A Fresh Breath of Heresy

By Ezra Bowen

On the morning of June 24, Tenth-Grader Dmitri Predkov, 17, stood up to answer a question in his history class at Moscow's Middle School No. 734. The question: "Is perestroika ((Gorbachev's economic and social reforms)) a natural stage in the development of Soviet socialism?" Dmitri's answer: No, it is not. He added the tart opinion that some people say otherwise "only because Gorbachev is head of our party." A classmate, looking sporty in a black leather tie, was equally bold in discussing the loosening constraints on % Soviet citizens. People of all stripes, "even fascists," he insisted, should have the legal right to form their own political parties to challenge the Communist Party. Said the openly skeptical Predkov: "We don't have any rights. They're just words on paper."

Just one year ago, such dialogue would have seemed pure heresy anywhere in the Soviet Union, let alone in a classroom, where doctrine has reigned and dissidence has been risky. Yet in the era of glasnost, talk like this is now allowed in schools all over the country. The stunning change came upon the insistence of Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev for rapid reform in the education system. "We pin hopes for the future largely on the work of our schools," he told a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee five months ago. The Soviet people, he said in another speech, must learn history as it really happened (rather than as the party had long told it), "so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past."

In line with Gorbachev's calls for a more candid assessment of the past, the Soviet State Committee on Education in May canceled all traditional history exams, which are based on old-party-line texts. Instead, it ordered ungraded, open "discussion" groups of the sort held in Middle School 734, where teachers could judge their students' actual knowledge of the past. A June 10 editorial in the government daily Izvestia championed the decision and took the opportunity to blast the authors of old-line histories: "Immeasurable is the guilt of those who deluded generation after generation, poisoning their minds and souls with lies." (Never mind that the pre-glasnost Izvestia had long done the same.)

The old texts are indeed rife with distortions, deletions and historical venom. One book, for example, offers a bizarre assessment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to this text, "international opinion viewed this 'crime of the century' as the deed of ultra-rightists linked to the CIA and carrying out the will of the oil magnates of Texas." Texts on Soviet history tend to celebrate triumph after triumph, from the success of the Revolution to victory in World War II to the launch of Sputnik. They gloss over Stalin's purges, the starvation of millions during the collectivization of farms, military blunders that nearly lost the war to Hitler and corruption in the Brezhnev era. Meanwhile, an elementary primer claims, "The leadership of the party of Communists is working well and is building a new, happy life."

Soviet educators worry that such skewed texts in history and other subjects may stifle creative thinking. Worse, the combination of bad books and ideologically rigid pedagogy may put Soviets at a competitive disadvantage in the world arena. "I'm ashamed to say it, but my grandchildren study more or less from the textbooks that I used as a child before the war," one man wrote to Pravda.

In a rush to plug the knowledge gap, revised books are being churned out: 160 teams of authors recently submitted manuscripts in a competition for new texts. Despite the haste, chances are that the books will not be ready in time for the fall, and the quality of the entries is said to be uneven. "Those in history still don't give the full story," growls Igor Parabrin, editor of the national teachers' newspaper.

The new texts are only one part of a larger revolution in the general outlook of Soviet education. "The main task of the changes is to make school more humanitarian, to give up the technocratic view that only technical upbringing is necessary," explains Eduard Dneprov of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.

This broader, more liberal-arts approach is enthusiastically endorsed by teachers. Says Yevgeny Yamburg, who is both the principal and a history instructor at Moscow's Middle School No. 109: "If an engineer has never heard Tchaikovsky's music, that is terrible." In addition, teachers will for the first time be given the option to choose among texts and to diversify curriculums, which have long been dictated by the central government. "Three or four years ago, any variations in instruction methods were unthinkable," admits Vladimir Shadrikov, vice chairman of the state education committee. "Now all this has become a reality."

While awaiting a new generation of textbooks, teachers of history glean material from glasnost-era news articles telling long-repressed tales, such as that of Nikolai Bukharin, whose free-market economics (presaging Gorbachev's) helped get him executed by Stalin. The impact of these makeshift texts is already apparent in the discussions in Yamburg's Moscow classroom, where 15- year-olds recently debated Stalin's role in Soviet history. "He had a lot to do with the industrialization and collectivization of our country," asserted one blond-haired boy. But a classmate countered, "Some consider him a criminal because he ruined our country's industrial system."

Yamburg beamed with pride at his students' lively performance. "I feel my chief task is to form nonconformist minds," says the veteran instructor and Communist Party member. Quite a change from the party line of yesteryear.