[17] workers, and all the employees adopted resolutions regarding the necessity to wage that war until victory. Similarly, whenever the authorities issued a whole series of regulations limiting or cancelling certain social privileges, either with regard to vacation. Characteristically, when the eight-hour work day was changed into ten-hour one, workers also had to adopt resolutions at meetings, as a result of which the government was requested to pass suitable legislation [b] or taxation for the benefit of the air force, and all such regulations were either preceded by resolutions, which were adopted at meetings of the working world and which called on the government to pass appropriate legislation, or, and that obviously happened more often, the regulations were endorsed post factum as essential and necessary for the proper development of the state and the welfare of workers.
All this indicates that the teachers, like all other workers, were completely deprived of free time, when they could work only for themselves.
[18] Teaching topics as a Bolshevik propaganda tool. As for teaching as such, it is highly telling what great importance the Bolsheviks attach to [teaching] topics. During the teachers’ conferences, in all circular letters that the supervisory authorities send to schools and in the organs of popular general and professional press, particular attention is paid to the political/educational aspect of teaching, which has to be reflected in the [teaching] topics, regardless of the [school] subject.
It does not matter if we take a French, English, or German coursebook – we will find the same content for every grade expressed in a different language, regarding either biographies or specific incidents from the life of Soviet leaders or the events connected with the course of the revolution [19] in the USSR. But in a German language coursebook we will also find descriptions of revolutionary attempts in Germany after the war of 1914–1918 or of the oppression of communists in Germany; in a French language coursebook – the same topic but about France: texts on communist activists and the Communist Party in France; in an English language coursebook – various descriptions of exploitation of workers by capitalists in England. Even in grammar exercises, all examples, thoughts, and maxims have educational propaganda content. Not even mathematics is free of that as the life in the USSR was also included in the content of the exercises.
Foreign language teaching. On the whole it should be said that even though the Bolsheviks did make a significant effort to promote the command
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