older than Lena and me. Animatedly he tells us:
When they came to the plant to recruit us for students, the foreman said: “Go to study, Shurka, you’re a clever one anyway. I’m not sure I can exactly tell you what linguistics is, but I think you’ll be a female doctor, it doesn’t matter—it’s useful.” Well, I came, but now I’m doubtful—these bourgeois speak foreign languages well, but will I make it?
Entering the conversation, a middle-aged village teacher in a tall Astrakhan hat says: “Don’t be so doubtful, boy. My nephew told me of an incident when he was entering the institute last year. A fellow was submitting papers at the same time as he, and the secretary asked him: ‘Your initials, comrade?’ He became confused, started to rummage through his pockets, and then said: ‘Here is a reference from the factory committee, here’s a recommendation from the Komsomol, but I have no initials . . .’ Well what do you think, he is now number one in the studies.”
203
But, evidently, irrespective of the effort made to attract the working masses to our institute, it was destined to remain one hopelessly comprised of intelligentsia. Languages are not in vogue now. The industrialization of the nation is taking place and youth storms the doors of the technical institutes. This is where the newly promoted party and labor administrators hope to wind up as well. By means of its allotment, the Komsomol sent us its children, but they drowned in the general mass of the “working intelligentsia.”
Ivan Mikhailovich Siiak, a Galician [from western Ukraine] and old Social Democrat, was appointed director of our institute. During the winter of 1919, he was a prominent participant in a revolt against the Romanian rulers in Bessarabia. Later he commanded some sort of “steel detachment” of Galician railroad workers, and then joined the Bolsheviks. He is handsome, smart, has the habits of an experienced demagogue, and the energy of a schemer. He was able to convince the People’s Ministry of Education and the students of the almost world-wide significance of the institute and, rather quickly, in an overcrowded Kiev, was able to get a building, in the center of the city, no less. Prior to the revolution, this had been a respectable bank, but was now occupied by a scientific research institute of water resources. Rather unwillingly, the latter ceded us two halls, and calmly continued to occupy the rest of the building despite the fiery tirades of Ivan Mikhailovich and stern notes from the city soviet [council].
Plywood partitions were quickly put up in the halls which converted them into a semblance of classrooms. But since materials were scarce and the partitions just slightly above human height, students in one place could easily hear neighboring lectures. Thus we very plausibly joked that even the teaching of German in our institute was permeated with dialectical materialism, which was passionately taught by the very same Ivan Mikhailovich Siiak.
Actually, he and his auditors quite rapidly became convinced that the unity of opposites is not always one of nature’s basic laws, and that it is impossible to bear both linguists and hydrologists under one roof.
Having lost patience with fruitless negotiations with a venerable and grumbling academic, Ivan Mikhailovich decided to go on the attack. True, his “army,” consisting principally of timid teachers, was fundamentally different from his brave “steel detachment.” But Siiak was uncontrollably drawn to the romanticism of the civil war. Once after lectures, with face aglow, he led us into “the attack.” The desks of the hydrologists were opened, and their tables, files, and books, were taken to the furthest room on the top floor with utmost care. Then, Ivan Mikhailovich made a speech from the stairs and ordered us not to dissolve but to spend the night “on liberated territory.” The hydrolo-gists tried complaining, wrote letters somewhere regarding arbitrariness, but
204
the building, nevertheless, remained in the hands of the victorious students. For a long time, as a payback, the hydrologists did not remove their remaining furniture and Siiak appointed students to keep guard and maintain protection so that not even an ink well could disappear.
We were split into brigades and it was announced that studies would proceed under collectivist principles— via the laboratory-brigade method. Of course, Lena and I rushed to sign up for the same brigade but Shura Zapiller boldly cancelled the composition of the brigades as submitted and announced that the professional group and the party-Komsomol community would be vigilantly checking to see that the brigades be structured on sound production principles and not on the petty bourgeois bases of personal affinity.
“We will not permit exclusive, individualistic groups of so-called friends to form under the guise of brigades. Therefore, we will now vote on those brigades which the action committee feels it necessary to present to the general meeting.”
The vote was taken, as usual, by commencing with the question “who is against?” In each brigade, the most talented and mature student was appointed brigadier, then came two or three of the middling students, and then the inevitable “blockhead for shaping and finishing.” That was what the un-talented and uneducated were called by students. They had obtained entry into institutions of higher learning as a result of recruitment or being pushed into it at work.
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-
205
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
