Pages From A Diary

The recent publication of the report on literacy among the
population of Russia, based on the census of 1920 ( Literacy in Russia , issued by the Central Statistical Board, Public Education
Section, Moscow, 1922), is a very important event.

Below I quote a table from this report on the state of literacy among
the population of Russia in 1897 and 1920.

| | Literates per thousand males | Literates per thousand females | Literates per thousand population |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1897 | 1920 | 1897 | 1920 | 1897 | 1920 |
| 1. European Russia 2. North Caucasus 3. Siberia (Western) | 326 241 170 | 422 357 307 | 136 56 46 | 255 215 134 | 229 150 108 | 330 281 218 |
| Overall average | 318 | 409 | 131 | 244 | 223 | 319 |

At a time when we hold forth on proletarian culture and the relation in
which it stands to bourgeois culture, facts and figures reveal that we are
in a very bad way even as far as bourgeois culture is concerned. As might
have been expected, it appears that we are still a very long way from
attaining universal literacy, and that even compared with tsarist times
(1897) our progress has been far too slow. This should serve as a stern
warning and reproach to those who have been soaring in the empyreal heights
of "proletarian culture". It shows what a vast amount of urgent spade-work
we still have to do to reach the standard of an ordinary West-European
civilised country.

It also shows what a vast amount of work we have to do today to achieve,
on the basis of our proletarian gains, anything like a real cultural
standard.

We must not confine ourselves to this incontrovertible but too
theoretical proposition. The very next time we revise our quarterly budget
we must take this matter up in a practical way as well. In the first place,
of course, we shall have to cut down the expenditure of government
departments other than the People’s Commissariat of Education, and the
sums thus released should be assigned for the latter’s needs. In a
year like the present, when we are relatively well supplied, we must not be
chary in increasing the bread ration for schoolteachers.

Generally speaking, it cannot be said that the work now being done in
public education is too narrow. Quite a lot is being done to get the old
teachers out of their rut, to attract them to the new problems, to rouse
their interest in new methods of education, and in such problems as
religion.

But we are not doing the main thing. We are not doing anything—or
doing far from enough—to raise the school teacher to the level that is
absolutely essential if we want any culture at all, proletarian or even
bourgeois. We must bear in mind the semi-Asiatic ignorance from which we
have not yet extricated ourselves, and from which we cannot extricate
ourselves without strenuous effort—although we have every opportunity
to do so, because nowhere are the masses of the people so interested in real
culture as they are in our country; nowhere are the problems of this culture
tackled so thoroughly and consistently as they are in our country; in no
other country is state power in the hands of the working class which, in its
mass, is fully aware of the deficiencies, I shall not say of its culture,
but of its literacy; nowhere is the working class so ready to make, and
nowhere is it actually making, such sacrifices to improve its position in
this respect as in our country.

Too little, far too little, is still being done by us to adjust our
state budget to satisfy, as a first measure, the requirements of elementary
public education. Even in our People’s Commissariat of Education we
all too often find disgracefully inflated staffs in some state publishing
establishment, which is contrary to the concept that the state’s first
concern should not be publishing houses but that there should be people to
read, that the number of people able to read is greater, so that book
publishing should have a wider political field in future Russia. Owing to
the old (and bad) habit, we are still devoting much more time and effort to
technical questions, such as the question of book publishing, than to the
general political question of literacy among the people.

If we take the Central Vocational Education Board, we are sure that
there, too, we shall find far too much that is superfluous and inflated by
departmental interests, much that is ill-adjusted to the requirements of
broad public education. Far from everything that we find in the Central
Vocational Education Board can be justified by the legitimate desire first
of all to improve and give a practical slant to the education of our young
factory workers. If we examine the staff of the Central Vocational Education
Board carefully we shall find very much that is inflated and is in that
respect fictitious and should be done away with. There is still very much in
the proletarian and peasant state that can and must be economised for the
purpose of promoting literacy among the people; this can be done by closing
institutions which are playthings of a semi-aristocratic type, or
institutions we can still do without and will be able to do without, and
shall have to do without, for a long time to come, considering the state of
literacy among the people as revealed by the statistics.

Our schoolteacher should be raised to a standard he has never achieved,
and cannot achieve, in bourgeois society. This is a truism and requires no
proof. We must strive for this state of affairs by working steadily,
methodically and persistently to raise the teacher to a higher cultural
level, to train him thoroughly for his really high calling and—mainly,
mainly and mainly—to improve his position materially.

We must systematically step up our efforts to organise the
schoolteachers so as to transform them from the bulwark of the bourgeois
system that they still are in all capitalist countries without exception,
into the bulwark of the Soviet system, in order, through their agency, to
divert the peasantry from alliance with the bourgeoisie and to bring them
into alliance with the proletariat.

I want briefly to emphasise the special importance in this respect of
regular visits to the villages; such visits, it is true, are already being
practised and should be regularly promoted. We should not stint
money—which we all too often waste on the machinery of state that is
almost entirely a product of the past historical epoch—on measures
like these visits to the villages.

For the speech I was to have delivered at the Congress of Soviets in
December 1922 I collected data on the patronage undertaken by urban workers
over villagers. Part of these data was obtained for me by Comrade
Khodorovsky, and since I have been unable to deal with this problem and give
it publicity through the Congress, I submit the matter to the comrades for
discussion now.

Here we have a fundamental political question—the relations
between town and country—which is of decisive importance for the whole
of our revolution. While the bourgeois state methodically concentrates all
its efforts on doping the urban workers, adapting all the literature
published at state expense and at the expense of the tsarist and bourgeois
parties for this purpose, we can and must utilise our political power to
make the urban worker an effective vehicle of communist ideas among the
rural proletariat.

I said "communist", but I hasten to make a reservation for fear of
causing a misunderstanding, or of being taken too literally. Under no
circumstances must this be understood to mean that we should immediately
propagate purely and strictly communist ideas in the countryside. As long as
our countryside lacks the material basis for communism, it will be, I should
say, harmful, in fact, I should say, fatal, for communism to do so.

That is a fact. We must start by establishing contacts between town and
country without the preconceived aim of implanting communism in the rural
districts. It is an aim which cannot be achieved at the present time. It is
inopportune, and to set an aim like that at the present time would be
harmful, instead of useful, to the cause.

But it is our duty to establish contacts between the urban workers and
the rural working people, to establish between them a form of comradeship
which can easily be created. This is one of the fundamental tasks of the
working class which holds power. To achieve this we must form a number of
associations (Party, trade union and private) of factory workers, which
would devote themselves regularly to assisting the villages in their
cultural development.

Is it possible to "attach" all the urban groups to all the village
groups, so that every working-class group may take advantage regularly of
every opportunity, of every occasion to serve the cultural needs of the
village group it is "attached" to? Or will it be possible to find other
forms of contact? I here confine myself solely to formulating the question
in order to draw the comrades’ attention to it, to point out the
available experience of Western Siberia (to which Comrade Khodorovsky drew
my attention) and to present this gigantic, historic cultural task in all
its magnitude.

We are doing almost nothing for the rural districts outside our
official budget or outside official channels. True, in our country the
nature of the cultural relations between town and village is automatically
and inevitably changing. Under capitalism the town introduced political,
economic, moral, physical, etc., corruption into the countryside. In our
case, towns are automatically beginning to introduce the very opposite of
this into the countryside. But, I repeat, all this is going on
automatically, spontaneously, and can be improved (and later increased a
hundredfold) by doing it consciously, methodically and systematically.

We shall begin to advance (and shall then surely advance a hundred
times more quickly) only after we have studied the question, after we have
formed all sorts of workers’ organisations—doing everything to
prevent them from becoming bureaucratic—to take up the matter, discuss
it and get things done.

January 2, 1923