"And you, fathers, do not provoke your children, but bring them up in the teaching and admonition of the Lord."
(Ephesians 6: 1)
After the October Socialist Revolution, several new children's and youth publications also appeared in Penza. In many ways, their appearance was due to the upsurge in social life, which swept the masses of people, including the younger generation, after the February bourgeois-democratic revolution. Children's publications solved the problems of supporting and developing children's creativity, stimulating and organizing social activities of children and youth, illuminating aspects of the surrounding reality that are interesting to them. Some of these publications had a certain political orientation, while others were mostly apolitical, which reflected the significant inertia of the children's consciousness of those years.
Many different newspapers were published in Penza. Many!
Thus, the monthly children's magazine "Zorka", published in Penza since 1917, published the Children's Club, organized by the Society for the Promotion of Out-of-School Education, which in turn was created by liberal educators before the revolution. The magazine was published on 16-20 pages, in a format slightly larger than a school notebook. Poems, stories, and even plays written by children between the ages of six and fourteen became obsessed with it. The adults - the leadership of the Children's Club - deliberately pursued a policy of "non-interference" in the conceptual and substantive sphere of the publication, and the children themselves, the authors of the works published in "Zorka", were still guided by the content of children's national magazines even before the revolution. The existence of "Dawn" lasted until the summer of 1919, and time seemed to have not touched it at all: from the first to the last issue, it was completely apolitical.
The same goal - to publish children's works - was set before itself by the magazine "Morning Sunrise", which began to appear in the village of Atmis, Nizhnelomovskiy district in 1919.
The idea of creating our own magazine originated in a children's club at a rural school. Published and edited by his teacher G. D. Smagin (1887-1967), who had already shown himself as a writer, ethnographer and educator before that. Having started teaching at the age of 15, in 1908 he was appointed head of the Atmis two-year school, and then he also created a local history museum at the school. In 1913, his autobiographical story "Misty Dawn - Clear Sunrise" was published in ód. In addition, he collaborated with many metropolitan magazines and corresponded with V. G. Korolenko. Later, he actively participated in the creation of the local Union of Peasant Writers. He was awarded the title "Honored School Teacher of the RSFSR", awarded the Order of Lenin and two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor.
In the preface to the first issue of Morning Sunrise, Smagin wrote: “Dear children! The time has come, joyful and bright … "Morning Sunrise" will serve as a guiding star in your future life, awaken in you a feeling of compassion for people, animals, teach you to love nature with all your soul. This is your magazine, bring your joys and sorrows into it, write about everything that worries you”[1. C.1].
The magazine was written by teenagers from 14 to 18 years old. They published their stories and poems in it, described the life of their children's clubs and other organizations. The “Morning Sunrise” also published reviews of readers, including parents of students, about the magazine itself. And here is how the newspaper "The Voice of the Poor" responded to its appearance on June 13, 1919: "Both in appearance and in content, this is one of the best children's magazines … Along with stories and poems, there are short addresses to children with an appeal to labor. There are tons of beautiful vignettes. Knowledge spreads in a wide wave across the remote corners, and now, in one of the bearish corners - Atmis, "Morning Sunrise" is published, despite all the difficulties of the present time "[2. C.4]
The essential difference between this magazine and Zorka was that it covered the difficult Russian reality of those years. And this is quite understandable, since G. D. Smagin was a man of the people, was born and raised in a peasant family, took an active part in the establishment of Soviet power, and therefore knew very well what it was necessary to say to the village children in him.
In the second issue of "Morning Sunrise" there were materials not only from students of Atmisskaya, but also from other schools of the Penza and neighboring provinces. Then the publication of the magazine was interrupted due to the appeal of G. D. Smagin to the Red Army. And in 1922 the last (due to the high cost of paper and printing services) double magazine N3-4, called "Voskhod", was published. Children from all over Russia, including Petrograd schoolchildren and schoolgirls, have become the correspondents of this issue. Moreover, despite the small volume of the publication, its editor found a place in it even for answers to his young readers and authors, establishing a stable feedback with them. Interestingly, at the same time, at least one of the author's answers, although quite sincere, was rather cynical and, undoubtedly, purely personal. So, in the answer to Zina Ovcharova G. D. Smagin wrote that "at your age, friendship is still possible … but further friendship is only by calculation!" - a very peculiar remark for those years [3. C.24].
In 1917, the magazine "Our Thought" began to be published - the organ of the Penza Union of Students, the founders of which were Penza gymnasium students. It was a newspaper-type edition of the pro-Kadet orientation, which came out without a cover, on sheets of large format. A total of four issues were published, after which the magazine ceased to exist due to the direct pressure of the Bolsheviks who came to power.
"Nasha Mysl" published articles and correspondence, in which topical problems of student youth were considered, including issues of school self-government and social and political activities of students.
Thus, the article “Two Camps”, which opened the second issue of Nasha Mysl (December 1917), was devoted to the problem of the relationship between “the two main elements of the school - teachers and students”. The author wrote about the totalitarian, suppressive personality of the education system that took shape in the era of autocracy, and called for the construction of a new, democratic school based on a comradely dialogue between teacher and student, on their mutual trust and understanding [4. C.2-3.].
The article "The Bolsheviks and the Democratization of School" reproached the new government for not actually reforming the education system, but introducing rigid ideological uniformity in schools, using repressive, terrorist methods. The entire policy of the Bolsheviks appears in the article as the dictatorship of a handful of blind men, striving to achieve their utopian goal by any means, while he fully solidified himself with the students who took part in the struggle against the Bolsheviks. The idea of resistance to Soviet power was also contained in a large publicistic article "Students and the political situation in the country", published in the issue of January 25, 1918. The magazine's authors saw one of the forms of such resistance in the teachers' strike. In the same place, in the note "Finish him!" the measures of the Penza school authorities directed against student unions, societies and circles were condemned. At the same time, a number of articles also expressed thoughts that, despite the difficult and difficult situation in the country, positive changes and a lot of interesting and amazing events are taking place in it. At the same time, the student youth got the opportunity to engage in social activities without fear of the tsarist secret police, read previously forbidden books and, finally, get acquainted with the people and various currents of political thought, both in theory and in practice, which gives them a wealth of experience that will be useful later in activities for the benefit of Russia.
A significant place in Our Thought was given to the literary experiments of young authors. Moreover, it was noted that young authors are too pessimistic, but that the latter is understandable, since the youth had to go through a lot this year.
Simultaneously with the Penza "Our thought" under the same name, members of the circle of students of the 1st and 2nd grade of the Insar Unified Labor Soviet School published their magazine. It's amazing that for a whole year, schoolchildren in a small county town managed to publish an 18-page edition on good paper every month, with a cliché cover and splash screens. In the magazine, as stated in the programmatic editorial address "To all fellow readers", it was planned to place poems, stories, book reviews, questions and answers, charades and riddles. As for the artistic merits of the published, in its mass it was not distinguished by a high level. The moods conveyed by young authors in their works can be briefly characterized by a line from a poem by a fourteen-year-old poet: “The birds are flying away from us…” - that is, a quite definite group of young people did not perceive any changes in society and kept their old spiritual world intact.
The content of the literary and artistic, social and popular science monthly for youth "Krasnye vskhody", the organ of the Penza Provincial Committee of the RKSM, published in 1922-1923, was of a completely different nature. It was published on poor paper, printed in "blind type", but in its ideological and conceptual level and the quality of published materials it was strikingly different from other similar publications. And the circulation - up to 1,500 copies - was significant at that time, even for adult publications. Experienced Penza journalists participated in the publication of the magazine, many of whom worked in the party press.
The journal "Life" ("Monthly literary-scientific and social-pedagogical journal") was a publication of the Penza People's University, which opened on November 21, 1917 and had completed the first academic year of its cultural and educational work by the time the first issue was published. During this year, public lectures were organized for the workers of the city, and the issue of opening short-term summer pedagogical courses and courses on out-of-school education was also resolved.
Classes were held at the popular science department, but then the idea arose to open an academic department, consisting of three faculties: historical and literary, socio-legal and foreign languages. It was planned to organize courses on cooperation, accounting and agronomy. “With the organization of the university, - said in the appeal of the organizers of the publication, - a great deal has been started, a great lamp of knowledge has been lit up, which already gathers all the best local scientific and teaching forces around itself and, hopefully, will not go out …” And then the university announced its poor financial situation and asked for support from all institutions, organizations, as well as individuals, but the potential audience did not respond to him [5. S. Z-4.].
Much space in the magazine was occupied by the department of prose and poetry, but it also published scientific articles. At the same time, for example, in the article by I. Aryamova: “Our schooling and degeneration” was discussed a serious problem (and it still is today!) - how to put the learning process in schools in such a way that it does not affect the health of children.
“Our Russian schools weaken the child's body and cause it to become prone to various diseases. And this is quite understandable. Our schools, especially primary and especially rural ones, are in impossible sanitary and hygienic conditions. Often they are housed in random rented buildings that are completely unsuitable for schools, cold, damp, semi-dark, so cramped that after an hour of study they cannot breathe. In addition, schools are rarely and not properly cleaned of dirt and dust”[6. P. 16.].
The author believed that the subjects taught at school should be designed not only for the strength and abilities of students, but also for the classes to be attractive, touch upon the emotional side of the student's nature, and not represent heaps of monotonous, repetitive information, amateur performance, creative beginning there is no personality. Therefore, children's creativity should be in the foreground of teaching and educating a child's personality. Moreover, the main task of upbringing and education should be in interesting creative work, and therefore it should not take place according to the old method of prohibition and inhibition, but according to the method of development and exercise. In his opinion, the main requirement of pedagogy should have been the following: to achieve the greatest result with the least expenditure of child energy. It should be noted that practically all of the above problems in this edition have not been resolved during all subsequent years, up to the present time. So, the author, referring to the data of the Nizhny Novgorod zemstvo and Moscow city schools [7. P.19], pointed to serious problems with the morbidity of students as a result of being in school, and emphasized that the child's nervous system is especially affected. “Therefore, it is extremely rare in our country to meet people with a rich initiative, with a broad outlook, a bold flight of thought, with a decisive and enterprising character.” Hence, in his opinion, the suicides of students, most of whom are in high school!
One of the problems that clearly hampered the development of society was the extreme underdevelopment of peasant children. So, in his article N. Sevastyanov "On the preschool education of peasant children" wrote that "foul language, intoxication of alcohol and all kinds of undisguised and unhealthy sexual relations between animals and people, cards and tobacco from the very first days of infancy are the main elements of raising a village child., deprived, moreover, of the same elementary leadership and understanding everything in most cases in a distorted form. " “At first, the kids (we are talking about a nursery set up in one of the provincial villages) were like wild animals,” the author subtly noted. He also concluded that the main impact in the field of child education should be directed at children under the age of five, and then we will not get a good result, and this conclusion, supported by the latest research in the relevant scientific fields, has not lost its relevance. and to this day!
In 1918-1919 vols. the political-trade union and literary-scientific journal of the Penza Provincial Council of Trade Unions "Proletary" was published twice a month. Penza trade unions also tried to acquire their own press organ.
On April 15, 1919, the tenth issue of the journal came to the readers, which opened with an editorial address, in which it was emphasized that the journal had recently been enriched by new employees. The publishers saw their task in helping the trade unions of the province, in strengthening them on the basis of new ideological principles, reflecting their activities and addressed the readers with the words: “Do not forget our magazine! Send us your articles, notes, stories, poems! Do not be embarrassed that you have not gone through a university or any bourgeois school! For cooperation in our magazine we need not a school, but an innate inclination to pen and a noble indignation at the injustices of life”[8. C.2]. That is, the magazine, sadly enough, was imbued with the idea of the superiority of class consciousness over professionalism in any areas, and it should be noted that, having been educated once, it has survived with us up to the present time. This was emphasized even in reviews of poetic collections of proletarian writers, for example, in No. 13, 1919. The following excerpt from a poem of this collection was placed there:
Sweet poison is alien to me
Of your exquisite colors
Poor kupava is closer to me
And the smell of uncrumpled mosses.
The dimmed pipes smoke.
Opened the furnaces hellish mouth, And the heat caresses the body roughly, And dehydrated lips
Bloody eats away sweat.
Of course, there is no dispute about tastes, but these "poems" seem both abstruse and overly naturalistic at the same time, although the reviewer assessed them differently. "The merit of the proletarian writers," the magazine noted, "is that their poetry was born directly, and the roots of its flowers are deeply embedded in the soil that gave rise to them!" It is interesting that even a short history of the revolution was printed in verse in the same magazine.
In 1918-1919. three issues of the magazine "Narodnaya unified labor school", which belonged to the Penza district department of public education, took place. In it, first of all, official documents about the labor school were published, and the publishers saw its goal in the creation of a modern democratic school in the RSFSR.
“Three and a half years have passed since the October Revolution provided us with ample opportunities in building public education and socialist education of the younger generations. Two and a half years have passed since the publication of the "Regulations on the Unified Labor School of the RSFSR". But the objective political and socio-economic conditions, in which the life of the republic has been going so far, have allowed us to put into practice very, very little of everything that we had to do, "- this is how the editorial begins, opening No. 1–3 magazine "Education" for 1921, which began to publish the Penza provincial department of public education. “The war is over, the time has come to move on to internal peaceful construction, in which enlightenment is one of the first and most important things. Many of our comrades, scattered in remote villages and villages, not only do not give themselves a clear account of the principles and methods of new labor education, plans and methods of political and educational work, etc., but also generally don’t know “what is going on in the world”, what's new in pedagogy, in literature, in life … The situation, of course, is completely abnormal. And in this situation, we will not build any new labor school, we will not develop any political and educational work on a large scale, we will not raise professional training. It is necessary to come to the aid of our comrades in the field. It is necessary, if possible, to inform them, at least in the area in which they have to work”- this is how the authors substantiated the need for this journal to appear. It is quite indicative that, although very little time has passed since the abolition of censorship restrictions by the tsarist government, a list of plays has already appeared in this magazine, the staging of which did not require permission from the Upolitprosvetov.
In No. 4-8 for April-August 1921, an appeal was published to educators with a call to discard such a concept as "apolitical", for in a workers 'state education should and will be workers' and communist. The requirement is undoubtedly relevant for that time, but it turned out to be untenable in the end, like many other things that were created by the revolution at that time and in one way or another were aimed at a radical reorganization of Russian society [9. P. 1].
The last was No. 9-10 of the magazine for September-October 1921. In it, along with general pedagogical materials, the problem of enlightening national minorities was raised and, accordingly, data on the growth in the number of libraries and schools for "nationalities" were given. So, if before the revolution there were 50 schools and 8 libraries in the province, where the main workers were representatives of the national clergy, then by the time the article was published, 156 national schools, 45 libraries, 37 cultural and educational organizations, 3 clubs, 3 people's houses had appeared in the province. 65 schools for the elimination of illiteracy, about 75 reading rooms, 8 kindergartens, 2 orphanages.
It should also be noted that in Penza, as well as in a number of district centers of the province, in 1917-1922. other publications were also published: the magazines "People's Self-Government" (April 1918); The Life of a Printer (1918-1919); almanac "Exodus" (1918) - almanac (in the only issue of which the works of I. Startsev, A. Mariengof, O. Mandelstam were published); Sober Thought (1918); "Education and the Proletariat" (1919); "Weekly report of the Penza Provincial Union of Consumer Societies" (1919-1920); The Machine Gunner (1919); Free Word (1919); The Light of Life (1919); Theatrical Journal (1920); "To the light. XX century "(1920-1921); "News. Penza Provincial Committee of the RCP (b) "(1921-1922) and others; newspapers - "Bulletin of the Penza Union of Printing Workers" (May 30, 1918); the publication of the Penza Provincial Commission for Military Affairs "Red Army" (July 14, 1918 - February 19, 1919); newspaper "Prometheus" in the village. Chembar (since March 1918 two issues have been published), "Chembarskiy Kommunar" (since March 1919); the organ of the agitation department of the Penza Provincial Executive Committee and the Provincial Military Commissariat "Klich" (February 22, 1919 - April 29, 1919); the organ of the political and educational administration of the Ural district military commissariat "For the Red Urals" (May 1, 1919 - August 28, 1919); organ of the Penza Provincial Food Committee, the Provincial Council of the National Economy and the Provincial Land Department "Penza Economic Life" (June 12, 1919 - August 7, 1919); organ of the Penza branch of ROSTA "Penza wall newspaper" (September 13, 1919 - April 21, 1921); "Izvestia of the Penza Provincial Committee of the RCP (b)" (September 18, 1919 - June 16, 1921); the publication of the political department of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Nth Army "Krasnoarmeets" (July 17, 1919 - September 9, 1919, November 7, 1919 - December 11, 1919); "Izvestia of the Penza Provincial Committee of the RKSM" (September 1920 - June 1921), the organ of the Penza Provincial Committee of the RCP (Bolsheviks) and the Gubernia Sevkom "Red Plowman" (February 9, 1921 - April 3, 1921); organ of the Penza provincial economic conference "Economic life of the Penza province" (September 12, 1921 - October 15, 1921); the weekly organ of the Penza Provincial Union of Consumer Societies "Bulletin of Consumer Cooperatives" (January 1922 - January 1923); and even the organ of the Penza Provisional Diocesan Council and a group of free-thinking clergy and laity of the Penza diocese "Living Church" (May 5, 1922 - June 30, 1922), etc. [10. Pp. 123-124.]
Thus, during the period from 1917 to 1922, many new printed editions appeared among the Penza provincial media, some of which continued to be published subsequently. But most of them were destined for a short life, since after the offensive on freedom of speech began in the twenties, their number became less and less, while the content of the "permitted" press acquired an increasingly orthodox communist character. Nevertheless, it should be noted that almost all Penza print media now actively used the feedback from the reader and tried to rely on public opinion. Although, without a doubt, this very opinion was dosed and commented on by the journalists of these publications not out of their own convictions (in those cases, of course, when they themselves were not ideological Bolsheviks), but, first of all, in accordance with the official course of the authorities. Moreover, extremely drastic changes in the press, which completely changed its worldview, took place in just five years, which speaks of the extremely tough pressure to which the Bolsheviks that won the country subjected the entire Russian society of that time. As noted in this regard, the American researcher P. Kenez, the Soviet state from the very beginning and much more than any other in history, paid attention to propaganda through the press. In his opinion, success in this area was facilitated both by the pre-revolutionary experience of propaganda work carried out by the Bolsheviks, and by the possibilities of their political system of isolating the population (primarily by simply closing “undesirable” publications) from alternative ideas and “harmful” from their point of view, journalistic information …
At the same time, the Bolsheviks, as Kenez emphasizes, unlike the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, did not create a particularly sophisticated "brainwashing system", but their ideology was truly comprehensive, embracing all aspects of human life and forming a single view of the world, having this undoubted "messianic component" [11. R.10]. At the same time, people who were openly illiterate, although "devoted to the cause of the RCP (b)," with an extremely limited outlook, not to mention bad education, tried to manage the Soviet media. At the same time, even then, party leaders actively intervened in the work of print media and instructed them what and how to write. So, for example, Head. On August 17, 1921, the Agitpropaganda Department of the Penza Provincial Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks sent a circular to Nizhne-Lomovskiy Ukom regulating the activities of the newspaper Golos Bednyak, which stated the following: maximize the participation of the local peasant population in the newspaper. The latter may well be achieved if the editorial board, instead of messages about Churchill's vacation in Paris (No. 15), prints economic instructions to the peasants on combating drought, on animal husbandry, etc. " [12]. Undoubtedly, one could fully agree with such an instruction for the newspaper “for villagers,” if it were not for the question that arises at the same time: “What should the local press write about?” After all, the problem of the local press was that it simply had nothing to write about, because nothing particularly happened in the countryside, and foreign news made it possible to somehow diversify its content. Otherwise, the newspaper turned into a periodical reference book on agriculture and, strictly speaking, ceased to be a newspaper. As a result, such a newspaper became uninteresting to anyone and people simply stopped subscribing to it. This is clearly seen from the content of the documents of that period: “… Subscription to our provincial newspaper Trudovaya Pravda by party members and individual party members is extremely sluggish. The overwhelming majority of party members, both urban and especially rural, did not take any measures to carry out a mandatory subscription or limited themselves to a resolution that remained on paper”[13]. That is, by and large, people were simply not interested in the newspaper!
