NEW RUSSIA'S PRIMER
THE STORY OF THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN

    "The revolutionary struggle has placed into his hands some very powerful aids. It has generated a great system of planning organs through which society is endeavouring to shape its own future. Perhaps the most challenging feature of the little book, therefore, has to do with the relation of education to social planning."

    "The American teacher will be forced to put to himself the question: Can we not in some way harness the school to the task of building a better, a a more just, a more beautiful society? Can we not broaden the sentiment of patriotism to embrace the struggles which men must ever wage with ignorance, disease, poverty, ugliness, injustice? This means that we shall have to turn our attention increasingly from the mechanics of school procedure to the fundamental problems of American life and culture."

    "I sincerely trust that it will serve this purpose and at the same time contribute to a better understanding on the part of the American people of the greatest social experiment of history."

                        -- from George S. Counts' introduction to the 1931 American edition of "New Russia's Primer"

"In order to tell about everything, one would have to be everywhere that construction goes on, one would have to see everything with one's own eyes... To be everywhere and to know everything is impossible.

"Of course there is much about which I shall not speak, there is much that I shall omit. Others will tell more: others will tell you of things I do not mention and will further illuminate those things concerning which I say little."

                         -- M. Ilin, "New Russia's Primer," p. 4, Houghton-Mifflin, 1931, translated by George S. Counts

                       -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's dedication of "The Gulag Archipelago"

Table of Contents

Webbed by Mike Davidson

Last changed December 21, 1998