The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

An immediate clarification: in many poorly prepared students, the lack of education was balanced by natural abilities and a sincere desire to work and learn. Such students improved rapidly and their friends willingly helped them. But there were quite a few of the lazy and the dullards. The brigade method eased their stay in the institution. The procedure was such that the brigadier and other brigade members were passed only after all members, without exception, completed their assignments. The brigadier and his deputy spent all of their free time with such a “backward pupil,” endlessly reviewing the material and writing his essays and reports—which their “ward” could not even read properly in class. This system led to a situation where capable students had absolutely no time to study since the time left to them after lectures, community labor and endless meetings was taken by “working with the blockheads” from their brigades. It was especially difficult with the inept of the worst kind, those who invariably at meetings, directed harsh criticism at senior professors. Such students looked at their brigadiers, especially those from intelligentsia backgrounds, as “milk cows,” demanding complete academic servicing of them.

If any of the students were depressed by the “wholesome productive atmosphere” of the brigade, built on scamming the professor and pulling the lunkheads through from year to year, and if such a student strove to work in-

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dependently, searching the libraries for corresponding materials and staying late at his books and truly deepening one’s knowledge, the nickname “individualist,” frightening in its consequences, was hurled from the podium at meetings and cemented venomously in the columns of the wall newspaper. One then had to hurriedly repent in order to avoid trial by his comrades and even expulsion from the institute.

If a capable student, moved by good will, attempted to help a less talented friend on his own initiative, this too was considered to be reprehensible. Fearing the rise of “secret organizations” under the pretext of brigade work, party leaders paid particular attention to the splitting up of friends.

Later, seeing the nonviability of such brigades, the institute’s leadership attempted to reconstitute them according to a different principle, namely the territorial wherein students living in the same district were to be united. But this too did not improve the work of the brigades. Then a final effort was made. Exemplary students were concentrated in the first brigade, good students in the second, mid-level in the third, and so on. Such an organizational principle also did not produce positive results. Those who were behind and even the average students were left without help and were unable to carry out any of the brigade assignments.

The matter kept worsening because in the time period described, the beginning of the 1930’s, the institutions of higher learning in the Soviet Union, especially the newly organized ones that did not arise on the foundations of the old establishments, which were simply renamed, had problems: they did not have well equipped laboratories or studies, nor textbooks besides primitive “work books” that reminded one of self-study manuals, and which, by the way, were published in very small press runs. Unheated classrooms and students’ empty stomachs did not facilitate successful learning. In such fashion, the laboratory-brigade method was destined for total failure under the conditions of Soviet higher education. However, as a result of its application over a number of years, there appeared a type of Soviet “specialist,” incompetent in his field and frequently simply ignorant, who was able to graduate from an institute by hiding his squalid baggage behind the backs of brigade comrades. However, the authorities became convinced quite swiftly that such “defective production” emanating from higher education, was completely inapplicable in the nation which had an acute need for specialists. Finally, special emphasis was placed on individual student responsibility, substantially raising the requirements for those entering and graduating from higher educational institutions. Results showed themselves quickly.

One day Siiak sent for all the students who were fluent in German and announced that on the very next day we were to depart for the Pulinskii Region

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Chapter Twenty-One

of Zhitomir Province in order to help in the collectivization of the German colonies.