Translated material
Soviet history through the eyes of high school students
The radical changes of the last 15–20 years in the political, social and cultural life of our country have led to the disappearance without a trace of many realities of the Soviet era. Perhaps that is why our recent history, the witnesses of which are not only alive, but are still socially active, seems to today’s schoolchildren to be as distant as, say, the era of the 18th–19th centuries. Meanwhile, this still relevant past, remaining an essential part of the life of the older generation, inevitably invades our everyday life, and the child, willy-nilly, forms some idea about it. However, conversations with adults, their often polar assessments - from a sharp rejection of everything Soviet to regret about bygone times - do not always clarify the picture emerging in the child’s mind. As a child grows up, he begins to turn to numerous and varied sources of information, which are extremely heterogeneous and require serious thought. But schoolchildren very often do not know how to correlate information received from different areas and connect them into a single whole.
Nevertheless, no matter how contradictory, chaotic, ideologically heterogeneous the information available to children is, they somehow assimilate and organize it. The peculiarities of children's perception are quite clearly illustrated by school essays on a free (free) topic, which students were asked to write based on the material of Russian history of the twentieth century [1] .
Reading school essays reveals two significant problems. The first of them is the emerging cultural gap between generations, which can lead to the complete loss of a single cultural language. The second is that the requirements of the modern school curriculum do not coincide with its content: children at school expect to hear from them what they are not taught there. The latter, apparently, happens because teachers still remember the Soviet past well and do not consider it necessary to explain some of its realities in the same way as they do in relation to other historical periods. The compilers of school textbooks have not yet come to the conclusion of the need to provide cultural commentary on the historical events of the 1917–1980s. As a result, the student can learn the facts and even partly their interpretation, but the real content of the life of the previous generation remains unknown to him. Any clear answer to the question “How did people live under Soviet rule?” the child does not receive it either in everyday life from adults or in school from teachers.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that information freedom, an undoubted achievement of the post-Soviet era, often turns into information chaos, against the backdrop of which the proven Soviet system of teaching Russian history looks quite thoughtful. For all its ideological schematicism and simplicity, this system was logical and consistent in its own way. It was built around several central oppositions (people - tsar, peasants - landowners, proletariat - bourgeoisie, before the revolution - after the revolution, etc.), gradually but persistently instilled in the child. The information and the way it was presented were appropriate for his age and level of development; at the same time, the knowledge gained in the lessons did not contradict information coming from fiction and the media, but, on the contrary, was reinforced by them. If alternative historical evidence reached a schoolchild from parents or older comrades, they were invariably labeled as anti-Soviet, prohibited, and as such were fixed in memory. That is, from early childhood, Soviet citizens mastered the cultural language spoken by their elders. (More precisely, in the situation of cultural bilingualism characteristic of any totalitarian system, all members of society mastered two “languages.”) By high school, a good student who had mastered the key words and the basic logical moves expected from him could easily characterize any era, and such a characteristic would not conflicted with what was written in a textbook, newspaper or novel. Thus, the external unity of society was maintained.
Today we see a different picture. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the inconsistency of textbooks like “Stories on the History of the USSR” for junior grades has become clear, but functionally similar propaedeutic courses have not been developed, although it is in them, according to the plan of the methodologists, that the emphasis should be on explaining everyday and cultural realities . Nowadays, students begin studying the history of their native country only in the eighth grade, and students become acquainted with the history of the 20th century only in graduation. By this time, the child has already spontaneously formed an idea of the history of the Soviet period, and a rather bizarre one at that. As an example, we can cite a phrase from an essay by an eighth-grade student: “Valery and his wife lived happily, went to the collective farm every day.” In this case, the confusion of the expressions “work on the collective farm” and “go to work” indicates both a misunderstanding of the very essence of the collective farm and a lack of command of the language of the Soviet era, and therefore the text is constructed according to other laws, known from modern life.
In addition, for today's schoolchild, the modern history of the fatherland begins with the collapse of the USSR, and all previous events merge with the history of the 19th and even 18th centuries and seem very long ago: “Once upon a time, there was a war. Then the city of Leningrad was surrounded by blockade” (7th grade). For the same reason, concepts are often substituted; for example, the word “manager” from classical Russian literature can be used in the meaning of “collective farm chairman”, following from the context (9th grade), and the expression “sent to the front” (8th grade), referring to the events of 1941, clearly refers to the phrase “send to the Caucasus in the active army”, widespread in the same Russian literature. Schoolchildren tend to consider the signs of modern life to be the latest achievement (for example, a statement like: “Back then there was no television or radio,” 6th grade) is often found.
At the same time, in the minds of schoolchildren, Soviet history is significantly more stereotypical than the history of the 19th or 18th centuries. There are a number of persistent images that are invariably associated with Soviet power. One of the most frequent associations is the concept of “repression,” the meaning and methods of implementation of which remain unclear. An illustrative example is a fragment from an analysis of A. Akhmatova’s poem “The Spell” by an eleventh-grade student. The starting point for the analysis was the time the poem was written - 1935. This fact forced the schoolgirl to look for (and successfully discover) political subtext in the poem, since most modern high school students are sure that such subtext exists in any Soviet work of art. (Moreover, the content of the possible subtext is understood quite straightforwardly: Soviet writers write about anything, but in fact they always try to at least hint to the reader about the repressions to which they, like all Soviet citizens, are constantly subjected.) “At the very beginning of the poem, Akhmatova writes: “A path untrodden, a meadow unmown, through a night cordon...” The poem was written in 1935, when, during repressions and strict control, there were patrols on the streets. Thus, the image of the hero of the poem becomes quite clear. This is an outlaw who comes to her secretly. Then the images familiar to this genre take on a new meaning. “From the high gates, from the Zaohten swamps...” - the hero, apparently, is hiding in the swamps, outside the city (behind the city gates). Thus, while outwardly maintaining the form of fortune-telling, Akhmatova conveys a real situation from life, introducing small details of reality into the text, such as “cordon” and “dinner”. Apparently, the hero eats poorly, suffers all sorts of hardships and goes to her for a hearty dinner... The heroine has prepared dinner, sits, waits and invites the hero.” Since exactly this situation - someone is hiding outside the city from political persecution, but every evening he comes to his beloved for dinner - is fundamentally impossible, its presentation is evidence of a complete misunderstanding of the realities of the time being described. At the same time, the author cannot be blamed for ignorance of historical facts: 1935 was truly a period of mass repression, and Soviet literature was indeed often expressed in Aesopian language.
It is interesting that the topic of violence against a person and encroachment on his person, popular in school essays, is often reduced to the topic of encroachment on the property of citizens, which indicates the importance of this category itself for modern children. It is the presence of property that is characterized as a guarantee of well-being and even happiness, and it is not so much its material value that is emphasized as the importance of realizing that it is “one’s own.” Property individualizes the personality, while the state seeks to deprive a person of his property, and therefore of his personality. Therefore, in the descriptions of schoolchildren, Soviet people try with all their might to preserve what belongs to them and is constantly in danger: “From childhood, his parents instilled in him a love for his home and for a small plot of land that had not yet been taken away from them” (9th grade) . Ceasing to be owners, people practically become slaves of the state - some schoolchildren even call the Soviet government a slave system (9th grade) - and not at all metaphorically. The motif of the continuous hard physical labor of Soviet people is one of the most common in school essays. In the same sense, the symbolism of the hammer and sickle is often interpreted - “a lot of work” (8th grade).
Often in school essays the theme of total lies and deceit is presented as a stable opposition: “false power” and “people who sincerely believe in communist ideals” (“They thought that soon their country would have a bright future, all that was left was to wait for one five-year period, and happiness will inevitably be in their home...", 9th grade). One side of this opposition, the authorities, has been constantly conspiring against the people since 1917. “The revolution occurred because: at first, several criminals began to tell the peasants: “You are being deceived, you are being fooled. All land belongs to you (agricultural land, of course). If you want to be free, don’t bring bread to the cities” (6th grade). All subsequent development of the country is perceived as the implementation of this conspiracy, and the tendency to deceive one’s own people is perceived as a hereditary quality of domestic politicians.
Typically, schoolchildren willingly emphasize the differences between the “past” and the present, but if we are talking about similarities, then the past turns out to be the direct source of many of the problems of our time. “It was 1928, there was a crisis in the country. In fact, the country was ruled by rich, “fat” Nepmen. They all had a common friend - Ivan Kudrin. He managed to work for everyone. By profession he was an accountant <…> all his previous owners, as a rule, became bankrupt. Kudrin somewhat altered the accounts and took most of the money for himself <...> But still, he was not allowed to rob the entire wealthy public of the country. In 1934, he was sent to prison after he was noticed by a NEPman's maid rummaging through her master's drawer after hours.
Now Kudrin is the Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation [2] and apparently he is not much different from his ancestor. He looks like a decent person, but it’s a mystery what’s inside him. And now there are a lot of such politicians” (8th grade).
The conspiracy of the authorities against the people is expressed not only in direct violence, but also in the imposition of primitive illusions on people. The naive faith of Soviet people in communist ideals is brought almost to the point of absurdity in school essays: “In his youth, he simply dreamed that he would see the leaders of the Soviet Union and similar things” (9th grade) - or is assessed as madness: “His parents did the same , like the others, were somewhat crazy. For example, his father was an ardent supporter of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)” (9th grade). Often the author’s attitude towards these illusions is expressed in irony, which he invites the reader to share: “At that time, ordinary foreigners, and especially former residents of the Soviet Union, could not go there, to that communist country that had a bright future” (9th Class). Knowing the expression “bright communist future” and clearly ironizing about it, the author of the essay is unlikely to realize the significance of the substitution made: instead of the characteristic expression “simple Soviet people” - “simple foreigners”.
Noting the strange illusory nature of the consciousness of Soviet people, the authors of the works remain on pragmatic and individualistic positions, and therefore any government intervention in human life is invariably assessed negatively, and the idea of patriotism of Soviet people is expressed in a somewhat paradoxical way. Thus, when describing the mobilization of 1941, schoolchildren not only use the phrase “sent to the front,” but also emphasize that in this situation people are forced to obey a certain force (the state): “Quite soon, just a month later, unknown people arrived and began to collect the entire male population in the square... They announced, citing a special document, that among them soldiers, pilots, and tank crews would be selected according to criteria. This did not last long, and after two hours half of the male population of Belyashevsky was put into special cars and taken away in the direction of the city” (9th grade). This description does not prevent the author of the essay from asserting that all the village residents were eager to defend their homeland, but the homeland is understood too narrowly: “Valery was a patriot and, like many at that time, hated all foreign capitalist countries, even other cities and villages of his country were called he is disgusted” (9th grade).
But the most difficult thing for a modern schoolchild is to characterize the consciousness of a Soviet person. Thus, a sixth grade student writes about people in the post-war period (1950s): “They prayed that we would not make their mistakes.” It would be incorrect to say that Soviet people did not pray at all, however, some incorrectness of the formulation is obvious. This example quite clearly illustrates the noted tendency towards the gradual loss of a single cultural language: the student cannot be blamed for a historical error or even inaccuracy; the point is rather in the chosen way of describing reality.
The question, however, is whether such a loss seems significant to modern Russian society. If we believe that the preservation of cultural memory is a necessary condition for the normal development of society, then the identified problem certainly requires a solution. In this case, only the public education system can provide a real opportunity to change the current situation. This means that we should immediately begin to develop new methods of teaching the humanities (primarily history and literature), and change the very approach to teaching these subjects.
If society (or its most influential part) sees its task as completely ridding young people of the legacy of the past, then all that remains is to wait for a complete change of generations to occur.
[1] Below we consider essays written in the last four years by students of general education classes of the Academic Gymnasium of St. Petersburg State University and gymnasium classes of School No. 371 of St. Petersburg, which is an “experimental site” of the Russian Academy of Education. The original punctuation is preserved in the quotations.
[2] The essay was written in the 2001–2002 academic year.