What Lenin was for our higher school
There was not a person in our party who could understand the political significance of enlightenment better than Vladimir Ilyich. "Every rural teacher should be our propagandist" - hardly anyone could forget this slogan, and hardly any of us five years ago realized how real this slogan is.
We are so entangled in a network of conventions, unconsciously inherited thoughts, "traditional", ie, taken from other rentals, ideas that living, genuine reality seems to us sometimes a mirage, a deception of sight. How many times has it happened that the super-realistic, life-like slogans of Ilyich seemed to us to be something super-fantastic. Did not we raise our hands, reading for the first time about the nationalization of the land, about an armed uprising, about the Soviet government? And he had whacked us all with these "unheard-of novelties" and just thought with his own head and saw with his own eyes. And it's not so simple as it seems.
Lenin's attitude toward higher education was a model of such wise simplicity. Reasoning on the topic that everything should be special in the proletarian school - even chemistry is not the same, and geometry is not the same as in the bourgeois school, - such arguments Ilyich organically could not stand. The first advice I heard from him sounded quite old-fashioned, to the point of indecency, conservatively, you can say: "Break down less!" It was in those days when some hot comrades measured the dignity of a Soviet worker with the amount of scrap. But Ilyich said: "The less you break, the better."
This peculiar conservatism of Vladimir Ilyich is well known to all his old comrades. This very serious man and the great power of a scientist could not stand the thought of Lenin as a scholar, no less books would be written than about Marx, neither revolutionary phrases nor amateur "with kondachka." But if these words: "In the higher school, break less!" - the other defender of the late "autonomy" sounds pleasantly in the ears, we must immediately disappoint him. Not to mention the fact that Lenin, this living embodiment of the proletarian dictatorship, could not stand the thought of any kind of bourgeois autonomy-the very word was mercilessly destroyed in the theses on higher education that the writer was reporting to the Politburo, not to mention this, Lenin appreciated in science, of course, not its bourgeois shell, but its proletarian essence. In contrast to people who are convinced, that the proletariat must still invent its own science, Lenin considered all bourgeois equipment, including science, to be the property of the victor-proletariat. Be able to use this inventory, and high school will be yours; but how to use it - look at the old masters; they built the inventory and know all its secrets: learn how to penetrate them.
And so the "Old Believer" and the "conservative" was the true progenitor of such an "unheard-of innovation" as the proletarian higher school. When the People's Commissariat passed through the Council of People's Commissars a decree that removed all slingshots on the road to higher education, making it legally accessible to any worker, Ilyich immediately faced the question: how can the proletariat actually learn there? And the Narkompros project was supplemented by the obligation: to provide scholarships for "students from among the proletariat and the poorest peasantry". In this was the grain of future workers' labor and the future "class reception." The very word "working class" does not belong to Ilyich: and, perhaps, that this hater of paradoxes and originality would not have liked it. But since the thing named by this name, he undoubtedly liked very much,
In fact, the ancestor of workers' committees (the decree of the Council of People's Commissars passed five months before the opening of the oldest of them, which could celebrate its 5-year anniversary on February 2), Ilich was the actual initiator of the Institute of Red Professors, who would have more right to demand an increase to his title " name of Lenin "than any of the innumerable institutions that claim it. It is characteristic that Lenin put the work of re-creating the personnel of higher education on the turn, as soon as the civil war ended, in the autumn of 1920. Without a Communist student, it was a hopeless task to take up this task - and the communist youth were on the fronts; and there was no other way to get the material to create a new professors: the greater part of the first set of red professors came from the front; The exception was only a small group of Sverdlovites,
But the training of academic youngsters was only one side of Vladimir Ilyich's proposals at that meeting, from which came the "commission for the radical transformation of the teaching of social sciences in higher education" (in short, the "Rothstein Commission" for the chairman). This idea was most easily assimilated by those present, and, as usual, it was not the simplest and most original of the thoughts that they heard.
With his usual thrift of a good owner, Vladimir Ilyich was not going to leave forever with the old living apparatus of Russian universities. Not to mention the higher technical school, where the slogan "Break less!" Remained in force in 1920 - even at the faculties of social sciences, he saw the opportunity to use the old teaching material. "Link them with solid programs," he told us, "give them such topics that would objectively force them to take our point of view. For example, make them read the history of the colonial world: here, after all, all bourgeois writers only know that they "reprove" each other in all abominations: the Englishmen of the French, the French of the English, the Germans of both. "Literature of the subject" will force your professors to talk about the abominations of colonial capitalism in general. Please, in addition, from each of them a thorough knowledge of Marxist literature; declare that, whoever fails to pass a special Marxist exam, will be deprived of the right to teach. I assure you that if they do not become orthodox Marxists, they will still set forth things that were not included in the curriculum of their courses before, and it's up to the students under our political leadership to use this material as needed. "
It goes without saying that this picture of the professor, re-learning to "speak Marxist," seemed to us an unheard-of and completely unreal innovation. We came to the realization of this slogan at the latest and only recently introduced compulsory exams on Marxism for those who claim to occupy the chair in our backgrounds. They expected great difficulties - they did not meet any. Examinations are held even with pleasure. And some (and even very old!) Suddenly discovered that they had always been Marxists.
The great heart-master was our late leader - and deeply penetrated into the nature of bourgeois humanity. The wise conservatism of Ilyich saved high school from the rout, when this defeat was objectively possible; but he saved only to ensure that the proletariat, when it comes to him to go to this school, does not end up in a ruined horizon. And that the proletariat can transform the mezzanine mezzanines and steppes to its tastes and needs, Lenin did not doubt for a moment: his faith in the creative forces of the working class was deeper, deeper than that of all of us, and she did not deceive him.
At the great grave. M., 1924. P. 264-265
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