He made a note for his Secretary on the peasants' letter: "Remind me at C.P.C. to speak to Sereda and (Frumkin) Svidersky. To be drafted by arrangement between P.C. of Agriculture and P.C. of Food Supply."
Ilyich demanded attention to the needs of the population on the part of all the administrative bodies.
Lenin's solicitude for the children was strikingly manifested during the famine that prevailed in 1919. The food situation became critical in May. At the second meeting of the Economic Commissium Ilyich raised the question of rendering relief in kind to the children of the workers.
Towards the end of May 1919 the situation got worse. There were lots of grain, thousands of tons of it, in the Ukraine, the Caucasus and in the East, but the civil war had cut off all communications, the central industrial districts were starving. The Commissariat of Education was swamped with complaints about there being nothing to feed the children with.
On May 14, 1919, the army of the North-Western Government launched an offensive against Petrograd. On May 15 General Rodzyaako had taken Gdov, the Estonian and Finnish White Guard troops started to advance, and fighting began at Koporskaya Bay. Ilyich was concerned about Petrograd. It was characteristic of him that at this very same time, on May 17, he put through a decree for children to be fed free of charge. This decree provided for the improvement of the food supply for children and the welfare of the working people, and ordered that such supplies should be issued free of charge to all children up to 14 irrespective of their parents' ration class. The decree applied to the large industrial centres of sixteen non-agricultural gubernias.
June 12 brought news of the treachery of the Krasnaya Gorka garrison. On the same day Ilyich signed an order of the Council of People's Commissars extending the decree of May 17 concerning free food supplies for children to a number of other localities. The age limit was raised to 16 years.
Red tape in the matter of rendering relief to the needy was particularly hateful to Ilyich. On January 6, 1919, he wired to the Cheka in Kursk:
"Immediately arrest Kogan, member of the Yursk Central Purchasing Board, for not having helped 120 starving workers of Moscow and sent them away empty-handed. Publish it in newspapers and leaflets so that all employees of purchasing agencies and food supply authorities should know that formal and bureaucratic attitude and failure to help the starving workers will be severely punished, if need be—shot. Chairman of Council of People's Commissars LENIN." (Ibid., p. 168.)
Ilyich took special care to have the People's Commissariats stand as close to the worker and peasant masses and the Red Army as possible.
I was working at the Commissariat of Education, and saw evidences of Ilyich's keen interest in this matter at every step. Our Extra-School Department was visited by a mass of people—men and women workers, peasants, soldiers from the front, teachers and Party workers. Our Department became a sort of rendezvous to which Party people came to enquire about Ilyich and tell about their own work, to which workers came for advice as to how best to organize propaganda and agitation work, to which Red Army soldiers and commanders came, as well as workers who were closely ,associated with the village.
I remember a young Red Army man complaining that the wrong books were being sent them, that the newspapers did not reach them and that they had no propagandists. He demanded that more propagandists should go out. He was not the only one who came, of course, but that young fellow was so desperately earnest about it that he sticks in my memory.
A young commander, newly arrived from the front, told us agitatedly how his company, billetted in a real school somewhere out west, had made short work of "masterclass" culture. The real schools were privileged institutions. The Red Army men had smashed up all the appliances and torn the textbooks and exercise books to bits. "This is master-class property," they said. On the other hand, their thirst for knowledge was stronger than ever. There were no textbooks to be had. The old textbooks with their prayers for the Tsar and the Fatherland were destroyed by the Red Army men. They demanded textbooks that had a bearing on real life and on their own experiences.
At the Extra-School Education Congress which Ilyich addressed a resolution was passed calling on the delegates to go out to the front. Many of them went along them was Elkina, an experienced school-teacher. She went to the Southern Front. The Red Army men asked to be taught to read and write. Elkina started giving them lessons based on the analytic-synthetic method of the textbooks then in use: "Masha ate kasha (porridge)," "Masha made butter," etc. "What are you teaching us!" the Red Army men started protesting. "Who the dickens is Masha? We don't want to read that stuff!" And Elkina constructed her ABC lessons on different lines: "We are not slaves, no slaves are we."
It was a success. The Red Army men quickly learned to read and write. This was the very method of combining instruction with real life that Ilyich had been urging all the time. There was no paper to print new textbooks on. Elkina's textbook was printed on yellow wrapping paper, and in a note explaining her method Elkina described how to learn to write without using pen and ink. One has merely to recollect what paper the notice announcing the First Congress of the Third International was printed on to understand why Elkina wrote about this. It was not a case of failure to appreciate the role of the textbook. The Red Army men quickly learned to read and write by Elkina's ABC book.
"...There cannot be the slightest doubt of the existence of a tremendous thirst for knowledge and of tremendous progress in education—mostly attained by means of extraschool methods—of tremendous progress in educating the toiling masses. This progress cannot be confined within any school framework, but it is tremendous," Ilyich said at the Eighth Party Congress. (Works, Vol. 29, p. 161.)
Our political-education workers Sergievskaya, Ragozinsky and others visited the fronts. We received numerous letters from the fronts. Here is an extract from the letter of a front-line comrade, a Petrograd worker, who had cooperated with us in organizing political-educational work in the district. "I have just read the newspaper for the 7th reporting the opening of the Congress on Extra-School Education," he wrote. "Yes, Nadezhda Konstantinovna, when you travel the length and breadth of Soviet Russia you see what a lot our Department has to do and how needful this extra-school work is. I'm afraid I won't be able to follow all the congress proceedings. I am waiting for a train at station Inza to take me to station Nurlat. I have been appointed inspector-instructor, and I am going to inspect the 27th Division. It's a big job, and the main thing, a new one both in general and for me in particular. The recommendation which Vladimir Ilyich has given me obliges me to fulfil the trust in the best way I possibly can. Referring to that recommendation, one comrade said: 'I'd give my life for such a letter.' I'll write you when I've done the job. Give Vladimir Ilyich and all my acquaintances my sincere regards. Army in the Field. Political Department."
We had visitors from the front as well as letters. Ilyich asked for the more interesting visitors to be directed to him.
Our Department devoted no less attention to explanatory work among the peasantry.
The question of propaganda among the peasantry had long been receiving the attention of Ilyich. We know what trouble he had gone to in building up a popular literature and symposiums of collected articles, and having a popular newspaper published for the village (Bednota).
On December 12, 1918, the Council of People's Commissar had issued a decree "On the Mobilization of Literate People and the Organization of Propaganda of the Soviet System." This decree called for the organization of readings of decrees and the most important articles and pamphlets in working-class districts, and especially in the villages. These readings were to have been organized first and foremost by our Department. Ilyich was a hard task-master. These readings were held; they awoke a desire for knowledge. "We're not going to take sides or join any party," the peasants of the Arzamas Uyezd told our agitator who went down there. "When we've learnt to read we'll read everything for ourselves, and then no one will be able to take us in."
A section for work in the village was set up at the Eighth Congress of the Party, in the name of which Ilyich made his report. The section consisted of sixty-six delegates. Sereda, Lunacharsky, Mitrofanov, Milyutin, Ivanov, Pakhomov, Vareikis, Borisov and others were elected to the committee for drafting the theses.
All this goes to show what tremendous attention the Party and Ilyich devoted to this question.
I remember with what interest Ilyich used to listen to everything our Department succeeded in learning about the life of the peasants and what their attitude was to one or another question.
A peasant of the Moscow Gubernia, who was working at some building site, once called on us for some books. He told us about the profiteering practised before the revolution among the army contractors, who had made fortunes out of the business. We directed him to Lunacharsky. He came back and told us: "He was very nice. He made me sit down on the sofa, while he walked up and down, up and down, speaking ever so well. He gave me some books. Promised to give me some vizool gadgets as well (visual aids.—N.R.). I'm afraid to take 'em, though. He says they won't cost anything, but I'm afraid I'll be taxed for those vizool things afterwards." Nevertheless he took away a collection of all kinds of placards and school aids. He became a frequent visitor at our Department. We called him the Vizool Gadget man. It is characteristic that Ilyich gave more attention to another incident related by this builder. It was about the school-teacher who lived in their village. She did not receive any salary, yet she did not give up her work at the school, and in the evenings gave lessons to the adults, whom she taught to read and write. The Vizool Gadget man told us that he had bought her a pair of boots, as her old ones were completely worn out.
In 1919, many villages were still cut off from the rest of the world. There was no radio in those days. The illiterate population (in the Simbirsk Gubernia, where Ilyich was born, eighty per cent of the population in 1919 was still illiterate) did not read the newspapers—in fact, there weren't any newspapers owing to the shortage of paper; the central newspapers had a very restricted circulation for the same reason, and never reached the villages. Book deliveries had not been organized properly and the bookshops sent out unbelievable stuff. The village was all agog for news of what was going on in the world, but its only source of information were rumours.
