For children who desire to get a technical education the instruction between 12 and 17 years is more vocational. Those who are gifted and want to train further can go to the university. All instruction is free. The students receive, in addition to food rations and lodgings, a small contribution in money by the state.
Besides these schools there are technical continuation schools, some of them organized by the Commissariat of Education, and some by the unions. There are also art industrial schools and a "proletkult" where young workers have produced quite splendid work.
Many private villas and palaces were transformed into Children's Homes. Even in the country I have visited many estate mansions where there are now children's homes. The children feel quite happy there. But there is one short-coming that is noticeable about all this, and that is the lack of equipment. No books, no lead pencils, no writing paper. The war and the blockade are responsible for this. All over, wherever one goes the complaint is heard about the blockade. Bolsheviks and mensheviks, revolutionaries and reactionaries, all of them complain of the blockade and wish it lifted. Maybe there are Russian counter-revolutionaries outside of Russia who desire a continuation of the blockade, in order to combat the bolsheviks, but in Russia itself all are against the blockade and' long for its discontinuance with the greatest impatience.
The bringing up of man to a free personality is one of the most important tasks for a new society. A growing person must be fitted out with the conquest of science and technique, in order that he may be able to build up a new society. But he must also be fitted out with the positive qualities of a socialist world conception, he must learn that the human and socialist ideal must be transplanted into actual life and that he must realize that in his own person. Education is not only a problem for the young but also for the old.
According to bolshevik theory, the dictatorship is the period which shall carry the working masses over to socialism or communism. This shall be realized by the fact that the conditions of economic and political life under which people live and which, without doubt, exert a great influence on the thoughts and actions of men — the Marxians say that this influence is absolute — assume other forms, through which men will then experience a change in their actions and will-expressions, a change for the better.
The essential difference between the capitalist and socialist order of society consists in this that in the latter wealth and poverty, mastery and servitude, shall be abolished. In practice the abolition of wealth and poverty means that a few people shall not live very well while others are living very poorly. But we must say that in Russia there are still in existence great differences in the standard of living of the people, and that ruling over people is by no means abolished. Judging from everything one cannot say that in Russia the economic and political conditions, such as they have been in the last three years, have exerted a particularly favorable or a decisive influence on the bringing up of people to socialism and communism. It has become evident that a revolutionary government, or a proletarian-communist state, or a state striving towards communism cannot create the economic and political life forms of freedom and justice, if men do not do it themselves, in each community, in each shop; that the interference of the state, however wellmeant it may be, must always appear as forcible dictation from the outside, through which men are prevented from coming nearer their ideal; that each individual must prepare himself, technically and culturally, and that this socialist training is possible not only later, when capitalism shall have been overthrown, but right now and today, just as socialist propaganda has always been more or less possible, whether openly or secretly.
It is my sincere wish that each reader of this book may draw this lesson from it. If we want to liberate the world from capitalism and class rule and state, then we must remember that this world emancipation is largely also self -emancipation.
The Revolution in Ukraine