When Anton Makarenko, aged 51, suddenly died in a train car, his heart was, according to the autopsist, torn in twain. The myocardial infarction sometimes develops precisely like that: the capillaries on a wall of the ventricle burst one by one until the entire surface turns blue. Then the healthy and pulsating part of the muscle contracts and tears the affected wall in two parts.
TRANSFER
Kyiv was made the capital of Ukraine 75 years ago, and a multitude of officials had to move there from the old capital, Kharkiv. One of them was Anton Makarenko, who moved with his common-law wife Halyna Salko, adopted son Lev, and niece Olimpiada. Makarenko left his job in the Dzerzhinsky Commune and took a fairly high office — he was appointed deputy head of the Labor Colony Department at the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the Ukrainian SSR. This department was opened pursuant to the April 1935 Regulation of the TsVK and RNK of the USSSR “On Measures to Combat Juvenile Crime.” This regulation was the starting point for NKVD departments for juvenile delinquents and the introduction of capital punishment for crimes committed by persons aged 12 (sic) or older. Ukraine’s NKVD immediately opened a huge department, which occupied the building on 37 Reitarska St.
By then Makarenko had made a name for itself: his two-part autobiographical novel Pedagogicheskaia poema (Pedagogic Poem) were published in Moscow. It was an account of how he transformed juvenile robbers, thieves, and conmen. The novel was praised by Maxim Gorky, a herald of social realism. Makarenko was put in charge of educational activities in a dozen of labor colonies, which had been transferred to the NKVD from the People’s Commissariat for Education, and in 30 reception centers and labor communes of the NKVD.
This part of Makarenko’s biography is virtually unknown due to the reluctance of Soviet researchers to identify Makarenko’s pedagogy with the NKVD. Moreover, Makarenko’s wife, who undertook censorship of the literary and pedagogical heritage of her late husband, was opposed to any mentions of his Cheka involvement in any encyclopedias, reference books, and suchlike editions. That is why when I got my hands on the personal and service records Makarenko filled out in his familiar neat handwriting, I felt like Columbus when he made his discovery.
PERSONAL RECORDS
As I read Makarenko’s personal files, I realized that someone had beaten me to them: the pagination was changed and the folder itself was very thin, as if he was a bank employee without any prior experience. At the same time, the fact that Makarenko became an NKVD officer at the age of 47 raised countless questions and was surrounded by mystique. For example, an entire range of biographical and other factors, any of which could be used to deny him office, seemed to have gone unnoticed. For example, Vitalii Makarenko, Anton’s brother, was a White Guard officer and a Denikin follower; he emigrated from Russia to France after the Bolsheviks’ victory. Makarenko’s common-law wife, Halyna Salko, came from the noble family of Rohal-Levytskys and had been expelled from the Communist Party during purges. Makarenko did not have the party membership card in his pocket either. Furthermore, Makarenko had always been careless about his health, and, four months before his appointment and transfer to Kyiv, he suffered a severe heart attack. It took him three months to recover. And here is something nearly sensational: Makarenko honestly stated all the details (about the White Guard and purges) in the “Special-Purpose Questionnaire of an NKVD worker” and affixed his signature to the document.
MARRIAGE
Our deeply ingrained image of the NKVD in the 1930s tells us that for his sincerity Makarenko had to be sent to a labor camp, at the very least. However, a month after his appointment Makarenko, who officially was a bachelor at the time, was given a comfortable three-room apartment on 6 Leontovycha St. with a view of St. Volodymyr Cathedral. However, the apartment was on the topmost floor in a building without an elevator. After the heart attack this was a real torture for him.
As one of the conditions for receiving the apartment, Makarenko made a promise to legalize his long-running relationship with Salko. He kept his word, and on Sept. 4, 1935, their marriage was registered. Makarenko used his new office and connections to do it in a special way. At the time one of the NKVD’s duties was to register marriages, and Makarenko used this for his benefit. He shunned publicity and so asked his colleagues to register the marriage at home. Thus Halyna Salko became Halyna Makarenko. Her husband was also happy: he had had many women in his life but had never been married.
PROTECTION
So who facilitated Makarenko’s advancement in the Cheka? I found the answer while leafing through his diaries and notebooks and juxtaposing what his friends and colleagues said about him. In August 1938 Maxim Gorky came to Kharkiv. The sole purpose of his visit was, in a sense, unique: he came to meet with the inmates of the Kuriazh juvenile penal colony, which was named after him. Gorky had nothing else scheduled for the trip. Needless to say, this was a landmark visit for Makarenko, who was in charge of the colony at the time: after many years of correspondence he met Gorky in person, and this greatly boosted his image in the eyes of Soviet educators, whom he had irritated with his educational activities. He became one of Gorky’s friends.
This is proved by the following fact: when Makarenko, already a Cheka officer, complained in a letter to Gorky about the unbearable bureaucratic burden he had to shoulder in the NKVD, Gorky immediately offered help in transferring him to Moscow. “I can write to Pavel Postyshev, I can ask Yagoda (the head of the Soviet NKVD — Author), etc.,” he wrote to his prot g , and proceeded to mention that he had influence on Vsevolod Balytsky, who headed Ukraine’s Cheka and was Makarenko’s direct boss. Balytsky was one of the most authoritative people’s commissars in the Soviet Union.
What did Makarenko have to do with this? It turns out that he had fallen in love with Balytsky’s sister back in Kharkiv and even offered to marry her. The marriage did not materialize but the warm relationship remained intact. Quite possibly, it was Natalia Balytska who recommended Makarenko to her brother for the vacant office in the NKVD. This was a fortunate coincidence for Makarenko: Balytsky already knew Gorky’s high opinion of him, while the NKVD central office lacked specialists to work with the “socially deficient.” This is why the NKVD personnel department had no quarrel with the new officer.
REVENGE
As I read Makarenko’s letters and works of that period, I came to the sad conclusion that after he took an office in the NKVD central office, he was infected with a certain bacillus. As if overwhelmed by the desire to take revenge, in particular on those who had been stifling him for his pedagogical innovations, he wrote: “Collectives, just like people, may die not only because of senility; they may die at the peak of their strength, hopes, and dreams. They may be killed by bacteria in a day, just like it may happen to a person. Future books will specify what kinds of medicine and disinfection need to be used against these bacteria.
“It is already known now that the smallest dose of NKVD is very potent in such cases. I had an opportunity to see the professorship of Chaikin die as soon as a GPU representative approached him. I watched his gown shrink and the golden nimbus fall off his learned head and roll on the floor. The professor transformed into an ordinary librarian so easily.
“I was fortunate to be able to watch as the ‘Olympus’ started falling apart in an effort to escape the caustic medicine of Cheka disinfection. The legs of certain insects were twitching and they hurried to a crack or a damp corner without uttering a single maxim. I had no regrets and was not writhing in compassion, because at the time I already grasped this: what I had believed to be the Olympus was nothing else but a hotbed of bacteria that destroyed my colony several years prior to that.”
We need to give Makarenko his due: he could criticize to his heart’s content those who attacked him and argue with the inhabitants of the pedagogical “Olympus” (including even Nadezhda Krupska), but, to his credit, he never resorted to the distinctive Cheka methods in fighting his opponents. These methods were absolutely foreign to a romanticist as he was.
DENUNCIATION
A few months went by. Makarenko already wore a brand-new NKVD officer outfit. This is important if you consider the fact that he did not really have any other decent clothes: for example, in one of the photos he is wearing his wife’s overcoat. However, the euphoria of wielding power gave place to a realization that he had abandoned writing, while the stacks of regulations, orders, instructions, letters, and other documents prevented him from even going to the theater, which he loved so much, not to mention seeing his family at their dacha in Dubechna.
Twenty glasses of extremely strong tea and 120 cigarettes a day became his norm. Increasingly often, he heard the hateful roar of the surf and was afraid of the nighttime. He was slowly going crazy over his bureaucratic milieu. “I’ve turned into a bureaucrat,” he wrote to his friend some time after his appointment. “I hate this job more and more with every passing hour.”
A wave of repressions was approaching: Akhmatov, the head of the Department for Labor Colonies, was arrested on charges of Trotskyism, and the deputies of the people’s commissar were hurriedly reshuffled. Makarenko also became a target. He was denounced, and the report read: “Makarenko will be removed. I do not believe him in the least. He is an enemy.” He was saved from the Great Terror only thanks to protection from above, but he himself broke down. He wrote a resignation report with the following argumentation: “For 31 years I dealt directly with children. I have no experience of working in the administrative apparatus, and the benefit from me here is absolutely minimal. After the publication of my Pedagogical Poem I made many literary commitments, which I am unable to meet while in office. Therefore, I ask you to seek the people’s commissar’s permission to my soonest resignation as deputy head of the Department for Labor Colonies.” In early 1937 Makarenko left for Moscow.
AFTERWORD
How should we view Makarenko today? I believe that his educational experience (excluding his Cheka service, something he did involuntarily) is very relevant today. In the unbalanced, embittered, miserable, and poor country that Ukraine is today, we need to go back to the down-to-earth and understandable — rather than heavily promoted impeccable and sickly — image of Makarenko. We need to at least reread his deep and extremely practical works, which contain certain recipes for overcoming infantilism, youthful incertitude in the future, the bravado that is replacing age-old traditions and values, as well as neglect and crime. Today the problems of youth are much more acute than they were in the 1930s.
The author has drawn on Abarinov, Aleksandr and Gutz Hillig (2000) Die Versuchung der Macht. Makarenkos Kiever Jahre (1935—1937), Marburg.
