The institutions which Madame Lelina is directing are in two groups:  First, those which she has taken over from the old Czar regime, and second, those which have been founded in the last 18 months.  The new government has been so handicapped by the difficulties of securing food and other supplies, by the sabotage of many of the intelligent classes, and by the necessity of directing every energy toward carrying on hostilities against the bourgeoisie and the Allies, that there has been little opportunity to remodel the institutions inherited from the previous regime, therefore neither the strength nor the weakness of these institutions is to any great extent due to the present regime.  Two of the institutions I visited were of this type, one happened to be very good and the other very bad, and in neither case did I feel that Lelina’s organization was responsible.

An aristocratic organization under the Czar maintained a boarding school for girls.  This has been taken over by the Soviet Government with little change, and the 140 children in this institution are enjoying all the opportunities which a directress trained in France and Germany, with an exceptionally skillful corps of assistants, can give them.

I inquired regarding the changes which the Soviet Government had made in the organization of this school.  Some of the girls who were there have been kept, but vacant places have been filled by Madame Lelina’s committee, and the institution has been required to take boys into the day school, a plan which is carried out in most of the soviet social and educational work.  Much more freedom has been introduced in the management of the institution, and the girls at table talk and walk about, much as though they were in their own homes.  The Soviet Government requires that certain girls be permitted membership in the teachers’ committee, and the two communists accompanying me pointed to this as a great accomplishment.  Privately, the teachers informed me they regarded it as of little significance, and apparently they were entirely out of sympathy with the innovations that the new government has made.  Now all the girls are required to work in the kitchen, dining room, or m cleaning their own dormitories, and certain girls are assigned to the kitchen to over-see the use of supplies by the cooks.  However, the whole institution, from the uniforms of the girls to the required form in which even hand towels have to be hung, indicates the iron will of the directress.  In one class we visited the girls sat at desks and listened to a traditional pedagogue pour out quantities of information on Pushkin’s Boris Gudonov.  Occasionally the girls were called upon to react, which they did with sentences apparently only partially memorized.  The spirit of the institution is behind that of our better institutions in America, and the spirit of the classroom is quite mediaeval.