Bolsheviks Power essays

Bolsheviks Power essays When the Bolsheviks came into power, everything was in a state of chaos. In 1917, the level of literacy was low. However, soon there were nearly seven times more specialists who had higher education than in 1913, while those with secondary education increased by almost twenty- eight times. Illiteracy fell dramatically. Press, radio, and the cinema soon began to have a direct influence on a population that was giving all its energies to the building of the socialist society. The emphasis of education was on skill building and the indoctrination with Communist ideology. Teachers were not only expected to teach but to shape the personalities of the student in accordance with the Communist ideal. Students were exhorted to join youth organizations, like the Young Pioneers, sanctioned by the Communist Party. Public education was free at the elementary and secondary levels. Tuition for preschool and postsecondary institutions were nominal if it was charged at all. Private school s were prohibited. Teenagers and young adults served as a discursive lens through which the anxieties of early Soviet Russia was exposed and debated. Children served as the personification of the whole enterprise of cultural revolution. The young were an empty canvas on which the revolutionary vision was supposed to be painted, symbols of what was new in about Soviet Russia, and the objects of changing policies and attitudes. The center of the Bolshevik canon was the transforming of the youth. Kindergartners were known as small conrades. They were the blankest slates of all, the first generation to grow up free of bourgeois prejudices. More radical Bolsheviks expected them to grow up free of parents for Marxism had the family becoming extinct. These same radicals believed that the young children left orphaned and homeless by war and revolution would serves as the vanguard of the new, family- free soci...