Sept. 20.
Some of our readers no doubt already know a remarkable book called "The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy." Exactly when it was first published we do not know and unfortunately the copy that came our way had lost the publisher's wrapper which gives such biographical details of the dia as have been obtained. We learn, however, that his name was Constantive Riabtsov, that in hero worship for Vladimir Lenin he is most anxious to be called "Viadien," and that his diary, covering events of. the years 3923-24, was written when he was fifteen. The English tran: Tation was apparently first published this year. Nothing that we have read about life in Soviet Russia has given us so intensely vivid and interesting a view of life under the Bolshevik regime as this book, We rather think that the translator has been more literary than the original. Of its genuineness there can be doubt. Were it otherwise, the author would either have said uch more ov much ess about unding conditions of life whi Riabtsov mentions as things to be taken for granted—especially, for instance, the description of his visit to the awful company of the "strays." the children who, being without families or homes, herd together in the collars of ruined buildings, living by crime, their hand against every man and every man's hand against them. It may be added that any author who could have drawn the per fect character study of a boy a5 revealed in these pages would have no need of artifice to bring himself before the public, 'That boys and girls' are educated together in Bolshevik schools is nothing unusual. is more surprising to find that the teachers are of both sexes and the head of the school is a woman, The word. "teacher, however, is banned. presumably savouring of the bad old days of bourgeois inequality. Now they are known as "sel 'Their authority seems of the slenderest, There are no fewer than three councils. the pupils'. the school workers' and the school board, which is apparently composed of both, On the slightest incident work is aban-ati the form goes into none of the teachers 8 the pupils "children," Riabtsov objects and the controversy eventually goes up to the school board. Ri reflects that boys may have endured such indigna ties, som of them. he has read. were even flogged:
But in those days the boys had no idea of the times through which we have had to live, For we've Knows famine and cold and a we've had th feed the whole family and have travelled a thousand miles in search of bread, and Some of us have been through the Again, when the Read teacher tells them that Pushkin "would
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.