Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/97

 CHAPTER VIII

Education and Religion

HE Communists have placed at the head of their Education Commissariat a man of remarkable character and great ability. Before we went to Russia reports concerning Lunacharsky had encouraged us to the belief that in him we should meet a genuine benefactor of his country. As a matter of fact I did not meet him at all, as he was not in Moscow at the time of our visit, but travelling in the south on business connected with his department.

Friends of his in Moscow discussed him with us and spoke of the incessant, obvious turmoil of a mind wrestling with two ideals, the one leading him back to the imaginative, romantic, anarchist system of a world of the past, with its leisured class and intellectual aristocracy; the other compelling him to the necessity of bringing organisation and discipline to bear in order to carry out a programme of general communisation in education and educational ideal. That he does not allow himself to be completely subdued by the 93