John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

As it dealt with areas regarded by a strongly patriarchal culture as of secondary importance–education, culture–many male Bolshevik Party members did not wish to work in Nakompros. Consequently, Lunacharsky’s key lieutenants were often women, the wives of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and others. It was also, like all Commissariats, pitifully underfunded, despite the need to maintain all of Soviet Russia’s schools, teacher-training institutes, universities, scientific work, theatres, cinemas, opera houses, libraries, historical archives, literacy and youth work, public memorials and extra-mural work for public occasions. Sovnarcom was keen that the philosophy, great texts and heroes of the socialist movement be celebrated in the new public culture, but rarely provided the money to do this. The result was to fall back on the work of the “Proletarian Culture” (Proletkult) organisation.

Nakompros’s most immediate priority was the preservation of the treasures left to it from the fallen Empire. Two days after the October Insurrection, Izvestia published an appeal stating that the new regime had inherited “enormous cultural riches, buildings of rare beauty, museums full of rare and marvelous objects, things that enlighten and inspire, and libraries containing vast intellectual treasures. All this now belongs to the people”. 2With the help of Gorky and the ex-World of Art director Alexander Benois, Lunacharsky organised special commissions to protect endangered monuments and national treasures. Although many mansions and privately owned museums were taken into public ownership their contents were, mostly, protected, and were in time thrown open to the public. Even amidst the worst conditions of the Civil War, in besieged, freezing and starving Petrograd, Victor Serge recorded that the city

never, even its most tragic days, lost the concern for art; it never neglected rhythms, fine gestures, beautiful voices full of pathos, dream-like settings, poems, anthems played on the organ, the sobbing notes of violins […] the Red City is suffering and fighting so that one day leisure and art shall be the property of all. 3

By 1920 Sovnarcom’s Section for Museums and Preservation of Monuments had registered over 550 old mansions, previously the occasional homes of a wealthy aristocratic elite, as new museums, as well as over a thousand new collections of hitherto private art collections. These were carefully preserved and made available to workers and peasants who had never before had the opportunity to see and experience great art. The private market in art was abolished. Even the Bolsheviks’ sternest critics concede they safeguarded Russia’s artistic treasures to the extent they were able. By the device of transforming private mansions into museums they met the twin aims of expropriating the riches of the ruling class with providing more access to art and culture for the masses.

It was one of the revolution’s most democratic and libertarian innovations. As Stites says, “By placing crowns, thrones and imperial regalia in a People’s Museum the regime depoliticised them, neutralised their former symbolic power, and offered them as a gift to the masses”. 4Yet although the Bolsheviks’ initial programme to liberate cultural private property for the benefit of all was bold and successful, their long-term policy was ultimately self-defeating. The regime preserved the culture of the past, even venerated it, but it did not value or sustain the institutions, freedom of expression and social pluralism that had created it in the first place, and might create more in the future.

Lunacharsky’s most challenging task was to build a socialist education system, and to a great extent he succeeded. An entirely new governance system was introduced whereby schools would henceforth be administered by workers’ cooperatives of all staff, not just the teachers, and representatives of pupils above 12 years of age, plus one representative from Nakompros. In some instances, teachers would be elected. Lunacharsky, the “moderate” Bolshevik who had wished to form a socialist coalition government after October 1917, proved much more comfortable with the elective principle than did Trotsky.

The general policy was outlined in a June 1918 “Statement on the Organisation of Education in the Russian Republic”, which established an “Educational Soviet” to run the national education system under the broad oversight of Nakompros. The Soviet was to consist of elected representatives from all bodies represented in the Central Soviet as well as representatives of teachers, pupils and educational experts. But even then Nakompros ensured that local schools had a significant amount of autonomy, consistent with the broad thrust of educational policy.

The introduction of democracy within the school system was not welcomed by educational traditionalists. The Teachers Union, the VUS, took strike action between November 1917 and March 1918 in protest against the changes ordered by Nakompros. Lunacharsky did not wish to break the strike and arrest it leaders, as had been done with the civil-service strike in the immediate aftermath of October, and he set out to convince younger teachers to work with, not against, Nakompros. He had some success as more left-wing teachers set up the Union of Teacher-Internationalists and began to work with the government. Nakompros also allowed private schools to continue in existence, although they could no longer charge for their services. It thereby incurred the wrath of, on the one side, Bolshevik zealots who demanded direct involvement by Nakompros, and on the other, conservatives appalled by the erosion of teachers’ previously absolute authority and the removal of religious education from the curriculum.

From its earliest days Nakompros drew inspiration not only from Marxism but also from the liberal approach to child-centred education pioneered by John Dewey in America and Bertrand Russell in Britain. This resulted in a new curriculum that emphasised activity over lectures, more pupil participation and more democratic, informal relations between pupils and teachers. The Soviet regime’s educational philosophy was explained in a document written by Lunacharsky and published in October 1918. The “Declaration on the United Labour School” outlined the aim of having a school system that functioned as a “single, unbroken staircase” from kindergarten to university. It explained that “All children must enter the same type of school and begin their education alike, and all have the right to rise up the ladder to its highest rungs”. It recommended what it called an “encyclopedia of culture”, including staples such as history, maths, geography, aesthetics, biology, physics, chemistry and modern languages, although these were to be taught as part of a “sociology of labour”. It was a polytechnical vision of education to be delivered in a non-hierarchical manner.

In May 1918 the Commissariat abolished single-sex schools and began to combine academic and technical courses. In October 1918 it abolished the examination system and homework, replacing them with continuous assessment of coursework. Tests of memory and learning by rote were done away with, inaugurating programmes that developed critical ability and learning tailored to individual pupils. Schools were also instructed to provide hot breakfasts for all children, although in conditions of Civil War in which schools and teachers were starved (sometimes literally) of resources this was more aspiration than reality. There were also tensions between teachers at the sharp end and those they considered unqualified to instruct them in the Educational Soviet, tensions smoothed over by Nakompros. But for all these difficulties Marcel Liebman was entirely right to characterise the Bolsheviks’ educational reforms as heralding “a profound and serious liberation of the human spirit”. 5