Lately, many people have often asked themselves questions: why do we have such a low level of education and why many graduates cannot answer even the simplest questions from school curriculum? What did they do after the collapse of the USSR with the previous education system? In the Soviet years, the personnel training of future specialists was radically different from the one that has reigned throughout the entire post-Soviet space today. But the Soviet education system has always been competitive. Thanks to her, in the 1960s the USSR came out on top in the ranking of the most educated states in the world. The country took a leading position in the demand for its people, whose knowledge, experience and skills for the benefit of their native country have always been valued. What were they like, Soviet science and Soviet education, if personnel really should decide everything? On the eve of the new school year, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of the Soviet education system, about how the Soviet school shaped a person’s personality.
“To master science, to forge new cadres of Bolsheviks - specialists in all branches of knowledge, to study, study, study in the most persistent way - this is now the task” (I.V. Stalin, Speech at the VIII Congress of the Komsomol, 1928)
More than once different people They interpreted in their own way the words of Bismarck, who, regarding the victory at the Battle of Sadovaya in 1866 in Prussia’s war against Austria, said that it was won by the Prussian people’s teacher. It meant that the soldiers and officers of the Prussian army at that time were better educated than the soldiers and officers of the enemy army. To paraphrase it, US President J.F. Kennedy, on October 4, 1957, on the day the USSR launched the first artificial Earth satellite, said:
“We lost space to the Russians at the school desk.” The Soviet school trained a huge number of young people who were able to master complex military equipment in the shortest possible time, were able to take accelerated courses in military schools in a short time and became well-trained commanders of the Red Army and patriots of their socialist Fatherland .
The West has repeatedly noted the successes and achievements of Soviet education, especially in the late 50s.
NATO Policy Brief on Education in the USSR (1959)
In May 1959, Dr. C.R.S. (C.R.S. Congressional Research Service) Manders prepared a report for the NATO Science Committee on the topic “Science and technology education and personnel reserves in the USSR.” The following are excerpts from this report, the notes in square brackets are ours.
“When the Soviet Union was formed a little over 40 years ago, the state had to face enormous difficulties. The harvest of the Soviet south was destroyed by a plague of locusts, resulting in food shortages and low morale [note: no mention of the so-called "Holodomor"]. Defense was not promoted by anything other than the rational use of territorial and climatic conditions. The state lagged behind in education and other social spheres, illiteracy was widespread, and almost 10 years later [this is 1929] Soviet magazines and print publications were still reporting the same level of literacy. Forty years ago there was a hopeless lack of trained personnel to lead the Soviet people out of a difficult situation, and today the USSR is challenging the US right to world domination. This is an achievement that has no equal in modern history...”
“Over the years, a significant share of trained personnel has returned back to the education system to train even more specialists. Teaching is a well-paid and prestigious occupation. The net annual increase in trained personnel is 7% in the USSR (for comparison, in the USA - 3.5%, in the UK 2.5 - 3%)."
“With each new stage of scientific and technological progress, a corresponding teacher training program begins. Since 1955, Moscow State University has been training programming teachers.”
“At the level of postgraduate education, the USSR does not experience a shortage of professionals capable of managing government projects. In higher and school education, everything indicates that the number of professionally trained graduates will not only easily remain at the same level, but can be increased.”
“Western experts tend to envy the quantity and quality of equipment in Soviet educational institutions.”
“There is a significant tendency in the West to hold extreme views regarding the Soviet Union. Its citizens, however, are not supermen or second-rate material. In fact, these are people with the same abilities and emotions as everyone else. If the 210 million people in the West work together with the same priorities and the same passion as their counterparts in the Soviet Union, they will achieve similar results. States that independently compete with the USSR are wasting their strength and resources in attempts that are doomed to failure. If it is impossible to constantly invent methods superior to those of the USSR, it is worth seriously considering borrowing and adapting Soviet methods."
And here is another opinion of a Western politician and businessman about Stalin’s policies:
“Communism under Stalin won the applause and admiration of all Western nations. Communism under Stalin gave us an example of patriotism for which it is difficult to find an analogy in history. Persecution of Christians? No. There is no religious persecution. Church doors are open. Political repression? Yes, sure. But now it is clear that those who were shot would have betrayed Russia to the Germans.”
Now we can say with confidence that education in the USSR was at the highest level, which is confirmed by the conclusion of Western analysts. It, of course, did not meet international standards in many ways. But now we understand well that this is a problem of “standards”. Because now we have the same world standards. Only the most capable representatives of our youth, trained in accordance with these standards, by our Soviet standards do not qualify as literate at all. So-so... solid C students. Therefore, there is no doubt that the problem is not with ministers Fursenko or Livanov, that the modern problem lies purely in the system itself.
What was the Soviet education system, which was spoken of so respectfully in the West, and whose methods were borrowed both from Japan and other countries?
There is still debate about whether the education system in the USSR can really be considered the best in the world. Some people agree with confidence, while others talk about the destructive impact of ideological principles. Without a doubt, propaganda existed, but also thanks to propaganda, illiteracy of the population was eliminated in record time, education became accessible to everyone, and until now there have not been as many Nobel laureates and winners of international Olympiads as there were annually in Soviet times. Soviet schoolchildren won international competitions, including in natural sciences. And all these achievements arose despite the fact that general education It took hold in the USSR almost a century later than in Western countries. The famous innovative teacher Viktor Shatalov (born in 1927) said:
“In the post-war years, the space industry arose in the USSR and the defense industry rose. All this could not grow out of nothing. Everything was based on education. Therefore, we can say that our education was not bad.”
There really were a lot of advantages. Let’s not talk about the mass character and accessibility of the school level of education: today this principle remains true. Let's talk about the quality of education: they like to compare this heritage of the Soviet past with the quality of education in modern society.
Accessibility and inclusiveness
One of the most significant advantages of the Soviet school system was its accessibility. This right was constitutionally enshrined (Article 45 of the 1977 USSR Constitution). The main difference between the Soviet education system and the American or British was the unity and consistency of all levels of education. A clear vertical system (initial, high school, technical school, university, graduate school, doctoral studies) allowed me to accurately plan the vector of my training. Uniform programs and requirements were developed for each level. When parents moved or changed schools for any other reason, there was no need to re-study the material or try to understand the system adopted in the new educational institution. The maximum trouble that a transfer to another school could cause was the need to repeat or catch up on 3-4 topics in each discipline. Textbooks in the school library were provided free of charge and were available to absolutely everyone.
It is a mistake to believe that in a Soviet school all students had the same level of knowledge. Of course, the general program must be mastered by everyone. But if a teenager is interested in a particular subject, then he was given every opportunity for additional study. Schools had math clubs, literature clubs, and so on.
However, there were specialized classes and specialized schools, where children had the opportunity to study certain subjects in depth, which was a source of special pride for parents of children who studied in a mathematics school or a school with a language focus. This instilled in both parents and children a sense of their own exclusivity and “elitism.” It was these children who in many ways became the “ideological backbone” of the dissident movement. Moreover, even in regular schools by the end of the 1970s, the practice of hidden segregation had developed, when the most capable children fall into classes “A” and “B”, and class “D” is a kind of “sink”, which practice in today's schools is already considered the norm.
Fundamentality and versatility of knowledge
Despite the fact that the Soviet school had a powerful range of leading subjects, including the Russian language, biology, physics, and mathematics, the study of disciplines that gave a systematic understanding of the world was mandatory. As a result, the student left school with almost encyclopedic knowledge. This knowledge became the strong foundation on which it was possible to subsequently train a specialist in almost any profile.
The key to quality education was the synchronization of acquired knowledge in different subjects through ideology. The facts learned by students in physics lessons echoed the information obtained in the study of chemistry and mathematics and were linked through the dominant ideas in society. Thus, new concepts and terms were introduced in parallel, which helped to structure knowledge and form in children a holistic picture of the world, albeit an ideological one.
Availability of incentive and involvement in the learning process
Today, teachers are sounding the alarm: schoolchildren lack motivation to study, many high school students do not feel responsible for their own future. In Soviet times, it was possible to create motivation due to the interaction of several factors:
- Grades in subjects corresponded to the knowledge acquired. In the USSR, they were not afraid to give twos and threes even for a year. Class statistics, of course, played a role, but were not of paramount importance. A student with poor grades could be kept for the second year: this was not only a shame in front of other children, but also a powerful incentive to take up his studies. You couldn’t buy a grade: you had to study, because it was impossible to earn an excellent result in any other way.
- The system of patronage and guardianship in the USSR was an undeniable advantage. The weak student was not left alone with his problems and failures. The excellent student took him under his care and studied until the poor student achieved success. This was also a good school for strong children: in order to explain a subject to another student, they had to work through the material in detail and independently learn to apply optimal pedagogical methods. The system of patronage (or rather, assistance from elders to younger ones) trained many Soviet scientists and teachers, who later became laureates of prestigious international awards.
- Equal conditions for everyone. The social status and financial situation of the student’s parents did not in any way affect the results at school. All children were in equal conditions, studied according to the same program, so the road was open to everyone. School knowledge was enough to enter a university without hiring tutors. Mandatory placement after college, although perceived as an undesirable phenomenon, guaranteed work and demand for the acquired knowledge and skills. This situation, after the coup d'etat of 1953, began to slowly change and by the 1970s, the children of the partyocracy became more “equal” - “those who are more equal” received places in the best institutions, many physics, mathematics, and language schools thus began to degenerate into “elite” “, from where it was no longer possible to simply remove the careless student, since his dad was a “big man.”
- The emphasis is not only on training, but also on education. The Soviet school embraced the student’s free time and was interested in his hobbies. Sections and extracurricular activities, which were mandatory, left almost no time for aimless pastime and generated interest in further study in various fields.
- Availability of free extracurricular activities. In the Soviet school, in addition to the compulsory program, electives were regularly held for those interested. Classes in additional disciplines were free and accessible to anyone who had the time and interest to study them.
- Financial support for students - scholarships accounted for almost a third of the country's average salary.
The combination of these factors generated a huge incentive to study, without which Soviet education would not have been so effective.
Requirements for teachers and respect for the profession
A teacher in a Soviet school is an image with a high social status. Teachers were respected and their profession was treated as valuable and socially significant work. Films were made about the school, songs were composed, presenting teachers in them as intelligent, honest and highly moral people whom one should emulate.
Being a teacher was considered an honor
There were reasons for this. High demands were placed on the personality of a teacher in a Soviet school. People who graduated from universities and had an inner calling to teach children came to teach.
This situation continued until the 1970s. Teachers had relatively high salaries even compared to skilled workers. But closer to “perestroika” the situation began to change. The decline in the authority of the teacher’s personality was facilitated by the development of capitalist relations. Installation on material values, which have now become achievable, have made the teaching profession unprofitable and unprestigious, which has resulted in the leveling of the true value of school grades.
So, Soviet education was based on three main pillars:
- encyclopedic knowledge achieved through versatile training and synchronization of information obtained as a result of studying various subjects, albeit through ideology;
- the presence of a powerful incentive for children to study, thanks to the patronage of elders over younger ones and free extracurricular activities;
- respect for teachers' work and the school institution as a whole.
Looking at the Soviet education system from the “bell tower” of our time, we can note some shortcomings. We can say that they are something like a brick that we, many years later, could add to the temple of science built by the country.
Let's look at some imperfections that are better seen from a distance.
Emphasis on theory rather than practice
The famous phrase of A. Raikin: “Forget everything you were taught at school and listen...” did not appear out of nowhere. Behind it lies an intensive study of theory and a lack of connections between the acquired knowledge and life.
If we talk about the system of universal compulsory education in the USSR, it was superior to the education system foreign countries(and above all - developed capitalist ones) in terms of the breadth of the thematic spectrum and depth of study of subjects (especially mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other branches of natural science). Based on secondary education of a very high quality (by world standards of that era), USSR universities provided students with knowledge not of a directly applied nature, but mostly knowledge of a fundamental nature, from which all directly applied knowledge and skills flow. But Soviet universities were also characterized by the general defect of the Western-type education system, which was characteristic of it from the second half of the 19th century
Lack of “industry philosophies”
A common defect of the Soviet and Western education systems is the loss of the canons of professional activity: therefore, what can be called the “philosophy of design and production” of certain technospheric objects, the “philosophy of operation” of certain devices, the “philosophy of healthcare and medical care” and etc. applied philosophies were not included in the educational courses of Soviet universities. The existing courses called “Introduction to the Specialty” for the most part did not cover the problems of this kind of philosophies, and, as practice shows, only a few of the entire mass of university graduates were able to independently reach its understanding, and then only many years after receiving their diplomas.
But their understanding of this issue in the overwhelming majority of cases was not expressed in publicly available (at least among professionals) texts:
- partly because the few who understood this issue were mostly busy with their professional work and did not find time to write a book (a textbook for students);
- but among those who understood there were also those who consciously maintained their monopoly on knowledge and related skills, since such a monopoly lay at the basis of their high status in social hierarchy, in the hierarchy of the corresponding professional community and provided one or another informal power;
- and partly because this genre of “abstract literature” was not in demand by publishing houses, especially since this kind of “philosophy of work” could largely contradict the ideological guidelines of the apparatus of the CPSU Central Committee and the stupidity of the bureaucratic leaders higher in the hierarchy of power (in the professional sphere) .
In addition, those who were able to write such books, for the most part, did not hold high leadership positions, as a result of which it was not always “in their rank” to write on such topics in the conditions of the tribal system of the post-Stalin USSR. And those who were “in rank” in post-Stalin times were for the most part careerist bureaucrats, incapable of writing such vital books. Although books were sometimes published by bureaucrats that purported to fill this gap, they were essentially graphomania.
An example of this kind of graphomania is the book by the Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Navy from 1956 to 1985, S.G., which is still being advertised by many klutzes. Gorshkova (1910 - 1988) “The Sea Power of the State” (Moscow: Voenizdat. 1976 - 60,000 copies, 2nd updated edition 1979 - 60,000 copies). Judging by its text, it was written by a team of narrow specialists (submariners, surface watermen, aviators, gunsmiths and representatives of other branches of the forces and services of the fleet), who did not perceive the development of the Fleet as a whole as building complex system, designed to solve certain problems, in which all elements must be presented in the required quantities and the interconnections of the functions assigned to each of them; a system that interacts with other systems generated by society and with the natural environment.
S.G. Gorshkov himself hardly read “his” book, and if he did, due to the feeble-mindedness of a careerist, he did not understand the vital inconsistency and mutual incompatibility of many of the positions expressed in it by the authors of different sections.
Before understanding the problems of developing the country's naval power, expressed in the works of Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union I.S. Isakova (1894 - 1967), S.G. Gorshkov was very far away, which had an extremely harmful effect on the defense capability of the USSR and its development Navy during those 30 years when S.G. Gorshkov headed the USSR Navy.
Those who are prejudiced that under the leadership of S.G. Gorshkov built a mighty fleet, we must understand that every fleet is a collection of ships, coastal forces and services, but not every collection of ships, coastal forces and services, even with their number and diversity, is truly a Fleet. The latter took place in the USSR, when the commander-in-chief of the Navy was S.G. Gorshkov, and it was very ruinous for the country and not very effective militarily.
Non-interference in technical issues of ideological bureaucracy
“How could it happen that the sabotage took such wide proportions? Who is to blame for this? We are to blame for this. If we had handled the business of managing the economy differently, if we had moved much earlier to studying the techniques of the business, to mastering technology, if we had more often and intelligently intervened in the management of the economy, the pests would not have been able to do so much harm.
We ourselves must become specialists, masters of the business, we must turn our faces to technical knowledge - this is where life pushed us. But neither the first signal nor even the second signal provided the necessary turn. It’s time, it’s high time to turn our face to technology. It’s time to throw away the old slogan, the outdated slogan about non-interference in technology, and become specialists ourselves, experts in the matter, become complete masters of economic affairs.”
The slogan about non-interference in technical issues in management practice during the Civil War and the 1920s meant that a “politically ideological”, but illiterate and not knowing technology and technology, person could be appointed as a leader, as a result of which “politically immature” people found themselves under his leadership "and potentially counter-revolutionary professionals. Next, such a leader set tasks for the professionals subordinate to him that were set for him by superior managers, and his subordinates, in turn, relying on their knowledge and professional skills, had to ensure their solution. Those. The “politically ideological” but not knowledgeable manager was responsible for the first stages of the full function of managing an enterprise (or a structure for another purpose), and the professionals subordinate to him were responsible for the subsequent stages.
- If the team leader and the professionals were conscientious or at least honest, and, as a result, ethically compatible in the common cause, then in this version the enterprise management system was workable and benefited both parties: the manager learned the business, subordinate professionals expanded their horizons, were drawn into political life and became citizens of the USSR (in the sense of the word “citizen”, understandable from N.A. Nekrasov’s poem “Poet and Citizen”) de facto, and not just de jure.
- If the manager or professionals turned out to be ethically incompatible due to dishonesty and dishonesty of at least one of the parties (be it the “ideological” leader or the professionals), then the enterprise management system to a greater or lesser extent lost its functionality, which entailed consequences that could be legally qualified as sabotage either by a leader, or professionals, or all together (such an article was in the criminal codes of all union republics).
How such a system worked in practice in military affairs, see the story of the writer-marinist, and earlier - the professional military sailor L.S. Sobolev (1898 - 1971, was non-party) “Exam”. In this story, the “spirit of the era” is presented accurately in many aspects, but from the point of view of liberals - slanderously. However, this same “spirit of the era” was also “in civilian life”, therefore the system “political-ideological leader - subordinate professional specialists, apolitical and unprincipled” (the same as Professor Nikolai Stepanovich from A.P. Chekhov’s story “Boring” history") also worked in civilian life.
Essentially I.V. Stalin, in the quoted speech, set the task: since “ideological conviction in the correctness of socialism” alone is not enough for business leaders, their ideological conviction should be practically expressed in their mastery of relevant technical knowledge and the application of this knowledge to identify and solve problems economic support the policy of the Soviet state in all its components: global, external, internal; otherwise, they are hypocrites, covering up real sabotage with their “ideological conviction” - idle talk.
Now let's turn to the speech of I.V. Stalin “New situation - new tasks of economic construction” at a meeting of business executives on June 23, 1931 (emphasis in bold is ours):
“...we can no longer make do with the minimum of engineering, technical and industrial command forces that we used to make do with before. It follows from this that the old centers for the formation of engineering and technical forces are no longer enough, that it is necessary to create a whole network of new centers - in the Urals, in Siberia, in Central Asia. We now need to provide ourselves with three times, five times more engineering, technical and industrial command forces if we really think about implementing the program of socialist industrialization of the USSR.
But we don’t need just any command and engineering forces. We need command and engineering forces that are able to understand the politics of the working class of our country, are able to assimilate this policy and are ready to implement it conscientiously» .
At the same time, I.V. Stalin did not recognize the party and its members’ monopoly on the possession of conscience and business qualities. In his same speech there is the following fragment:
“Some comrades think that only party comrades can be promoted to leadership positions in factories. On this basis, they often wipe out capable and enterprising non-party comrades, putting party members in first place, although they are less capable and uninitiative. Needless to say, there is nothing more stupid and reactionary than such, so to speak, “politics.” There is hardly any need to prove that such a “policy” can only discredit the party and alienate non-party workers from the party. Our policy is not at all to turn the party into a closed caste. Our policy is that there should be an atmosphere of “mutual trust”, an atmosphere of “mutual verification” between party and non-party workers (Lenin). Our party is strong in the working class, among other things, because it pursues precisely this policy.”
In post-Stalin times, if we relate to this fragment, personnel policy was stupid and reactionary, and it was as a result of it that M.S. ended up at the top of power. Gorbachev, A.N. Yakovlev, B.N. Yeltsin, V.S. Chernomyrdin, A.A. Sobchak, G.Kh. Popov and other perestroika activists are reformers and unable to put them in the place of V.S. Pavlov, E.K. Ligachev, N.V. Ryzhkov and many other “opponents of perestroika” and bourgeois-liberal reforms.
The mention of conscience as the basis of the activity of every person, and above all managers, in the conditions of the construction of socialism and communism contrasts with the statement of another political figure of that era.
“I free man,” says Hitler, “from the humiliating chimera called conscience. Conscience, like education, cripples a person. I have the advantage that I am not held back by any theoretical or moral considerations.”
The quote itself is from the report of I.V. Stalin at the ceremonial meeting of the Moscow Council of Working People's Deputies on November 6, 1941, dedicated to the 24th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
But A. Hitler is not an innovator in denying conscience. Nietzsche
“Have I ever felt remorse? My memory remains silent on this score” (Vol. 1. P. 722, “Evil Wisdom”, 10).
“Remorse is as stupid as a dog trying to chew a stone” (Ibid. P. 817, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”, 38)”
As a result of this, F. Nietzsche ended his life in a madhouse.
Communism translated from Latin into Russian means community, community; Besides, in Latin this word has the same root as “communication”, i.e. with communication, including information communication between people and not only between them, and the root of the word “conscience” is the same “communication” - “news”. In other words:
"Communism— a community of people based on conscience: everything else in communism is a consequence of the unity of conscience among different individuals.”
Low level of foreign language teaching
The lack of experience in communicating with native speakers gave rise to the study of languages based on cliches that did not change in textbooks from year to year. Soviet schoolchildren, after 6 years of studying a foreign language, were still unable to speak it even within the confines of everyday topics, although they knew the grammar perfectly. The inaccessibility of educational foreign literature, audio and video recordings, and the lack of need to communicate with foreigners relegated the study of foreign languages to the background.
Lack of wide access to foreign literature
The Iron Curtain created a situation in which citing foreign scientists in student and scholarly works became not only shameful, but also dangerous. The lack of fresh information has given rise to some conservation of teaching methods. In this regard, in 1992, when Western sources became available, the school system seemed outdated and in need of reform.
Lack of home education and external studies
It is difficult to judge whether this is good or bad, but the lack of opportunity for strong students to pass subjects externally and move to the next grade hindered the development of future advanced personnel and made them equal to the bulk of schoolchildren.
Non-alternative co-education for boys and girls
One of the dubious Soviet innovations in education was the compulsory co-education of boys and girls instead of the pre-revolutionary separate education. Then this step was justified by the struggle for women's rights, the lack of personnel and premises for the organization of separate schools, as well as the widespread practice of co-education in some leading countries of the world, including the USA. However, the latest research in the United States shows that separate education increases student results by 10 - 20%. Everything is quite simple: in joint schools, boys and girls are distracted by each other, and noticeably more conflicts and incidents arise; Boys, right up to the last grades of school, lag behind girls of the same age in education, since the male body develops more slowly. On the contrary, with separate education, it becomes possible to better take into account the behavioral and cognitive characteristics of different sexes to improve performance; adolescents’ self-esteem depends to a greater extent on academic performance, and not on some other things. It is interesting that in 1943, separate education for boys and girls was introduced in cities, which was again eliminated in 1954 after the death of Stalin.
Degradation of the secondary vocational education system in the late USSR
Although the USSR extolled the working man in every possible way and promoted working professions, in the 1970s the system of secondary vocational education the country began to clearly degrade, even despite the noticeable advantage that young workers had in terms of wages. The fact is that in the USSR they tried to ensure universal employment, and therefore they en masse took into vocational schools those students who had failed and failed to enter universities, and also forcibly placed juvenile criminals there. As a result, the average quality of the student population in vocational schools has fallen sharply. Besides, career prospects Vocational school students were much worse off than in the previous era: a huge number of skilled workers were trained during the industrialization of the 1930s-1960s, the best places were taken, and it became more difficult for young people to get to the top. At the same time, the service sector was extremely poorly developed in the USSR, which was associated with serious restrictions on entrepreneurship, but it is the service sector that creates greatest number jobs in modern developed countries (including places for people without higher or professional education). Thus, there were no alternatives in employment, as there are now. Cultural and educational work in vocational schools turned out to be poorly placed, “vocational school students” began to be associated with hooliganism, drunkenness and a general low level of development. “If you do poorly at school, you’ll go to a vocational school!” (vocational technical school) - this is what parents told careless schoolchildren. The negative image of vocational education in blue-collar occupations still persists in Russia, although qualified turners, mechanics, milling operators, and plumbers are now among the highly paid professions, whose representatives are in short supply.
Perhaps the time will come when we will return to the experience of the USSR, mastering its positive aspects, taking into account modern requirements society, that is, at a new level.
Conclusion
Analyzing the current culture of our society as a whole, we can come to the conclusion that historically established societies on earth give rise to three levels of unfreedom for people.
Level one
It is inhabited by people who have mastered a certain minimum of commonly used socially significant knowledge and skills, but who do not know how to independently master (based on literature and other sources of information) and produce “from scratch” knowledge and skills that are new to them. Such people are able to work only in professions that do not require any specialized qualifications, or in mass professions that can be mastered without much effort and time on the basis of a universal educational minimum.
They are the most unfree, since they have practically no free time and are not able to enter other areas of activity except those that they have somehow mastered and in which they find themselves, perhaps not of their own free will.
Level two
Those who have mastered the knowledge and skills of “prestigious” professions in which relatively short-term employment (daily or occasional) provides a fairly high income, which allows them to have a certain amount of free time and use it at their own discretion. The majority of them also do not know how to independently master and produce “from scratch” new knowledge and skills, especially outside the scope of their professional activities. Therefore, their lack of freedom begins when the profession they have mastered depreciates in value, and they, not being able to quickly master any other fairly highly profitable profession, slide into the first group.
At this level, in the cultures of most civilized societies, individuals are given access to knowledge and skills that allow them to enter the sphere of government of overall social significance while remaining conceptually powerless. The term “conceptual power” should be understood in two ways: firstly, as that type of power that gives society a concept of its life in the continuity of generations as a single whole (i.e., determines the goals of society’s existence, ways and means of achieving them); secondly, as the power of the concept itself over society.
Level three
Those who are able to independently master previously developed and produce “from scratch” new knowledge and skills of social significance for them and society as a whole, and exploit them on a commercial or some other social status basis. Their unfreedom begins when they, without thinking about the objectivity of Good and Evil, about the difference in their meaning, consciously or unconsciously fall into permissiveness and begin to create objectively unacceptable Evil, as a result of which they are faced with a stream of circumstances that are restraining their activity - circumstances beyond their control - even murderous. These factors can be both intrasocial and general in nature, and can have a scale both personal and broader - up to the global.
Reaching this level is conditioned by mastering, among other things, managerial knowledge and skills, including those necessary for acquiring and exercising conceptual authority. In societies in which the population is divided into the common people and the ruling “elite”, in which an even narrower social group is reproduced from generation to generation, carrying one or another internal closed tradition of management, access to this level is blocked by the system of both the universal and “ elite" education. Access to it is possible either spontaneously (rare self-taught people are capable of this), or as a result of belonging to certain clans of those who carry internal traditions of management or the election of an individual by these clans to include him in their ranks. This blocking is not spontaneous and natural in nature, but is a purposefully built system-forming cultural factor, the action of which expresses the defense of their monopoly on the conceptual power of certain clan groups, which allows them to exploit the rest - managerially incapable - of society in their own interests.
Level of gaining freedom
The level of gaining freedom is one and only: a person, acting according to conscience, realizes the objective difference between Good and Evil, their meaning, and on this basis, having taken the side of Good, acquires the ability to independently master and produce “from scratch” knowledge and skills that are new to him and society in advance or as the situation develops. For this reason, it gains independence from corporations that have monopolized certain socially significant knowledge and skills on which the social status of their representatives is based. Let us note that in the religious worldview, conscience is an innate religious feeling of a person, “connected” to his unconscious levels of the psyche; on its basis, a dialogue between man and God is built, if a person does not shy away from this dialogue himself, and in this dialogue God gives everyone proof of His existence in full accordance with the principle “practice is the criterion of truth.” It is for this reason that conscience in the religious worldview is a means of distinguishing between objective Good and Evil in the specifics of the incessantly ongoing life of society, and a good person is a person living under the dictatorship of conscience.
In the atheistic worldview, the nature and source of conscience are not knowable, although the fact of its activity in the psyche of many people is recognized by some schools of atheistic psychology. We can talk about conscience and freedom in the indicated sense as a self-evident fact, without going into a discussion of theological traditions of historically established concepts of religion, if circumstances do not favor this; or if you have to explain this problem to materialist atheists, for whom turning to theological issues is a known sign of the interlocutor’s inadequacy, or to idealist atheists, for whom the interlocutor’s disagreement with their accepted religious tradition is a known sign of possession and Satanism.
In accordance with this non-economic and non-military-technical task in its essence - the task of changing the current concept of globalization to the righteous concept of the system universal compulsory and professionally specialized education in the country was oriented under the leadership of I.V. Stalin's goal was for everyone who is capable and willing to learn to acquire knowledge that would allow them to reach at least the third level of unfreedom, including the acquisition of conceptual power.
Although the gradation of levels of unfreedom shown above and the phenomenon of conceptual power in the era of I.V. Stalin was not realized, however, this is exactly what he wrote about directly in the terminology of that era, and this can be clearly understood from his words:
“It is necessary... to achieve such a cultural growth of society that would provide all members of society with the comprehensive development of their physical and mental abilities, so that members of society have the opportunity to receive an education sufficient to become active figures in social development...”.
“It would be wrong to think that such a serious cultural growth of the members of society can be achieved without serious changes in the present state of labor. To do this, you must first reduce the working day to at least 6, and then to 5 hours. This is necessary to ensure that members of society receive enough free time necessary to receive a comprehensive education. To do this, it is necessary, further, to introduce compulsory polytechnic training, which is necessary so that members of society have the opportunity to freely choose a profession and not be chained to one profession for the rest of their lives. To do this, it is necessary to further radically improve living conditions and raise the real wages of workers and employees at least twice, if not more, both through a direct increase in money wages, and especially through a further systematic reduction in prices for consumer goods.
These are the basic conditions for preparing the transition to communism.”
Real democracy, which is based on the availability for the development of knowledge and skills that allow the full management function in relation to society, is impossible without the development of sufficiently wide layers in all social groups the art of dialectics (as a practical cognitive and creative skill) as the basis for the development of conceptual authority.
And accordingly, dialectical materialism was included in the USSR as a standard of both the average (later becoming universal) and higher education, due to which a certain number of students, in the process of becoming acquainted with “diamat”, developed in themselves any kind of personal culture of dialectical knowledge and creativity, even though dialectics in “diamat” was crippled by G.V.F. Hegel: reduced to three “laws” and replaced by a certain logic, in the form in which it was perceived by the classics of Marxism - K. Marx, F. Engels, V.I. Lenin, L.D. Bronstein (Trotsky).
However, the education system of the USSR did not provide access to the level of freedom due to the totalitarian dominance of Marxism, which distorted the worldview and brought it into conflict with conscience, which was also facilitated by the principle of “democratic centralism” that underlay the internal discipline of the CPSU (b) - the CPSU, the Komsomol and the Pioneer organization, Soviet trade unions, which became an instrument of subordination of the majority to the not always righteous will and essentially mafia discipline of the leading minority.
But even with these vices, the education system in the USSR still did not prevent the breakthrough to freedom of those who lived under the rule of the dictatorship of conscience and treated Marxism and the internal discipline of the party and public organizations controlled by the party leadership as a historically transitory circumstance, and conscience - as an eternal basis, on the basis of which the essence and fate of every individual and every society is built.
And ensuring the effectiveness of the education system as a means of innovative development of the economy at a faster pace and economic support of the country’s defense capability is a means of solving the above-mentioned I.V. Stalin's main task: so that everyone could become active figures in social development.
If we talk about the development of the Russian education system in the future, then - based on what has been said above - it can only be expressed in the construction of a system of universal compulsory education, capable of bringing the student to a single level of freedom in a previously defined sense and motivating everyone who has problems to achieve this result health problems do not interfere with mastering the curriculum.
At the same time, education (in the sense of providing access to the development of knowledge and skills and assistance in their development) is, without alternative, associated with the upbringing of younger generations, since access to the only level of freedom is not only the possession of certain knowledge and skills, but also the unconditional self-subordination of the will of the individual. conscience, and this is the topic of raising each child personally in accordance with the specific circumstances of his life.
Afterword
Soviet school teachers provided basic knowledge in their subjects. And they were quite enough for a school graduate to independently (without tutors or bribes) enter a higher educational institution. Nevertheless, Soviet education was considered fundamental. The general educational level implied a broad outlook. There was not a single school graduate in the USSR who had not read Pushkin or did not know who Vasnetsov was.
At the end I would like to cite an essay by a Soviet schoolchild about the Motherland. Look! This is how our mothers and grandmothers knew how to write. 1960-70 years in the USSR... And this was not written ballpoint pen, and feather!
Congratulations to you all on the Day of Knowledge!
Myth one: Soviet education was the best in the world. When we talk about Soviet education, we imagine something monolithic, static, unchanged throughout its entire length. In fact, this was not the case. Soviet education, like any social system, of course, changed, was subject to certain dynamics, that is, the logic of this formation changed, the goals and tasks that stood before it changed. And when we generally say the word “best,” it is very loaded with emotional evaluation. What does “best” mean, compared to what is best, where are the criteria, where are the assessments, why do we think so?
In fact, if we look at Soviet education from the early 1920s, when the Bolsheviks finally came to power, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, we see that it changed significantly. For example, in the 1920s, the main goal of Soviet education was the elimination of illiteracy. The majority of the population - almost 80%, and not only among the peasant population, but also some people in the cities, practically could not, or did not know how to read and write at all. Accordingly, it was necessary to teach them this. Special schools were created for adult citizens from 16 to 50 years old, special courses were created for the younger generations, and there was a completely understandable task - the elimination of illiteracy.
If we take the later era of the 1930s-1940s, then of course the most important task there was to create personnel for accelerated naturalization, to prepare specific technical personnel who would ensure accelerated modernization of industry. And this task is also understandable. School courses were built accordingly, technical schools and colleges were built accordingly, and so on. And Soviet education also coped with this task, courses were prepared and, as you and I know, Stalin’s industrialization was carried out in the shortest possible time.
If we take the post-war era of the 1950-1960s, then the most important task for Soviet education is to provide, again, scientific and technical personnel for a big breakthrough in space, in the military-industrial sphere, and again, Soviet education coped with this task, we We remember the words of John Kennedy that we lost the space race to the Russians at school. That is, in principle, it coped with the tasks that faced Soviet education. But you and I can already see that it was heterogeneous and these tasks changed.
However, we are talking mainly about physics and mathematics education, that is, Soviet education was aimed at specific main tasks. All other spheres, and primarily the humanitarian sphere, were accordingly in a completely different state; there were virtually no foreign languages, and at the level at which they were taught, those people who were lucky enough to escape abroad were told that few people understood them. Moreover, humanitarian knowledge itself was blinkered by ideological clichés. And in general, this area has been mothballed and its development has been called into question.
Why was there mainly a focus on mathematics, physics and exact sciences? There were both objective and subjective reasons. The objective reasons were that it was necessary to train personnel, as I already said, for the military-industrial complex; engineers were needed, engineers qualified first of all. Not just a person who could work at a machine, but a person who would understand how it all works. And the subjective reasons were that since the humanitarian sphere was completely ideologized and there was nowhere for scientific thought, as such, to develop in the humanitarian sphere, everything was prohibited. Therefore, the person who wanted to engage in science with relative freedom could afford to do this in the field of mathematics, in the field of physics - in the field of exact sciences. And it is characteristic that future philosophers of logic came mainly from Soviet mathematical schools. And if we take the humanitarian sphere, a classic example is with our philosopher Alexei Fedorovich Losev, who was forbidden to engage in philosophy, and under the guise of philosophy he studied aesthetics, although he practically did the same thing.
For the exact sciences, physics and mathematics, Soviet education was indeed very good. But the fact is that when in 1943 Soviet troops began to push the Germans to the borders of the Soviet Union and new cities and villages were liberated, the question arose of who would restore it all. Of course, the choice was made in favor of high school students and future students of technical vocational schools. But it turned out that the literacy level of these people was at the lowest level; they could not even enter a technical school as a first-year student, such was the low level of education.
Subsequently, a gradual increase in the educational level began to occur. First, a compulsory seven-year plan, then, from 1958, an eight-year plan, from 1964, a ten-year plan, and from 1984, an eleven-year plan. What this led to - it led to the fact that those poor students who previously could go to work, or say, to a factory, or to a factory school, get some kind of education there, without interrupting practice and become a good worker, or they could simply leave to work immediately without improving their educational level, now they are forced to stay in school. And those who could not be sent to vocational schools were forced to stay at school and teachers had to do something about it. Moreover, since all this was done spontaneously and our educational level increased quickly, that is, yesterday, a very large number of teachers did not have time to master this increased level, that is, take advanced training courses, understand what is required of them.
And therefore, a very ugly situation turned out - what we call culling, when most of the students could not go anywhere and the formalization of education, when the teacher pretended that he was teaching, the children pretended that they were studying in order to survive to the end of school, draw threes and release them in peace great life. And the result was a situation of segregation, when on average 20-30% of school graduates entered universities in the 1960-1970s. The remaining 70-80% were rejected, they did not go anywhere, they went to production, but the 20% who entered received a good academic education at school, they could get it and wanted it. They then received a very good education in universities and then made glory for Soviet science, primarily fundamental physico-mathematical science. They will then launch rockets into space and so on. But the remaining 80% were left behind and not taken into account, and the literacy rate among them was very low. That is, they knew how to read, write, count, and in general, after that they immediately went into production.
Soviet schoolchildren for the most part had a fairly good set of fragmentary knowledge in subjects, but, firstly, they did not know how to apply this knowledge in life, and secondly, they had no idea how to transfer knowledge from one subject area to another. A classic example with mathematics and physics - any physics teacher knew that if physics fails, most likely it is necessary to look for problems in mathematics. But this was more problematic for other subjects, such as chemistry and biology, or history and literature. And most importantly, when they talk about the best educational system in the Soviet Union, they forget that practically no one copied this system. We now know the best educational systems in the world - in Finland, in Singapore, people from all over the world flock there. This system is in demand, it is bought for a lot of money. No one bought the Soviet system, and even for free, by and large, no one needed it. A diploma from a graduate of an average Soviet university was not valued anywhere in Europe or the world. Now I’m not talking about those bright minds who went abroad and then received good money, first of all - these are, again, physicists and mathematicians, someone could even become a Nobel laureate. But the question is how much the education system itself has invested in these people, how much is from the system and how much is the result from them, from these outstanding people.
We came to power to hang, but we had to hang to come to power
The flow of articles and notes about the “good Tsar-Father”, the noble white movement and the red murderer ghouls opposing them does not diminish. I'm not going to advocate for one side or the other. I'll just give you the facts. Just naked facts, taken from open sources, and nothing more. Tsar Nicholas II, who abdicated the throne, was arrested on March 2, 1917 by General Mikhail Alekseev, his chief of staff. The Tsarina and the family of Nicholas II were arrested on March 7 by General Lavr Kornilov, commander of the Petrograd Military District. Yes, yes, those same future founding heroes white movement…
Lenin’s government, which assumed responsibility for the country in November 17, invited the Romanov family to go to relatives in London, but the English The Royal Family DENIED them permission to move to England.
The overthrow of the Tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. " Even Nikolai’s close relatives put red bows on their chests.”, writes historian Heinrich Joffe. Grand Duke Michael, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, refused the throne. The Russian Orthodox Church, having committed perjury to the church oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the Tsar’s abdication.
Russian officers. 57% of him was supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later went over to the reds. 43% (75 thousand people) immediately went for the Reds, that is, ultimately - more than half of the officers supported Soviet power.
It was not for nothing that the first few months after the October Uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were called the “triumphal march of Soviet power.” Of the 84 provincial and other large cities, it was established in only 15 as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere,” testifies Major General Ivan Akulinin in his memoirs “Orenburg Cossack army in the fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920." “Just at this time,” he writes further, “combat units - regiments and batteries - began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts, but it turned out to be completely impossible to count on their help: they didn’t even want to hear about the armed struggle with the Bolsheviks "
Russian officers were divided in their sympathies...
How, under such circumstances, did Soviet Russia suddenly find itself surrounded by fronts? Here's how: from the end of February to the beginning of March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.
February 18, 1918 German and Austro-Hungarian troops (about 50 divisions) went on the offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In two weeks they occupied vast spaces.
March 3, 1918 The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, but the Germans did not stop. Taking advantage of the agreement with the Central Rada (by that time already firmly established in Germany), they continued their offensive in Ukraine, overthrew Soviet power in Kiev on March 1 and moved further in the eastern and southern directions to Kharkov, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa .
5th of March German troops under the command of Major General von der Goltz invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. April 18th German troops invaded Crimea, and on April 30 captured Sevastopol.
TO mid June more than 15 thousand German troops with aviation and artillery were in Transcaucasia, including 10 thousand people in Poti and 5 thousand in Tiflis (Tbilisi).
Turkish troops operated in Transcaucasia from mid-February.
March 9, 1918 The English landing force entered Murmansk under the pretext... of the need to protect military equipment warehouses from the Germans.
5th of April Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but under the pretext of... protecting Japanese citizens “from banditry” in this city.
May 25- performance of the Czechoslovak Corps, whose echelons were located between Penza and Vladivostok.
It must be taken into account that the “whites” (generals Alekseev, Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Pyotr Wrangel, Admiral Alexander Kolchak), who played their role in the overthrow of the tsar, renounced the oath Russian Empire, but did not accept the new government, starting the struggle for their own rule in Russia.
Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918
In the south of Russia, where the “Russian Liberation Forces” operated mainly, the situation was veiled by the Russian form of the “White Movement”. Ataman of the “Don Army” Pyotr Krasnov, when they pointed out the “German orientation” to him and set Denikin’s “volunteers” as an example, replied: “Yes, yes, gentlemen! The volunteer army is pure and infallible.
But it’s me, the Don Ataman, who, with my dirty hands, takes German shells and cartridges, washes them in the waves of the quiet Don and hands them over clean to the Volunteer Army! The entire shame of this matter lies with me!”
Kolchak Alexander Vasilyevich, the much-loved “romantic hero” of the modern “intelligentsia”. Kolchak, having violated the oath of the Russian Empire, was the first to Black Sea Fleet swore allegiance to the Provisional Government. Having learned about the October Revolution, he handed the British ambassador a request for admission into the British army. The ambassador, after consultations with London, handed Kolchak a direction to the Mesopotamian front. On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, inviting him to Manchuria to form Russian military units.
Murdered Bolshevik
So, by August 1918, the armed forces of the RSFSR were completely or almost completely opposed by foreign troops. “It would be a mistake to think that during this entire year we fought on the fronts for the cause of Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian White Guards fought for OUR cause,” Winston Churchill later wrote.
White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the magazine “Science and Life” No. 12 for 2004 - and this magazine has managed to be noted in recent years for its ardent anti-Sovietism - in an article about Denikin writes: “In the territories liberated from the Reds, a real revanchist Sabbath was going on. The old masters were returning, arbitrariness, robberies, and terrible Jewish pogroms reigned..."
There are legends about the atrocities of Kolchak's troops. The number of those killed and tortured in Kolchak’s dungeons was impossible to count. About 25 thousand people were shot in the Yekaterinburg province alone.
“Terrible murders were committed in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. I will not be mistaken if I say,” American General William Sidney Greves, an eyewitness to those events, later admitted, “that for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements."
General Kornilov clearly expressed the “ideology” of the Whites on this issue:
“We came to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power”...
Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik
The “allies” of the white movement - the British, French and other Japanese - exported everything: metal, coal, grain, machinery and equipment, engines and furs. Civilian ships and steam locomotives were stolen. From Ukraine alone, by October 1918, the Germans had exported 52 thousand tons of grain and fodder, 34 thousand tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53 thousand horses and 39 thousand heads of cattle. There was a large-scale plunder of Russia.
And read about the atrocities (no less bloody and massive - no one argues) of the Red Army and the Chekists in the works of the democratic press. This text is intended solely to dispel the illusions of those who admire the romance and nobility of the “white knights of Russia.” There was dirt, blood and suffering. Wars and revolutions cannot bring anything else...
“White Terror in Russia” is the title of the book by the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it leave no stone unturned against the fictions and myths widely circulating in the media and publications on historical topics.
There was everything: from demonstrations of force of the interventionists to the execution of Red Army soldiers by the Czechs
Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party began to take a firm and uncompromising attitude towards them as they became convinced from their own bitter experience of the need for decisive measures. And at first there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. After all, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from edge to edge of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the Soviet power by the overwhelming majority of the people. Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials - generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, prominent political figure Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on fair terms. word, although their hostility to the new government was beyond doubt.
These gentlemen broke their word by taking an active part in the armed struggle, in organizing provocations and sabotage against their people. Generosity shown towards obvious enemies Soviet power, resulted in thousands and thousands of additional victims, suffering and torment of hundreds of thousands of people who supported revolutionary changes. And then the leaders of the Russian communists made the inevitable conclusions - they knew how to learn from their mistakes...
Tomsk residents carry the bodies of executed participants in the anti-Kolchak uprising
Having come to power, the Bolsheviks did not at all ban the activities of their political opponents. They were not arrested, they were allowed to publish their own newspapers and magazines, hold rallies and marches, etc. The People's Socialists, Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued their legal activities in the bodies of the new government, starting with local Soviets and ending with the Central Executive Committee. And again, only after the transition of these parties to open armed struggle against the new system were their factions expelled from the Soviets by decree of the Central Executive Committee of June 14, 1918. But even after this, opposition parties continued to operate legally. Only those organizations or individuals who were convicted of specific subversive actions were subject to punishment.
Excavation of the grave in which the victims of Kolchak’s repressions of March 1919 were buried, Tomsk, 1920
As shown in the book, the initiators of the civil war were the White Guards, representing the interests of the overthrown exploiting classes. And the impetus for it, as one of the leaders of the white movement, Denikin, admitted, was the rebellion of the Czechoslovak corps, largely caused and supported by Western “friends” of Russia. Without the help of these “friends,” the leaders of the White Czechs, and then the White Guard generals, would never have achieved serious success. And the interventionists themselves actively participated both in operations against the Red Army and in terror against the insurgent people.
Victims of Kolchak in Novosibirsk, 1919
The “civilized” Czechoslovak punitive forces dealt with their “Slavic brothers” with fire and the bayonet, literally wiping out entire towns and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathizing with the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those living there. When suppressing the uprising of prisoners of the Alexander Transit Prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot them point-blank with machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days, about 600 people died at the hands of the executioners. And there are a great many such examples.
Bolsheviks killed by the Czechs near Vladivostok
By the way, foreign interventionists actively contributed to the establishment of new concentration camps on Russian territory for those who opposed the occupation or sympathized with the Bolsheviks. The Provisional Government began to create concentration camps. This is an indisputable fact, which the exposers of the “bloody atrocities” of the communists are also silent about. When French and English troops landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, one of their leaders, General Poole, on behalf of the allies, solemnly promised the northerners to ensure “the triumph of law and justice” in the occupied territory. However, almost immediately after these words, a concentration camp was organized on the island of Mudyug, captured by the interventionists. Here are the testimonies of those who happened to be there: “Several people died every night, and their corpses remained in the barracks until the morning. And in the morning a French sergeant appeared and gloatingly asked: “How many Bolsheviks are kaput today?” Of those imprisoned on Mudyug, more than 50 percent lost their lives, many went crazy...”
An American interventionist poses near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik
After the departure of the Anglo-French interventionists, power in the North of Russia passed into the hands of the White Guard general Yevgeny Miller. He not only continued, but also intensified repression and terror, trying to stop the rapidly developing process of “Bolshevisation of the masses.” Their most inhumane embodiment was the convict prison in Yokanga, which one of the prisoners described as “the most brutal, sophisticated method of exterminating people with a slow, painful death.” Here are excerpts from the memoirs of those who miraculously managed to survive in this hell: “The dead lay on bunks along with the living, and the living were no better than the dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decomposing alive, they presented a nightmare picture.”
Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919
By the time Iokanga was liberated from the whites, out of one and a half thousand prisoners, 576 people remained there, of whom 205 could no longer move.
A system of such concentration camps, as shown in the book, was deployed in Siberia and the Far East by Admiral Kolchak, perhaps the most cruel of all the White Guard rulers. They were created both on the basis of prisons and in those prisoner of war camps that were built by the Provisional Government. The regime drove almost a million (914,178) people who rejected the restoration of pre-revolutionary orders into more than 40 concentration camps. To this we must add about 75 thousand people languishing in white Siberia. The regime deported more than 520 thousand prisoners to slave, almost unpaid labor in enterprises and agriculture.
However, neither in Solzhenitsyn’s “GULAG Archipelago”, nor in the writings of his followers Alexander Yakovlev, Dmitry Volkogonov and others, there is not a word about this monstrous archipelago. Although the same Solzhenitsyn begins his “Archipelago” with the civil war, depicting the “Red Terror”. A classic example of lying by simple omission!
American Bolshevik Hunters
In the anti-Soviet literature about the civil war, a lot is written with anguish about the “barges of death,” which, they say, were used by the Bolsheviks to deal with White Guard officers. Pavel Golub’s book provides facts and documents indicating that “barges” and “death trains” began to be actively and massively used by the White Guards. When in the fall of 1918 they began to suffer defeat from the Red Army on the eastern front, “barges” and “death trains” with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps reached Siberia and then the Far East.
Horror and death - that’s what the White Guard generals brought to the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary regime. And this is by no means a journalistic exaggeration. Kolchak himself frankly wrote about the “vertical of control” he created: “The activities of the chiefs of district police, special forces, all kinds of commandants, and heads of individual detachments are a complete crime.” It would be good to think about these words for those who today admire the “patriotism” and “dedication” of the white movement, which supposedly, in contrast to the Red Army, defended the interests of “Great Russia”.
Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk
Well, as for the “red terror”, its size was completely incomparable with the white one, and it was mainly retaliatory in nature. Even General Grevs, commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia, admitted this.
And this happened not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, the frank confessions of the American general do not at all absolve him of guilt for participating in reprisals against people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. Terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign interventionists and white armies.
In total, there were more than a million interventionists on Russian territory - 280 thousand Austro-German bayonets and about 850 thousand British, American, French and Japanese. The joint attempt of the White Guard armies and their foreign allies to commit a Russian “Thermidor” cost the Russian people, even according to incomplete data, very dearly: about 8 million were killed, tortured in concentration camps, died from wounds, hunger and epidemics. The country’s material losses, according to experts, amounted to an astronomical figure - 50 billion gold rubles...
The myth busting continues:Unlike Marxism, the counter-revolution always opposed conspiratorial activity to the laws of historical development.
Anti-Soviet propaganda that doesn't stop for an hour in our country, has long been adopted thesis about the conspiratorial and anti-patriotic nature of the Bolshevik Party and the October Revolution.
On television and in other media, the voices of Narochnitskaya and others do not cease, persistently introducing into the public consciousness the idea that, if not for the actions of a small group of Bolshevik conspirators who received countless funds from Germany, then the Soviet period in our national history did not have.
In addition to the fact that these claims are based on long-debunked fakes, they blatantly distort the essence of Bolshevik theory and practice, which were based on the principles of Marxist teaching.
The founders of Marxism taught that revolutions are an objective consequence of deep contradictions in social development and the intensification of class struggle. Developing the Marxist doctrine of revolution, V.I. Lenin emphasized that the revolutionary situation is a combination of objective reasons: the crisis of the “tops,” the aggravation of the plight of the “bottoms,” a significant increase in the activity of the masses.
At the same time, Lenin pointed out that revolution arises only in those conditions when these objective reasons are joined by “the ability of the revolutionary class to carry out revolutionary mass actions strong enough to break (or break) the old government.” Marxism-Leninism resolutely rejected teachings and movements that proceeded from the possibility of making revolutions through conspiracies contrary to the objective conditions of social development (Blanquism, anarchism). Only relying on the scientific theory of revolution, Lenin and his comrades were able to carry out the world's first socialist revolution.
Unlike the communists, their enemies sought to act contrary to the flow of historical development, trying to stop it, or reverse it with the help of conspiracies, relying on individual representatives of the ruling classes and the huge funds at their disposal.
The counter-revolution always opposed conspiratorial activity to the laws of historical development. This activity especially intensified during the preparation and during the First World War, which was the result of a chain of grandiose conspiracies of the imperialist powers against the peoples of the world. The failure of adventurist plans based on quick victory marches to Paris, Berlin, Constantinople and St. Petersburg, and the growing popular resistance to imperialist policies only increased the efforts of the secret intelligence services of the warring powers aimed at continuing the bloody massacre.
Now in our media it's not customary to judge the inhuman and predatory nature of the First World War, the predatory and adventuristic policies of its main participants, the anti-people nature of the worldwide massacre in which they were involved hundreds of millions people on the planet. On the contrary, the activities of the Bolsheviks, who turned out to be one of the few political parties in the world that remained faithful to proletarian internationalism and the anti-imperialist struggle, are called treasonous, claiming that Lenin and his supporters stabbed Russia in the back at a time when it was two steps away from victory.
At the same time, using monopoly media, the ruling class of modern Russia and its lawyers are trying to hide facts that have long been widely known all over the world. These facts indicate that conspiracies to bleed Russia were not hatched by the Bolsheviks, but by their ideological opponents with direct support foreign intelligence These facts indicate that with the participation of the ruling circles of Russia, the Western powers planned to use the peoples of Russia as a free source of cannon fodder and turn her wealth and her territory into objects of plunder.
To verify this, just contact famous facts, including those set out in the memoirs and other works of the famous English writer William Somerset Maugham, who during the First World War successfully served as a British intelligence officer.
A conspiracy organized by British intelligence and preparation for the Russian Civil War
In his autobiography W. S. Maugham This is how I remembered my first and last trip to Russia in 1917:
“I was sent as a private agent, who could be disavowed if necessary. My instructions required that I make contact with forces hostile to the government and prepare a plan that would keep Russia from withdrawing from the war." To the end of his life, Maugham was confident that "there was a certain possibility of success if I had been sent six months earlier." According to the writer, to implement the task he had “unlimited funds” at his disposal. Maugham was accompanied by “four loyal Czechs who were to act as liaison officers between me and Professor Masaryk (future President of Czechoslovakia. Author’s note), who had under his command something like sixty thousand of his compatriots in various parts of Russia».
It is known that during the battles of the First World War in Russia it turned out 200 thousand captured Czechs and Slovaks, who were soldiers and officers of the Austro-Hungarian army. After the February Revolution, the Czechoslovak National Council, created in Paris in 1915, headed by Professor Tomas Masaryk, decided to organize a corps, or legion, in Russia. It was assumed that it would include Czechs and Slovaks who permanently lived in Russia, as well as those who were taken prisoner by the Russians.
In June 1917
Masaryk, having arrived in Russia, set about forming two corps divisions, whose ranks soon included over 60 thousand people. The corps was placed in Left Bank Ukraine.
At first, it was decided to send this corps to France, where there were already many military units from Russia. But then the leadership of the Czechoslovak National Council began to talk about how the corps could become a “military-police force” to restore order in Russia. Who put forward this proposal and what exactly it consisted of is still unclear. The fact is that the events in which the soldiers and officers of the Czechoslovak corps were involved were a tangled chain of foreign policy intrigues. The individual links of this chain were forged in the leading imperialist powers of the world.
Although England and France were Russia’s allies in the bloc of “cordial consent”, or the Entente, they did not feel “cordial” closeness to her. Both powers sought to use Russia in their own interests and at the same time did a lot to harm their ally. Each of these countries did not want Russia to strengthen during the world war. As the English historian A. J. P. Taylor noted, France strongly opposed plans to expand Russian positions at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, and “the British... had their own problems with Russia in the Near and Middle East.”
Neither France nor England wanted a strong Russia, and therefore in London welcomed the overthrow of the autocracy, seeing in this event evidence of the weakening of Russia. British Foreign Secretary Balfour commented on the news of the revolution in Russia: “If it is possible to create a completely independent Poland..., then it will be possible to completely cut off Russia from the West. Russia will cease to be a factor in Western political life, or will almost cease to be such.”
Despite the fact that Russia was ally Entente countries, the Western powers were in no hurry to help the Russian army, which took over first blow and actually saved France from defeat in the fall of 1914. Lloyd George later admitted:
“If the French, for their part, had allocated at least a modest part of their reserves of guns and shells, then the Russian armies, instead of being simple target for Krupp guns, would in turn become a formidable factor in defense and attack... While the Russian armies were being slaughtered under the blows of superior German artillery and were not able to provide any resistance due to a lack of rifles and shells, the French were hoarding shells, as if it were gold."
The rise of anti-war sentiment in Russia in 1917 worried London. Wanting to continue to drive Russian soldiers “to slaughter,” the British government began to prepare a secret conspiracy to prevent Russia from leaving the war. The “military-police” mission that the Czechoslovak corps was supposed to carry out did not mean establishing control over the observance of order on the streets of Russian cities, but the implementation of state coup in the interests of Great Britain.
The Czechoslovak Corps was not the only organized force participating in the implementation of London's plans. Maugham mentions his constant contacts with the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary terrorists, murderer of Russian Minister of Internal Affairs V.K. Pleve and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Boris Savinkov. The ruthless terrorist made a lasting impression on Maugham - “one of the most amazing people I have ever met.”
Together with Savinkov, other right-wing Social Revolutionaries, his like-minded people, also took part in organizing the conspiracy. Since Savinkov was Deputy Minister of War Provisional Government and commissioner Southwestern Front, he became close to Alekseev when he replaced Kornilov after his arrest as chief of the general staff. Therefore, Maugham was able to attract the military to the conspiracy, who then led the Volunteer Army.
It is quite possible that the actions of military and political organizations, if they acted simultaneously and in concert, under a single command, could change the nature of events or, at least, seriously influence their course. One of the reasons for the failure of the conspiracy was the rapid loss of controllability of Russia in 1917, which was contributed to no small extent by the arrogant arrogance of the head of the Provisional Government.
When Maugham arrived from Vladivostok to Petrograd, the situation in the country was critical.
“Things in Russia were getting worse,” Maugham wrote. - Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, was consumed by vanity and fired any minister who seemed to him to pose a threat to his position. He made endless speeches. Food shortages were becoming increasingly serious, winter was approaching, and there was no fuel. Kerensky made speeches. The underground Bolsheviks became more active, Lenin was hiding in Petrograd, they said that Kerensky knew where he was, but he did not dare to arrest him. He made speeches."
England decided to overthrow the vain talker and establish in Russia the “firm power” it needed to continue the war against Germany.
In implementing this plan Maugham was not a simple performer, but an proactive organizer and inspirer of a political conspiracy. Portraying himself in an autobiographical account of the scout Ashenden, Maugham wrote:
“Plans were being made. Measures were taken. Ashenden argued, convinced, promised. He had to overcome the hesitation of one and fight the fatalism of the other. He had to determine who was decisive and who was arrogant, who was sincere and who was weak-willed. He had to restrain his irritation during Russian verbosity, he had to be patient with people who wanted to talk about everything except the matter itself; he had to listen sympathetically to pompous and boastful speeches. He had to beware of betrayal. He had to indulge the vanity of fools and avoid the greed of the selfish and vain. Time was running out."
By the end of October 1917, Maugham had completed his work to create a powerful underground organization. He sent an encrypted coup plan to London. Maugham claimed that "the plan was accepted and all necessary funds were promised to him." However, the great scout found himself in time trouble.
To a large extent this was due to the fact that the ruling circles of Russia showed a pathological inability to quick action even in the name of self-preservation .
Maugham wrote: “Endless chatter where action was required, hesitation, apathy when apathy led to destruction, pompous declarations, insincerity and a formal attitude towards the matter, which made me disgusted with Russia and the Russians.” “Disgust” for those in power, transferred to the country and people, prevented Maugham from seeing the main reasons for the internal weakness of the top - their deep conflict with the people, their inability to express its interests and act in the name of the people.
The activity of Maugham, the ruthlessness of the terrorist and writer Savinkov, the business determination of the leaders of the Czechoslovak corps and other participants in the conspiracy were not enough. They were opposed by the organization of the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin. According to Maugham, at the end of October 1917
“The rumors became more and more ominous, but the actual activity of the Bolsheviks became even more frightening. Kerensky ran back and forth like a frightened chicken. And then thunder struck. On the night of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks rebelled... Kerensky’s ministers were arrested.”
The very next day after the victory of the October Revolution, the writer was warned that the Bolsheviks were looking for a secret resident of Great Britain. ( Back on September 14, J.V. Stalin, in his article “Foreigners and the Kornilov Conspiracy,” drew attention to the active participation of British subjects in conspiratorial activities in Russia.) Having sent an encrypted telegram, the leader of the conspiracy urgently left Russia. Britain sent a special battle cruiser to remove its super spy from Scandinavia.
Maugham - W. Somerset Maugham
However, Maugham's flight did not mean the defeat of a complex and extensive network a conspiracy that he carefully created.
The links in Maugham's conspiracy became time bombs planted under the Soviet Republic. The scale of the secret activities of British intelligence in Russia in 1917 was so great that even the belated actions of some organizations participating in the conspiracy almost turned out to be fatal for Soviet power.
Despite the fact that by May 1918, the Czechoslovak corps was able to act not in central Russia, but beyond the Urals, 45, not 60 thousand people took part in its rebellion, and the already formed bodies of Soviet power, units of the Red Army and forces opposed it The Cheka, the Czechoslovak corps immediately captured large cities located along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and soon took control of a significant part of Siberia, the Urals and the Volga region and even tried to capture the central part of Russia. The uprising of the Czechoslovak corps, conceived by British intelligence in mid-1917, became the signal for the start of the Civil War of 1918 - 1920.
Czech legionnaires
The Czechoslovak Corps was not the only organized force participating in the implementation of London's plans. Mutiny led by one of the conspirators Maugham Boris Savinkov in Yaroslavl and other cities of the Upper Volga region (July 6 - 21, 1918) became one of the most powerful counter-revolutionary actions of the Civil War: the rebels held power for 16 days, having exterminated many supporters of Soviet power.
Later, many wondered why Savinkov raised revolts in Yaroslavl, Rybinsk, Rostov, Vladimir, Murom, where the forces of the right Socialist Revolutionaries were small, and not, say, in Kaluga, where they had a powerful organization. Obviously, the performance of the right Socialist Revolutionaries assumed the imminent arrival of interventionist forces from the north, which by this time had landed on the Kola Peninsula and were going to take Arkhangelsk. It is also known that during the rebellion Savinkov maintained contacts with the Czechoslovak corps. Even before the start of the rebellion, money was delivered to members of the Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom in the north by Masaryk’s closest assistant I. Kletsanda.
The forces involved in the Yaroslavl rebellion were only part of what Savinkov and his henchmen had at their disposal. Headed by Savinkov, the “Union for the Defense of the Motherland” united thousands of military units, divided into groups of 5-6 militants for the sake of conspiracy. These formations remained in Moscow, Kazan, Kostroma, Kaluga and other cities. Even after the defeat of the Yaroslavl rebellion, Savinkov’s organization retained its combat effectiveness for a long time.
The course of the Yaroslavl rebellion showed not only the presence of organizational ties between the Savinkovites and the Czechoslovaks, but also with the “White Guard”, which acted at the end of 1917 in the south of the country. After the mutiny in Yaroslavl, in his order for the city, the rebel Colonel Perkhurov reported that he was acting “on the basis of the powers given by the Commander-in-Chief of the Volunteer Army, which is under supreme command General Alekseev." The civil war, for which the Russian media foamingly blames the Bolsheviks, was prepared and unleashed as a result of a conspiracy between the counter-revolutionary forces of Russia and foreign intelligence services and in favor of the anti-people, anti-national interests of the imperialist powers.
A copy of someone else's materials
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