RUSSIAN HOOLIGANS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21112, 20 February 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

RUSSIAN HOOLIGANS.

OVERCROWDED STUDENTS. SEARCH FOR ROOMS. RAID ON DORMITORIES. Extraordinary vicissitudes, culminating in expulsion from their dormitories at the point of the revolver, have befallen 175 students of the "rabfac" or preparatory school attached to the Moscow Electrical Institute. These students were put out of their original quarters and transferred to lodgings in Ostankino, outside of Moscow, These lodgings were built on low, swampy ground and were so damp and unhealthy that many of the students became sick. After commissions had reported on the unsuitability of the Ostankino lodgings, some of the students were transfened to the Dorogomilov dormitories, which belong to the Moscow University and to other student hostels in Moscow. However, the troubles of the students were far from ended. They wero continually transferred from one overcrowded dwelling-place to another. Classrooms were as difficult to find as living quarters, and groups of the students, with their instructors, wandered from room to room in the University buildings looking for free places. The restaurant where they were allowed to eat was very bad, ono of its characteristics being that there wero only 10 glasses to a thousand students. The climax of these difficulties of the electricity students was reached when a

group of students from the ' rabfac of tho Moscow University, who apparently had rival claiins to the Doioginilov dormitories, burst into the building at night, armed with revolvers, and put tho electricity students to rout, throwing their cots and belongings out of the building after them. The author of the account of this incident concludes his story with the observations:— "The hooligans who threw out the students and put revolvers to their foreheads etill remain unpunished. We are firmly convinced that the regional committee of the Communist Party and the public prosecutor will intervene in this revolting business." The whole affair is a rather extreme instance of the overcrowding which prevails throughout the Soviet educational system, from top to bottom. According to official statistics the number of children in elementary schools increased by about 40 per cent, during 1931, as a result of the introduction of four years of compulsory elementary education.

Simultaneously there was a vast increase in the number of students admitted to the middle and higher schools, because of the need for trained specialists of all kinds which is stimulated by the industrial development of the country. It proved quite impossible to increase school buildings and living quarters fast enough to keep pace with .the growth in the numbers of students. So many of the Russian students to-day find their struggle for knowledge complicated by problems of finding rooms in which to livo and sometimes even classrooms in which to study.