LENIN'S CHILDREN

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20956, 9 September 1933, Page 15

LENIN'S CHILDREN

•* . Youth in Soviet Russia. By Klaus Mchnert. Allen and Unwin. 270 pp. (7s 6d net.) ; Dr. Mehnert was born in Moscow in 1906. His family had lived there for generations, but still retaining ; their German nationality, they were obliged to leave Russia during the war. Completely bilingual, he now revisits Russia each year, travelling from cities to villages and staying ; with Russian friends in communes, collectivised farms, and in peasants' cottages. This makes his comments far more valuable than those of other westerners, who go on officially conducted tours. His book, comparable with those of Maurice Hindus in sage detachment and obvious veracity, is altogether remarkably temperate and intelligent. Dr. Mehnert sticks closely to his subject—youth. He is not here concerned with the question whether communism compelled on the people Is ethical or not, or whether the I various plans are successful or uni successful in a material sense. His criterion of bolshevism is the bolshevik—does he show signs of becoming a better human being as the outcome of all this sacrifice? He emphasises the point that two-thirds of the present population of Russia were less than 10 years of age when the Tsarist regime disappeared. The standards of by-gone generations mean no more to them than the ! standards of Noah: their comparii sons are with yesterday and last year. Everything that can be done by propaganda and by military discipline is used to keep them away from the "vita contemplaliva" of other days and to enlist their energies in the "vita activa" which alone has meaning to the proletarian chiefs of state: I I shall never forget Me pictve which a walk down the express duri ing the long journey through Siberia i offered me. The Germans, American?, iand Frenchmen, travelling first and ; second class, were whiling away the I time with a story magazine, an Edjgar Wallace thriller or a yellow-backed novel; but the Russians in their "wooden class" were reading technical manuals and text-books of political economy, records of Party Congresses, | agitation pamphlets, works on agricultural science. The entire country i seemed to be a vast school. The new j Russian student is the personification j of this hunger after knowledge. The university student has been enlisted by the government to a degree unknown elsewhere. A million or more of students are wards of the State. Each receives 40 roubles a month to begin with, rising to 150 roubles a month in the last year. This allowance is increased or decreased according to the results of term examinations. Every student, male and female, is required to attend classes on military science. From the most promising students (from the party point of view), the Komsomol, or communist organisation of youth,.six millions strong, is recruited. This organisation is almost as powerful as the party itself. It conducts all those propagandist campaigns whose object is to provide "storm troops" for the weak piaccs in the industrial "front." Everywhere the terminology is military and the excitement that of a beleaguered garrison. The Komsomolites feel themselves to be salvation's army. Rapidly the most talented and the most active aro promoted to key positions in the communist State. Whenever the State wants a difficult job done it addresses itself directly to youth over the heads of the parents. The Russians, according to Dr. Mehnert, show an inventive faculty amounting positively to genius in the training of unreliable workers. The names of the idle are written up on black notice boards, those of the industrious on red boards. Efficient workers are decorated with j medals; Ihe others receive orders of i dishonour, the "Order of the Honj ourable Do-Nothings," as it is called. | These last receive their wages at special pay-offices, above which an enormous poster hangs: "This is the Pay-Office for Drunkards, Wasters, and Loafers." The Komsomol takes itself very seriously as is only natural, since it wields so much power in the State. Its education is serious, its work is serious, its literature, drama, and art are serious too. A prize poem on the river Dnieper ends unhesitatingly with a crescendo on the Dnieprostroi power station; "Dawn in Moscow" in its final stanzas brings us to the factory gates of the dynamo works. Dr. Mchnert's own question: Has Bolshevism made a better human being?—he leaves unanswered. But that something of great importance to the rest of the world is happening over there in Russia, he has no doubt at all. To one astonishing fact he can point in proof of his statement and that is, simply, that there are 100 millions of people in Russia to-day who are less than 25 years of age. Altogether it seems that Lenin's children are chips of the old block. VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE. Occupational Misfits. By Sheila Bcvington. Allen and Unwin. 99 pp. (6s net.) This small book describes an interesting piece of sociological research carried out in London by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Two hundred unemployed lads of primary school education were chosen at random from the files of the Employment Bureau. Another group of 200 boys in employment was compared with the first group in respect to family background, school success, character qualities, and working experience. The purpose was to discover what qualities, if any, distinguished the employed lads, as a group, from the unemployed. The general outcome of the enquiry was threefold: (1) To emphasise that temperamental factors or character arc of much greater importance than economic, social or intellectual factors in determining a lad's industrial success. The typical employed lad is scarcely distinguishable from the typical unemployed lad by his father's grade, the number of his brothers and sisters, his school-leaving standard, or his wages. He is, however, distinguishable by better school reports (on conduct), by fewer changes of post, by a more settled outlook, and better future prospects. (2) To disclose the vast extent to which headmasters, and the less but still important extent to which parents, fail to give lads vocational guidance. <:3) To disclose the adverse effects on a lad's subsequent industrial career of an occupationally aimless outlook on leaving school. The specialist who is concerned, cither in theory or practice, with the guidance of youth, will find much of interest in this book; the ; general reader will probably baulk at the statistical detail. But even he could not go away without an uncomfortable feeling that, for all the vocational guidance he gets in a modern industrial community, the elementary school boy might just as well decide his future career by thfi "finker-tailor-soldier-sailor" system so beloved of children.