Pathway to Japanese Literature

The Five-Year Plan and the Soviet Union's Cultural Leap

It was the summer of 1930.

In the Soviet Union, the Five-Year Plan for production expansion—which bourgeois scholars and politicians of the world had ridiculed in unison—was about to complete its second year through the support of all revolutionary workers and their tremendous efforts.
Across the entire Soviet land, blazing leaps and construction resounded.

I went to visit the large state farm "Gigant" in Ukraine that summer.
Starting from the railway line, the vast farmlands stretching as far as the eye could see were a sea of wheat.
Across this expanse, combine harvesters (reaping machines) resembling airplanes gliding smoothly toward the horizon advanced.

Beside the agricultural workers' camp fashioned from old freight cars, a kitchen car was steaming.

The vivid peach-colored skirts of women workers fluttered at the blazing camp entrance under the scorching sun. She shaded her sunburned hand and gazed toward the dazzling edge of cultivated land where the tall towers of wheat transport "Elevators" shone white. In the shade between the camp's wheels, two or three young agricultural laborers on break lay sprawled out, strumming guitars.

Post office, farm newspaper publishing office. For a labor survey, medical officers were dispatched, filling an entire camp with test tubes and blood pressure monitors.

Beside the Gigant office, a Ford convertible was parked, and it was an American engineer in a striped shirt who had one foot on the running board and was picking at his pipe.
In a cottage adorned with a stylish hammer and sickle decoration, the State Publishing House’s bookstall had its books arranged.—
Generally speaking, the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan was progressing with various unexpected leaps, but there was, for example, the issue of collective farm conversion in rural areas.

This was being carried out even more successfully than the most proactive workers of the Soviet Union had expected.

Number of Farm Households Organized into Collective Farms

1928 400,000

1929 1,000,000

1930 6,000,000

1931 9,000,000

Sown Area

1928 2,000,000 hectares

1929 6,500,000 hectares

1930 43,000,000 hectares

1931 65,000,000 hectares

If it were merely a matter of using large-scale farm machinery to plow, sow, and reap, American large-scale farms had long since done that.
But what had sophisticated agricultural machinery brought to agricultural workers in America?
Since the autumn of 1929, America had been experiencing a rural crisis.

The operation of a single tractor on Soviet cultivated land not only promised collectivized farmers a certain percentage of guaranteed increased profits. Along with tractors came culture.

About an hour’s train ride from Gigant lay the Agricultural Machinery Technical School in the heart of Verblyud, a vast state-owned farmland. The newly built school buildings, dormitories, workers’ housing, and so on cheerfully encircled the flower garden with their windows open. The male and female students—future engineers—were limited to those who had been in workplaces for five years or more.

On the outskirts of Rostov City lay the newly built Selmashstroy (Agricultural Machinery Manufacturing), a grand factory city resembling a magnificent castle of proletarian culture.
This was a town built through purely socialist urban planning.

Centered around the bright, electrified large factory was a communal cafeteria.
The consumer cooperative store even handled woolen fabric.
Nurseries, schools, Houses of Revolution, and hospitals were under construction.
As I walked through the wide, flower-filled pathway inside the factory with the young engineer serving as a labor correspondent, cheerful piano sounds began to drift from somewhere across the forge department where they melted iron in an electric furnace.

Selmashstroy was a giant factory and still unfinished.
Each department still had its club in buildings near their workplaces.
It was exactly lunch break, which explained why the sound of a piano—where Soviet workers sat in their work clothes—had begun to be heard.
There, I saw workplace wall newspapers neatly typed on a typewriter.

I returned to Moscow, struck by the intense, fresh reality of construction.

One day not long after, when I went to the State Publishing House store, I noticed something different about its interior arrangement. When I looked, apart from the bookshelves that had until then been arrayed and embedded in the wall, a single large bookshelf had been constructed on this side of the display window.

Economics.
Agriculture.
Machinery.

Pamphlets on the Five-Year Plan.

Politics.

Party-related literature.

Anti-religion.

Such labels were affixed to each shelf of the bookshelf.
People were gathering incessantly in front of it, some taking out notebooks to jot down book titles.
Some immediately had the clerk in the black cap retrieve the book from another shelf and were paying for it.

Indeed, this was a quintessentially Soviet approach—thoughtful and systematic.
It wasn’t simply gathering new releases and arranging them like Maruzen’s shelves.
This bookshelf was, so to speak, a book selection advisory service.
For economics, books one should read on the subject were systematically arranged, spanning from introductory materials to advanced works.

Party-related materials encompassed everything from the history of the Russian Communist Party and Comintern-related works to pamphlets on the Five-Year Plan—even those that concisely explained Bukharin’s errors.

Upon investigating this bookshelf, one found it structured in such a way that what should be read regarding any particular issue became clear without needing to ask others.

As I walked further around, I realized such bookshelves had not been created only there.
This too stood as one of the splendid achievements of the Soviet Five-Year Plan.
Beyond the beautiful Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications lay a Boys’ Bookstore.
When I entered and looked—there they were! There they were!
Shelves had been systematically arranged according to elementary school grade levels, spanning from vibrantly illustrated explanations of the Five-Year Plan to the rather challenging historical accounts of the October Revolution.

I had been away from Moscow for less than a single month.

And yet, while Soviet bookstores shared the same exterior as bourgeois bookstores, their interiors had made a socialist leap in quality. Learning and books were daily necessities for the proletariat, peasants, and general laborers. Let us deliver this class weapon as precisely and effortlessly as possible into everyone’s hands! Such an active will was vividly felt.

Illiteracy is a disgrace to laborers.

Generally speaking, until the revolution, Russia had been a country world-famous for its high illiteracy rate.
The rulers of Imperial Russia, fearing resistance against their exploitation, did nothing but assign laborers firewater—which brought the government high tax revenues—and priests.
In both rural and urban areas, elementary schools were managed by Greek Orthodox clergy.
The children of poor peasants and female servants could not even enter middle school.
Jewish people were rejected by a certain university.

October, with its fluttering red flags, cast off all such burdens upon proletarians and peasants and fiercely launched a campaign to eradicate illiteracy. Sparing no place—factories, barracks, villages, towns, Soviets, or even churches—Communist Youth League members and Pioneers created alphabet cards and began teaching seventy-year-old grandfathers and twenty-five-year-old priests how to read.

Nevertheless, in 1926, there existed a vast illiterate population of 50,771,997 people (aged twelve and above) in the Soviet Union.
In other words, compared to the total population, it was a situation where nearly one in three people were illiterate.
The sheer number of peasants included in this illiterate population made clear how horrendous rural life had been since the days of Imperial Russia.
Out of 50,771,997 illiterate individuals, indeed 45,910,651 were rural residents.

Even after the civil war, which had produced numerous brave class warriors, women’s basic cultural level was generally low.
As evidence, of the entire illiterate population, 34,576,128 were working women who could not read.

However, the cultural movement to eradicate illiteracy advanced at a rapid pace, driven by the spontaneous demands of laborers living in a socialist society.

In the days when they were beaten with zelkova branch whips by landlords, it’s true that not knowing how to read sufficed.
Only the kulaks had carefully stored short pencils in their pockets alongside gold watch chains.
However, the revolution realized the slogan “Land to the Peasants,” and the peasants came to govern their own villages through the Soviets.
Men and women eighteen years of age and above elect and are elected as Soviet officials.—

Let us consider Pyotr, a fifty-year-old poor peasant who had participated in the revolutionary partisans from 1917 to 1918–1919 and valiantly protected his village from the White Army’s ravages, now elected chairman of the village soviet.

He sat in the chairman’s seat.
He rang the bell.
“Comrades!”
he began his speech.
Everyone else could manage it, but when they thrust a pen and documents at him with “Come now, Chairman, just write here,” Pyotr’s agitation reached its peak.
Pyotr could no longer endure the inconvenience of his illiteracy.
But then again, if the only person in the village who knew how to read was that kulak’s son Vashka, would they really entrust Soviet work to him?
*No way!*
Thus, Pyotr, sweating profusely under his rubashka, set off for the village’s illiteracy eradication workshop.

He realized that learning characters from the young was unexpectedly not awkward after all.
Before long, Pyotr’s wife came too.
The wife brought along the neighbor’s wife as well.

“Ah… So this is how my name is written, huh.”
“Once you know your letters like this, you don’t have to worry about not reading documents and getting your wheat swindled into sesame, huh.”

If the urban factory proletariat did not know how to read, there was no greater inconvenience.
When becoming union members and exchanging contracts with factories, the Soviet Union’s proletariat could not write (!)

As the class-based activities, class consciousness, and socialist construction of the proletariat and peasants within the Soviet Union advanced, illiteracy shrank.

The Five-Year Plan aimed to deploy 300,000 tractors to rural areas and increase electricity supply to factories by 22 billion kilowatt-hours, while allocating 246.3 million rubles for illiteracy eradication. It was in the process of eliminating 18 million illiterates. By 1928, 1,365,000 people had already completely cast off illiteracy—93% of the urban population and 79.4% of the rural population were dispelling the intellectual darkness of the past.

――Come on, books!
――Newspapers!――

If only they could read, Soviet laborers would find mountains of things they wanted to read and needed to read.

With the Five-Year Plan's commencement, the Soviet Union's splendid reconstruction had begun.
There were endless things they wanted to know.

Since October Revolution，the laborers of the Soviet Union had adhered to eight-hour workdays as their principle.
However，as progress on completing the Five-Year Plan within four years accelerated，the enhancement of production methods through electrification and other improvements increased，while average working hours sharply decreased.
At that time，there were 13，684，000 active laborers in the Soviet Union.
Of these，half were already working seven-hour days.
Young laborers under eighteen worked six hours.
For those under sixteen，the standard was four hours.

Moreover, under the five-day week system, a rest day arrived on every fifth day.

Wages in 1913—compared to those of the pre-revolutionary period—had increased beyond measure.
Under the Five-Year Plan,wages rose by seventy-one percent.
As the Five-Year Plan progressed，it became clear even from this alone that Soviet workers in general had developed sufficient leeway for cultural construction.
As an example，let us examine statistics related to publishing.
Taking one printed signature as the standard，
1927：1，757，000，000
1928：2，158，000，000

1929: 2,661,000,000

Which country publishes the greatest variety of book titles in the world? (in thousands)

Denmark 3.3

Poland 6.5

Italy 6.9

United States 10.3

France 11.9

United Kingdom 13.8

Japan 19.9

Germany 31.1

Soviet Union 32.6

In 1930, the Soviet Union published 1,291 types of magazines.
And how were they selling?

*Ogonyok* (a comprehensive political, social, and literary magazine): 400 (thousand) copies

*Working Women*: 200 (thousand) copies

*I Want to Know Everything*: 150 (thousand) copies

*Agricultural Engineer*: 60 (thousand) copies

*Red Virgin Soil* (literary magazine): 25 (thousand) copies

When it came to newspapers in the Soviet Union, these too were remarkable.

Socio-political guidance newspapers: 6 types, 1,487 (thousand) copies
Economic newspapers: 8 types, 112 (thousand) copies
Red Labor Union newspapers: 1 type, 70 (thousand) copies
Cooperative newspapers: 1 type, 24 (thousand) copies
Military newspapers: 1 type, 40 (thousand) copies
Worker Mass Newspapers: 59 types, 1,426,750 copies
Peasants: 105 types, 1,534,500 copies

Youth/Adolescents: 47 types, 407,250 copies

Ethnic language newspapers: 208 types, 1,004,750 copies

Evening editions: 6 types, 320,000 copies

In Imperial Russia, the ethnic minorities and peasants within Russia who had been most harshly oppressed were now liberated and possessed such a variety of newspapers.

Now, there lay an issue.
How did the workers of the Soviet Union manage to read such an enormous quantity of books, magazines, and newspapers?
Did they buy every single one?
Of course they bought them, but in the Soviet Union, libraries were being expanded at an astonishing rate.

“Red Corners” and Libraries

In every factory, there was a "Red Corner" in some corner of the cafeteria—nowhere lacked the facilities of a small library.
Even farms, even in hotel bellboy lounges—these existed.
Worker club libraries.
Peasant home libraries.
During summer vacation, when workers went to "rest homes" for their month of paid leave, a library branch was typically established nearby.

In fact, it was when I spent a summer near Leningrad.
The former imperial villa had been opened as a delightful park museum for workers.
By the scenic pond, a small former palace building had become a library branch.
Union members could freely borrow books by submitting a minimal deposit (50 kopeks—2 rubles) with their identification booklet.
I too received considerable assistance there.

Number of Libraries in the Soviet Union

1926: 22,163

1928: 22,982

The Five-Year Plan began increasing libraries by an additional 50%.
These were fixed libraries.
Mobile libraries would increase to 40,000.

In rural areas, besides libraries, there were "reading houses" for reading books.

1928: 21,876

1933: 38,283

Worker clubs and other facilities—including libraries and research rooms for literature, music, art, sports, politics, and more—were increasing in this manner alongside the Five-Year Plan.

Clubs: 7,646 (24.9% increase compared to pre-Five-Year Plan levels)

Peasant homes: 6,820 (25% increase compared to pre-Five-Year Plan levels)

——Elementary Schools Fully Funded by the National Treasury——

Now, after the October 1917 Proletarian Revolution, how children were being educated in the Soviet Union became a subject of keen interest and observation from countries around the world.

This was because bourgeois educators did not comprehend the true nature of the Proletarian Revolution.
They predicted that the so-called "brilliant development of individuality" would suffer gross mistreatment under the Socialist Republic's education system.
They believed individual talents, inclinations, and personalities would be trampled underfoot, and that children would become like mechanical dolls forged in a single mold—communist education.

However, as years passed, even the sarcastic and critical observers from bourgeois countries gradually began expressing admiration.
Nowadays, even those who still made reactionary criticisms regarding the conditions—such as the Proletarian Revolution that transformed Imperial Russia into the Soviet Union, socialist production relations, or in other words, the class-based foundation upon which a new and humane education system was being built—had come to assert that the Soviet Union’s methods of educating children were worthy of reference.

Indeed, the Soviet Union was a country of proletarian dictatorship.
Since social labor participating in social production formed the foundation, even what would be called elementary schools were not referred to as such but instead bore the name Unified Labor School.

Children were raised from an early age in accordance with an educational method clearly linked to social labor, production, and socialist construction.
For example, in the first term, studies were centered around the “spring” complex.

Spring came to the fields; it came to the mountains.
The content differed greatly from that of bourgeois elementary schools’ “spring,” which merely stated, “Butterflies dance.”

How does the climate change with spring's arrival?
What transformations do plants undergo? (Here they study natural science and observation.)

How do urban populations labor in spring?
How do rural communities work during spring?
(Production and social labor—specifically, at that time, factory output expansion under the Five-Year Plan and agricultural collectivization—were explained.)

How did children help working adults?
(There，they actually engaged in various tasks.)
Urban elementary schools went to parks to hang nest boxes for protected birds．
The students of that elementary school also went out to assist the specific collective farm they supported．
Through such trips，they also learned geography．
They also learned surveying．
(In higher grades，during this season，they learned economics and politics—extending even to the exploitative conditions of colonial agricultural workers in foreign Eastern territories．)

Each subject was not mechanically divided into rigid compartments and stacked in isolation.
Because each topic extended to the next through solid, real-life connections, this was a study method that proved immediately useful in practical life.
Children’s minds were endowed with the remarkable power to dissect, critique, and then innovatively synthesize and build anew—all grounded in their immediate daily lives.
That was precisely how they came to possess proletarian wisdom—a waste-free blend of theory and practice that astonished through its international scope and vibrant applicability.

Socialist society’s education never engaged in the wasteful practice of crushing or distorting the talents one was born with.
They rejected the American Dalton Plan—bourgeois society’s individualistic free competition for producing geniuses.
It was no educational method obsessed with molding solitary heroes.
Yet this approach to upbringing—whereby all children of the people employed their unique talents toward society’s collective construction—proved remarkably successful.

For example, suppose a class of elementary school students went on a factory tour.
They set out to compile a record of it.
When the class produced a book titled *Impressions of the XX Factory Tour*, the teacher never ordered anyone by saying, “So-and-so-san, write an essay.”
Each person consulted with others and participated in the work using the skills they were best at and wished to employ.
One child worked hard, drawing from Stalin’s papers to write an essay.
One child created a sketch.
Then another composed poetry.
There were also children suited for journalism who wrote critiques attached to clippings from the factory newspaper.
Each of them compiled their enthusiastic, autonomous creations to form the class’s collective achievement.

If there was a single good idea, in the proletarian-peasant constructive society they put it to use for as many people as possible so that everyone could make that good idea their own and utilize it! This was precisely why the essential foundational education of what was termed socialist competition was already provided within elementary schools.

Training in class-based self-governance was conducted from this era onward. In each grade there were hygiene committee members, attendance committee members, social activities committee members, and others. From those committee members emerged one representative per grade who, together with the school principal, teacher representatives, labor union delegates, and others, organized the school committee.

Even when organizing a field trip, a field trip execution committee would be formed to research destinations, timetables, itineraries, travel expenses, and other details. They decided everything through class discussions—in the Soviet Union, teachers were truly leaders.

The grand undertaking of the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan cultural activities aimed to comprehensively enroll all school-age children across the Union into these efficiently organized elementary schools, with all expenses covered by the state treasury.

After all, elementary schools in Imperial Russia—especially rural ones—had been unthinkable. As for elementary school teachers under Tsarism, they had actually lived like beggars on monthly salaries of five rubles.

After the revolution, Soviet Unified Labor Schools were divided into four-year, seven-year, and nine-year systems.
However, due to shortages of school buildings, insufficient teacher budgets, and other factors, enrollment rates never reached ideal levels.
Only thirty percent of children had properly enrolled at age eight.
Seventy percent were even more delayed.
In the Russian Republic, sixty-nine point five percent of children in the four-year system enrolled at age nine.

The Five-Year Plan allocated the enormous sum of thirty-four billion seven hundred sixty million rubles toward raising the foundational level of proletarian and peasant culture and toward the nationwide enrollment of eight-year-old children.

By how much would the number of enrolled children increase?

1927: 9,942,000

1933: 17,000,000

Seventeen million children—nearly double the previous number—could now study in the Soviet Union without tuition fees, with even their school supplies and lunches provided by the state!

For that purpose, the number of teachers had to increase.

Currently, there were approximately 265,000 teachers in the Soviet Union.
An additional 440,000 new teachers were required.

Through the Five-Year Plan, production across the entire Soviet Union increased, and the wages of general laborers were rising.
Elementary school teachers’ monthly salaries were also rising.
By the end of the Five-Year Plan, rural elementary school teachers would receive eighty-seven rubles, and urban elementary school teachers would receive one hundred rubles.
Currently (1930), the average was fifty-eight rubles.

Social Strata of Students in Teacher Training Schools (1926)

Workers: 14.6%

Peasants: 53.9%

Salaried Workers: 20.4%

Social Strata of Students in Teacher Training Colleges

1925 1927

Workers: 15.5% | 12.5%

Peasants: 31.0% | 28.3%

Salaried Workers: 34.8% | 35.7%

Other: 18.7 | 23.5

This data was already outdated but nevertheless demonstrated how rapidly culture advanced across Soviet rural areas.

In total let us examine how much per-child education budgets grew.

Annual education expenditure budget per child

1928: 27.0 (rubles)

1933: 58.3 (rubles)

However, improving enrollment rates for children in elementary schools could not be achieved without pre-school-age educational and cultural facilities.

The Soviet Union was also realizing through the Five-Year Plan—in order to alleviate working women’s burdens and simultaneously enable young older siblings to study freely—the expansion of facilities such as kindergartens, nurseries, and children’s playgrounds centered around factories and collective farms.
The cost was 350 million rubles.

Expansion Rate of Facilities for Young Children: Capacity (unit: thousand)

1928 | 1933 | Growth Rate

Kindergartens | 107 | 217 | 102.2%

Children’s playgrounds | 203 | 505 | 149.3%

――All Technology into the Hands of the Proletariat and Peasants――

Next to the Kremlin in Moscow stood Moscow First University.
On the pediment of that building was inscribed in gold letters the phrase “All Scholarship to the Laborers.”

Seventeen years ago, in Imperial Russia under the control of capitalists, landlords, and clergy, what secondary education facilities existed for the working masses became evident when viewing the following table.

Distribution of Students by Class Origin in Russian Middle Schools, Vocational Schools, and Preparatory Schools for the 1914 Academic Year

Children of hereditary nobles: 6.3%

Nobles and high-ranking officials (combined): 18.4%

Clergy (combined): 4.8%

Gentry and merchant class: 9.6%

Merchants and guild masters: 32.1%

Kulaks and Cossacks: 25.5%

Other: 3.3%

It was the same in every country.
Wealthy merchants had sent their sons to school so they would rise to become powerful figures, just as kulak fathers had enrolled theirs dreaming of sons who would become great landowners.

The "October" of 1917 firmly seized all schools across Russia—every school throughout the Soviet Union—as the property of its own class.
The schools of the Soviet Union admitted into their first ranks the children of workers, peasants' children, and the sons and daughters of salaried workers.
They truly made them into places that produced workers who contributed to the socialist construction of the Soviet Union.

Distribution of Higher Specialized School Students by Social Origin in the Russian Republic

1927 1928 1929

Workers and their children | 28.7% | 34.6% | 42.3%

Peasants and their children | 22.2% | 24.4% | 25.1%

Salaried workers and their children | 33.0% | 25.0% | 19.7%

Intellectual workers | 12.5% | 14.0% | 11.3%

Other | 3.6 | 2.0 | 1.6

This joyous class leap of workers and peasants that emerged alongside the Five-Year Plan was inextricably linked to the growing number of worker-peasants participating in the Soviet government as Soviet officials.

At the same time, it was only natural that the number of technical experts from worker and peasant backgrounds at production sites was increasing.

Engineer/Technician Allocation Rate per 100 Workers

1928: 2.50%

1929: 2.66%

1930: 2.84%

Steadily, engineers and technicians from worker and peasant backgrounds were increasing.
However, this rate remained far from sufficient when compared to production expansion within the Soviet Union (the Five-Year Plan's annual projections had anticipated a five percent increase in total industrial production for the second year.
Yet Soviet workers' enthusiasm for socialist construction surpassed expectations, achieving a twenty-five percent increase.
In monetary terms, this represented the remarkable feat of raising planned industrial production from 124.76 billion rubles to 137.64 billion rubles over two years).

In socialist production, it could never be maintained that only a small number of engineers needed to excel.
The technical standard of all workers had to be elevated beyond last year’s level this year, and beyond this year’s next year.
On this matter, Stalin had emphatically declared:

“Technology resolves every problem during reconstruction!”

There was indeed a pressing need for the technical improvement of workers and peasants.
After all, at the start of the Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union had 500,000 unemployed individuals—non-working laborers.
It had been planned that absorbing half of them into production over five years would suffice.
There again arose a welcome deviation—the unforeseen expansion of production sucked labor into every sector at breakneck speed.
The unemployed vanished from the Soviet Union.
Up until then, employment offices across the Soviet Union—whose task had been assigning workplaces—underwent a fundamental change in function.
They had to transform into rational distribution centers for labor.

The example of the Industrial Party—the major counterrevolutionary conspiracy in the winter of 1930 by engineers, scholars, and officials in prominent positions within the Soviet Union, which drew global scrutiny—made clear just how crucial proletarian technical experts were.

The Russian Communist Party, at its congress, provided full support for production cooperatives and labor unions to directly train technicians and skilled workers in factories, schools, and farms.

At the time the Five-Year Plan was launched, according to a survey by the Supreme Economic Council, the ratio of skilled to unskilled workers had been as follows.

Skilled workers: 41%

Unskilled workers: 59%

Through the Five-Year Plan, they aimed to increase skilled workers to 60%—that is, raise them to the technical level of Germany and America—by the end of 1933.

When we broke down the 1927 academic year's technical school graduates by industry, social origin, and membership rates in the Russian Communist Party and Youth League, the results were as follows.

Industry Worker Origin Rate Membership Rate in the Russian Communist Party and Youth League

Industry (Daytime): 24.6% | 20.7%

Ibid. (Nighttime): 72.5% | 40.0%

Agriculture: 10.2% | 38.7%

Education: 13.8% | 39.9%

Medical: 23.6% | 17.0%

Economic Production: 15.5% | 29.7%

Arts: 10.1% | 5.5%

The labor department of the Soviet Union encompassed the vast majority of workers and peasants who were then working in factories and had not received formal preparatory education.

Membership Rate in the Russian Communist Party Among Labor Department Students (1928)

Russian Communist Party Youth League

Daytime: 32.1% | 47.3%

Nighttime: 33.8% | 40.6%

In 1929, there had been 113,000 technicians and skilled workers; by 1933, they aimed to increase this number to nearly four times that—over 435,000.

Already, 743 out of 1,512 secondary schools (with 154,000 students) had been converted into technical schools.
Factory schools were imparting higher technical skills to 1.2 million vibrant working youth.

Rural youth too could not be neglected.
138,000 rural youth were studying at 1,216 schools for socialist agriculture's construction.
Among them worked 300,000 labor correspondents and 2,393,363 Youth League members.
They were the class forgers.
They vigorously wielded hammers and compasses while operating tractors toward global workers' and peasants' liberation alongside Soviet power's establishment.

——The Glorious Lives of Ethnic Minorities——

Now then, in what way was such splendid cultural construction changing the daily lives of ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union?

As everyone knew, the Soviet Union was a vast nation encompassing one-sixth of the Earth.
From the Arctic in the north to the deserts in the south.
There cotton grew across regions where only camels could tread.
Persia and Afghanistan bordered it immediately.
Mongolia shared its frontier.
Within these lands dwelled twenty-five races.
Even when speaking of Russia monolithically, I walked through Moscow's streets during the 16th Russian Communist Party Congress as illustration.

Behind a Russian Pioneer in a red necktie walking ahead came an Uzbek man dressed in a long robe resembling Japanese striped cotton, trudging steadily in his boots.

A petite woman, the lower part of her long hair adorned with a red cloth, was a female representative of the Kumyks, renowned for their mare’s milk.

The one who smartly wore a short cloak with a dagger and swiftly turned the corner where a cucumber seller’s cart stood was a young Kazakh renowned worldwide for his dance.

In the hotel dining room, it was not just English and German that mingled with Russian.
Guttural Oriental languages were animatedly exchanged here and there.—

Until the October Revolution brought about the fundamental independence of each ethnic group, how did these ethnic minorities within Russia live?

We need not look to distant examples.
One need only read Tolstoy’s *The Cossacks* and his outstanding short story *Hadji Murat*—the imperial regime remembered them solely as colonies, vassal states, and easily deceived frontier inhabitants to exploit for their own comfort.

A splendid automobile road ran from Vladikavkaz, threading southward through the supremely grand mountains of the Caucasus all the way to Tiflis, Stalin’s hometown.
What ran there then were sightseeing buses filled with cheerful worker and peasant tourists.
Yet this road had not been built for such purposes.
It had served military needs.
The Imperial Russian authorities had constructed it as a shortcut to seize control—by force—of Tiflis’ silk and leather production centers and Baku City’s petroleum fields.

The masses of ethnic minorities in the Near East had an extremely backward culture, enduring the scorching heat of the sun, long winters lasting half a year, primitive handicrafts, endemic diseases, and the dual exploitation by feudal landlords and bosses.

How could a free-spirited culture possibly flourish when they were prohibited from reading and writing in their native language, from publishing works, even from performing plays!
If schools occasionally existed, they taught only in Russian.

The red flag was raised even in Yakutsk.
A village soviet was established even in Cherfus’s village.
The masses of ethnic minorities were liberated from their colonial enslavement and feudal exploitation at an almost unbelievable pace.

Progressive women were now able to openly combat family system oppression for the first time. Now they too were members of a women’s society protected by Soviet power. Newspapers in 208 ethnic languages came to be published. The elementary school enrollment rate—once a mere three percent—steadily increased as cultural standards rose across the Soviet Union. Under the Five-Year Plan, nationwide enrollment of school-age children from eight years onward—funded by state coffers—naturally encompassed all ethnic republics and autonomous regions.

"Raise class-based technical skills!"—this slogan resounded across the entire Soviet Union and was steadily being realized.
The Party Women’s Department, in cooperation with labor unions, organized women’s handicraft cooperatives and technical workshops centered on each ethnic group’s unique handicrafts.
Not only did the women begin to knit as skillfully as they wove carpets,
they learned that if production is carried out in a socialist manner, it benefits the workers.

In 1926, what percentage of men and women in each ethnic group within the Soviet Union knew how to read and write?
This was a survey per 1,000 people.

By Ethnic Group Male Female

Russia 376 339

Ukraine 567 277

Georgia 458 331

Belarus 520 231

Armenia 435 242

Turkey 138 23

Uzbek 63 10

Turkmen 42 2

Germans (Residing in Russia) 612 592
Koreans (Residing in Russia) 553 291
Tatar 416 257
Chuvash 485 165
Moldavans 431 122
Bashkir 346 148
Buryat 369 93
Abkhazians 178 25
Kazakh 125 11

Yakut 99 23
Dagestan 109 12
Kyrgyz 84 3
Tajik 39 3

The Russian Communist Party had a total of 1,664,805 members, but what was the rate of membership by ethnicity?

By Republic Number of Party Members Ratio per 10,000 Adults

Russian Republic 1,135,312 197

Ukraine 246,705 147

Belarus 35,274 126

Zakaukaz 86,157 271

Uzbekistan 40,318 120

Turkmenistan 10,251 165

Such was the state of affairs.
When the light of culture shone upon deserts and perennial snows, there clearly took root the driving force—the proletariat—and the class-based guiding power for the peasants that brought about that culture.

As this table shows, even among the Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek peoples—where women had the highest illiteracy rates—what transpired when the Theater Olympiad was held in Moscow in the summer of 1930?
The national theater troupes of these ethnic groups arrived with scripts that took as their theme the class struggle centered on their local production.
And though their performances were unsophisticated, their distinctive acting won widespread applause.

However, this was none other than the vast Soviet Union.
In frontier regions, numerous inconveniences for cultural improvement still remained.
For laborers living places requiring two days’ travel just to reach railway lines, attending workshops would have been tremendously difficult.
What became of such situations?

Worry proved unnecessary.
In socialist Soviet Union practice—"If students cannot go to school, schools must go to students"—this meant correspondence education.
Alongside the Five-Year Plan came expansion of a responsible correspondence education network.
One million six hundred thousand trainees would thereby gain access to education.

—Radio for the Class—

Even grandmothers who could not read newspapers could listen to Stalin’s speeches via radio.

The Five-Year Plan aimed to project the voice of this class-based culture to 50% of urban worker housing residents and 35% of farm households in rural areas.
In other words, as collective farms expanded, radio broadcasting stations increased from 24,000 to 50,000 locations, and the number of listeners was projected to grow from 2 million to 4 million.

Next came the expansion of movie theaters.
At the start of the Five-Year Plan, there had been 15,300 movie theaters.
There too lay a remarkable expansion.
Before long, Soviet Union workers would be able to happily watch movies at 80,700 locations using half-price tickets purchased by showing their labor union ID cards.

It was only when the cultural foundation expanded on such a mass scale that brilliant proletarian art could truly blossom for the first time.

The artists of the Soviet Union—the writers, the actors, the filmmakers—knew this truth in their very bones.
Therefore, for example, when the issue of state-funded universal school enrollment for all school-age children arose, writers did not simply retreat into writing novels alone.
Through various books and lectures, they supported and encouraged universal school enrollment for all school-age children as the foundation for producing future builders of proletarian culture.

The workers and peasants of the Soviet Union were astonishingly elevating their own culture through increased socialist production.
However, the more culturally elevated the class became, the more they came to recognize the value of the Soviet Union’s socialist production as the foundation enabling such cultural development.
Now they were striving to enhance the technology of socialist production.
Thus, higher and higher!
“Complete the Five-Year Plan in four years!”
This was the heartfelt cry of Soviet workers striving to build up truly correct production and culture across this globe.

[November 1931]