A foreigner who takes up work in the U.S.S.R. is struck by many things. But, for an all-round view of what everyday life is like, few occupations could be better than that of a teacher. The foreign worker in the Soviet factory has the experience of being a wage-earner in a Soviet enterprise. But the worker in a Soviet school not only has this important experience, but also constant contact with the younger generation, with those who form the youngest and freshest ranks of Soviet citizens. For this reason I am glad that my first occupation in the U.S.S.R. was that of a teacher in a technical college, where I was able to see the working of a really democratic educational system at first hand.
There are two features of Soviet education which must strike every person who has taught outside the U.S.S.R. The first is that the students themselves appear to be drawn from people of every walk of life, who are always enabled to study if they have the necessary ability, without any economic burden through not earning a living while studying. The second feature is the extent to which the Soviet student, in school, technical college, and university, is trained to participate in the running of public affairs, starting in the school or university itself, and extending over every aspect of Soviet life. In the present chapter we shall deal with the first of these features of Soviet education. In the next chapter we shall consider the second.
A first decree of the Russian Soviet Government, adopted shortly after the seizure of power in 1917, dealt with education: “Every genuinely democratic power must, in the domain of education, in a country where ignorance and illiteracy reign supreme, make its first aim the struggle against this darkness . . . it must introduce universal, obligatory, and free tuition for all.” And, in the new Constitution of the U.S.S.R. adopted in December 1936, we find the Right to Education being guaranteed to every citizen by “universal compulsory elementary education, free of charge, including higher education, by a system of State stipends for the overwhelming majority of students in higher schools, instruction in schools in the native language, and organization of free vocational, technical, and agronomic education for the toilers of the factories, State farms, machine and tractor stations, and collective farms.”
The significance of these two declarations of Soviet educational policy can only be appreciated when certain basic facts are known. In pre-revolutionary Russia well over 80 percent of the adult population could not read or write. To-day the percentage of adult illiterates has been reduced to less than 10 percent. In the years before the Revolution the number of children attending school was round about 8 million, of whom only half a million received any secondary education. By 1934 the number of children attending school had reached 25 million—more than half the population of Great Britain, and over three times the pre-revolutionary figure. By the end of 1937 the number of children attending school is planned to reach 30 million.
This rapid extension of education has not taken place without the greatest difficulties. I remember how, between 1931 and 1934, there was the most acute shortage of accommodation for all educational institutions. In the towns the school-leaving age was being rapidly raised to seventeen and eighteen. But there were not enough schools: so the school buildings were used by two shifts of children, the younger ones in the first half of the day, the older ones in the later half. And as far as the higher educational institutions were concerned, I have taught university classes in the offices of State departments from six o’clock in the evening onwards because there was no accommodation available earlier in the day.
But that difficulty was temporary. In 1935 Moscow built over 70 new schools and another 120 in 1936. The shift system has now been abolished. Similar programs of school-building in other centres have put an end to the shift system there also. And to-day in the Soviet towns every child has schooling from the age of seven to the age of seventeen or eighteen, while an increasing number are attending kindergartens before they go to school, and attending the university or other higher educational institutions when they finish.
The Soviet educational system is not yet complete. At present every town child has compulsory education from the age of seven to the age of seventeen. This is an achievement of the past few years. In the villages the school-leaving age is still round about fourteen, but certain villages have already advanced ahead of this. In Yasnaya Polyana, the one-time home of Tolstoy, a school has been established in his memory which provides secondary education for the children up to the age of seventeen. In Chapaevka, in the Ukraine, the collective farm has provided the necessary funds for the raising of the school-leaving age to seventeen. In the latter case all the children of the village continue their schooling to seventeen, and some children from neighbouring villages also obtain a secondary education there. I mention these two villages because I happen to have visited them. There are a continually growing number of such village secondary schools.
From a Soviet secondary school any pupil who has achieved the necessary standard can enter a university. And, as a university student, he or she receives a maintenance allowance from the State while studying. The Soviet student is paid, and higher education is open to all without being a financial burden. All students who finish a Soviet secondary education have the opportunity, according to their abilities, to proceed to a higher educational institution.
But all children in the U.S.S.R. do not yet enjoy a compulsory secondary education. If they finish a village school at fourteen, they may then go to some industrial training school in the town, or start to work in the collective farms. Also, in industry itself, there are many workers, many of them still in their twenties, who have never had schooling after the age of fourteen. The school-leaving age has been raised very rapidly in the past few years, and certain children have finished school at fourteen only to find that if they had been born two years later they would have had the opportunity to continue until the age of seventeen. Have they missed their chance?
In no country of the world are so many facilities available for those who have, for some reason or other, missed the opportunity for a secondary school education. Sometime before I left Moscow I remember reading that, in certain villages where the school-leaving age was being raised, those who had left schools at fourteen, three or four years before, wanted to continue their education and to obtain the secondary education which had just been introduced. So the schools readmitted these students, who were now able to benefit from the raising of the school-leaving age, though they had left school several years previously. In these particular villages certain individuals who had left school at fourteen returned at the age of seventeen and eighteen for another three or four years’ study!
But that is not all. For the system of adult education in the U.S.S.R. is to-day so widespread that it is possible for almost every working citizen to qualify, by means of free evening classes, for entry to the university. In the cases of older workers, who finished school at fourteen and then had a purely industrial training, it is possible to obtain a secondary education free of charge at evening classes at their place of work, and then to become full-time university students, drawing the usual State allowance while studying.
I found that many of the students of English whom I was teaching in Moscow in 1932 had been recruited in this way. Young peasants from the villages, and young workers from the factories, who had left school at fourteen, had then continued to study in evening classes, had qualified for entrance to technical schools and universities, and were now full-time students, training to become teachers.
I say that it is possible for “almost” every working citizen to qualify for a higher education in the U.S.S.R. to-day. The word “almost” is used because there still are, in certain exceptional cases, technical difficulties which may prevent certain individuals from obtaining the kind of training that they would like. I have in mind one particular example. This was a young-dining-car attendant on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
He was particularly interested in the theatre, and wanted to become an actor. But since his work was on a dining-car, and he was travelling for ten days at a time, and then having several days off, he was not in a position to attend regular evening classes. He had left school at fourteen, and therefore could not, without such classes, qualify for entrance to one of the drama institutes or universities. Actually, he considered himself to be an unfortunate exception to the general Soviet rule that every working person can enter the university.
So far we have been considering equality of opportunity in the purely educational sphere. But equality of opportunity in the U.S.S.R. extends far beyond the realms of education.
Perhaps another of the most interesting features of Soviet life to a foreign visitor is the close link which exists between all kinds of amateur and professional activities. This starts in the school, in the form of an intimate connection between the children’s studies and their hobbies. The Soviet schoolchild has the opportunity, in the school buildings, or in other institutions specially created for the purpose, of being a young naturalist or photographer, scientist, engineer, or inventor, in his or her spare time. Equipment is supplied free of charge, and instructors are available.
Many Soviet children to-day go on to the university to specialize in that very subject which they found to be their most interesting hobby when at school.
In the Soviet factories and collective farms much of the leisure time of the people—and this leisure time is ample since the working day averages less than seven hours throughout Soviet industry—is spent on amateur activities such as dramatics, literature, sport, photography, art, and so on. But these amateur activities are not, as is usual in other countries, left to the care of the local enthusiasts, without professional assistance. For, in all Soviet amateur activities, the professional people in that particular sphere render organized assistance, so that the general level of the amateurs is raised so as rapidly to approach a professional standard.
A typical example of this is theatrical work. Practically every industrial enterprise in the U.S.S.R. has its workers’ dramatics circle. Agreements are made through the trade unions with professional theatres, and these promise to give assistance to such circles in the form of voluntary or paid help by trained actors and producers. The result is that the amateur group has the benefit of professional assistance, and can raise its standard of excellence considerably above that which in this country we term “amateur,” meaning inferior to “professional.”
Such an “amateur” dramatics group in the U.S.S.R. may at any time, having reached a certain standard, be offered by the authorities the opportunity of taking over a professional theatre as a full-time job. I have been present at a competition of village theatres in Moscow and seen a performance by a young theatrical group which was certainly up to the best British repertory standard. The whole company consisted of young working men and women who had previously been members of the dramatics club of the automobile plant in Gorky. They had received professional guidance from the Vachtangov Theatre in Moscow, and, at a certain stage, had been offered facilities by the Commissariat of Education to become a full-time theatrical company. They now had their own theatre in a Russian village. In this way workers in the factory had become professional actors and actresses, through their amateur theatricals.
Just as in the sphere of the theatre there is an opportunity for the ordinary amateur to become a professional, so, too, in painting and writing, in sport and in science.
A reference to sport in this connection may raise a query in the minds of certain readers. Does this mean that there is professionalism in Soviet sport? The answer is that in the U.S.S.R. to-day the facilities for sport are rapidly growing all over the country. New sports grounds are being laid out, and factories and collective farms, towns, and villages, have their teams, which compete against each other in separate matches and league competitions. But these teams require trainers. And the trainers are the “professionals” in the Soviet Union.
Any Soviet worker can participate in sport free of charge. Those who are good enough to play in their town or factory teams have their expenses paid when away from home, and draw the equivalent of their wages from the sports club when away for matches or training. Those who are outstanding at any sport become eligible for the whole-time work of instructor to other teams. In this way the road is open for the amateur sportsman to become a full-time professional instructor.
We have so far considered two aspects of equality of opportunity in the U.S.S.R.: first, the equal availability of education to all citizens; secondly, the possibility of development through amateur activities to professional activities, quite apart from the ordinary educational system of the country. Certain other aspects of equality of opportunity remain to be considered.
It is not every worker in the Soviet factory or collective farm who wants either to go to a university, or to convert some amateur activity into a full-time profession. There are hundreds of thousands of workers greatly interested in the particular jobs which they are at present doing, but who want advancement to more skilled or more responsible branches of the same work. Such advancement is possible in all Soviet enterprises.
A characteristic of every Soviet institution is the stress which is laid on the desirability for every working man and woman to raise their qualifications at their work. Whether it is a case of teachers in an elementary school or university, or workers at machines in a factory, or typists in an office, there are always available the means of further education, through evening classes free of charge. And in all this a leading part is played by the best workers in the enterprise, who often undertake voluntarily to train other workers up to their own level.
When, in 1935, the coal-miner Stakhanov became famous all over the world as the young man who in a six-hour shift had doubled output and had at the same time received a tremendous rise in earnings as a result, many people outside the U.S.S.R. asked the question: “Does this not mean that a new privileged category of workers will arise, having a monopoly of the jobs which earn high wages?” To those who were living in the U.S.S.R. at the time, this question appeared singularly divorced from real life, for in his spare time this same coal-miner Stakhanov was going round his own and other pits training the workers there to use his methods and to become more efficient organizers of their work, raising earnings accordingly. In this way leading workers in the U.S.S.R. train others up to their own level.
From the point of view of the ordinary worker this means that, in every sphere of work, the most highly skilled are willing helpers and trainers. Every working man and woman has the opportunity to learn to improve technique at the job, with the expert assistance of those who are best at that kind of work. Obviously, such a system is itself dependent on certain economic conditions! Leading workers in the U.S.S.R. would not be so willing to train others up to their own level of efficiency if, as in Britain to-day, they thought they might be replaced by these other workers as soon as they had trained them. Full co-operation on the part of all the skilled workers in a community in training others to their own level of skill can only be obtained in a society in which there is no unemployment, and where every sort of skilled work is in demand. In the U.S.S.R. there has been no unemployment since 1931, and there is a demand for every kind of qualified worker. It is in such circumstances that the skilled worker knows that by training others he is not endangering his own security, and that the community as a whole, and he as a member of it, will gain from a greater supply of skilled workers and the products of their labour.
There still remains one sphere of equality of opportunity in the U.S.S.R. which has not yet been discussed. This is public administration.
In the first Soviet Constitution of 1918 the vast majority of the population obtained electoral rights on a wider scale than have existed at any previous time in Russia or, with the exception of Soviet China, in any other country to this day. But it would be a great mistake to think that, under Soviet conditions, participation in public administration depended simply on the electoral rights of the population. It must be realized that in the U.S.S.R. to-day there no longer exists that distinction between “civil service” and other occupations which is typical of every other country. The reason for this is that since all industry and trade are in the hands of the State, the relation of the manager of a factory to a factory worker is no different in essentials from that of a director of a State clinic to a doctor working there, or of a headmaster of a State school to one of the teachers. All Soviet citizens are, in a sense, civil servants. And it follows from this that the opportunity to rise in any particular occupation to the most skilled and most responsible posts means, in effect, the possibility to rise to the highest posts in the public administration of the country.
There is a further feature of Soviet administration which must here be mentioned. While we have considered the case of the amateur actor, we have not yet mentioned the “amateur” administrator, the voluntary worker in various municipal and State departments, who is an essential part of the Soviet apparatus of State. Not only is it customary in Soviet elections to return members to the Soviets, or Councils, in whose hands lies the authority to govern the country ; but, in addition to this, it is the usual thing for the electors to nominate further additional representatives to work for the Soviets, in their various departments, voluntarily in their spare time. In this way voluntary public workers play a considerable part in the Soviet health, housing, educational, and other services; as also in the work of the militia.
In this sphere, as in the sphere of amateur activities in the factories, such voluntary work is a recruiting-ground for able administrators. The factory workers, men and women, who in their spare time do good work for the Soviet in one of its departments, may at any time be called upon to turn such work into a permanent job, and to transfer from their factory to some administrative position in the Soviet for which they have shown their aptitude as voluntary workers.
Equality of opportunity in the U.S.S.R., then, may be said to exist in education, and in the opportunities available both to youth and to adults for obtaining education. It may be said to exist in every profession, through the availability of the necessary training-facilities for all citizens to improve their skill. In the sphere of administration there are paths to the leading administrative positions, through election, through promotion, and by way of voluntary work in the various administrative bodies of the State. And, in cases where working people show ability at some amateur activity, there is the opportunity to turn their amateur activity into a profession.
Such a system not only gives every citizen an opportunity to qualify for every occupation, but the “square pegs in the round holes” can re-qualify for some other occupation if an earlier choice has proved unsuitable.
This system, the result of nineteen years’ development, is still far from complete. There are still a few dining-car attendants who would like to become actors (but who, because of the mobile location of their present jobs, cannot immediately qualify for the other occupation). But already the inequalities of opportunity are the exceptions, whereas elsewhere they are still the rule.
In conclusion, a word must be said on two kinds of equality which have existed since the Soviet State was set up, and which further contribute to make equality of opportunity effective for all citizens.
First, it must be realized that in the U.S.S.R. to-day every citizen enjoys the rights of citizenship irrespective of nationality. In 1918, in the first Soviet Constitution, it was declared “contrary to the fundamental laws of the Republic to institute or tolerate privileges, or any prerogative whatever, founded on such grounds, or to repress national minorities, or in any way to limit their rights.” And, in the new Constitution of 1936, the same point is stated with even more emphasis: “The equality of the rights of citizens of the U.S.S.R., irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic. State, cultural, social, and political life, is an irrevocable law.
“Any direct or indirect restriction of these rights, or conversely, the establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of the race or nationality to which they belong, as well as any propagation of racial or national exceptionalism or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law.”
Citizens of every nationality are treated as equals. A Tartar may live and work in his own republic, or he may choose to live and work in one or other of the national republics of the Union, but wherever he goes he will have the same treatment as everyone else. Further, as far as education is concerned, every citizen has the right to education in his own language, provided only that there are sufficient fellow-nationals in the locality to make such education practicable in an organized way. In the U.S.S.R. no student is forced, as students are compelled, for example, in Wales to-day, to sit for examinations in their own national universities in a language which is strange to them. The advantage of this may not easily be appreciated by Englishmen, but I have known plenty of students in North Wales, many of whom found the English language extremely difficult, who will appreciate what this means to the students of all the nations of the Soviet Union.
The effect of the Soviet attitude to nationality has been a vast increase in national pride throughout Soviet territory at the same time as national antagonism has been eliminated. Particularly does this show itself among the Jewish population, who were as ruthlessly persecuted under Tsarism as they are in Nazi Germany to-day. In Tsarist Russia they did not have their own territory. To-day, to give them complete equality with other nationalities the Soviet Government has put Birobidjan at their disposal, and Jews, like citizens of all other nationalities of the Union, may settle in their own national territory or elsewhere, according to choice.
In his Russian Sketchbook, David Low has a cartoon which is supposed to illustrate the Soviet solution of the Jewish problem. A foreigner, obviously Mr. Low himself, is interviewing a group of men with very large noses. Their nationality cannot be doubted. The Foreign Enquirer asks: “How do the Jews get on?” and a Comrade replies; “Well, you see, there aren’t Jews here any more. Jews is just Russians like ourthelvth.”
I quote this because as a rule Low showed very great insight into Soviet life. But this cartoon is an exception, for in this portrayal of the Soviet solution of the Jewish problem Low shows precisely the reverse of the truth. Contrary to Low’s conception, the U.S.S.R. is the one country in the world to-day where no Jew will be found who will not proudly state that he is a Jew. The Soviet Jew is a Jew and is proud of it, just as the Soviet Russian is Russian and proud of it. It is not the Soviet Jew, but the German and the Hungarian, the American and the English, the Jew of every other country of the world outside the U.S.S.R. who, at some time or another, feels it is in his interest to pretend he is just a German or Hungarian, American or Englishman, like everybody else. It is only in the U.S.S.R. that this feeling no longer exists. Low portrays the elimination of the Jewish problem as the negation of nationality, whereas in fact it lies in the full expression of national consciousness and the most extensive development of national pride.
Finally, equality of opportunity between the sexes in the U.S.S.R. must be mentioned. You do not hear in the U.S.S.R. references to “women’s jobs” as opposed to the jobs of men. Admission to all occupations is based on merit, irrespective of sex, and payment in all occupations is also based on merit, irrespective of sex. And, in so far as the role of women in society is complicated by their functions as mothers, this side of their lives is being increasingly cared for by the rapid development of social insurance and communal centers.
Equality of opportunity in the U.S.S.R., then, exists irrespective of the nationality or the sex of citizens. It exists in education, in every occupation, and in opportunities to change from one occupation to another. To say that exceptions do not occur would be fantastic, but the really significant feature of equality of opportunity in the U.S.S.R. To-day is that these words no longer express something to be vaguely attained at some future date, but a fact of Soviet life at the present time. In the U.S.S.R. every case of absence of equality of opportunity is now regarded as an exception, and as a serious fault in the working of the system. As faults, the people combat the existence of such exceptions.
And so we come to another aspect of Soviet democracy, the combating of faults in the system. How is this done? We begin to answer this question in the next chapter.