It associates most young people in the Soviet Union and makes no special requirements for new members. Many students in our Institute came from the interior of the USSR. There was even one from a half-savage tribe in Crimea. The young Soviets did not really stand out in any way. They were relatively narrow-minded in terms of their worldview, had little knowledge of world literature, and knew almost nothing about the lives of young people abroad. They treated us with distrust. Despite our best efforts we sometimes found it difficult [12] to communicate with them. The young Soviets had a number of virtues we lacked: freshness of emotions, directness and frankness, lack of cynicism, certain pride, and devotion to their socialist fatherland. We might have had more knowledge, been better versed, and had a better grasp all kinds of phenomena, but the Soviet students were healthy young people unspoiled by the bourgeois hypocrisy. But when we compare young Soviets with young people from any other country, then despite Gide’591 claims the outcome will be much more favourable to the former. When Gide talked about the high level of development of intelligentsia youth in France, he did not have all young people in mind but only a small number of intellectuals from his milieu. Gide looked at young Soviets as an intellectual sensitive to style, form, and external garb, [13] instead of at the actual social values of every young boy or girl in the USSR. Take a look at the bourgeois young people in Paris, at the cynical young men, rotten to the core and adoring Celine592 – that vile testimony to the bourgeois self-criticism and apotheosis of brothels and cesspools. What I envied my Soviet friends for was their sunny smile and a certain naivety of their worldview. Compared to them, we were much older, experienced, and arrogant in our opinions. The main fault of the Soviet youth was their almost total lack of criticism and individualism – they seem to be standardised. Only now did I understand what education was. If one wishes to create a new man, he must be brought up from infancy. The role of the educator in the socialist system is central. The heaviest responsibility for
