Back To the Soviet Origins

A.S. Makarenko – 1888-1939

A famous Soviet educator whose practical work and writings influenced the development of the Soviet Union's school system. Born in Belopoliye, Ukraine, Makarenko began his career in 1905 as a teacher in the Kryukov Railroad School in Kremenchyg, Ukraine. From 1917 to 1920 he served as director of the school. In the 1920s he directed the Gorky Colony, a reform settlement for homeless juvenile delinquents. In 1931 Makarenko became head of the Dzerzhinsky Commune, a reform school for juvenile delinquents near Kharkov. The young offenders who passed Makarenko's school developed into honest and responsible people with high spirituality and strong mind. Many of them became the heroes of the WW II, defending their country – the USSR. Among the Makarenko's graduators – former bandits, robbers, thieves and prostitutes! – there are famous teachers, scientists, top managers of the Soviet economics and other people who became the pride of their country. He worked at various other children's institutions In Kiev, Ukraine, from 1935 to 1937, and then moved to Moscow, where he wrote and taught for the remainder of his life. His books include Pedagogical Poem 1925-1935, The Road to Life and A Book for Parents.

Recently I re-read Makarenko. The last time I had had his "Pedagogical Poem" in my hands was at the age of 11. Surprisingly, I had memorized a lot, but – as I can see now – I didn't understand anything. Reading the "Poem" today I don't even know what is more delightful – the largeness of that person, or the spirituality of his era. This book is a perfect encyclopedia of the early Soviet days. And this must be the best way to read it: as a historical document, which can uncover more and more new psychological details as well as the characteristics of that mode of life. In addition, it is written by an author with very fine sense of humor and without any egotism. (And with a great gift for literature also: had Makarenko become a professional litterateur, not an educator – no doubts, he would have become famous for his writings only.)

Let's pay attention to the routine details. In the first Soviet years food was very scarce and the Government had to distribute it by special regulations. Makarenko writes: "Those days there were many official nutritional standards: the regular ones, the intensive ones, the standards for the weak people as well as those for the strong ones, the defective standards, the sanatorium standards, the hospital ones, etc. By means of very sophisticated diplomacy we managed sometimes to convince the corresponding authorities and to be transferred to the sanatorium nutritional standard, e.g." And imagine the situation: the Civil War is not finished yet, there is famine everywhere – the days of so-called "war communism." Every piece of bread (literally!) is counted. But the Soviets introduce the sanatorium standard of nutrition! (It must have been a palpable earthy reflection of the forthcoming Communism!) The first sanatoriums will come into life much later. For that moment there were only lice, puttees instead of shoes, typhus and starvation. Distributing the poor crumbs among the hungry people, the Soviet Power understood that it should not have to be done equally! That a sick person should get at least a little more food; that milk had to be spared for kids. Certainly it was a kind of a manager's pragmatism. But besides that it was a manifestation of a deep religious feeling, which penetrated deep into the atheistic Soviet life mode.

Or another detail: they had organized a theatre in the colony and played performances for the local youth (every week – a new premiere!). Starting as a drama class, the colony theatre appeared to be so important and called thing that it turned to become not a hobby, but a mandatory work for all colonists. "Squad "A" – actors", as they put it in the colony reports. By that time the famine becomes less severe, but the life is still difficult and the food is jogtrot. When according to the play they had to "have a dinner" on the scene, a real dinner was served and the hungry "actors" were trying to play-for time with that episode. (That was their little privilege for playing at 20° below zero – the "theatre" did not have enough firewood to heat the room.) On Saturdays the local farmers arrive on carts and wait for the performance. They bring foodstuffs, eat themselves and try to treat the colonists with home-cooked meals. So the Young Communists' Union meeting enacts not to accept any food from the visitors! It was a mixture of pride with an exalted belief that art was not to be traded for smoked tallow and sausages. The theatre expenses are a heavy burden for the colony, however the tickets are distributed only for free the idea to balance the expenses with some profit just doesn't come to their mind.

For one of their plays they needed a statue on the scene. "We rummaged out all cemeteries in the town, but there was nothing suitable..." It is really very different from our paradigm: they did not find it disreputable to borrow a monument from a cemetery (providing that the living ones needed it for something vital). But even starving they rejected pay for their job. Because... they believed it to be really useful for people!

In the beginning of the book there is a pretty famous episode when Makarenko hits one of his students. To understand it we should consider every detail of the circumstances. The Civil War (1918-1921) is still on; the local bush is infested with armed gangs; in spring the students will be picking in the vicinities of the colony the human skulls, gnawed round by foxes (to put them on sticks for scaring the female teachers). Once in the morning looking out from the window everybody saw two hanged men at the fringe of the forest and nobody was surprised. Those two corpses kept hanging until the official came from the town. This is the reality – human life costs completely nothing. Makarenko himself stays in a bush with 5 young bandits. There used to be 6 guys, but recently one of them had been arrested by the police and removed from the colony for a night murder on the local road. To keep the story short – the situation and the scenery are quite clear. Makarenko gives one of them a slap in the face for insulting behavior (although that young bandit was much stronger than Makarenko). We should hear" what Makarenko is remorseful about in this particular situation: ..."I've broken the law!"

From the point of view of any our contemporaries, brain-washed with the ideas of "combining the Law with Freedom" mixed with the American blockbusters, it may sound ridiculous – what kind of law is applicable under these circumstances?! However in this case we can see the very specific Soviet perception of law in its development. I do not want to divagate, but It must be very important to investigate and understand the motives of the Soviet law-abiding. Which always was mutual: exhibited both by the citizens and by the State (I doubt it can wherever be one-way). One of the central "black myths" of today's anti-Soviet propaganda is that about the "lawless USSR". Where, as they claim, people were sent to Gulag or executed without court hearings, where no one was protected enough and so on, The "Poem" may provide helpful data regarding this point. The aspiration of people in those days to act only according to the law is a phenomenon that deserves close attention. Here is a small but telling detail: when Makarenko learns that the colony he had created was "sentenced" by the bosses of education to be closed, the first thing he does is to remove from the colony all his closest upholders –"not to create there any centers of protest". Makarenko had no intention to "win by any means".

Of course, reading the book as a child I didn't notice that Makarenko in his day was almost a "dissident" in pedagogy. He was criticized by all kinds of bureaucrats from education. It is Makarenko who was the first to set in his colony such traditions as to name the groups of students "squads", to use the trumpet-calls, etc. Those things, new for the early USSR, were disparaged as an "education of military barrack". Now we can see that all the subsequent approaches in Soviet education had Makarenko in their origin. The "squads" appeared everywhere. By the way, this word is still widely used – even in our jail the groups of prisoners are called "squads". In his book Makarenko explains the charm of this word in a definite and laconic way: "The name "squad" was a term of the revolutionary days, when the revolutionary stream had not yet been structured into the accurate lineup of regiments and divisions". Here is one more remarkable point. We know that every educational system is an overprint of the corresponding historical era. "School is one of the matrices of civilization to reproduce itself as a famous Russian scientist and philosopher, Sergey Kara-Murza defined. But the school built by Makarenko was not a matrix, but rather a mold! Regularizing, organizing, "structuring of the revolutionary stream into the accurate lineup" will be found necessary a little later, but in 1921-1923 it is still viewed as a "brutal military approach". Makarenko in his colony antedated the tendency, which was to become the social mainstream and to be poeticized soon. (As a sideline remark I would mention that among all kinds of Soviet edifices the first water-power stations besides their economic importance were perhaps the most meaningful metaphysically – they were the materialized symbols of our civilization. It was the image of an element, curbed by the concrete shores and rotating the turbines -but remaining an element the same time!)

The well-developed and precise routine for everyday activity led directly to the futurology of those days: "The happy people do not need any power spread over them, the power will be replaced by this joyful, new and humane instinct -when everyone just knows exactly what he/she needs to do, how to do it and what for." I think that "HAPPY" is the key word here. I'd stress it for the attention of those, who want to find In Makarenko's words the indications of the so-called "totalitarian type of mind" and to view the first builders of the Soviet Republic as ants. Any real education Is an education for happiness. And it brings us to a very sad (especially for our days) conclusion. In case the formula of happiness is lost or falsified at the level of the whole civilization (happiness is not to be mixed up with "consumer satisfaction") ... no education is possible. I'll put the same in a more general and more merciless way: in the world that lacks the "image of the future" bringing up kids becomes impossible. (From this point of view it is very strange to see how we bring up our own kids. Like the survivors of a global disaster we use those images of happiness and future that do not exist anymore. Isn't it a kind of phantom education?!)



The meeting of the Council of the Children's Colony



There is a remarkable pivotal point in the fable of the "Poem" – we should dwell on it to understand better the tragic death of the Soviet Union. Makarenko tells us about the most difficult first years of the Gorky Colony. Those years were spent to build up an excellent farm and to achieve prosperity. They managed! As a result of their collective efforts the Colony turned into a well-developed community: they had a science-based agriculture, good accommodation and food for everyone, they planted hundreds of roses in their garden... In other words they had built "a highly-developed socialism" (a self-naming of the late USSR during the Brezhnev's rule) in one single colony. Now they could have just enjoyed their life! However, strange things started to happen in the Colony. The first "rebels" appeared; the first suicide took place; the majority of students turned to nihilism and claimed that "we should run away everybody, because otherwise we'll also hang ourselves"; etc. Makarenko got the reasons for all of that: they had lost the room for growth, lost the goals in front of them – the stagnation started. "Our stop was the reason. There is inadmissible in the life of a collective. I was happy as a child after this finding: it was fine! What an amazing breathtaking dialectics! A free working collective can't stay still.... The form of existence for a free people's collective – moving ahead; the form of death – a stop." And Makarenko found an unexpectedly new solution to overcome the crisis -he creates artificially a new crisis, but this times a fruitful and "creative" one. There was another reform settlement for young offenders in the vicinity. But that one was in a deep decline and everything was downhill there. The common meeting of the Gorky colonists made a decision to amalgamate with the "bad" colony. It was a kind of a mission for Makarenko and his students. They arrived at this decision in spite of the obvious hardships they were about to face: "that" colony was much larger than the Gorky one, those guys threatened the newcomers with knifes. Nevertheless, the Gorky Colony collective left the established and wealthy life and moved to the dilapidated settlement. They did it in hope to overcome the difficulties and to rescue others. And it made the Gorky Colony itself to regenerate! Isn't it one more "shaping mold"! Unfortunately, this one was not noticed and used by the next generations of the Soviet people.

I should also mention all those details that would look ugly and repellent to a person today. For example, the story about the above-mentioned suicide is one of those. One guy hanged himself because his girlfriend planned the future life in a different manner than he did. At every step the responses of Makarenko (as well as those of other members of the Colony) were blameless: everybody tried to support the poor one with attention and wise words. But when the guy committed his suicide in spite of all precautions taken, the intonations were a subject of drastic changes:

* He lived a turn-penny and died in the same manner, he died because of his greed.

* I'd hang myself people of that sort: he just disturbed others with his silly dramas!

* Any way, he didn't have any life. He was not a human being, but a slave. His master was taken away from him, so he replaced him by Natashka [the girl's name].

Makarenko loved the poor guy, however he didn't use any single worm word to make mention of him after his death, the description of the burial is just absent in the book.

All of the above sounds strange to us. However, shouldn't we try to not to blame, but to understand these words and actions? Let us try to view them as an organic part of a very holistic paradigm those people had. Most likely, the personal borders between the members of the Colony differed from those we have between ourselves. It doesn't mean they had no privacy at all. Surely they had, but it was different from our one. The suicide even after his death is viewed as a part of "we" in the collective. Convicting him every colonist is trying to overcome those inner forces hidden in the mind, that make things like that happen. The dead guy is a part of everyone's soul. And this part is to be convicted and neutralized! "Once a person hangs himself – just check him out!" as one of his former friends says. As it always comes, one's life is viewed not as his\her "private property", but as belonging to the whole community – this is a norm for a traditional society. Perhaps, that is why the colonists pronounce the angry words at the moment we would rather keep devout silence facing the mystery of another person's life.

The same way Makarenko's students without any hesitations disassemble the brick wall of a XVII century abbey to build a hogcote. At this place we should recollect a good definition, saying that people, ethnos is an intercommunity of the living ones with all those who lived in the past and those who are only about to come into the world. Then many things appear to become clearer. Maybe since those people felt the personal borders differently from us and did not recognize one's special rights to stay aside as a "unique human being" – the same way they didn't feel the borders between different historical times as sharply as we do? The abbey wall was not "a historical monument" for them because only the dead have monuments. Most likely, a very sharp feeling of ethnos with its sophisticated through-time bonds leads to a conclusion that ... nobody has "died to the full extent" yet. That's why it was possible just to busily correct a mistake made by the XVII century people, who misused valuable bricks.



Makarenko with himeless children



We can also consider such basic (in my opinion!) points of bringing kids up as duty and honor. While teaching in Canada I had been told many times that I was not supposed to burden children with the feeling of duty – it was a kind of emotional abuse. The idea of duty is a totalitarian idea. What about honor... What honor are we talking about if "everyone has his/her own values"! Conscience is a private territory and thus any attempts to discuss some model of honor to be accepted by all people sound "almost like fascism".

I was used to thinking that all the above is a logical result of liberalism & multiculturalism in politics together with postmodernism in culture. (A Russian religious philosopher Sergey Stroev called it "the repressive pluralism".) ... A procreation of Python and Echidna... The remarkable Western hypocrisy – the poisonous mucus resulted from copulation of these two nice creatures. So I was very surprised to learn from Makarenko's book that one can fall into the same trap going from the opposite (ultra-revolutionary!) side.

When Anton Semenovich was animadverted and fired by the bunch of "educational apostles" of that time, they were claiming: "We advise comrade Makarenko to follow carefully the historical genesis of the idea of duty. This idea belongs to the bourgeois social relationships, the idea of mercantilism." "The Soviet public also join their voices to the statements of science – it also cannot accept the return of this category [honor – M. S.J, which resembles us so clearly about the privileges of the noblesse, uniforms and golden shoulder-straps." The refusal to apply "any administrative measures" against the young trouble-makers was also the official point of view in early 20-ties ("punishment shapes a slave"). It is really true that the extremes meet together.

The abovementioned methods of group testing, used in schools in Sweden (as well as in North American universities) were invented in the USSR in the early 1920s. At that time they were in fashion. It took a lot of time and efforts to put them aside and to develop the modem system we are familiar with in Russia. And to do it the innovators of education had to break the resistance of a very influential group of the "revolutionary teachers" of that historical period. In this connection I'd like to note that for a long time it seems helpful to me establishing a new subject in the science of history – "the fools-studies". Indeed, a fool is an excellent and irreplaceable object of research whenever we need "an instantaneous picture" of some historical period. An intelligent one may outpace his time. Or – on the contrary – he can dwell in the past, belonging mentally to some remote historical era of his choice. He may drop in his actual days only from time to time by necessity. But a fool always wears the ideas "from the end of the needle" only. He is perfectly modern In any time!

Finishing I should mention the remarkable Soviet optimism which was the basis for Makarenko's pedagogy. As the readers of the "Poem" we can follow its becoming. Unfortunately by the time our generation was growing up the very word "communism" had already been irreversibly profaned and deprived of its meaning. It must be good if everyone who identifies himself as a communist would give his/her personal definition: what communism is about? It should be done without the quotations from Marx about "the classless society". Let those definitions rather be "the personal heresy" of every single person. "Which communism are you ready to struggle for?" – besides any party programs and manifestos. In my turn I'd define that communism is first of ail a belief that every human being comes to this world kind and gifted.

Of course, her/his destination may not be realized because our world is too far from being perfect. Thus from the very beginning of life the newcomer may get under negative influences of the corrupted surrounding that connives the wrong aspirations. From this point of view, the main difference between Communism and Christianity (which comes close) is that the first one implies the active changes of life. It should be changed that way, that the soul salvation becomes much easier for everyone. What is really remarkable is that all capitalist ideologies inevitably have the concept of human's initial viciousness as a pivotal point. The whole parts of psychology and sociology are dedicated to making parallels between human behavior and that of an ape. Some of them do not want to consider a human being "above the belt" at all. Behaviorism (the main tool of an American teacher) goes even farther and views a student as a machine with some combination of buttons to play with: something like a laboratory rat with two electrodes embedded into brains (the so-called centers of "paradise" and "hell"). The state in this horrible world is a guard that does not allow the brutish citizens to eat each other openly. What about the last ones, they just have to direct their immanent selfishness into the legal way (they also call it "to combine the Law with Freedom" – sounds terrible...)

Anton Semenovich started the wittingly – as many people believed! – hopeless business. He decided to find the clean origins of soul in each of his minor thieves, robbers and prostitutes. Neither has he had any guaranteed tested means to do that. But he wins! Here these origins are – everybody who does not believe can look and see!

If our world survives, sooner or later somebody will have to clean the Augean stables in the people's souls caused by decades of lies and violence. And the same way as in Makarenko's time, as in any times at all, the evil will be convincing us about its own invincibility.

What do we see now in Russia? We see the same pitiless packs of homeless children all around the country. We see the "well-doing" young people who drink beer with glassy eyes. We see the teenagers, who are so busy shooting somebody down in the bloody computer games. Do you hear the incessant bawdy swearing? These are the beloved pairs having the romantic promenade at night... Let's be honest with ourselves: nobody knows for sure how to start curbing all that under the present conditions.

Of course, it is not possible today just to copy Makarenko's methods in the straightforward way: we are dealing with another generation in a different world. And we are different ourselves as well.

But we should use the main approach: Makarenko's remarkable conviction about the principal solvability of unsolvable problems. To apply his really communist combination of pragmatism with a consistent refusal to use any kind of manipulative "behaviorism", that insults the humanity of a human being. To look for the keys – not for latchkeys!

That is why I suppose the "Pedagogical Poem" to be a helpful reading for everyone who wants to understand Soviet history as well as the ways to overcome the present spiritual crisis.

Michael Shaturin

The site about Makarenko: http://www.makarenko.edu.ru/

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