Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Pages From A Diary

Dictated by Telephone: 15 December,

1922
First Published: Pravda No. 2, January
4, 1923; Signed: N.Lenin. Published
according to the Pravda text checked
with the stenographer’s notes
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd
English Edition, Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, pages 462-
466
Translated: David Skvirsky and George
Hanna
Transcription\HTML Markup: David
Walters & R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive
(2000). You may freely copy, distribute,
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The recent publication of the report on

literacy among the population of Russia,
based on the census of 1920 (Literacy in
Russia, issued by the Central Statistical
Board, Public Education Section, Moscow,
1922), is a very important event.
Below I quote a table from this report on the
state of literacy among the population of Russia
in 1897 and 1920.

Literates per Literates per Literates per

thousand males thousand females thousand population

1897 1920 1897 1920 1897 1920

1. European 326 422 136 255 229 330

Russia
2. North 241 357 56 215 150 281
Caucasus
3. Siberia 170 307 46 134 108 218
(Western)

Overall
318 409 131 244 223 319
average

At a time when we hold forth on proletarian

culture and the relation in which it stands to
bourgeois culture, facts and figures reveal that
we are in a very bad way even as far as
bourgeois culture is concerned. As might have
been expected, it appears that we are still a very
long way from attaining universal literacy, and
that even compared with tsarist times (1897)
our progress has been far too slow. This should
serve as a stern warning and reproach to those
who have been soaring in the empyreal heights
of "proletarian culture". It shows what a vast
amount of urgent spade-work we still have to
do to reach the standard of an ordinary West-
European civilised country. It also shows what
a vast amount of work we have to do today to
achieve, on the basis of our proletarian gains,
anything like a real cultural standard.
We must not confine ourselves to this
incontrovertible but too theoretical
proposition. The very next time we revise our
quarterly budget we must take this matter up
in a practical way as well. In the first place, of
course, we shall have to cut down the
expenditure of government departments other
than the People’s Commissariat of Education,
and the sums thus released should be assigned
for the latter’s needs. In a year like the present,
when we are relatively well supplied, we must
not be chary in increasing the bread ration for
schoolteachers.
Generally speaking, it cannot be said that the
work now being done in public education is too
narrow. Quite a lot is being done to get the old
teachers out of their rut, to attract them to the
new problems, to rouse their interest in new
methods of education, and in such problems as
religion.
But we are not doing the main thing. We are
not doing anything—or doing far from enough
—to raise the school teacher to the level that is
absolutely essential if we want any culture at
all, proletarian or even bourgeois. We must
bear in mind the semi-Asiatic ignorance from
which we have not yet extricated ourselves, and
from which we cannot extricate ourselves
without strenuous effort—although we have
every opportunity to do so, because nowhere
are the masses of the people so interested in
real culture as they are in our country; nowhere
are the problems of this culture tackled so
thoroughly and consistently as they are in our
country; in no other country is state power in
the hands of the working class which, in its
mass, is fully aware of the deficiencies, I shall
not say of its culture, but of its literacy;
nowhere is the working class so ready to make,
and nowhere is it actually making, such
sacrifices to improve its position in this respect
as in our country.
Too little, far too little, is still being done by
us to adjust our state budget to satisfy, as a first
measure, the requirements of elementary
public education. Even in our People’s
Commissariat of Education we all too often
find disgracefully inflated staffs in some state
publishing establishment, which is contrary to
the concept that the state’s first concern should
not be publishing houses but that there should
be people to read, that the number of people
able to read is greater, so that book publishing
should have a wider political field in future
Russia. Owing to the old (and bad) habit, we
are still devoting much more time and effort to
technical questions, such as the question of
book publishing, than to the general political
question of literacy among the people.
If we take the Central Vocational Education
Board, we are sure that there, too, we shall find
far too much that is superfluous and inflated by
departmental interests, much that is ill-
adjusted to the requirements of broad public
education. Far from everything that we find in
the Central Vocational Education Board can be
justified by the legitimate desire first of all to
improve and give a practical slant to the
education of our young factory workers. If we
examine the staff of the Central Vocational
Education Board carefully we shall find very
much that is inflated and is in that respect
fictitious and should be done away with. There
is still very much in the proletarian and peasant
state that can and must be economised for the
purpose of promoting literacy among the
people; this can be done by closing institutions
which are playthings of a semi-aristocratic
type, or institutions we can still do without and
will be able to do without, and shall have to do
without, for a long time to come, considering
the state of literacy among the people as
revealed by the statistics.
Our schoolteacher should be raised to a
standard he has never achieved, and cannot
achieve, in bourgeois society. This is a truism
and requires no proof. We must strive for this
state of affairs by working steadily,
methodically and persistently to raise the
teacher to a higher cultural level, to train him
thoroughly for his really high calling and—
mainly, mainly and mainly—to improve his
position materially.
We must systematically step up our efforts to
organise the schoolteachers so as to transform
them from the bulwark of the bourgeois system
that they still are in all capitalist countries
without exception, into the bulwark of the
Soviet system, in order, through their agency,
to divert the peasantry from alliance with the
bourgeoisie and to bring them into alliance
with the proletariat.
I want briefly to emphasise the special
importance in this respect of regular visits to
the villages; such visits, it is true, are already
being practised and should be regularly
promoted. We should not stint money—which
we all too often waste on the machinery of state
that is almost entirely a product of the past
historical epoch—on measures like these visits
to the villages.
For the speech I was to have delivered at the
Congress of Soviets in December 1922 I
collected data on the patronage undertaken by
urban workers over villagers. Part of these data
was obtained for me by Comrade Khodorovsky,
and since I have been unable to deal with this
problem and give it publicity through the
Congress, I submit the matter to the comrades
for discussion now.
Here we have a fundamental political
question—the relations between town and
country—which is of decisive importance for
the whole of our revolution. While the
bourgeois state methodically concentrates all
its efforts on doping the urban workers,
adapting all the literature published at state
expense and at the expense of the tsarist and
bourgeois parties for this purpose, we can and
must utilise our political power to make the
urban worker an effective vehicle of communist
ideas among the rural proletariat.
I said "communist", but I hasten to make a
reservation for fear of causing a
misunderstanding, or of being taken too
literally. Under no circumstances must this be
understood to mean that we should
immediately propagate purely and strictly
communist ideas in the countryside. As long as
our countryside lacks the material basis for
communism, it will be, I should say, harmful,
in fact, I should say, fatal, for communism to
do so.
That is a fact. We must start by establishing
contacts between town and country without the
preconceived aim of implanting communism in
the rural districts. It is an aim which cannot be
achieved at the present time. It is inopportune,
and to set an aim like that at the present time
would be harmful, instead of useful, to the
cause.
But it is our duty to establish contacts
between the urban workers and the rural
working people, to establish between them a
form of comradeship which can easily be
created. This is one of the fundamental tasks of
the working class which holds power. To
achieve this we must form a number of
associations (Party, trade union and private) of
factory workers, which would devote
themselves regularly to assisting the villages in
their cultural development.
Is it possible to "attach" all the urban groups
to all the village groups, so that every working-
class group may take advantage regularly of
every opportunity, of every occasion to serve
the cultural needs of the village group it is
"attached" to? Or will it be possible to find
other forms of contact? I here confine myself
solely to formulating the question in order to
draw the comrades’ attention to it, to point out
the available experience of Western Siberia (to
which Comrade Khodorovsky drew my
attention) and to present this gigantic, historic
cultural task in all its magnitude.
We are doing almost nothing for the rural
districts outside our official budget or outside
official channels. True, in our country the
nature of the cultural relations between town
and village is automatically and inevitably
changing. Under capitalism the town
introduced political, economic, moral, physical,
etc., corruption into the countryside. In our
case, towns are automatically beginning to
introduce the very opposite of this into the
countryside. But, I repeat, all this is going on
automatically, spontaneously, and can be
improved (and later increased a hundredfold)
by doing it consciously, methodically and
systematically.
We shall begin to advance (and shall then
surely advance a hundred times more quickly)
only after we have studied the question, after
we have formed all sorts of workers’
organisations—doing everything to prevent
them from becoming bureaucratic—to take up
the matter, discuss it and get things done.
January 2, 1923

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