In anticipation of the all-Russian congress on popular education scheduled for December, it would be appropriate to draw attention to an old but eternally new question — the destitution of popular teachers.

Before us lies the first volume of the "One-Day Census of Primary Schools in the Empire." This volume was published by the ministry of public — excuse me — enlightenment. It is signed by the well-known statistician V. I. Pokrovsky.

The official bureaucratic character of this work — in the most deplorable sense of the words: official and bureaucratic — strikes one immediately. The census was conducted on January 18, 1911. A full two years later, the first volume appears, covering only the provinces of the St. Petersburg educational district! It seems we are capable of conducting only the sort of bureaucratic red tape involved in passing laws — like laws against the press — with agonizing, tedious slowness.

The census program was, as usual, discussed repeatedly throughout all of 1910 in a whole series of bureaucratic offices and conferences, each one of which spoiled it further. As a result, for example, on the question of the native language of pupils, there is only a general category for the "Russian" language: subdivision into Belarusian, Little Russian (Ukrainian), and Great Russian is explicitly forbidden. As a consequence, a whole series of schools in the census of Empire schools was excluded — for instance, urban schools according to the 1872 regulations, private schools of the first and second rank, etc.

It is forbidden to collect complete data. It is forbidden to know the truth about the language spoken in the families of pupils. It is forbidden to compare state and private schools.

The compiler of the statistics, praised to the skies by the liberals, Mr. Pokrovsky, for his part helped worsen the material of the census. For each teacher, separate material was collected concerning the size of compensation. Naturally, on such a burning question as the destitution of popular teachers, it is important to know the truth. It is important to know exactly how many teachers and teachresses receive desperately low, the lowest, very low, generally low, etc. wages.

The material on this has been collected. Information on this exists. But Mr. liberal statistician "processes" it in such a way as to cover up the unpleasant truth.

Mr. statistician informs us only of the average sizes of wages for teachers and teachresses by province and by different categories of schools. Official divisions have been observed religiously. But for those who wish to know the truth, what is of interest is not in which province and in which category of school the teachers are starving, but rather how many teachers are starving and suffering. It would have been entirely possible, and it would absolutely have been necessary, to determine from the material collected by the census how many teachers receive starvation wages (say, below 360 rubles, from 360 to 400 rubles, and so on). But this was not done. This is hidden in the archives of hundreds of thousands of cards.

Only officially gutted and officially embellished figures of average wages by category and by province have been communicated to the public… There is no need to say that liberal statisticians wished to hide from the public what proportion of starving teachers has a family.

From the "average" figures, one can see that the wage for a teachress (in the St. Petersburg district) is 433 rubles per year, for a teacher — 376. But the majority of teachers are in villages. Here the "average" wage is 347 rubles for a teachress and 367 rubles for a teacher. (Note that the number of teachresses is generally twice as large as the number of teachers.)

The majority of those teaching in the SPB district are located outside St. Petersburg province. The size of wages for teachresses is: in Olonets province — 375 rubles; in Novgorod province — 358 rubles; in Vologda province — 320 rubles; in Arkhangelsk province — 319 rubles; in Pskov province — 312 rubles.

It is clear even from these figures, which embellish reality, that the majority of teachresses receive starvation wages. At current cost of living — 26–30 rubles a month for teachresses, of whom (again, on average) 11.5 percent are married and 4.4 percent are widows — this is, without question, a pittance, condemning those who teach to hunger and deprivation.

From the "categorical" data we see that in church parish one-class schools there were 2,180 teachresses (in the SPB educational district, where the total number of teachresses is 7,693). We have before us, consequently, a "category" with a very substantial number of teachers. How much, then, do the teachresses of this category receive?

On average, 302 rubles in the city and 301 rubles in the village.

The Russian state spends hundreds of millions on maintaining bureaucracy, police, military expenditures, etc., while it condemns teachers in popular schools to starvation. The bourgeoisie "sympathizes" with popular education — but on the condition that teachers live worse than servants in the mansions and wealthy homes of the nobility…

*"Za Pravdu" No. 51, December 4, 1913*

Printed according to the text of the newspaper "Za Pravdu"