When life is hard, when you don't have the strength or hope to change it, you wish you could picture it or imagine it to be different. To do this you have to put reason to sleep and dull the power of critical thought, which you can do with alcohol. When you drink you forget all your sorrows, all your troubles disappear, and all your problems fade away.156
This comment, which ends up sounding rather favorable toward alcohol, may provide a clue to some of the thinking behind the steady increase in vodka production, aside from the desire for larger state revenues. The initial plan for vodka production for the year 1929—30 provided for 41 million vedra (406 million liters), but this was increased to 46 million (456 million liters).157 In those days sorrows, troubles, and problems were multiplying by the thousands.
Public Prosecutor Ivan Kondurushkin gave this summary of NEP's results:
As of 1927 we have accomplished the following: (1) restored industry to the prewar level of production; (2) restored the transportation system, which is now working smoothly; (3) stabilized the currency; (4) revived and organized the working class, which numbers 300,000 more than in 1922; and (5) revived agriculture, fully restoring the area previously under cultivation.158
The economic success of the policy begun in March 1921 was undeniable. It enabled the economy to return more or less to its prewar condition. But that was not the goal of the Bolshevik party, which had made a revolution in order to create a new society and a new kind of human being.
During the "years of waiting" between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the Stalin revolution the old society was under attack on every front. The first Soviet legal code on the family and marriage was adopted on September 18, 1918. Its aim was to "revolutionize" the family and the four main provisions of this code did indeed make it a revolutionary document for its time: only civil (not religious) marriage was recognized; there was no requirement for consent by any third party to a marriage; divorce was permitted without restrictions—if only one member of the couple wanted it, the divorce went through a court, but in cases of mutual consent, divorces were granted by the marital registry office; and the legal concept of illegitimacy pertaining to children was abolished.
The chief expression of this revolution in the family was the destruction of the "old bourgeois morality." The ideas of Alexandra Kollontai, commissar of social welfare and a prominent party member, were very widely accepted. Clara Zetkin in her Recollections of Lenin described his attitude toward Kollontai's ideas: "No doubt you have heard the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love will be as simple and trivial as 'drinking a glass of water.9 A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this 'glass of water.'"159
It was true that the "glass of water" theory became very popular in a society where the family had suffered heavy losses continuously for seven years of war and revolution. According to the 1897 census, women constituted 50.3 percent of the population, and men 49.7 percent, roughly equal proportions. According to the census of 1926, there were 5 million fewer men than women in the Soviet Republic. It was under these conditions that the party waged its fight against the "bourgeois family." Lenin expressed his indignation over "free love" theories in private to Zetkin and others, but he never spoke about it publicly. Instead he preached the "new revolutionary morality." The hero of a novel about free love that was popular in the 1920s quoted Lenin almost word for word: "Komsomol morality does exist. ... Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletarian class struggle! Komsomol morality is a system that serves the working people in its struggle against exploitation of every kind. Whatever is useful to the revolution is moral; whatever is harmful to it is immoral and intolerable."160 Morality as a weapon in the class struggle was a theme constantly reiterated by party theoreticians. Preobrazhensky dedicated his book, The Moral and Class Norms of Bolshevism, to that paragon of Bolshevik morality, GPU leader Felix Dzerzhinsky.
The party's policy toward children also contributed to the breakup of the family. In the ABCs of Communism, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, the authors of this most popular 1920s guidebook for the "new Soviet man," wrote: "Children belong to the society into which they are born, not to their parents."161 A prominent Soviet legal authority, one of the drafters of the new code on marriage and the family, expressed the same idea even more succinctly: "The family must be replaced by the Communist party."162
On September 30, 1918, at virtually the same time that the new family code was adopted, the All-Russia Central Executive Committee approved a resolution establishing schools that would combine learning with labor. The school was revolutionized. Everything outdated was thrown away: desks, daily lessons, homework, textbooks, grades, tests. All education was made free of charge and coeducational. In working out a model for the new Soviet school, the Bolsheviks drew upon the most advanced pedagogical ideas of Russian educators, in particular, Konstantin Ventsel, as well as those of progressive Western educators, such as John Dewey.
The new Soviet school was "self-administered" by a collective consisting of all pupils and all employees, from the teachers to the janitors. The very word teacher was abolished and replaced by the term shkrab, short for shkolny rabotnik, school employee.
During the civil war the Soviet government was unable to carry out its Utopian dreams for this new type of school. Only at the end of 1923 was a plan adopted for reorganizing the school system, which was to be oriented toward the training of skilled specialists who would have a Marxist, working- class view of the world. One thing had been accomplished during the initial, Utopian phase: teachers' resistance to the politicization of the school had been broken. Lenin insisted that the bourgeoisie be fought in the schools as well, that education cannot proceed apart from politics. The chief slogan in the second phase of the Soviet school system was, "We do not need literacy without communism." As a result, communism was included everywhere, even in arithmetic. For example, students were asked to solve the following problem: 'The insurrection in which the Parisian proletariat took power occurred on March 18 in 1871. The Paris commune fell on May 22 the same year. How long did it last?" The politicization of education was facilitated by the use of new methods comprehensively conceived with long- term aims. Or, as the Small Soviet Encyclopedia said, "in the Soviet Union for the first time in history, schools took up the task of combatting religion; the school became an antireligious institution."163
Education was unabashedly made a class privilege. When children started school, they were immediately and bluntly made aware of their class origins. Among the first lessons they learned was that people were divided into two categories, the higher category of working people and the lower category of nonworkers.
One of the main aims of the class-oriented school was to train internationalists, as V. N. Shulgin, an influential Marxist educator explained: "Our goal is not to turn out a Russian child, a child of the Russian state, but a citizen of the world, an internationalist, a child who will fully understand the interests of the working class and who is capable of fighting for the world revolution. ... We educate our children, not for the defense of the motherland but for worldwide ideals."164