But how long did Dewey’s books stay in print in the Soviet Union? To be fair, Dewey’s ideas on “progressive” education were in vogue during the early years of Soviet rule, but Stalin did away with them.
Later, Dewey became one of the most outspoken members of the American left in his condemnation of Stalin’s purge trials.
Actually, the epilogue to Dewey in the Soviet Union was almost comic.
It began before Lenin was in power, after the overthrow of the Czar, when the short lived democratic government was in power. The history of that period sounds like something crafted in the minds of Monty Python comedians. Many are the times when you shake your head and ask how sane people could do such things.
Led by the neurotic, paranoid and arrogant jackass Aleksandr F. Kerensky(*), the first order of their Menshavik-controlled Duma, or parliament, was the infamous “Order Number One”, which abolished the rank structure in the Russian army. In the middle of World War I. All decisions were to be made by voice vote.
It went downhill from there. Both the Menshaviks and the Bolsheviks were filled to the brim with socialist theory of the lowest order of moonbattery, and wanted to try it out at full strength, without testing first.
When Lenin finally took power, he decided to do everything socialist, and all at once. He fired the Russian bureaucracy, which was dominated by Germans, by the way, and had been for a hundred years. This of course slammed the brakes on the government doing anything, so he had to rehire everybody who had been fired within a week.
He decided to try and institute an experiment in “free love”, which lasted, well, um, probably under five minutes, and ended up with fistfights, venereal disease and unplanned pregnancies.
He ordered the schools to adopt Dewey’s educational philosophies, and the test scores at the end of the semester were so abysmal, that he instituted the strictest form of European standards education, kind of a mix between the German and French forms. Rigid classrooms.
Then he went for farm collectivization, which so effectively ruined Russian agriculture, that Lenin had to institute the New Economic Plan, which was basically taxed capitalism. The NEP-men restored the economy, for which they were promptly shot when Stalin came into power.
(*) Kerensky bugged out at the first sign of trouble, ending up in the United States, where he would give the occasional lecture, lying like a dog and blaming every other person in the world but himself, for his awful mistakes. He finally died of old age, in 1970.