Lunacharsky - Lenin and youth

Lunacharsky Articles and speeches on international politics

Lenin and youth

The published report is one of the first direct responses of A. V. Lunacharsky to the death of Vladimir Ilyich. It was read on Revolutionary Students' Day, January 25, 1924, to students at the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow. In the first publication (A. V. Lunacharsky's pamphlet "Lenin", M., "Krasnaya Nov", 1924), the shorthand record, due to the haste of publication, was poorly edited. In this publication, several stylistic clarifications have been made - where the essence of the typographical error was not in doubt. The publication was prepared by I. A. Sats.

Comrades! I willingly follow your desire to recall together with you Ilyich's basic views on the youth and their tasks. It is not very difficult to do this now, since most of the ideas of Vladimir Ilyich - at least those that he was able to express in writing - most of his ideas concerning youth are expressed in those of his works that are devoted to issues of education and which are published by the publishing house "Krasnaya Nov" in a relatively small book 1 Nadezhda Konstantinovna, at my request, recently did additional work: she found a number of resolutions, points of programs and decisions of the Central Committee, the author of which was Vladimir Ilyich. But it adds a little to what is in this book.

Vladimir Ilyich generally did not like to waste words in vain and in most cases he gave bright and simple formulas, for all their enormous depth. Often what Vladimir Ilyich said seemed unusually light. True, this did not deceive his large popular and international audience. Everyone understood that behind this simplicity, through this transparency, great wisdom shines, although this social wisdom was expressed in such publicly accessible forms; nevertheless, wisdom is always wisdom, and only by constant deliberation, penetration into its depths, can one completely master it. I do not want to use these words to make it seem to me that Lenin's thoughts about youth are not widely spread or misunderstood. I don't know and I'm guessing otherwise. I only want to say that on a few relatively quotations from the works of Comrade Lenin, we must build a consistent, as exhaustive as possible of his views on youth. These are the ones I will try to present to you now.

Of course, it is natural that youth and education are two concepts that are inseparable from each other. Speaking about the views of Vladimir Ilyich on the youth, I will have to constantly refer to his views on public education. This is where I should start.

Vladimir Ilyich, of course, was not one of those idealist liberals who believed that the degree of cultural development of a people determines its proximity to the revolution. You remember, of course, those vulgar propositions with which Russian liberalism was rich: first it is necessary that the masses reach a certain cultural level, and then one can think about freedoms, even if they are torn out by the protest of the masses of the people.

Vladimir Ilyich took a completely opposite point of view. He believed that the exploitative government would not give education to the masses. And he did not see the slightest contradiction in the fact that the bourgeois democracies, being exploiting societies, nonetheless give a certain education to the masses: he understood that this education was inadequate in its scope, poisoned in its composition by such specific impurities that should have retarded the development critical thought among the people, and does not at all aim at turning false democracy, which makes it possible to hold power in the hands of tens of thousands of exploiters, into genuine, i. people, determined by the entire array of this people. Lenin understood perfectly well that public education in bourgeois countries serves to throw the dust of external, decorative democracy into the eyes of the masses, to keep them at the level of satisfaction with their constitution.

Especially when it came to a country like Russia, it was clear to Vladimir Ilyich that progress could not be made through the doors of public education. Although the development of capitalism in Russia should have pushed her towards at least the minimal implementation of those aspects of public education that were deployed by the capitalist system of the West, the autocracy was aware that for its existence and for the existence of that form of alliance between landowners and capitalists, which was our autocratic power even this degree of education is harmful.

Two principles struggled in the soul of our landowner state: on the one hand, the consciousness that capitalism cannot be developed without public education, and on the other hand, the consciousness that if you cast off this backwardness, if you begin systematic work to improve the education of the masses, then you run the risk of instantly evoke in the imagination of the masses a consciousness of the enormity of oppression, and thereby evoke condemnation, which could turn into a fight against you the next day. If there was such a government in the world that had to use all its strength to hinder the cause of public education, then this, of course, was an autocratic government.

But how to be? If a certain self-consciousness is required for the people in general, and for the proletariat in particular, in order to pose revolutionary problems and find the correct paths to their solution, and this enlightenment cannot be achieved without a revolution, is this not a snake biting its own tail? Is this not an insoluble problem: without consciousness there is no revolution, without revolution there is no self-consciousness?

This question was apparently resolved to some extent "aristocratically", i.e., by posing the problem on such a plane: the masses of the people put forward - even if it is tight, if only through suffering, if only through sacrifices - a well-known avant-garde, of course, mainly from the proletariat, from its most advanced part. The whole mass cannot yet stand at the height of this self-consciousness; therefore, left to itself, it will inevitably make mistakes. This vanguard, which has the fullest consciousness, is the Communist Party. It will be an organ of consciousness of the masses, an organ that precedes its development. And the masses will be able to act—because no vanguard can act for them—and they will act correctly like the masses, for the revolution is a mass action—if if it has sufficient confidence in its advanced party, and if the advanced party is strong and consistent enough to lead the masses. This was the preliminary, the first solution to the problem: the vanguard, the revolutionary minority, came forward, the revolution was made.

You say that this is similar to syndicalism? It doesn't look like one bit. With the syndicalists, who in this respect adopted the Blanquist idea, it turns out that this minority creates the revolution itself, with the inert attitude of the masses. Vladimir Ilyich did not believe in such a revolution; with him, this minority creates a revolution, like an infinitely heroic, self-sacrificing commanding staff of the masses. It cannot be required of an army that every single one of the rank and file in it is aware of the whole plan of battle and that one can rely on their instinct in the conduct of any strategic operation. Of course, it's even crazier to think that command staff can fight alone. And the third folly would be to assume that the command staff can be held by violence. In a revolution, the commanders command only because they believe in them. He cannot win if the whole mass or a huge part of it is not drawn into the battle, but the mass cannot win if it does not have a good commanding staff.

In this formulation of the question, education as a prerequisite is not necessary. And a dark country, a backward, ignorant country under such conditions can make a revolution if the masses suffer, if a revolutionary crisis is ripe, and if there are mass leaders, that is, thousands, if not tens of thousands of people of such commanding staff.

But here comes the revolution. What's next? Vladimir Ilyich's first proposition: one must be a child to think that communists can build communism with their own hands. Communists are a drop in the ocean. Proceeding from this thesis, Vladimir Ilyich formulates others: it is necessary to rely on forces outside the Party, to involve them in the work of the state, economic, cultural; on the model of the Red Army, where we grinded and subjugated the officers, it is necessary to attract the administrative, technical, commercial, educational, medical, etc. "officers" - the very one that served the bourgeoisie, with its right flank, going into the Black Hundreds, and with his left flank, Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik. We need to bring this "officer" closer to us, control it and force it to work in the direction we need. And Vladimir Ilyich says:

An absolutely clearly formulated thought, but this clearly formulated thought immediately stumbles upon an internal contradiction. It would be good, of course, if the Communists really succeeded in converting such specialists, it would be good if the Communists found sufficient support in a certain part of the non-Communist proletarians, who were completely ready to devote their entire lives to the Communist cause! But the proletariat, as Vladimir Ilyich emphasized many times, during the revolution is still a class sufficiently ignorant and already a class sufficiently exhausted, having sacrificed so many lives for the revolution that it has ceased to be an inexhaustible reservoir of strength; and it is difficult to draw qualified forces from him, in the sense of all kinds of specialists..

Vladimir Ilyich systematically and constantly demanded the involvement of specialists. He made revolutions in this respect. He created the Board of the Supreme Economic Council, which includes a number of professors, he created the State Planning Commission. He fought, sometimes with extreme bitterness, against the policies of the communist cells in the universities, which waged their own fight with the professors. He said: if we fail to use these people in order to learn from them and to give them the opportunity to apply their strength to the construction according to our plan, then we are no good, because without them we cannot move forward in any way.

And from this point of view, all kinds of bourgeois and semi-bourgeois specialists are now ready to pray at the coffin of Vladimir Ilyich, and they almost with tears in their eyes tell (their leaders, at least) how Vladimir Ilyich received them, how he knew how to enter into their needs how he was interested in the fate of science in Russia, etc.

But this did not prevent Vladimir Ilyich from realizing that we were waging our construction struggle with bad weapons. Of course, among these specialists there are brilliant minds, brilliant talents, there are also those who completely go over to our side. But in general, and especially if you add to them all these innumerable small specialists, clerical technicians, who make up the mass, so to speak, naturally pushed between the administrative tops and the masses of the people, then you will, of course, understand that it is largely worthless material. And Vladimir Ilyich did not fall into the slightest contradiction with himself, saying: we can use the old tsarist command staff in our army, but we must develop our own, because among them, of course, there are traitors and enemies, there are, of course, indifferent people drawn back to the meat-pots of Egypt, but there are also people who would like to, but cannot - they do not have our skills, they do not know how to understand what we need. There are simply negligent people, for whom the whole point is only to feed themselves somehow near our apparatus.

If we add to this the fact that Vladimir Ilyich constantly emphasized the well-known inexperience of the Communists themselves in many branches of their work, emphasized the existence of the fact that too often a Communist can be a commissar, but cannot be a specialist in the business he is about, then you will understand to what an enormous extent the state apparatus newly built by us must have reeked of an old eructation, to what extent the dead seized the living here, what internal friction this mechanism developed. Like ungreased wheels, it all screamed, screeched and did not move. All the screws and nuts of our state machine were a set that had previously appeared in a completely different mechanism and which the communist hammer had to accidentally drive and stuff on top of each other. When this monstrous machine of old officials is set in motion by one or another communist, it dangles, of course, it rattles, it knocks and throws dust, it breaks down at every step and yields very little results. Vladimir Ilyich saw this with complete clarity.

Two problems were drawn by Vladimir Ilyich from this point of view. First, it is necessary as soon as possible to raise the cultural level of the masses, and not only the proletarian masses, but also the peasant masses. The path to this uplift is literacy. From this point of view, Vladimir Ilyich often spoke out bitterly against the introduction of "proletarian culture" in the higher forms of education. He compared the advocates of this point of view to people striving to build a fourth floor at a time when the foundation was not yet ready. With amazing sobriety of thought, he directed us, often quite harshly, to look at the earth, and said: the first task is literacy. Whether literacy is a bourgeois thing or a proletarian one, I don't know, but I know that we need it. Reading, writing, counting - this is what an immense number of people need to be taught. And without literacy, he said, citizens will be tenth grade citizens who feed on fables, rumors and cannot check what their government is doing. They will be blind people.

At the 1st Congress for the Elimination of Illiteracy 2Vladimir Ilyich spoke and laughed a lot. Elimination of illiteracy! he exclaimed. - This means that we, to put it mildly, are like savages, because who eliminates illiteracy among non-savages? Not a check, especially invented for this, but a school. But we are savages. Our school, apparently, still cannot fully do this and now does not embrace all those who are newly entering into life. We need to catch up with what they missed, and we have to urgently teach literacy. But since this is already the case, let's urgently teach literacy. And Vladimir Ilyich, as you know, thought very seriously about this. The famine hit our entire struggle against illiteracy and destroyed almost all the likpunkts all over the face of our country. But when the hunger passed, Vladimir Ilyich - already, one might say, in a stagnant language, already at that time, when a terrible illness really, really made itself felt after the first illness, I hurried to write an unequivocal, bright article and emphasize that our direct duty is to eliminate the illiteracy of the population up to 35 years of age by the 10th anniversary. It is very difficult. 17 million people need to be trained - it is very difficult. And Vladimir Ilyich knew perfectly well that it was difficult. He was a great realist, and he felt these difficulties better than any of us, he knew the number of illiterates, and how much it would cost approximately, and said that it was possible. And I was infinitely glad that at least the Congress of Soviets of the RSFSR approved this plan. Ukraine has now accepted it. And we thus already have the will of the highest institutions in the Soviet order that this should be carried out. Of course, Vladimir Ilyich was equally interested in the questions of the school and the problems of public libraries. And it's understandable why. Because he, being a fully-fledged democrat, in the most holy and radiant sense of the word, wanted in every possible way to bring closer the time when the masses of the people, not only the workers, but also the peasants, would be fully aware of their needs and the paths to their redemption. only in the plane of politics, but also in the plane of all their daily management and life.

At a moment when we were threatened with a catastrophic separation from the peasant masses, Vladimir Ilyich gave a significant cry. Let us linger, he said, in our impulse and even retreat, if this is necessary for the bond with the peasant masses. Let us hook this mass of peasants more firmly and march forward together with them, perhaps much more slowly than we would have gone without them. But come back! We will go with her, inseparably with her. Only then will this forward movement be invincible. This is true. But it does not follow from this that we can completely withdraw into lower education, that the whole main task boils down to this: schools for the elimination of illiteracy, public libraries.

Vladimir Ilyich understood perfectly well that we would not put up schools properly, and we would not put up a mass library, and we would not liquidate illiteracy, if at the same time our economy did not develop, if the state administration itself was that eternally intermittent and radically corrupted machine. as he saw before him. After all, he said bluntly: with the exception, perhaps, of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, which still looks like something, not a single commissariat is like anything else, all of them work very badly. He stated this with all severity. We built a state mechanism that withstood the fight, which turned out to be viable, but look what interruptions it gives, how stupid it is, how absurd it is, how barbaric it is ... We must rebuild it, we must teach people to manage, and manage well, in convenient forms , clear, crisp and simple. Yes, you need to learn how to manage - including trading. We must learn to educate, to educate in such a way that all three aspects—general education, beginning with literacy, technical education, and political enlightenment—would be twisted into one bundle, turned into one iron rope of a single system of education. But for all this it is necessary that the educators themselves be present, that there should be business executives, that there should be administrators. And they are few.

Wait until little children, after we have built a satisfactory school for them, grow up and become good business executives? But we cannot organize a satisfactory school because there are not enough teachers. It is also impossible to wait until the illiterate peasant and worker, who has only now received the first primer, grows up to Marxism. It would mean trying, drop by drop, to raise the level of the whole sea. In order to raise the very question of raising public education to its due height, it is necessary to renew the entire leading apparatus, of which the Communist Party was the apex. Update how? So, in order to knock out the old elements from it, so that the remnants of these old elements from below, above, from the sides are fixed by our own people. What is the way out of this? There is only one way out: to appeal to the youth. To what youth? To our youth, of course, not to the bourgeois youth. It is known that we, even from among the middle intelligentsia, even the highest, from among even the well-born aristocracy or big capitalists, had socialist leaders in Russia and outside Russia. But these were “white crows”, while the bulk of such people only dream of their privileges and can turn science into that doctrine, hiding behind which, sitting on the neck of the people, consolidate their education as a source of privilege. Such people are usually interested not in raising the level of development of the masses as soon as possible, but in delaying this rise. We appeal to our own youth, to the youth of workers and peasants. Is she clueless? Yes. It is necessary to educate her - to give her the education that both she and we need. High specialists can be obtained through higher educational institutions; but this youth of ours is not yet capable of learning from them. The first gesture of Vladimir Ilyich was the order to open the doors of the university for all who yearn for education. These people poured into the university, filled it. So far there have been only lectures - nothing: they will crush each other's sides, but they listen. But when it came to laboratories, to the anatomical theater, things got worse. I had to go back to taking it away, because the basket of Russian higher education itself is rather small, and you can’t fill it with everyone who wants to get this education at once. Therefore, it was necessary to choose those who are now more needed, who are more capable, and arrange a check. And for those who are excellent material, but not yet prepared, it was necessary to create forms of preparation for those. This is how the idea of a workers' school and the class principle of admission to higher educational institutions arose.

Immediately after this, new problems arose, which Vladimir Ilyich knew perfectly well, the solution of which he was very concerned about, about which he constantly talked with us, although, perhaps, in his writings we will not find especially abundant traces of his reflections in this area. First of all, a fundamental question. It is clear that the youth of workers and peasants cannot exist at their own expense, that it is necessary to come up with some kind of combination of study and earnings - and this is very difficult with an insignificant amount of paid work in our country - or else to give state scholarships to students. Of course, it would be most rational to support these young people at the expense of the state. The need for education in the country is huge, the influx of applicants is gigantic, the country's need for people who are already educated is no less, but the tube through which this wave of knowledge-hungry people has to pass into the reservoir that must be filled is narrow, there are few funds, and this tube will always be insufficient. until that happy moment when we have such time that we will say: we can support so many hundreds of thousands of students at public expense more satisfactorily and freely than now. This will mean that we have solved the state and economic task by three-quarters. And we can solve it only by "pumping up" this very youth. This means that this very process will be painful, will be accompanied by need, disappointment, fatigue, illness, and possibly death. It will be in the true sense of the word a battle front where people put their lives at stake. "Give science!" Here it is... And in order to take it, you need to put your life on the line with the same courage, with the same readiness to put your life on the line, as in a war.

I do not mean to say that all the methods available to us have been exhausted. We are again and again considering from all sides the question of state appropriations. Perhaps we will have to think about narrowing down the enrollment of students from next year, about reducing the number of scholarships when they are enlarged, about all sorts of economic improvements, about attracting students to work that would be both more or less pedagogical and more or less bread. I am not saying that all these problems do not confront us, but I am saying that even if we solve them successfully, they will alleviate the situation, but they will not be able to completely eliminate the material crisis. We are fighting precisely for a state that would become fully capable of pursuing a cultural policy, and while we have not yet achieved it, we will have to fight, in the exact sense of the word.

The second question is the question of what to teach and how to teach. You know that Vladimir Ilyich devoted his brilliant and bottomlessly profound speech to the Komsomol members to this very question. In general, principled outlines, he answered this question with exhaustive clarity. The communist often stops with a shudder before the science into which he is about to dive, before the goblet of knowledge that the “Mr. poison? He says: I am a Marxist, and I know that every ideology is a reflection of class existence. Is science an ideology? Yes. What class created it? Bourgeois-landlord. This means that I do not need this science, it is even hostile to me. But still, I need ideology, I need science... What kind of science do I need? The one that expresses my being, proletarian. So I need proletarian science! Where's she? It doesn't exist, with the exception of Marxism... It doesn't exist in other areas. How to be? We have to invent it. Then, therefore, one must not study, but immediately teach, one must not look for a science that needs to be overcome, but create one's own. But so far, we know absolutely nothing. Where do we get knowledge from? From our being, from our insides, from ourselves. And when it seems to us ourselves that our proletarian science is a little liquid, then we only need to spit more energetically on these learned bald heads and say: well, you are there, bourgeois, with all your treasures, that you are standing in front of one stroke of my proletarian pen - get it on, shoulder wave your hand! I will deduce such a proletarian science that in one pamphlet of 33 pages I will give a solution to all questions of life.

Such a possibility frightened Vladimir Ilyich terribly. I put it in a humorous way. But which of these stated provisions can be ignored? Every Marxist knows that ideology reflects being, and it is better for anyone who doubts this to give up his party card. And what about the ideology that still existed, didn't it reflect the bourgeois life? How can you doubt it ... So why do we need it? Here's how the question is posed.

What is wrong here? What is the delusion? In that ideology reflects not only the negative aspects of the existence of a given class, but reflects existence in its entirety, that is, in its progressive aspects. Did the bourgeoisie, capitalism have any progressive sides? Of course they did. What was this main progressive side? The fact that the bourgeoisie, for example, was the organizer of machine technology. Machine technology is the basis of the latest bourgeois society. In order to come up with a machine that would work correctly, a necessary prerequisite is the knowledge of mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, etc. For millions of tasks related to trade, navigation, construction, metalworking, rocks, earth etc., all this requires a lot of positive knowledge. The bourgeoisie needs profit, and in order to have profit, you need cheap and rational production. To do this, you need a car: build it for me! But the engineer will say: I would build it, but for this you need to have a correct understanding of the material world that surrounds us, for this you need to become materialists, for this you need to study the laws of nature, expelling God and all his relatives, and then, on the basis of such a study, proceed already to the drawings and calculations. Does the capitalist want this or not? The capitalist says: “Of course, I don’t really need God for myself, it’s possible without him, but for the vile people he is necessary. Let's do this: in your laboratory, act like a materialist, and in the factory, act like a materialist, and in the market, act like a materialist, and I will act like a materialist - take thick bundles of completely material tickets and put them in my thick pockets. material trousers. But along with this, we will give idealist professors who will do their job. And not only will they talk about God and idealism in philosophy, not only will they pollute the intermediate spheres of the natural sciences with idealism, but in the natural sciences themselves they will probably say: what is matter? If you go “deeper” to the question, here you can find sollipsism, and “the totality of human sensations”, and anything else ... But you, engineer, do not be embarrassed by all this and work yourself like a materialist. Thus a two-faced, false, disgusting culture is created.

So, when we approach this culture, we, despite all its vices, must understand that it has accumulated an amazing wealth of genuine experience - after all, the bourgeoisie wanted to get real profit and real ways! She did not want to share this profit with anyone, so she was interested in folk stupidity, hence her desire to spread dope. Datura must be fought, and a huge treasury of real knowledge and its application must be taken from the hands of the bourgeoisie. True, they need to be reworked. Bourgeois NOT 3- not like our NOT, the bourgeois factory - not like our factory. But does it follow from this that we should say: to hell with all the locomotives - they are bourgeois, and until we invent our own, in our own style, let there be no railways? No, we don't want that. Vladimir Ilyich expressed his thought with all sharpness: that communist will be sad who is brought up only on communist pamphlets and books; if we do not assimilate the whole culture of the past, we will not move forward in any way.

If you re-read his speech at the Komsomol congress, you will see that Vladimir Ilyich fearlessly carries this thought through to the end. He says: learn everything, learn the whole bourgeois culture, and after that figure out what suits you and what does not. Add your proletarian instinct to the knowledge you have acquired, add your proletarian philosophy, your Marxist school, and they will illuminate all the material for you in a new way. Then you will understand and expel the unnecessary. But remember that you can teach and build only when you study for a long time.

Of course, I understand, comrades, that an incorrect conclusion can be drawn from this statement by Vladimir Ilyich. The wrong conclusion will be drawn first of all by a hurry-up from the camp of the intelligentsia, which is hostile to us. There, perhaps, there will be wise men who will say: “Here is a clever man, Ilyich! He instructed his guys - learn, and to us, people of science, he said - teach, and so the matter will last in earnest and for a long time. What better way if they learn what we teach them! In all likelihood, they are finally assimilated in such a way that they will depart very far from Vladimir Ilyich. Give them, as teachers, old experienced tutors, and they will soon turn these young eagles into calves, and even into pigs ... ”But this hasty conclusion would, of course, be foolish. Vladimir Ilyich knew perfectly well that the danger In order for bourgeois science to poison and confuse the worker-peasant youth, given the existence of proletarian control, it is not very great, although the struggle along this front must be waged unswervingly. But the opposite danger: to push bourgeois science away from oneself and to plunge wholly into the heresy of arrogance—this danger is enormous. And this would create that atmosphere of superficiality, dilettantism, all sorts of phantasmagoric lightweight inventions that could fundamentally ruin the whole thing. That is why Vladimir Ilyich said to the Komsomol members: study without fear! Here you will receive a huge and necessary material for you, and do not be afraid that in doing so you will "break away from Marxism." Your insides are healthy, and you will then perfectly understand where you need and where you don't. Draw from what you had to scoop from the sea of so-called universal knowledge, which has been largely determined up to now by the bourgeois world. And when you do this, then you will determine science with your proletarian thought and give it a completely new direction and an unprecedented scope.

How to teach? This question - how to teach - Vladimir Ilyich put it this way. He said: we need to study in order to break the bourgeois class and achieve communism, and this task should be an unshakable pole star that points the way. Therefore, it is necessary to teach in direct connection with life. School - even the lowest, and even more so the highest - should not be closed in itself. It must be agitated by all the great storms of social life, it must respond to them, take the liveliest part in them. The student is a citizen, not an "academician". And not only a student, even a teenager in a school of the 2nd stage or a faculty teacher, even a child should be dedicated to this side of the matter.

Care must be taken, says Vladimir Ilyich, to ensure that, as far as possible, all knowledge is assimilated in the order of a real labor problem. This is a very difficult task from a pedagogical point of view, but it is purely Marxist and profoundly true. You need to be given a calculation task - take some calculation necessary for your area, for a cooperative that works nearby, for repairs that are done in the same building, take, if possible, an example from real life, so that each task is a solution tasks set by the surrounding world of work. It is necessary to teach mechanics, or chemistry, or astronomy, entering, penetrating into those organs of social life that live for this and for this, where all this is applied as separate elements of social construction. It's hard, we all know it. But it is necessary. We believe, that there can be, in a broad sense, an agricultural or industrial bias, which will be somewhat different, that we can rely on the municipal economy, on the social life of the city with its hospitals, post and telegraph, fire brigades, sewerage and water pipes, all kinds of urban statistics, etc. We know that people who will organize such training will have to meet with us a mass of obstacles in terms of educational, practical, laboratory. They will have to replace classes that are thought out and arising from the course of the didactic plan with a story, a book, a transparencies, talking about what life gives or should give. And the larger circle we have, in our pedagogy, is occupied by the labor method, the method of expedient and generally useful labor, as an educational impulse, the closer we will be to the fact that, studying all aspects of bourgeois science in deep connection with the practical tasks of the time and with the scope of the revolution, we will be insured against the perception of lies for truth. Falsehood will disappear because it will be tested by practice, and Marx said: the question of what truth is in itself is scholastic, for the only verification of truth is practice. And Lenin, of course, fully supported this Marxist point of view.

Thus, you see that this side of Vladimir Ilyich's thoughts about youth can be summarized as follows. We must tirelessly work on a general rise in the level of the masses, both in school and out of school, but at the same time, we must push out of the masses - or rather, let them out - tens, if possible, hundreds of thousands of young people whom we should in an accelerated manner, with the help of the workers' faculties, lead to the full armory of knowledge, through the assimilation of the old culture, and the assimilation of this culture must take place in a labor order, in connection with social practice and with constant illumination of each acquired given by the general idea of the communist revolution. What can we expect if this program is carried out? We will not, returning to what has already been said, talk about the dangers and positive aspects, we will say this: whether the "Nepmen" or we will win - it depends on whether the working class creates its own intelligentsia. We see a prospect that is extremely encouraging and important, but also fraught with dangers, depending on which word of this phrase we emphasize. “Will the NEP man win or we will—it depends on whether the working class creates its own intelligentsia.” By the intelligentsia in this case one has to understand the tool of the proletariat and the perfect tool, talented people, people of knowledge. What are our prospects in this respect? If we follow the path pointed out by Lenin, if we take young people, primarily workers and secondarily peasants, if we teach them what Lenin provided, and in the way he said, then we will undoubtedly get an intelligentsia, despite our poverty, the narrowness of that "tube" that I told you about - tubes, through which a wave of young people thirsting for knowledge is now pushing into the reservoir of our future intelligentsia. Despite all this, this problem is solvable.

But we can read the same phrase with a different emphasis. “Whether the NEP man or we win depends on whether the proletariat creates its own intelligentsia.” Perhaps he will create an intelligentsia alien to him? In rough terms, this possibility can be rejected at once: we will not bother to educate the children of the Nepmen, we will place them at the very rear, we will give an enormous advantage to the worker-peasant youth. So, of course, we will educate our intelligentsia. But can't this intelligentsia, to the extent that the worker-peasant boys and girls turn into intelligentsia, cease to be one of their own? Here is a problem to think about.

Vladimir Ilyich spoke on many occasions both about swagger and about the possibility for commanding officers to understand their role as dominant. In his last article on the RCTs and the Central Control Commission, speaking of the fact that our very method of administration is wrong, he, among other things, throws out the following thought: in essence, administration is a simple matter if one learns to manage in a simplified and clear way. Subsequently, it will turn out that this is a matter in which all leadership can be discarded; we are going to completely kill the state in order to send it along with the stone ax to the museum. On the way to this, we will discard "compromise" and any excessive "boss". Lenin was a man of great authority, and he knew how to use the knotty "club of Peter the Great" quite well.

Physically, he did not beat us, but he made his way rather unkindly, and almost everyone, of course, has corresponding honorable bruises on his spiritual back. The authority of this man was great, he did not indulge either a few or the masses, but nevertheless there was no “boss” in him. What kind of leadership is there? A simpler treatment, decisively with everyone, cannot be imagined. If it were something artificial, if a person found a tone in which to talk with the simplest peasant, it would not be such a miracle as the fact that this man, Lenin, did not feel like a boss in any way and walked like everyone else, on the same ground that everyone walks on. It was a man in a shabby overcoat who talks to another person without the slightest grimace, without the slightest tone of swagger. He could always admit: oh, what a stupid thing I did! And he will say this, perhaps, to a postman or a teenager, if he discovers something new in front of him, says some new consideration, points out some unknown fact to him. Not the slightest boss! And he terribly wished that no one had it. He often expressed this, and it was insulting to some Soviet dignitary to hear when Lenin in the Council of People's Commissars began to spread about this. And although we have very little dignitary there, but in the face of Ilyich's crystalline anti-dignitaryism, it occurred to anyone: but in fact, am I not a dignitary? With this, perhaps, "at the top" things are still tolerably good. But the bossy dope a little lower can be found as much as you like. If the people's commissar is amiable, then his secretary is usually rude. And if in Moscow they speak like a human being, then in the province they are already silent and lowing, and in the district they growl.

So Ilyich wanted to completely discard this bossiness. And here's the question: if we have a so-called command staff that has gone through workers' faculties and universities, can it not happen that it will degenerate into a "boss" command staff? This is a very big question. Imagine such a thing. Russia is freeing itself from the landowners and the bourgeoisie, driving them out. The country remains mainly petty-bourgeois and is under strong pressure and control of the proletariat, but in relation to the whole country it is very small in number. On all this petty-bourgeois milk, new cream, new commanders, are rising. He advanced, received the Order of the Red Banner, was appointed to such and such a post from the district - to the province, then to the center, etc. We are looking for people, promoting them, fixing them in certain places, this is a natural process, it cannot be otherwise. But don't they still make "Sovburs" - "Soviet bourgeois" and dignitaries? Will these creams turn sour? Could it not turn out that this public, next to the NEP men who are also rising to the top, will turn into the beginnings of a new command class?

From the point of view of Marxism, there is not only the possibility, but also the inevitability that a petty-bourgeois country spontaneously separates itself from the big bourgeoisie. At the same time, as for the Nepman "cream", they can be collected and used for the benefit of the state, and if they are already very bitter, then they can be thrown off somewhere in Narym. It's not as dangerous as the other one. Will it not happen that one of his own, who has grown economically, administratively, culturally and who, by all rights - because he is really talented, knowledgeable, experienced - leads the country, will he not turn into a "sovbur"?

Under what conditions will he remain a communist and a servant of the people? Firstly, this will be on the condition that we already now develop in him a correct understanding that separation from the masses is doom for him, that the inability to give the masses what he took from them and at their expense is just as disastrous. When Lavrov (Mirtov) wrote his letters to the intelligentsia and reproached the noble, bourgeois and, at best, raznochintsy intelligentsia for having a duty to the people, this was a duty imposed from outside. And when we now repeat this to the worker-peasant youth, we remain in harmony with your own instinct, we go in the direction that life has given you. And it is only against such forces that cross your path that can make you deviate from this direct path that you have to fight.

Young people are already biologically the people who will decide the fate of humanity for tomorrow, this is the main force, the fundamental power of humanity for tomorrow. At the same time, young people are going through a time in their lives when they are especially susceptible to both bad and good. At this time, her flexible, wax-soft soul can be stained, a flaw can be applied, which then hardens, stiffens and becomes a vice; but at the same time, one can put on it the sacred stamp of devoted love for humanity, which lived in the heart of Vladimir Ilyich and which Nadezhda Konstantinovna testified to us on the day of his solemn commemoration by the Congress of Soviets of the USSR. You are the part of the youth that will determine the fate of all your peers and, to a large extent, the generations that follow you to the greatest extent. What seal will fall on you - that seal will be the most possible for all your peers who are not among the lucky ones who acquire knowledge and who are candidates for command posts. I repeat: not only for them, but partly for future generations, for your brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. You are now in the center of a struggle between two forces—growing socialism and the vast peasant-philistine, petty-bourgeois element, in which the voice of egoism speaks, the voice of ambition, which finds captivating, flattering notes in order to sneak into your heart. Therefore, in addition to the difficult material struggle that you are waging, and the struggle for special knowledge, you will also have to fight for your soul and for the soul of your neighbor on the bed, on the table at which you study, - to fight for the speediest rise to the light of a complete communist consciousness, embedded in your flesh and blood to the very bones and marrow of your bones, in order to be cut off once and for all from any possibility of succumbing to petty-bourgeois tendencies. This struggle for the youth is one of the most important, precisely because in so far as the youth will be conquered and will not fall out of the hands of the working class, they will be a powerful weapon in the forthcoming struggle. And she guarantees us victory, since together with her we will be able to launch a struggle for the enlightenment of the masses, incomparable with the current scale. that in so far as the youth will be conquered and will not fall out of the hands of the working class, they will be a powerful weapon in the forthcoming struggle. And she guarantees us victory, since together with her we will be able to launch a struggle for the enlightenment of the masses, incomparable with the current scale. that in so far as the youth will be conquered and will not fall out of the hands of the working class, they will be a powerful weapon in the forthcoming struggle. And she guarantees us victory, since together with her we will be able to launch a struggle for the enlightenment of the masses, incomparable with the current scale.

That's when your young worker-peasant shoulders, tens and hundreds of thousands of young shoulders, will bear to a large extent the burden of solving our social problems, then we will be able to say that we are really powerful, then we will be able to say that our task is up to us. Now it is burdening the shoulders of the already thinning old guard of communism and the shoulders of the often unadapted and comparatively sparsely scattered network of workers, both Party and non-Party, who understand our tasks. This task is difficult now, but it will become easier and more joyful as you, having gone through your path of education, will stand in the ranks of the leaders of the new state and new society. Of course, I am not pointing out these dangers in order to send some dark clouds into your sky. On the contrary, that's what I'm talking about. so that these clouds could not thicken into a cloud. I personally fully share the titanic optimism that permeates Marxism in general. In particular, Vladimir Ilyich in the sense of optimism goes much further than the majority of Marxists of his generation. These Marxists proceeded a priori from the fact that countries with a large proletariat can make a socialist revolution. When Vladimir Ilyich said that we would make a Marxist revolution in Russia, what was the answer of the Marxist-Mensheviks? “You have too much optimism, Lenin,” they said. You forgot that Russia is a backward country, you forgot that there are few proletariat in it, that it is not organized and educated, that the working class, like a fly in milk, swims among the vast peasantry. Under such conditions, Marx himself, as the Marxist-Mensheviks said, - I would never dare to think about a Marxist revolution: it would be good if there was a more or less decent bourgeois revolution, and we would postpone the rest until the proletariat matured ... And Vladimir Ilyich thought that not only in Russia, but also in Persia, in In China, in Hindustan, and in Java, revolutions guided by Marxist teachings are possible. Of course, they will not pour out immediately into communist forms, but there is no doubt that revolutions in petty-bourgeois countries, peasant revolutions, poor peasant revolutions, can receive leaven, ferment, coloring from their proletariat and through their proletariat, no matter how small it may be in comparison with the proletariat of the Western Europe and America. The bond with the peasantry is Lenin's central idea. The proletariat infects the petty bourgeoisie with its ideas and mood, draws it to itself, moves it after itself. Vladimir Ilyich is based on this. That is why he was not afraid that the communists were a drop in the ocean. That's why he called: use all kinds of specialists! He knew that this all-attractive force, this proletarian yeast, is so powerful that it can make a very large dough rise. This allowed him to assume that the entire countless sea of peasants could be raised by the proletariat.

The Mensheviks, of course, listened to all these thoughts with trembling knees. The Mensheviks remembered that they were "workers' workers", that they had "a real proletarian, working soul", and they whined: what are you doing, Lenin? You will drown the proletariat in all this confusion. This is Socialist-Revolutionaryism, this is heresy! But they whined like that not because they, the Mensheviks, had a proletarian soul, but because they had a short intellectual gut, and they, perceiving the idea of the proletariat as an advanced class, did not understand it from the point of view that this class was at the same time a servant. and leader of humanity.

No one emphasized this idea to the extent that Lenin did. When we, the first generations of Russian Marxists, studied Marx, we understood him in this way: the proletariat in the advanced countries makes a proletarian revolution and after that stretches out its hand to backward brothers, cares for them, and does not exploit them. What did Lenin say? - The proletariat will not be able to emancipate itself without relying on the peasantry, including the peasantry of the colonial countries. He must, even before his release, draw them into his orbit. Under such conditions, could Vladimir Ilyich be afraid that our youth, if it is not exclusively proletarian in composition, will go crazy in the other direction, that this youth will go the wrong way, to which the voice of world history is calling it, and to which our tried and tested Communist Party is directing it with its faithful hand? He couldn't be afraid of it. When he pointed out to us the dangers of NEP, when he pointed out the dangers of arrogance, he did this not in order to sow despondency among us, but so that we would know what reality we were dealing with, so that we would take all this into account. and said to themselves: our path is fraught with dangers, but we will avoid them, we will overcome them.

"Lenin and the youth" is the title of my report today. Here is the courage of Ilyich - she was young. He was young at 53 and would have remained young no matter how long he lived in the world. Leninism is also young - it exudes the youth of the world, it exudes a colossal future ahead and unbridled youthful courage.

And if Ilyich is young, then the youth must also be "Ilyich" youth. She must be imbued not only with this contagious and native youth of his, but also with the wisdom of Lenin, and prudence, and the ability to draw conclusions from a hoary culture acquired over the centuries. And when all this is combined in her, when she becomes worthy of Ilyich, when she reflects this radiant image in herself with tens of thousands of mirrors and becomes, as far as anyone can fit it, like our leader, then it will already be truly heroic youth. Then, of course, neither internal nor external dangers will mean anything to us. Today I received a funny letter. It was written by a Frenchman. “Your Lenin is at least three times more leader and leader of people than Mohammed. Your USSR is ten times larger than Mohammed's Arabia. Therefore, according to my calculations, by 1944 you should have conquered three-quarters of the world.” “I have no doubt,” he says, “that everyone will abandon the principle of private property, and your new Koran – Marxism – will be accepted everywhere. Some follow the path of violence, others the path of petty concessions, but undoubtedly the beginning of a gigantic world movement has been laid. And that seething energy that is in you, should, - he says, - then spill over all over the world. The only important thing is that, just as Mohammed turned out to have a good heir - Abubekr, who could eliminate all the competing Alis and Ottomans from his path and turn Mohammed's internal moral energy into conquering energy, so it is necessary that you also find Abubekr. And he ends his letter with these words: "The world asks you, Russia: give him, after your Mohammed, your Abubekr."

And so, maybe we won't give Abubekr, and we don't really need him. Vladimir Ilyich, standing over the coffin of his friend Sverdlov, said: only the team can replace such people. And we will also say: Mohammed, maybe Abubekr could replace Ilyich, but you can’t replace Ilyich with any Abubakr, you can only replace him with a team.

Strive, comrades, for each of you to become an element of this great, unheard-of, victorious collective.

V. Lenin, Socialist revolution and the tasks of education. M., 1924.
There is an inaccuracy here: Lenin spoke about this at the II Congress of Political Education on October 17, 1921:

“Our commission for the eradication of illiteracy was established on July 19, 1920. Before coming to the congress, I deliberately read the corresponding decree. The All-Russian Commission for the Elimination of Illiteracy ... Not only that, the Extraordinary Commission for the Elimination of Illiteracy. <...> the very fact that we had to create an emergency commission for the eradication of illiteracy proves that we are people (how can I put it mildly?) like, as it were, semi-savage, because in a country where people are not semi-savage, it was a shame there to create an emergency commission for the liquidation of illiteracy - there they liquidate illiteracy in schools ”(V. I. Lenin, New economic policy and tasks of political enlightenment. Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 44, pp. 169–170).

“An illiterate person is outside politics, he must first be taught the alphabet. Without this there can be no politics, without this there are only rumors, gossip, fairy tales, prejudices, but not politics” (Ibid., p. 174).

NOT - scientific organization of labor - a system of rationalization of production