Russia in the ShadowsWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Russia in the Shadows
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Communism -- Soviet Union; Soviet Union -- Social conditions
This hectic moral fever of the young is the dark side of
the educational spectacle in Russia. I think it is to be regarded mainly
as an aspect of the general social collapse; every European country has
noted a parallel moral relaxation of the young under the war strain; but
the revolution itself, in sweeping a number of the old experienced
teachers out of the schools and in making every moral standard a subject
of debate, has no doubt contributed also to an as yet incalculable
amount in the excessive disorder of these matters in present-day Russia.
Faced with this problem of starving and shattered homes and a social
chaos, the Bolshevik organisers are _institutionalising_ the town
children of Russia. They are making their schools residential. The
children of the Russian urban population are going, like the children of
the British upper class, into boarding schools. Close to this second
school I visited stood two big buildings which are the living places of
the boys and of the girls respectively. In these places they can be kept
under some sort of hygienic and moral discipline. This again happens to
be not only in accordance with Communist doctrine, but with the special
necessities of the Russian crisis. Entire towns are sinking down towards
slum conditions, and the Bolshevik Government has had to play the part
of a gigantic Dr. Barnardo.
We went over the organisation of a sort of reception home to which
children are brought by their parents who find it impossible to keep
them clean and decent and nourished under the terrible conditions
outside. This reception home is the old Hotel de l’Europe, the scene of
countless pleasant little dinner-parties under the old _régime_. On the
roof there is still the summertime roof garden, where the string
quartette used to play, and on the staircase we passed a frosted glass
window still bearing in gold letters the words _Coiffure des Dames_.
Slender gilded pointing hands directed us to the “Restaurant,” long
vanished from the grim Petersburg scheme of things. Into this place the
children come; they pass into a special quarantine section for
infectious diseases and for personal cleanliness—nine-tenths of the
newcomers harbour unpleasant parasites—and then into another section,
the moral quarantine, where for a time they are watched for bad habits
and undesirable tendencies. From this section some individuals may need
to be weeded out and sent to special schools for defectives. The rest
pass on into the general body of institutionalized children, and so on
to the boarding schools.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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