partiinost remained. Soviet assertions that their scholars were free men retained a hollow - and indeed tragic - ring. Glasnost, to be sure, has represented a real breakthrough into honest sc
holarship, but it could not immediately eliminate all institutional, psychological, and material obstacles to it.
Literature
Literature in Soviet Russia in the twenties continued in certain ways the trends of the "silver age," in spite of the heavy losses of the revolutionary and civil war years and the large-scale emigration of intellectuals. Some poets went on publishing excellent poetry, and writers created numerous groups and movements.
The formalist critics rose and flourished. All that, of course, could not last under the new system. First, the R.A.P.P. - a Russian abbreviation for the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers - came to dominate the scene, preaching, somewhat along Pokrovsky's lines, the discarding of all culture except the proletarian. In 1932 the government disbanded the largely nihilistic R.A.P.P. and preceded to organize all the writers into the Union of Soviet Writers and to impose on them the new official doctrine that came to be known as "socialist realism." Guided by the correct principles, Soviet writers were to participate fully and prominently in the "building of socialism" as, to quote Stalin, "engineers of human souls." "Socialist realism" became synonymous with literature in the Soviet Union, other approaches being proscribed. Most of the prominent figures of the "silver age" disappeared early in the Soviet period: Blok died in 1921, Briusov in 1924, Bely in 1934, Gumilev was shot as a counterrevolutionary in 1921, Esenin committed suicide in 1925, and Maiakovsky, whose futurist verses rang the praises of the revolution and whose "Left March" had become almost its unofficial poetic manifesto, took his own life in 1930. The few outstanding figures who remained, such as Akhmatova and Pasternak, either fell into silence - at best writing for themselves and their friends - or concentrated on translating from foreign languages. Akhmatova was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers by Zhdanov in 1946, following the publication of some poems where she had displayed an unsocialist loneliness among other vices, and Pasternak was ejected in 1958 after the appearance abroad of his celebrated novel, Doctor Zhivago, for which he was offered the Nobel prize.