Soviet Schoolbooks Teach West’s Cruelty

When 10-year-old Anya came home from school the other day, she faced a daunting homework assignment from her fourth-grade history teacher.

Anya had been asked to write an essay comparing her mother’s or father’s working day to that of a typical worker in a capitalist country. How does a child in the Soviet Union know what a capitalist worker’s life is like?

The point of the assignment was to encourage Anya to study Pages 84 to 88 of her history textbook, “Stories About the History of the U.S.S.R.,” by T.S. Golubeva and L.S. Gellerstein, where she would find a vivid if somewhat grisly picture of brutality, starvation and the whipping of child laborers.

For Westerners who believe that East-West tension and the arms race are rooted in fundamental misunderstandings between the people of different social systems, Anya’s book--the introductory history text presented to fourth-graders throughout the Soviet Union--makes instructive reading.

The section on life under capitalist slave masters is presented in the context of the limited free-enterprise in pre-revolutionary Russia of the late 19th Century. But the writing moves back and forth between past and present tenses, leaving the impression that in countries unfortunate enough to be saddled with capitalism, life is still nasty, brutish and short. Under capitalism, according to the book, mothers, fathers and even children work for pennies in hot, noisy factories with dangerous machines. One false step and “a person is left without a hand or a leg.”

“The factory owner doesn’t want to spend money on better equipment,” the authors explain, since capitalists give “no consideration to the health and life of workers.” Because they earn only a pittance in wages, capitalist workers are obliged to live in “damp, dark and stuffy” tenements where families rent “not an apartment but a corner of a room with space for a single bed.”

Saddest of all is the plight of the children hardly older than Anya. Under capitalism, children labor in heavy industry from 4 a.m. until 8 p.m., in constant fear of suffering 25 lashes for even the most minor infraction--such as breaking a tool. For emphasis, the book offers a color illustration of a bearded shop foreman holding a whip poised over the back of a kneeling child.

Why don’t these downtrodden workers just go work someplace else? Because, the book says, capitalists own all the factories and all the mines. And there are so many people and so few jobs, “a man can do nothing but go there and beg to be taken on: He has no other choice, except to wait for death by starvation.”

The text concentrates on building patriotic pride in the Soviet homeland and on preparing the student for an ideologically correct understanding, later on, of the outside world.

“Dear Kids,” an afterword summarizes, “know well the history of our great motherland. Remember about its glorious heroes, about those who struggled for the freedom and happiness of the people.”

The basic history course introduces such concepts as five-year plans and the peaceful policies of the Communist Party’s leadership. Except for brief references, the outside world exists only implicitly--a blurry, threatening place.

The 250-page book hurries through the first 1,000 years of Russian history in a mere 90 pages, then settles down to describe the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War that followed and a smooth march toward communism interrupted only by the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known. The social tumult of the 1930s, estimated by Western historians to have taken roughly 20 million Soviet lives, receives no mention.

Soviet leadership over the past 60 years is another delicate matter. Josef Stalin is mentioned only as a great wartime figure. When the textbook was published, in 1983, the Soviet Union was passing through a political transition; Leonid I. Brezhnev had just died, Yuri V. Andropov was ailing and Konstantin U. Chernenko’s brief tenure was yet to come. Anya’s book avoids thorny transition problems by not identifying a single Soviet leader since Vladimir I. Lenin, even as it recounts the steady development of socialism, the growth of industry and the country’s triumphs in space. The impression is that since Lenin died in 1924, the Soviet Union has been running on autopilot.

The 30 pages devoted to World War II--the same space given 300 years of pre-revolutionary Russian history--underscore the important role the war still plays as a source of patriotic pride and national unity. While American textbooks have traditionally underplayed the Soviet role in defeating Germany, this one goes in the other direction and asserts that the Red Army crushed both Germany and Japan, only to have the United States drop its atomic bombs senselessly on an already-defeated Japan.

Such assertions form a vision of the United States as a nation filled with hatred and envy, prepared to unleash thermonuclear war on the Soviet Union and its allies.

For Soviet fourth-graders, World War II began not in September, 1939, when Germany (and its then-ally, the Soviet Union) attacked Poland, but in June, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. There is no mention of the war in Western Europe, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union or Moscow’s wartime alliance with the United States and Britain.

“For a long time before, the capitalist countries had prepared to attack the U.S.S.R.,” the book says. “They hated the free socialist state.” The United States, Britain and France appear only as they advance through Germany in the closing days of the war in 1945. The Western Allies are said to have “met with almost no resistance,” while Soviet forces waged a fierce battle to capture Berlin.

Then, with Germany defeated, “Soviet soldiers dealt a shattering blow to the Japanese army and annihilated it. On Sept. 2, 1945, Japan lay down its arms.”

In fact, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945, and attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria two days after the the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Nagasaki was destroyed on Aug. 9 and Japan announced its surrender on Aug. 15, but the formal surrender ceremony did not take place until Sept. 2. Yet, by the book, “even as the Red Army was destroying the Japanese army, the government of the U.S.A. sent its pilots to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to frighten the people of the world with these fearful weapons.” Closing that chapter, “The atomic bombing was a crime of the capitalists of the U.S.A. against humanity, which the people of the world will never forget.”

From there, the authors trace a smooth march toward socialist prosperity, the construction of great dams, atomic power stations and factories.

Anya and her schoolmates learn that Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin was the first man in space in 1961 and that a Soviet spacecraft took the first pictures of the surface of Venus in 1983. But they have to go elsewhere to learn that Soviets and Americans linked up in space in 1975, or that certain capitalist astronauts left footprints on the moon.

Going elsewhere, in families with the advantage of higher education, usually means one’s parents. For parents who know something about the world, and many do, such textbooks are as frustrating as they are troubling. Gently and subtly, those parents work at home to correct and supplement the official curriculum without directly disputing it.

Anya’s mother solved the problem of describing a day in the life of a capitalist worker by dictating an essay to her. It avoided extremes but satisfied the teacher’s expectations. Anya received a good grade--and learned another lesson.

DR, CATHERINE KANNER / for The Times