It’s hard for me to say how “typical” School Number 30 was in comparison with other specialized schools. At the time I am writing, Leningrad had three specialized math schools: School Number 30, School Number 239, and the Specialized Boarding School Number 45 affiliated with Leningrad State University (the one Boris graduated from thirteen years before I graduated).
Obviously, we would kill anyone who suggested our school was second best. I didn’t challenge the quality of my education until fairly recently, and as I spoke at length about my University experience, I am going to describe my life and studies at School Number 30.
I won’t say everyone was highly motivated, but more students were motivated than at an average school. One thing is for sure: most of us felt elite and were very proud of it. We were also “a little bit dissident” and felt equally proud of that. Now I know that segregating more gifted students into separate classrooms immediately triggers the separation between “better” and “worse” within it, but back then, everyone was sure that it was the only way to give the best to the best students. Most of our teachers, not only in STEM but also in literature and social studies, were “above average” and demanded a lot from us.
Recently, I read a book titled “At Freedom” by Anatoliy Kuznetsov. This book is brilliant in so many ways that I can speak about it for hours. I don’t see any indication that it was ever translated into English, but I think this book is most valuable to those who lived in the Soviet Union or have close ties to it. It’s hard to single out the most important essay in this book; still, I want to call out the “Misinformation Secret.” This essay addresses a crucial topic that is almost forgotten thirty-five years after the Soviet Union’s collapse. These days, most people think Soviet political propaganda was on a “dummy” level, and that “nobody believed it.” In reality, many high-level specialists worked to perfect the propaganda, operating on multiple levels, exactly as Anatoly Kuznetsov describes.
Looking back, I realize we were all subjected to this “Level III propaganda,” and we all thought we were better than those common folks who believe in Level I or Level II, and that we knew “the actual real truth.” We admired our history and literature teachers, and once again, looking back, I am sure that some of them were cynical enough to continuously feed us with this “Level III”, and some were, like us, victims of the previous round of indoctrination, and truly believed in what they taught us. For example, I remember visiting my former Russian literature teacher during one of my trips to Saint Petersburg, who asked how well my children knew Russian. After I replied that they knew very little, she declared, as if it were the greatest tragedy that could happen to someone: They will never know Great Russian Literature! Never! Even though at that time I was still not completely free of all of the imperial nonsense we were taught, I was wondering why their ability to read and fully understand great English and American literature was less important, not even mentioning great French, German, or Spanish literature, which none of us could fully appreciate.
I think that a significant part of Russians who now declare that they always were “against all bad” and that their parents and teachers taught them good values, and that they are not responsible for anything, came from these specialized schools, where we were brought up to believe that we were so special, and so progressive, and so much better than others… And I was one of them, and it took me years and years just to start to understand that. I have no excuse, because I actually had brains but didn’t use them in some cases. Now it’s too late to undo what was already done, and the only thing we can do is stop Trump from repeating the same thing in the US.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
