education in the most explicit manner at the All-Russian Political Education Conference on the 5th of November, 1920. (See Soviet Russia, April 30th, 1921.) He explained that the teachers must be, first of all, political propagandists and humble followers of the Communist Party:
We must treat this question frankly and in complete opposition to tradition, must combat the erroneous conception that education may under no circumstances be combined with politics. We are living in a historic period, in the period of struggle against the world bourgeoisie, which is still very much stronger than we are. In such a moment of struggle we must defend our Socialist work of construction and wage a conflict with this bourgeoisie, both in a military and—what is more important—in a spiritual sense, in the way of education.
The teaching staff must itself attract the working classes, fill them with the Communist spirit, interest them in what the Communists are doing and win them over to the Communist standpoint.
But the school teacher the world over has a certain minimum respect for his calling. Though the overwhelming majority of the teachers under Kerensky were Social Revolutionists or Social Democrats, they were teachers, and not propagandists. Dismissed by the wholesale, the majority of the new teachers are scarcely more amenable. Lenin and Lunacharsky, Commissary for Education, complain bitterly of this difficulty and pursue their usual method of vilifying their victims. Lenin says, in the speech just quoted:
