Krupskaya was a leading force in the campaign to end the old regime’s legacy of illiteracy after the Revolution. Here she relates the accomplishments of the ‘Cultural Offensive’ begun in 1928 to do just that.

‘The Cultural Revolution’ by Nadezhda Krupskaya from Communist International. Vol. 8 No. 19. November 15, 1931.

EVERY revolution is carried out by the masses. The same is the case with the cultural revolution. When in 1923 I happened to complain about the slowness with which we were liquidating illiteracy, Comrade Lenin said: “It is all a question of the masses themselves taking up the matter, then illiteracy will be liquidated.” In his last article he wrote about our standing face to face with the cultural revolution. Beginning with October the masses have been thirsting for knowledge; but these were the active ones mainly, a vast number, true, yet tens of millions were left behind illiterate, in the dark. The rate of progress remained slow when compared with that which the new order inside the country required. Only when the industrialisation of the land began to go forward rapidly, and then the reconstruction of agriculture on the basis of collectivisation, the rate of progress as regards cultural work also began to change. A sharp turn was taken in 1928. In the summer of 1928, on the initiative of the Y.C.L., the “cultural offensive” so called, was begun. The most clear-cut, well-defined form of “cultural offensive” was to be found in Saratov, a town on the Lower Volga. The district of Saratov during the 1905 revolution was one where many peasant uprisings had taken place, which culminated in repressions by the Tsarist Government, from which the landlords almost completely fled, and big landlord estates had almost completely disappeared before October. This affected Saratov itself. Of the non-industrial centres this was one of the most cultured. And there in 1928, the “cultural offensive” was begun on the initiative of the Y.C.L., a large cultural movement to liquidate illiteracy. They began to foster the illiterates on every hand; they were given preferential treatment in queues, plays were arranged specially for them—for it turned out that many illiterates had never been to the theatre—Y.C.L. girls began to visit the illiterates and keep an eye on their children while the mother went to evening classes. They began to teach the illiterates in their homes. A whole army of volunteers was formed who worked under the slogan “literate, teach the illiterate.” Those volunteers who worked gratis on the cultural front, began to be called “culture army soldiers.” Their number continued to increase, the masses themselves chose them from among their own number.

The winter of 1928-29 was the time when the “cultural offensive” began to be launched towns. In 1928 it was spread to the village. Here it covered the darkest corners of the Union. The Central Black Earth Region had previously been a district where the most reactionary landlords had held sway, where the people were completely illiterate, where the villages were already degenerate. The “cultural offensive” attacked these places. The children taught their mothers; the husbands—their wives. The school for grown-up illiterates—the ‘‘liqupunkt’—often had no rooms to work in and led a nomad existence, going from cottage to cottage. You could go into a cottage and find a picture like this: the room packed with illiterates, among them women with breast-fed babies, all eager to learn, to write, to read. The atmosphere was very hot. The owner of the cottage—so one of the inspectors who visited there relates—is pleased to have his visitors, and is also not idle; he is sharpening their pencils with an axe (there is no penknife). The youth offensive had begun in the village. Students from the upper courses in the Pedagogical Technical Institute in the Black Earth Region took it in turns to come to the village on two to three months’ practical work. The peasants rode out to meet them on sleighs, carrying warm felt boots and skin-coats.

The offensive made to liquidate illiterates has already given fine results. Leningrad is now a town where the inhabitants are completely literate. The Vorobich district is the same. By the XIV. Anniversary of the October Revolution the whole of the Leningrad Region will be entirely literate. The Moscow and Saratov and other districts are aiming at the same results.

There was a particularly large percentage of illiteracy before the revolution among the national minorities; for instance, 7 per cent. were literate among the population of Chuvash; 12.7 per cent. were literate among the Tartars of the late Kazansk province; 3.3 per cent. among the Mariitsi of the late Ufinsk region; there were 9.3 per cent. literate among the Mordva of the late Kazan province; 3 per cent. among the Tadijiks; 2 per cent. Cossacks; 0.6 per cent. Kirghiz; 0.7 per cent. of the Turks in the late Zakasny region; 0.8 per cent. of the Buriats in the late TransCaucasus region; 0.7 per cent. of the Yakuts; of the North Caucasian peoples, 1.7 per cent. of the Cherchentsi and 3 per cent. of the Kabardins were literate, and so on.

The difficulties connected with working among the national minorities were enormous—the hard conditions of life, the old customs, century-long enslavement of the women—all this made it extremely difficult to liquidate illiteracy; transportable forms of work had to be created—red nomad tents and covered carts like the nomads use, in order to carry on considerable agitational work. There were great achievements, especially in those places where industrialisation and collectivisation are in full swing. Adygeya was an especially fine example. Before the revolution only the Cherkess aristocracy went to school. The total number of literate persons was 3 per cent. of the population. In 1930 Adygeya became collectivised on an all-round basis, which gave an enormous stimulus for the development of the whole of their cultural life. Throughout the villages a thick network of stations were organised for fighting against illiteracy. Old and young sat down to the alphabet, and the Cherkess women were especially ardent. By the Lenin days in the beginning of 1931, Adygeya became a land of all-round literacy. And in this respect Adygeya is not alone.

Similar victories are to be seen in Kabardino-Balkaria; for only 2.3 per cent. of the population were literate before the revolution, and now the percentage has risen to 80 per cent.

And everywhere throughout the regions and republics of the national minorities we find this enormous thirst for knowledge. “The cultural offensive has begun in the Kalmytsk Region,” we read in the “Izvestia,” our governmental organ. “In the Kalmytsk-Bazarinsk steppes, near Astrakhan, on the shores of the Inaksk lake, a big national festival recently took place. Over 4,000 persons, 1,500 of whom were “cultural army soldiers,” took part in the festival. Meetings were held, and then under the open sky a play was enacted, “Ulan Sar,” dedicated to the second Bolshevik spring. Such a multitudinous gathering is the first to occur in the history of the Kalmyks. Half the population of this Mongolian nomad tribe was present at the festival, and afterwards the “cultural army soldiers” left for other places to meet other tribes.”

Everywhere there is this push forward. In White Russia in 1920 there were only 31.5 per cent. literate, and in 1930-31 the figure (All the figures which follow from now on, will concern only the R.S.F.S. R.) had reached to 87 per cent. We shall soon become a literate country, but we have not yet arrived there, and we must not slacken our work until the job is finished. This is why the Soviet People’s Commissars on August 15, 1931, made the following decision: “To institute universal compulsory education for the illiterate populations in towns and villages throughout the territory of the R.S.F.S.R. to cover persons between the ages of 16 and 50 years.”

The Soviet of People’s Commissaries made this decision, when the cultural work had been launched so successfully as to make this Decree fully realisable. This work cannot be carried out administratively, but by the methods worked out during the course of the “cultural offensive.” “Shock brigades, Socialist competition, the ‘social tug,’ counter-plans from below and so on should be widely used in all the work carried on to realise universal education,” says the Soviet of People’s Commissaries.

But the “liquidation of illiteracy” offensive does not only deal with technical knowledge; it must draw all the scholars of the schools for liquidating illiteracy into the active work of Socialist construction; give them a wide political outlook and general cultured methods of working; prepare them for further studies. A whole network of schools for collective farm workers and town workers has been created everywhere.

Take the collective farms. In the Urals there is to be found the Krasno-Poliansk district. This is a district of all-round collectivisation. Among the collective farm workers there are not a few old partisans, who fought against the Kolchak armies, and who even in those days had organised into collective farms. In this district there are about thirty villages. And right in the centre of this district, in one of the biggest villages, a Palace of Culture has been organised, where the villagers send their delegates to study—there are sanitation courses, liquidation of illiteracy, the question of kindergartens, the study of agronomy and cattle farming. Near the Palace of Culture there are a few model institutions, where those attending the educational courses learn how to make use of the various measures taught them in practice. In another village there is the collective farmers’ university. The collective farming movement. awakens the consciousness of the women. “The women have also now turned towards the collective farms,” asserted one of the women delegates to the last Congress of Soviets. And having turned to the collective farms, the women find themselves face to face with culture.

As for the workshops, here we find a complete network of workers’ educational institutions, both day and night institutes, and even correspondence classes. The way to knowledge is open wide before the working men and women. In many workshops over half the workers are studying. The question is now being raised of organising large undertakings—schools, where every single working man and woman would have a chance to study.

The working men and women have set themselves the task of becoming the masters of technique. The Supreme Council of National Economy has opened a special department to deal with technical propaganda. Thus day by day the working men and women, the collective farm men and women, wage war in the interests of widening their range of knowledge. Even now the workers in the collective farms dig up all they can out of newspapers, from speeches, listening in on the radio, hearing stories—but they are not systematic. Their grasp of knowledge will become systematic when they attend the various schools for grown-ups, when they begin to use text-books. The demand for text-books, incidentally, is positively enormous!

Ever new cadres flow into the ranks of the working class. They come from the villages, having no knowledge of the ways of life in industry; at first they feel lost to the wide inside the factories. So the All-Union Council of Trade Unions make a decision that every new worker should pass through preliminary “introductory courses” in connection with industry. These introductory courses should give the new worker an idea of the raw material he is to work up, how and from whence it is obtained; they should be shown the whole working-up process, should learn to understand the machines, and how to work them. These introductory courses should give the worker, who is entering the industrial process for the first time, a complete idea of the entire production as a whole, of the position which the given branch of industry and the given works occupy in the general plan of construction. The Soviet worker must not be a blind executor, but a class-conscious participator in Socialist construction. The introductory courses must help him in this respect. Measures are being taken at present to use the kinematograph for this purpose also.

The class-consciousness of the workers and masses of collective farming workers grows very rapidly. The whole turn taken in connection with labour—shock-brigading methods, Socialist competition, the solidarity of brigade work, assistance to the backward workers on the part of the more skilled (‘social tug’), publicity in connection with the work, the fact that a public account must be given of the work, and social control manifested, and so on—all this educates the workers and gives them a class-conscious attitude to labour. And this latter is what gives the stimulus to knowledge. They begin to feel that the book is an instrument of labour. The masses want to work, not in the footsteps of their fathers, but in the way shown them by science.

Thus on the basis of this general cultural development of the toilers, it has become possible to put through such a measure as universal education. We are still faced with enormous difficulties; there are no buildings available, not enough text-books, exercise-books, educational books and appliances and, worst of all, there are not enough teachers properly prepared for the work. For now we demand a high standard not only of pedagogic training, but also political training from our teachers. For without it the teacher has no authority in the eyes of his pupils. “What is the Kuomintang” ask the kiddies, and if the teacher does not know, the children give him no further peace. He must know the Kuomintang, and the latest events, and the decisions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The problem of cadres is a very difficult one in the regions and Republics of the national minorities. The number of technical schools grows rapidly everywhere, but it is still totally inadequate. Take White Russia. In 1921-22, ten years ago, there were four technical schools, and now there are sixty-five; there were two workers’ faculties, and now there are twenty-four; but all this is a mere drop in the ocean compared with the enormous demand. Pedagogical technical institutes are lacking; and yet the teacher is an essential factor. Considerable work is carried on among the teachers. “The plan to introduce universal compulsory education by the anniversary of the decision of the Commissariat for Education, 25.vii.1931,” declared Comrade Bubnov, the People’s Commissar for Education, in his report to Comrade Stalin, “has been accomplished with a surplus margin.” The total number of scholars in the elementary schools throughout the R.S.F.S.R. (without the autonomous republics) has reached 8,709,937—105.7 per cent. of the plan of the People’s Commissariat for Education. The increase in the number of scholars in the elementary schools alone was 28.4 per cent. over and above the 1929-30 figure. Throughout the autonomous republics, the total number of scholars attending elementary schools has reached 1,506,013—101.3 per cent. of the plan for the republics.

If during the last educational year 1929-30 the average percentage of school children covered was 71 per cent., which figure fell in the country places to 68.2 per cent., the percentage throughout the R.S.F.S.R. (without the autonomous republics) was raised this year to 97.1 per cent., and in the autonomous republics to 87.9 per cent. Compulsory education over a period of seven years has also been introduced in the industrial centre.

In the preparational work for the new year 1931-32, the problem of a universal seven-year course of education for all children will be one of the central tasks of our cultural constructional work.

During the last year also serious changes have been made in the quality of the teaching in schools. Our school is becoming polytechnical. Schools are being attached to factories and workshops, to collective and State farms. The link which binds them is made stronger.

On September 5, 1931 the decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was published, concerning the middle schools. This decision fixes the attention of the Party and Soviet organisations on the school, in general. It provides for improvements in the material conditions of the teachers, who in the matter of supplies are brought on to an equal level with the workers; instructions are given to the economic organisations, and what is most important, most significant in this decision, the need is emphasised for an intense struggle to improve the quality of the teaching provided. The school must allow of no deterioration in the sphere of revolutionary theory, must illustrate it in practice, must arm the children with general educational knowledge and educate them as Communists, make Communists of them. Methodological assistance to the teachers must be kept on a high level, a system of instructorship must be properly instituted, etc.

Whereas the struggle for universal education last year was launched as a class struggle against sectarians who were against allowing their children to attend godless Soviet schools; against the kulaks, the exploiters of child labour, and the labour of young peasants and so on; against those who defied the decision concerning universal! education, i.e., questioned the rights of the children to attend schools—this year the struggle will be much more intense. It will be far more intense because the school will cover much older persons, because the school will become more imbued with the spirit of Communism. The Central Committee declares war on all those who try to drag the school back to a wordy affair, where swotting and repetition are the order of the day; against those who fail to understand the whole enormous educational significance of the school and deciare that the school is apparently doomed to extinction, becomes no longer necessary ; against those who draw up Utopian plans, use untried methods which discredit the Soviet school. On the pedagogic front a war is being waged between the Communists and the petty-bourgeois tendencies in education. The line of the party in the work of educating the growing generation becomes clearer and more defined. A wave of teachers’ meetings greeted the decision of the Central Committee. Forces are being mobilised, great work has begun to give methodological assistance to the schools. The Pioneer organisations, for their part, are explaining the decision of the Central Committee to millions of cadres of Young Pioneers; the school children are being told about it by the teachers. The children will help to bring our schools into order. The parents also, whose degree of literacy and class-consciousness grows with every new day, will also do their part to assist.

Fourteen years have passed since the October Revolution. The fight to defend the October Slogans goes stubbornly ahead year by year, day by day. Millions are being drawn into this struggle. By the forces of the masses we shall convert our land into a land of Socialist culture. There is still much work ahead, but with each year the cultural prospects before us become clearer, prospects which can be achieved only in the Land of the Soviets, and the security for which achievement we already have in the victories already gained on the cultural front.

The ECCI published the magazine ‘Communist International’ edited by Zinoviev and Karl Radek from 1919 until 1926 irregularly in German, French, Russian, and English. Restarting in 1927 until 1934. Unlike, Inprecorr, CI contained long-form articles by the leading figures of the International as well as proceedings, statements, and notices of the Comintern. No complete run of Communist International is available in English. Both were largely published outside of Soviet territory, with Communist International printed in London, to facilitate distribution and both were major contributors to the Communist press in the U.S. Communist International and Inprecorr are an invaluable English-language source on the history of the Communist International and its sections.

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