Living My Life - Emma Goldman [243]
People raided, imprisoned, and shot for their ideas! The old and the young held as hostages, every protest gagged, iniquity and favouritism rampant, the best human values betrayed, the very spirit of revolution daily crucified—were all these nothing but “grey, dull spots,” I wondered! I felt chilled to the marrow of my bones.
Two days later I went to see Anatol Lunacharsky. His quarters were in the Kremlin, the impenetrable citadel of authority in the popular mind of Russia. I bore several credentials, and my escort was a “Sovietsky” anarchist held in high esteem by the Communists. Nevertheless we made very slow progress in reaching the seat of the People’s Commissar for Education. Repeatedly the sentries scrutinized our propusks and asked questions regarding the purpose of our coming. At last we found ourselves in a reception room, a large salon filled with many objects of art and a crowd of people. They were artists, writers, and teachers awaiting an audience, my companion explained. A sorry and undernourished lot they were, their gaze steadily riveted on the door leading to the Commissar’s private office. Hope and fear burned in their eyes. I too was anxious, though my rations did not depend on the man who presided over the cultural positions. Lunacharsky’s greeting was warmer and more cordial than Kollontay’s. He also inquired whether I had already found suitable work. If not, he could suggest a number of occupations in his department. The American system of education was being introduced in Soviet Russia, he said, and I, coming from that country, would undoubtedly be able to make valuable suggestions in regard to its proletarian application. I gasped. I forgot all about the purpose of my visit. The educational system found wanting and rejected by the best pedagogues in the United States now accepted as a model in revolutionary Russia? Lunacharsky looked much astonished. Was the system really being opposed in America, he inquired, and by whom? What changes had they suggested? I should explain the whole matter to him and his teachers, and he would call a special conference for the purpose. I could do much good, he urged, and I could be of great help to him in his struggle with the reactionary elements among the teachers who were clamouring for the old methods in dealing with the child and who even favoured prison for the mental defectives. [ ... ]
Lunacharsky continued to talk of his difficulties with the conservative instructors and of the controversy raging in the Soviet press about defective children and their treatment. He and Maxim Gorki were standing out against prison as a reformative influence; he himself was even opposed to milder forms, in fact to any form, of coercion in dealing with the young. “You are more in tune with the modern approach to the child than Maxim Gorki,” I said. In part, however, he agreed with Gorki, he replied, for most of Russia’s young generation were tainted with bad heredity, which the years of war and civic strife had accentuated. But rejuvenation could not be brought about by punishment or terror, he emphasized. “That is splendid,” I remarked; “but are not terror and punishment the methods of dictatorship? And do you not approve of the latter?” He did, but only as a transitory factor, while Russia was being bled by the blockade and attacked on numerous fronts. “Once these have been liquidated, we will begin in earnest to build the real Socialist Republic, and the dictatorship will then go, of course.” [... ]
On my way back to the National I learned from my escort that the People’s Commissar for Education was considered not only sentimental, but also a scatter-brain and a wastrel. He was doing very little for the proletcult (proletarian culture), spending huge sums instead to protect bourgeois art. Worst of all, he was devoting most of his time to saving the last remnants of the counter-revolutionary intelligentsia. With the co-operation of Maxim Gorki he had succeeded in reinstating the old professors