GLORIOUS THREAD OF THE PEOPLE

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In the Soviet Union:

· By 1938, the 21 years of Soviet rule had brought about a 50% reduction in child mortality rate.

· The height of the average Soviet child in 1938 was one and a quarter inches greater than that of the average child in tsarist Russia.

· The weight of the average Soviet child was eleven and a half pounds greater in 1937 than in 1925.

· The chest expansion of the average Soviet child in 1938 was roughly 1 inch greater than that of the average child in tsarist Russia.

· Incidence of tuberculosis decreased 83% under Soviet rule up till 1938 and continued to decrease.

· Cases of syphilis decreased 90% by 1938 and continued to decrease.

· The death rate in 1937 in the USSR was 40% below the death rate in Russia in 1913 (implying a much higher life expectancy)

-Life expectancy increased from 32 in 1913 to 63 in 1956. The trend continued into the 1960s, when the life expectancy in the Soviet Union went beyond the life expectancy in the United States. Arguments are made that even without the October Revolution, Russia would have seen an equivalent increase in life expectancy as that accomplished by the USSR. This notion is questioned by data showing life expectancy at 35 in Albania and 32 in China in 1949.

Before the Revolution,76% of the people were illiterate, including 88%of the women. Virtually complete illiteracy prevailed among the indigenous populations of Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. Indeed, more than 40 languages had not been reduced to writing at all. Prior to the revolution, only 290,000 Russians possessed any kind of higher education, whereas the 1959 census reported that more than 13 Million citizens had some higher or specialized secondary education, and more than 45 million people had 7-10 years of education....Raising the literacy rate from 24% to 98.5% within the span of a single generation for more than 200 million people would be an achievement in itself if only one language were involved, to say nothing of the severe problems posed by a multilingual society....

To detail the massive character of the Soviet educational effort in Central Asia, the Uzbek Republic, which is the most advanced of the Central Asian areas today, as it was in pre-Revolutionary Russia, provides an apt illustration. Before the Revolution, only 2% of the population was literate. There were no native engineers, doctors, or teachers with a higher education. In short, Central Asia was no different in this respect from most of the colonial dependencies of the European powers, and worse off than many.

Today, in the Uzbek Republic alone, there are 32 institutions of higher learning, more than 100 technicums, 50 special technical schools, 12 teachers' colleges, and 1400 kindergartens. Nearly 2,500,000 children attend school, and more than 50% of its teachers have had some higher education...The rate of literacy is over 95%. The Republic before the Revolution possessed no public libraries: today there are nearly 5,000.

Health education played a very important role in the battle against pestilence. In 1920, 3.8m Red Army soldiers attended lectures and talks on hygiene, and in 1919 and 1920, 5.5m hygiene posters, booklets and leaflets were published for distribution in the army alone. Such health education campaigns were also carried out amongst the population as a whole. With the end of the war came a new health slogan: "On from the struggle against epidemics to the fight for healthier working and living conditions."

Although conditions after the Civil War were far from easy, health improved steadily during the years of the New Economic Policy. By 1928, the number of physicians had increased from the pre-war level of 19,785 to 63,219, the allocation for health protection from 128.5m to 660.8m roubles per year, and the number of hospital beds from 175,000 to 225,000 and the number of nursery places from 11,000 to 256,000. The Five Year Plan was based on a full report by the regional health bodies, the hospitals, the farms and the factories on what was required and what was achievable. In the four years it took to complete the first Five Year Plan, the number of doctors increased from 63,000 to 76,000, the number of hospital beds increased by more than half and the number of nursery place increased from 256,000 to 5,750,000. 14 new medical colleges were established, along with 133 new secondary medical schools.

In a remarkably short period of time the socialist state has succeeded in raising the material and cultural level of the entire population enormously, thereby laying a firm foundation for successful work in the field of public health” (Professor N. Propper-Grashchenkov, Assistant People’s Commissar of Public Health, in an article entitled ‘Public Health Protection’). The Soviet Union wiped out slums and provided both town and country with water mains, sewer systems and electricity. In addition to this, the quality and quantity of the foods available were increased beyond all recognition. The output of the food industry in the USSR in 1938 was approximately 6 times the output of the food industry of Tsarist Russia in 1913. Nutritious food was made available to the entire population, and its production and consumption increased constantly. Over the period of the second Five Year Plan, consumption by workers of fruits and berries increased three-fold, consumption of ham, bacon and other cured meats increased five-fold, and consumption of eggs increased two-fold. In 1938 the per capita consumption of protein was over 100g per day, compared with 35g in Germany. The national payroll in 1938 was three times what it was even in 1932.

At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, 37.9 percent of the male population above seven years old was literate and only 12.5 percent of the female population was literate. These low literacy rates dropped further in the turbulence caused by the Russian Civil War and in the famines, epidemics, and disorganization that followed from it. These same factors also caused a decrease in the general educational level in the country.

Beginning in 1922 Soviet authorities started implementing a far-reaching, large-scale educational program with the goals of universal education and eliminating illiteracy among adults. By 1938 the government had established a network of four-year elementary schools covering the Soviet Union, and seven-year schools for children in urban areas. In addition, whereas before 1914 there were almost no kindergartens in Russia, the Soviets rapidly developed preschool education, including kindergarten, as part of their national program. Education at these schools was traditional, and strict discipline was enforced. Soviet schools were especially strong in mathematics and the hard sciences but also stressed language, literature, and history, a big change from the tsarist schools, which taught only the fundamentals of reading and arithmetic.

In an attempt to help illiterate adults, the Bolsheviks launched an ambitious campaign between 1923 and 1927 called "Down with Illiteracy of Society," which depended on volunteers. Members of the Bolshevik youth organization, the Komsomol, were especially enthusiastic participants. One of its campaign posters said, "Literacy is the path to communism. The general census of December 1926 underscored the success of this campaign. For the first time in Russian history the majority of the population could read and write: 65.4 percent of males and 36.7 percent of females (above the age of seven years). By the 1939 census, 81.1 percent of Soviet citizens (age ten and above) were literate, and by the 1960s literacy was common to almost all of the Soviet Union's citizens. The most rapid increase occurred in the first ten years after the revolution, a remarkable feat for the Soviet Union.

[Guest]

too much vodka

couldn't read

next bottle please, comrade