This education of children in the spirit of universal ideals meant first of all the extirpation of their national roots. "We realized a little too late," Mikhail Pokrovsky admitted in a self-criticism at the First Conference of Marxist Historians, "that the term Russian history is a counterrevolutionary term." Schools taught the history of the revolutionary movement. Civic history was eliminated. The manipulation of social memory began. Simultaneously war was declared on classical Russian literature. In 1930 a proletarian literary critic objected that "the terms 'Russian literature' and 'the history of Russian literature' have not yet been denied their civil rights as part of the school curriculum, of textbooks, and of teaching aids."165 Many classical writers were removed from the curriculum and others were studied only from a special angle. For example, the works of Pushkin, Griboedov, and Lermontov were analyzed as models of "the literary style of the Russian nobility during the rise of commercial-industrial capitalism."
One of the most tragic consequences of war and revolution were the homeless children, the besprizorniki. Hundreds of thousands of children lost their parents in the war zones, and millions lost them during the 1921 famine. Government statistics spoke of 7 million homeless children in 1922.166 The officially encouraged breakup of the family only increased the problem. Krupskaya admitted in 1925: "I myself have written in the past that the problem of homeless children was a legacy of the war and economic dislocation, but after observing these children, I can see that we must stop speaking in those terms. We must say that the roots of the problem lie not only in the past but also in the present."167
In 1921, at the height of the famine, a civic organization, the Save the Children League, was suppressed. It had functioned since 1918 and included former members of the Cadet party, SRs, and Mensheviks, as well as unaffiliated activists. The Commissariat of Education had insisted that the League be abolished on the grounds that representatives of the bourgeoisie could not be allowed to rescue proletarian children and then miseducate them. A Commission to Improve the Lives of Children was organized and placed under the direction of Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka. Thus, concern for children became the task of the organs of repression.
Two months after the revolution a new law was passed under which all cases involving children or adolescents under eighteen were transferred from the common courts to "special commissions for cases involving minors, these commissions having purely pedagogical and medical aims." It was forbidden to refer to minors as criminals; they were delinquents. In 1920 a new decree allowed the special commissions to refer cases involving minors above fourteen back to the regular courts.
A policy of harsh punishment became one way of dealing with the problem of homeless children. They were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. Another solution was to place them in what were called children's homes or in a special category of such institutions—vocational-agricultural labor colonies. Among Communist educators one theory gained a special currency: namely, that these children without parents or families could serve as splendid material for breeding the "new Soviet man." Many of the children's homes and labor colonies were placed under GPU jurisdiction. Finally, there was a third way of dealing with the problem—leaving the homeless children to their fate. Delinquents for whom vacancies could be found were sent for reeducation to the children's homes; the rest were left on the streets.
Toward the end of the 1920s, the economic revival and improved material conditions brought about a reduction in the number of homeless children. The Stalin revolution in the 1930s would throw new millions of children without parents into the streets.
One of the chief tasks undertaken by the Soviet government was the elimination of illiteracy. In 1855, 93 percent of all Russians were illiterate; in 1897 the figure was approximately 77 percent. The American scholar Daniel Lerner, basing himself on information drawn from twenty-two countries, has demonstrated a very close link between urbanization and literacy. In the mid-nineteenth century only two Russian cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. In the early twentieth century, when Russia's industrial growth rate became one of the fastest in Europe, the literacy rate rose rapidly. The tsarist government, however, is not usually given credit for this rise in the literacy rate.
Immediately after the October revolution the "anti-illiteracy front" was opened, alongside the military front and the economic front. The goal was not so much to teach illiterates how to read and write as to teach them to think correctly. 'The illiterate," Lenin explained, "remains outside of politics, and that is why he must be taught the alphabet. Without this there can be no politics."168 Bogdanov, the ideologist of proletarian culture, held the view that illiteracy would be eliminated and education provided to the people spontaneously through a kind of natural process. Lenin's view was the exact opposite. A decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the elimination of illiteracy, which Lenin signed on December 26, 1919, said in the preamble:
With the aim of providing the entire population of the republic the opportunity of conscious participation in the political life of the country the Council of People's Commissars hereby decrees: All inhabitants of the republic between the ages of eight and fifty who do not know how to read or write must take part in the literacy campaign.
The workday for illiterates was reduced by two hours with no cut in pay. However, article 8 specified that "those who seek to avoid the obligations put into effect by this decree ... will be subject to prosecution."169 Learning to read and write became a duty, a kind of tax required by the government, and refusal to fulfill this obligation was made a crime.
In 1926, when the first census was taken under Soviet rule, it was determined that 5 million people had overcome illiteracy. This indicates that after the revolution the population acquired literacy at approximately the same rate as before, despite all the noisy propaganda and intimidating decrees. In the early 1930s the literacy rate would rise much more quickly, with intensified industrialization and urbanization.
A new family and marriage code adopted in 1928 completed the stage of revolutionary upheavals in the realm of family law. Under the new code registered and unregistered marriages were recognized as equally valid. Either husband or wife could dissolve the marriage without even informing the other. All he or she had to do was make a written statement. A postcard to the registry office was sufficient. "A divorce now costs three rubles," wrote Mikhail Koltsov in Pravda. "No more formalities, no papers, no summons, not even the need to inform in advance the person you are divorcing. Subscribing to a magazine is harder. ... For three rubles why not indulge yourself?"170
The new legal code was meant to strike a mortal blow at the family and to tear apart the social ties which had begun to reassert themselves under NEP. The struggle against the intelligentsia and the destruction of the family and the old morality were meant to clear the ground for the new society. Since the state felt itself to be insufficiently powerful as yet, it sought to disrupt all ties between individuals, leaving each isolated in relation to the state.
Despite all this, the countryside—where the majority of the people lived—remained a bulwark of the old forms of authority and old morality. It was through the cells of the Young Communist League (the Komsomol), and especially in the form of "free love," that the new morality reached the countryside, although its influence remained marginal during this period.
Religion did not wither away despite the bitter fight against it. Churches were torn down, members of the clergy arrested, and antireligious propaganda constantly intensified. The publishing house Atheist began operations in 1922. A newspaper by the same name began to come out once every five days in 1923, along with a monthly magazine Bezbozhnik и stanka (The godless at the workplace), which published caricatures prefiguring the crude anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era. On February 17, 1923, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, director of antireligious propaganda, announced the formation of the League of Militant Atheists, which published the mass distribution magazine Bezbozhnik (The godless).