Page:My Further Disillusionment In Russia.djvu/137

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EDUCATION AND CULTURE
111

the Bolsheviki deserve credit for their educational work and the general diffusion of education.

In the case of the theatres no reservations have been made. All were permitted to continue their performances when factories were shut down for want of fuel. The opera, ballet, and Lunacharsky's plays were elaborately staged, and the Proletcult—organized to advance proletarian culture—was generously subsidized even when the famine was at its height. It is also true that the Government printing presses were kept busy day and night manufacturing propaganda literature and issuing the old classics. At the same time the imagists and futurists gathered unmolested in Café Domino and other places. The palaces and museums were kept up in admirable condition. In any other starved, blockaded, and attacked country all this would have been a very commendable showing.

In Russia, however, two revolutions had taken place. To be sure, the February Revolution was not far-reaching. Still, it brought about political changes without which there might not have been an October. It also released great cultural forces from the prisons and Siberia—a valuable element without which the educa-