Magic into Hocus-Pocus

Blessed with abundant faith, makers of the October Revolution proposed to make anew society and humankind. Visions of a utopian future collapsing into the present burned particularly brightly at the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Charged with overseeing the educational and cultural institutions of the infant Russian Republic, it sallied forth to transform the school and, through it, the child and society. Labor, the essence of all human and social activity, would make it all possible. In 1918, Narkompros's Declaration of the United Labor School asked: How do you instill willpower, form character, and develop a spirit of solidarity? The answer, it declared, is in one magic word-labor.' Less than two decades later, in March 1937, Narkompros and the Party's Central Committee were to issue a directive in inelegant but clear language: Abolish labor as an independent subject in all classes of the elementary and secondary school.2 At issue are two interrelated questions: 1) why the loss of faith in labor and the transformationist curriculum of which it was the most critical part; and 2) by what process had Soviet authorities concluded that the magic of 1918 should be superseded by the hocus-pocus of 1937. Only the loud but ineffective voice of N. K. Krupskaia, one of the architects of the new school of the 1920s, and a barely audible murmur from A. S. Bubnov, the commissar of enlightenment from 1929 to 1937, seemed to have marred the occasion.3

Economic history · Economics · MAGIC (telescope) · Physics · Political science · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Soviet and Russian History

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  Open Access•Larry E Holmes•Slavic Review•1997

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