Education and Art in Soviet Russia/Foreword
FOREWORD
When we read in the newspapers that people are being executed in hundreds by the Soviet government in Russia, that thousands are being assaulted and shot dead in the streets, or shooting themselves through fear and desperation, and when we read that the industrial disorganization is so great that the whole population is starving and people are dying at the rate of several hundred a day in Moscow and Petrograd, we feel that the condition in that land is desperate indeed. And yet that is merely a feeling, it is not a fact.
People are dying at the rate of two or three hundred a day on Manhattan Island alone. Many of them are dying from starvation. The president of the American Public Health Association is quoted as saying that 3,000,000 American children go hungry to school every morning. We commit 20 or 30 murders a day in the United States. We rob, rape and assault in proportion. We hang or electrocute a man or a woman every third day. Once in every four days we lynch, burn at the stake, or torture to death a defenseless human being without any pretense at legal procedure. The conditions of life in the United States are so appalling that our starved, desperate and degenerated citizens are committing suicide at the rate of one every half hour!
If a foreign correspondent should deliberately set out to tell all the bad things that can be told about the United States, and none of the good, he could, without any actual lying, make this country look like the bottom of the inferno. And that is exactly what the foreign correspondents in Russia have done—and besides doing that they have indulged in a stupendous and organized campaign of criminal lying. And if any correspondent has been impelled to do otherwise, his dispatches have been suppressed in transit or upon their arrival in this country. One such correspondent, a representative of the Associated Press, told me that 58 per cent of the dispatches he sent out from Moscow were suppressed by the British Government before they ever arrived on our shores. The rest of them were mangled or distorted by our own censors and headline writers until it was assured that not one golden grain of favorable truth about the Soviet Republic ever fell under the eyes of the American public.
Of course, in Russia it is especially easy to find the bad things to tell—the things that will convey an impression of complete barbarity and misery and the-dissolution of civilization. Russia was a relatively illiterate country in the first place; it was stripped bare by the war, and bereaved of millions of its strongest young men; it has just passed through the most profound revolution in history, and the revolution has been complicated by the chaotic self-demobilization of an army of ten or twelve million men, and by the necessity of withstanding a counter-revolutionary foreign invasion. Obviously under such circumstances all those gruesome statistics of our human existence that we usually ignore, would show a morbid increase in Russia. There is nothing, however, in any press dispatch having a reasonable degree of credibility, to make a person who is familiar with such statistics feel unduly excited, or in the least degree inclined to despair of the success of the great social experiment that is being conducted by the Soviet government. It is only necessary that some avenues of publicity shall be established, which are not in the control of the counter-revolutionary interests, and which will, therefore, let us read the good things, as well as the bad, which can be said about conditions under that government.
In this little book are contained, I think, the most important of all the good things. And I write this foreword in order to urge every American who cares about truth and even-handed justice to assist in giving it a share of publicity equal to that which has been given to the so-called “crimes of the Soviet Government.” We learn in this book that after all the futile yearnings of the idealists through the ages, a powerful government has at last set out with resolute purpose, unclouded with any contrary economic motive, to make a complete and high education accessible to all of its one hundred and fifty millions of people without bias or exception. To those who know anything about the world, and the sad history of the great hopes of the world, that is almost the most important fact in the record of these times. No political or military event could possibly be more important than that. And yet that fact has never received the space of a single paragraph in the news columns of any of our great daily papers.[1] It is to the general American public absolutely unknown. Let it be your task—you who happen upon this volume—to make it known,
One cannot read these idealistic experimental decrees of the Soviet Bureau of Education, and the firm clear-minded report of the humanitarian scholar, Lunacharsky, without travelling back in his thoughts to Plato's Republic—the great book of the political hopes of mankind. For in that book these hopes rested altogether upon the faith of its author in the power of education. He believed a republic to be possible in which men should be happy in a common ownership of capital, and in which there should be an "aristocracy," not of wealth, but of real merit and ability. But he knew that such a republic would never be realized in human history until someone who desired it came into the possession of absolute power and immediately devoted himself to the problem of education. He thought of this "someone" as the son of a king. He thought that the world must wait until by some grand lucky chance a "philosopher"—that is, a man of the highest impersonal wisdom and motivation—should be born to the throne. And he was so sure that even this almighty imaginary savior could do nothing except by revolutionizing the educational system, that he declared, with humorous exaggeration, that the first act of his government would be to "send out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and take possession of their children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents."
The aspiring heart of the world has never for a single moment forgotten Plato’s hope. It has steadily refused to believe that the ideal republic is merely an abstract dream. In its dark sorrow and continual misery of broken efforts and aspirations, it has waited for the king's son to come. And now, after twenty-two hundred years, the king's son has come. But he has come in overalls and old clothes of the farm, and the heart of the world is slow indeed to recognize him and acknowledge his triumphant power. Just as the rabbis of Jerusalem were unable to recognize their Messiah in the carpenter of Nazareth who rode into their city on an ass, so the high priests of democracy and of "social science" cannot give their allegiance to the real savior of mankind, the revolutionary proletariat. They cannot divorce their idea of what is wise and fine from what is well-clothed and respectable. They are still bound by the habits of the old kind of aristocracy, and so they are powerless even to extend a hand of welcome to the new.
And yet, how obvious it seems to have been all along! A society in which one class of the people lives and finds leisure for "ideals," only because it exploits another class and deprives them of life, cannot possibly realize those of its ideals which are humane and just. To create a beautiful political thing out of the materials of human nature in such conditions, is utterly impossible. The most benevolent of reformers cannot even begin to do it, for they are destroyed and their effort is destroyed by the blind instinct of self-preservation in that upper class which holds the power of wealth. Even the philosopher-king, as Plato himself realized, would succeed only in becoming a martyr to this power that is behind all thrones. "And yet in the whole course of the ages," he said sadly, "perhaps a single one may be saved."
It was altogether impossible that a tyrant-philosopher should communize the world—and equally impossible that the tyrant class should be persuaded to relinquish its privilege little by little in behalf of a more ideal society—an impossible dream. Nature's force of self-interest is too strong. But it was not impossible that the members of the exploited class themselves, instead of trying each one individually to climb out into the tyrant class, should band themselves together to conquer the tyrant, abolish the system of exploitation altogether, and begin the building of an ideal republic. That was possible, because the self-interest of these classes when banded together happens to be in general accord with that impersonal wisdom which Plato attributed to the philosopher, and they happen through the evolution of industry to have acquired a power greater than could ever have fallen to the son of a king. And so in our century, in the old empire of Russia, that miracle for which Plato so wistfully waited has come. Someone who desires a common ownership of capital, and am aristocracy not of wealth but of real merit and ability, has come into the possession of absolute power. And what we learn in the leaves of this book is the joyful news that this great savior of the world has proceeded at once, and with all the power, energy, brains and wealth at his disposal, to make permanent the growth of the seeds of the republic, by revolutionizing the system of education.
It is a great deal to say that the self-interest of the lower classes when banded together accords with an impersonal interest in the welfare of man. The assertion rests, of course, upon profounder considerations than can be advanced here. But whatever exceptions must be made to it, they do not appear in the material which is presented in this volume. These documents reveal not only a determination to make the schools of the New Russia "revolutionary," but also, and still more clearly, a determination to make them wise. It seems as though the very genius of Plato—who is the spiritual father of the "modern movement" in education—presides over this bureau of the people's enlightenment. I believe the most advanced philosophers of that modern movement—which is in our country for the most part merely a speculation—will find themselves at home in these reports of what is beginning to be done in Russia. To me, at least, much as I have believed in the possibility of ideal developments once the capitalistic obstacle was removed, the degree in which such a development appears already in these fragments of the most vital news from Moscow, is astonishing. I want to add to them a paragraph which appeared in the very first decree of the Commissar of Education, issued in the days immediately following the Bolshevik revolution. I quote it from the Appendix of John Reed's book, "Ten Days that Shook the World":
"One must emphasize the difference between instruction and education. Instruction is the transmission of ready knowledge by the teacher to his pupil. Education is a creative process. The personality of the individual is being 'educated' throughout life, is being formed, grows richer in content, stronger and more perfect.
"The toiling masses of the people—the workmen, the peasants, the soldiers—are thirsting for elementary and advanced instruction. But they are also thirsting for education. Not the government, nor the intellectuals, nor any other power outside of themselves, can give it to them. The school, the book, the theatre, the museum, etc., may here be only aids. They have their own ideas formed by their social position, so different from the position of those ruling classes and intellectuals who have hitherto created culture. They have their own ideas, their own emotions, their own ways of approaching the problems of personality and society. The city laborer, according to his own fashion, the rural toiler according to his, will each build his clear world-concept permeated with the class-idea of the workers. There is no more superb or beautiful phenomenon than the one of which our nearest descendants will be both witnesses and participants: the building by collective Labor of its own general, rich and free soul."
There is here no intimation of any narrow or temporary purpose—even the purpose to perpetuate the insurrection, which might at that time have dominated every mind. It is only the broadest and fullest expression of the impulse of mankind in social communion to grow. We do not yet know how strong or general that impulse is, nor how much the inexorable facts of nature may impede it, but we see it at last set free from the one age-long, dark, compressive force of economic tyranny, and we are justified in feeling an emotion of joyful and creative hope.
"The problems that face us are great, responsible and pressing," says the appeal of the Proletarian Cultural Organization, "but we believe that the forces which will come to our assistance are also great." To that message of courageous faith it is the duty of every understanding idealist in every land to respond.
MAX EASTMAN.
- ↑ We were learning some time ago to discredit the picture of events that is presented in our daily papers. We supplemented that with the reading of news-articles in some of the popular magazines, whose editors assumed a more serious responsibility for statements of fact. The degree to which these editors also have thrown all truth and honorable responsibility to the winds in the matter of Russia is suggested in this statement signed by the editors of McClure's (January, 1919): "Throughout Russia tens of thousands are being officially executed merely because they are educated."
Compare that statement with the facts reported in this volume, and estimate the editors of McClure's accordingly. It would not have taken them two hours to possess these facts at the time they made that statement.