The Bullitt Mission to Russia / Testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, of William C. Bullitt

by William C. Bullitt

SOCIAL WORK IN PETROGRAD

The wife of Zinoviev, Madame Lelina, is in charge of the social institutions in the city of Petrograd. This does not include the public schools, which are under another organization. Madame Lelina is a short-haired woman, probably Jewish, of about 45. She has an enormous amount of energy, and is commonly supposed to be doing at least two things at the same time. The morning I met her she was carrying on two interviews and trying to arrange to have me shown some of the social work she is directing. There seemed to be little system about her efforts. Her office was rather disorderly, and her method of work seemed very wasteful of time and effort, and very much like the usual Russian way of doing things. Bill Shatov, formerly organizer of the I.W.W., who is commissar of police for Petrograd and also commissar for one of the northern armies, introduced me to Madame Lelina, and accompanied me the first day on our visits. We were guided by a young woman by the name of Bachrath, who is a university graduate and lawyer, and since the legal profession has fallen into disrepute, has turned her efforts toward social work.

Under her guidance I spent three days visiting institutions. I saw a boarding school for girls, a boarding home for younger children, an institution for the feeble-minded, three of the new homes organized by the Soviet Government, and two small hospitals for children.

The institutions which Madame Lelina is directing are in two groups: First, those which she has taken over from the old Czar regime, and second, those which have been founded in the last 18 months. The new government has been so handicapped by the difficulties of securing food and other supplies, by the sabotage of many of the intelligent classes, and by the necessity of directing every energy toward carrying on hostilities against the bourgeoisie and the Allies, that there has been little opportunity to remodel the institutions inherited from the previous régime, therefore neither the strength nor the weakness of these institutions is to any great extent due to the present régime. Two of the institutions I visited were of this type, one happened to be very good and the other very bad, and in neither case did I feel that Lelina's organization was responsible.

An aristocratic organization under the Czar maintained a boarding school for girls. This has been taken over by the Soviet Government with little change, and the 140 children in this institution are enjoying all the opportunities which a directress trained in France and Germany, with an exceptionally skillful corps of assistants, can give them.

I inquired regarding the changes which the Soviet Government had made in the organization of this school. Some of the girls who were there have been kept, but vacant places have been filled by Madame Lelina's committee, and the institution has been required to take boys into the day school, a plan which is carried out in most of the soviet social and educational work. Much more freedom has been introduced in the management of the institution, and the girls at table talk and walk about, much as though they were in their own homes. The Soviet Government requires that certain girls be permitted membership in the teachers' committee, and the two communists accompanying me pointed to this as a great accomplishment. Privately, the teachers informed me they regarded it as of little significance, and apparently they were entirely out of sympathy with the innovations that the new government has made. Now all the girls are required to work in the kitchen, dining room, or m cleaning their own dormitories, and certain girls are assigned to the kitchen to over-see the use of supplies by the cooks. However, the whole institution, from the uniforms of the girls to the required form in which even hand towels have to be hung, indicates the iron will of the directress. In one class we visited the girls sat at desks and listened to a traditional pedagogue pour out quantities of information on Pushkin's Boris Gudonov. Occasionally the girls were called upon to react, which they did with sentences apparently only partially memorized. The spirit of the institution is behind that of our better institutions in America, and the spirit of the classroom is quite mediaeval.

The greatest objection which the teachers seem to have to soviet activities is the question of sacred pictures and religious observances. The chapel of the school has been closed, but in each room from the corner still hangs the Ikon and at the heads of many of the girls' beds there are still small pictures of the Virgin, much to the disgust of the representatives of the Soviet Government, who in many cases are Jewish, and in practically all cases have renounced any religious connection. Recently the Soviet Party has announced the fact that they as a party are not hostile to any religion, but intend to remain neutral on the subject. The attitude of the commissars apparently is that required religious observances should not be permitted in public institutions, and doubtless some of the inspectors have gone further than was necessary in prohibiting any symbol of the religion which probably most of the children still nominally adhere to.

The second institution I visited, which had been taken over from the old government, was an orphan asylum with some 600 children mostly under 10. It was frightfully crowded, in many places rather dirty, with frequently bad odors from unclean toilets. In one little room some 20 small boys were sleeping and eating, and I found one child of 2 who was not able to walk and was eating in the bed in which he slept.

Ventilation was bad, linen not very clean, a general feeling of repression present, slovenly employees, and, in general, an atmosphere of inefficiency and failure to develop a home spirit which one still finds in some of the worst institutions in America. The instructor who showed me this home realized its horrors, and said that the Government intended to move the children into more adequate quarters as soon as conditions permitted. In summer the children are all taken to the country. In this institution all the older children go out to public schools and there have been no cases of smallpox or typhus in spite of the epidemics the city has had this winter. Forty children were in the hospital with minor complaints. About 10 per cent of the children are usually ill.

The school for feeble-minded occupies a large apartment house and the children are divided into groups of 10 under the direction of two teachers, each group developing home life in one of the large apartments. There is emphasis on handwork. Printing presses, a bookbinding establishment, and woodworking tools are provided. Music and art appreciation are given much time, and some of the work done is very beautiful. This school is largely the result of the efforts of the Soviet Government. Careful records are kept of the children and simple test material has been devised to develop in the more backward children elementary reactions regarding size, shape, form, and color. The greatest difficulty is the impossibility of securing trained workers either for the shops or for the special pedagogical problems of the school. However, an energetic corps of young men and young women are employed, and they are conscious of the size of their problem and are already thinking of the difficulties of sending their students back into industrial life. In many of the activities of the Soviet Government, as well as in these institutions taken over from the old regime, I was dismayed at the inefficiency and ignorance of many of the subordinates. After talking to the leaders and getting some understanding of their ideals, an American expects to see these carried over into practice. One is liable to forget that the Russian people have not greatly changed, and that the same easy-going, inefficient attitude of decades of the previous regime still exists. No one knows this obstacle better than the members of the present regime. They realize that the character of the Russian people is their greatest obstacle, and change in the Russian conception of Government service is a slow process. Far from being discouraged, they point to their accomplishments with pride.