By abolishing at one stroke all the local self-governing institutions the 
Bolshevics were undermining the very system that was implanting and 
spreading primary education in the country. And nothing was organized 
in place of what had been demolished: Local grants were not replaced 
by those of the State. The financial and economic disorder reigning every- 
where at that time caused all systematic pecuniary help to be taken away 
from the schools. And yet, as the Soviet Government had concluded peace 
and refused paying all the State debts, one had the right to expect that the 
credits granted for public instruction should be larger than before, and 
therefore that universal instruction should be possible in a shorter period. 
But the activity of the Commissariat of Education consisted only of all 
kinds of declarations; of fixing imaginary premature terms for “universal 
nstruction”. It founded Children’s Homes (which were to replace family 
:ducation); it organized so-called “liquidation circles”, to do away with 
literacy. The declaration issued in 1918 proclaimed that the aim of the 
school was to develop “free personality” and to give a well grounded 
political education. Instead of being the “slave of capitalism” the child 
was supposed to become the “Conqueror of Nature”. And yet while all 
these fine sentences were expounded the teachers would receive no salaries 
for a whole twelve month; and during the period of 1922-1924 no less 
than 22 thousand schools were closed. The remaining schools were com- 
pletely disorganized, due to a total absence of all care or help given to 
them. A decree of 1921 ordered all these schools to be subsidized out of 
“local funds’’; and yet the Commissary of Education himself owned that 
no such funds whatever existed. This general destruction of the schools was 
greatly accelerated by such national calamities as famine, epidemics, the 
devastation of whole regions. Masses of schildren would wander away 
from such regions. 
Krupskaya, the widow of Lenin, who was the leader and guide of the 
people’s education in Soviet Russia, was horrified to see that the schools 
were “in a most threatening condition”; that they presented a picture of 
‘night mare-horror”’. And in her report during the XIII Congress of the 
Communistic Party she speaks of facts which would seem quite incredible to 
anyone who knew the pre-revolution any condition of the people’s education 
and the schools of that time: buildings crumbling to pieces; classes not 
heated; windows with wooden boards instead of window panes; all the 
children crowded together in the room of the school-mistress. She herself 
dressed in rags. No black-boards; the teacher obliged to write on the wall; 
no benches, so the children sit on the floor. They have neither paper nor 
ink, nor books. “And all this,” says Krupskaya in her report, “is not an 
exception. On the contrary, a good school is a rare exception in contem- 
porary Russia.” The attendance at school has also fallen off in a terrific 
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