II. Our factory statistics The main source of factory statistics in Russia are the statements delivered annually by manufacturers and breeders to the department of trade and manufactures, in accordance with the requirements of the law, the publication of which refers to the very

Many people know about the Makarenko labor colony, since books have been written and films have been made on this topic.
And the school under the leadership of V.F. Lubentsova turned out to be undeservedly forgotten. There is very little material on it.

Here are published the memoirs of one of the students of this school, Vladimir Sergeevich Nesterov.
Unfortunately, he did not finish his memories, but even what is there is of great interest. In addition, here are letters from V.S. Nesterov, in which we are talking about school.

Also, all these perceptions were published in a book, mainly devoted to work in the field of archeology, which V.S. Nesterov worked after retiring.
But this book was published in a very small edition and was distributed among local historians of Obninsk and Kaluga. (Obninsk local historian Vladimir Sergeevich Nesterov. Memoirs. Collection of works. Moscow 2009 Compiled by Nesterov A.V., Danilova M.A.)

1. SCHOOL YEARS.
V.S. NESTEROV

To the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the Experimental Demonstration Plant
Skoda-Commune named after K. Liebknecht

IN primary school I was sent to study for seven years. The next year, at the insistence of my mother, I took the exam and was accepted into the Real School. This meant transferring across the class, because Real's preparatory class corresponded to the third grade of elementary school. Therefore, in the future I was always the youngest in age and one of the smallest in height in the class. Nevertheless, I studied well, and although I was not “first,” I was usually one of the best in the class.
The revolution found the parents' family in Tashkent. I completely omit the description of revolutionary events here, because... I don’t want to distract from the main theme of the story. In the childhood of 1917, I heard from the guys that at the hippodrome, where I often ran to watch the flights of the antediluvian Farmans and Newpars, some kind of student team was organized for drying vegetables. They seem to welcome everyone there, feed them, the guys live in tents and under open air. The next day, grabbing a blanket, I was there. Everything turned out exactly as described. I was put on some kind of list and half an hour later, together with other guys, I diligently began to lay out freshly chopped vegetables on plywood boards laid out right on the ground under the hot Central Asian sun. The matter turned out to be not difficult, entertaining, and for me, accustomed to school boredom and books, completely unusual. The guys, both boys and girls, worked willingly. The only rule there was: “If you want to work, you’re welcome, if you don’t want to, good riddance!”
On the very first day I had to witness such a scene. The drying center was a barracks where vegetables were brought. There were also shredders - machines for cutting vegetables, like large meat grinders. 15-17 year old boys and girls worked for them. And then some kind of commotion arose in their crowd, screams were heard, many were running with buckets and dousing each other. The girls, as expected, squealed, but tried to keep up with the guys. Among this crowd was a rather stout, mustachioed man in a wet, unbuttoned shirt, who laughed infectiously and took an active part in the merry melee.
This is how my first acquaintance with Vsevolod Fedorovich LUBENTSOV, later the head of our school, and currently one of the professors at Tashkent University, took place. Before the revolution, he was a literature teacher in the senior classes of the Tashkent Real School. But I didn’t know him there and, apparently, didn’t even meet him.
The 1917-1918 academic year was the last year of my stay in Real. In the spring of 1918, I graduated from the third grade of the Real School, which corresponds to the sixth grade of a modern school. I was 12 years old at that time.
In the summer of 1918, my mother sent me to the mountains. There, also consisting of students, but only adults, an artel for cultivating the land was organized. To feed me during the summer, my mother gave me a five-pound sack of flour, and in addition - a blanket, two changes of linen, a bar of soap so that I could do my own laundry, and a pack of paper for writing letters home.
I have thousands of new impressions from this summer. For the first time I had to ride on an Uzbek cart for more than a hundred kilometers. We were traveling together, me and one of the members of the artel, Volodya Panfilov, a strong guy about 18 years old. A year later, he died in Fergana during a battle with the Basmachi. Night driving, daytime rest in villages, stories about mudflows - mud flows of incredible power, rolling down from the mountains after heavy rains, rock layers, rocks, mountain ranges and stormy rivers bent by the powerful forces of nature - all this still lives in my memory.
The following was found in place. In the tiny Uzbek village of Shchungak, located one hundred kilometers from Tashkent in the valley of the Chatkal River, an artel of 15-20 young men aged 16-18 settled on a plot of land of about 10 hectares. The organizer of the artel was the same V.F. Lubentsov. Here I got to know him much better. Since I was the smallest, I was only involved in light field work, but my main occupation was herding bulls. For two summer months I turned into a shepherd. Near Shchungak, the Chatkal valley is about 3 kilometers wide. It is surrounded on all sides by mountains. A significant part of the valley is cultivated. In the middle of it, Chatkal dug a real canyon with vertical walls 50 meters deep and there he rushes and roars. You will drive the bulls beyond the cultivated fields to Chatkal, lie down among the drying grass and admire the perspective of the pointed mountains. The sun rolls across the bottomless, cloudless dark blue sky, cicadas ring in different voices and a soft, gentle wind blows. While the bulls were grazing, he was busy catching cicadas and planting them in matchboxes, then he went to a slope completely occupied by an impenetrable mass of wild roses, picked and chewed their various berries, then wandered in another neighboring place, where mountain cherries grew in abundance (a small shrub 5 in height 40 centimeters) and picked up full handfuls of its slightly astringent berries. Often, when I went out to pasture, I would take Rostand or Molière with me and, sitting down in the shade of the stones, I would read them.
Subsequently, I had the opportunity to visit the mountains many times and see beautiful places, compared with which Shungak is a pitiful hole. But in those days, “all the impressions of existence were new to me,” and to this day they remain the same in my memory. Here I learned that Vsevolod Fedorovich is a man of strong waves, unbreakable and following his own paths. All of him conscious life was filled with endless searches, organizational hassles and experiments. The Hippodrome and Shungak, as well as his other undertakings, were preparatory steps for setting up experiments to develop general and private methods of educating truly “new” people. To what extent he managed to implement these plans, I will try to describe below.
In the fall of 1918, my mother said that I would no longer study at Real, but would move to another school. Indeed, after some time she took my sister Lena and me for a medical examination at the premises of the former Cadet Corps, located on the outskirts of the city. The doctor found that I had heart failure, and at first, for this reason, they did not agree to admit me, but then after a while everything was settled, and on October 1, 1918, I became a student in the senior 7th grade at a new school called "Trudovoy" ".
In our everyday life, the name “Labor” school and “Trudoviki” - the students of the school, are firmly rooted and continue to be preserved to this day by all persons associated with the school. However, when all the schools became “Labor”, subsequently the official name of our school gradually changed, became more complicated and was finally established in a rather long form: “Experimental Demonstration School - Karl Liebknecht Commune”. Every word in this title had a deep meaning. The school, indeed, was “Experimental” - all its activities were a continuous chain of experiments, it became “Demonstrative” - teachers from all over the world knew it and constantly visited it. Central Asia, as well as many employees of the Center. It became a real "Commune". Finally, she honorably bore the name of a courageous man, the only parliamentarian in the world who openly raised his hand against the war. This bold act in the name of humanism was, as it were, a symbol of true humanism inscribed on the ideological Banner of the school. In Tashkent, this was one of the first schools re-organized after the revolution. Its initiator was the same tireless Vsevolod Fedorovich LUBENTSOV.
The first contingent of students was recruited from orphans, who were accepted for full support and permanent residence until graduation. The reason for this was not any sentimental or philanthropic considerations, but the fact that such students could devote themselves entirely to school, while the school was spared possible interference from parents, which could harm the cause when conducting pedagogical experiments. In the future, this principle of replenishing the school continued to be preserved. Exceptions were made only for children of school employees. My mother was first closely associated with the main group of teachers, and then from 1919 she went to work in the school. Therefore, my sisters and I, although we were not orphans, also went to school. Of the former realists, I was the only one who got into school, and, it seems, none of the high school students. Several former cadets - orphans, who remained to live after the liquidation of the Cadet Corps in its premises allocated for our school, were included in its composition. Thus, Anatoly and Kirill Kochnev, Seryozha Borisov and some others came to us, among them Anatoly Kochnev, my classmate, who died two years later from pneumonia, in 1919/20. played big role in the registration of student organizations. From which educational institutions the remaining students of the first cohort were taken, I don’t know. In subsequent years, homeless children poured in alone and in small groups; their influx intensified in 1921, when a mass of refugees from the Volga region poured into Central Asia. However, once they found themselves in a well-formed student group, street children quickly assimilated and lost their specific “spirit.” There was no need to resort to any particularly “strong” methods to re-educate them.
At first, the beautiful building of the former Cadet Corps was allocated for Skoda. Part of the cadet uniform went to the school workshop, and for three years we wore good quality uniforms and boots. Therefore, the first years of the “Trudoviks” could always be recognized from a distance by their unique uniform, which differed from the cadet uniform in the absence of shoulder straps, frayed edges, and buttons sewn up with black cloth. Girls also wore boots, uniforms and overcoats.
Three months later, the huge building of the former Cadet Corps was given over to a hospital, and the school was moved to the unfinished premises of the former Junkers School. I remember well how we had to carry school property through terrible slush and rain. It was the beginning of winter, which turned out to be very harsh in 1918/19. The snow did not melt for three months, which is rare for Tashkent. In January 1919, the Esser uprising broke out and the city turned into a battlefield. During this difficult winter, the school received almost no supplies, had no fuel, and the heroic efforts of its organizers were aimed primarily at getting bread and cereals for several hundred hungry mouths. The guys were desperately cold, slept in boots and overcoats, and those who managed to get an extra mattress piled it on top of the blanket. Almost everyone walked around with frostbitten fingers and faces, because... in the bedroom the temperature dropped to -10°C.
Academic work was falling apart; during the January uprising, classes were interrupted and resumed only a month and a half later. The workshops, they were organized immediately after the opening of the school, also almost did not work. Some of the students could have gone to some relatives - they left, and many never returned to Skoda. Among those who remained, who had nowhere to go, moral decay quickly began, which was expressed primarily in the catastrophically increasing theft and plunder of school property. It seemed that the whole idea with the “new” school would disintegrate under the influence of these factors. And yet, the school survived, and the desperate winter it endured ultimately brought benefits, because... brought to life such forms of school organization that turned out to be suitable for overcoming current difficulties and ensured the successful development of the school for many years in the future.
When it became clear that the school was on the verge of complete collapse, a meeting of the two senior classes - our seventh and sixth - was convened at the end of February or beginning of March 1919. No teachers were present and there was no official agenda. I don’t even remember whether a chairman and secretary were chosen and whether minutes were kept. This meeting was opened by Shchurka Tsygankov, my classmate, a handsome black-haired guy. At first, he played a prominent role at school, but then two years later, together with another Shurka - Shaporenko, left school, volunteered for the Red Army and laid down his head under Basmach bullets in Eastern Bukhara. The bodies of him and his dead comrades were thrown by the Basmachi from the cliff into the stormy waves of the Amu Darya.
The speech Tsygankov made at the opening of this historic meeting was short and simple. Here is its approximate content:
“It’s very difficult to live in a school. However, if the school collapses and we disperse, then many of us will die completely. If the school remains intact, we will survive. What are we doing to support the school? - Nothing! On the contrary, we are stealing it. Everyone is doing it. , including me. I myself stole an overcoat, two towels and a sheet. And everyone who is brave enough will say the same about themselves. I want to ask everyone - what should we do? Should we separate and become real thieves or Can we figure out how to save the school and ourselves?"
Later it became clear to me that this meeting, and Tsygankov’s speech, and the subsequent speeches of several of the oldest students
were subtly inspired by educators who placed their last priority on the appeal to conscience. However, relying on the psychological effect of an honest confession turned out to be immeasurably more effective than the police measures usually used in such cases.
Following Tsygankov, Volodya Poshlyakov, Anatoly Kochnov, Guriy Muzhichenko made similar confessions, and off and on... An endless stream of confessions began, and ones that the most experienced investigator would not have been able to extract. In short, everyone was indeed guilty of the theft of school property. Including me. True, I had some small change - a Finnish knife stolen from a carpenter's workshop, and a handful of eight-inch nails from the same place, which attracted my attention with their rare size. But it still happened. And everyone had enough “courage to speak about themselves.”
This meeting continued for two days until late at night and ended with the creation of the first student organization, called the "Senior Council", which took upon itself the leadership of all internal school life. It was decided that stolen and unsold items would be returned to the school, other things that the boys confessed to stealing would no longer be mentioned, but if in the future anyone is caught stealing, he will be expelled from school by a resolution of the student organization. The first student government was elected - the Executive Committee and after some time the Charter of the Senior School Council was developed.
After this meeting, the thefts stopped and subsequently became extremely a rare occurrence. I only remember two incidents that happened a few years later. In one of them (the theft of a microscope from a biological laboratory), the suspect’s guilt was not proven. But the analysis of this case excited the entire school, and disputes at several general student meetings, which also performed judicial functions, clearly showed what the attitude of the student masses was to this kind of action. In another case, when the culprit was caught with a master key at the crime scene, by decision of the general student meeting he was sent to a colony for juvenile delinquents. Finally, the third case - the theft of a gun from a preparation workshop was not solved. A few years later, when I was no longer in school, I quite accidentally had to pick up the trail of the culprit. This crime was organized by a former student who had nothing to do with the school at the time of the theft.
Returning to the first meeting and the first steps of the student organization, I must note two significant results that changed the entire tone school life. Firstly, the moral atmosphere at school immediately cleared, by “repenting” and confessing to each other, everyone seemed to breathe clean air. Secondly, the guys awakened a sense of community, they became closer to each other and felt like members of a “team”, and not a random gathering seated at desks.
The new organization immediately got to work. All her strength was felt later, when the school moved out of town. In the spring of 1919, I don’t remember exactly, it seems in April, first a small group of schoolchildren, and then the whole school, moved to the building of a former orphanage, located four kilometers from Tashkent in the neighborhood of the village of Nikolskoye, later renamed the village of Lunacharskoye.
This move was not made out of necessity, but completely deliberately, because... It was here, in rural conditions, that experiments with “labor” education were supposed to be carried out. At first, the school did not set itself the goal of training agricultural specialists (this came to pass a few years later and will be discussed below), and the school needed “labor” from two points of view. Firstly, as a strong educational factor that shapes and prepares the future person for any activity - intellectual and physical. And, secondly, from a purely economic side, as a factor ensuring the normal existence of the school. Looking ahead a little, I can say that in the first years of its existence the school received less than 15% of its budget from public funds. More than 85% were obtained by the school through its own productive labor. Do not forget that all the students were completely supported by the school, and therefore, the maintenance of the school cost the state many times less than the maintenance of any orphanage or modern vocational school, with an equal number of pupils.
The first attempts to create a base for labor education were made at the very beginning, when the school was located in the city. At this time, carpentry, shoemaking, sewing and basket workshops were organized at the school. At first it was assumed that each student should work in all workshops in turn, but then quite soon this was abandoned and specialization began. I wanted to work in a carpentry shop, but... I was short and weak, so they offered me to choose any of the others. I chose a shoe shop and worked there for four years. How many pairs of shoes did I have to repair and sew again during this time? About 300 people moved to Lunacharskoye, and when I left in 1923 the number of students exceeded 500. No one had fathers or mothers, the cadet inheritance had long been shattered, and yet no one walked barefoot. The same thing happened with clothes. All repairs, all the sewing of new clothes and shoes were done by the hands of teenagers like I was in those years. In order not to return once again to the workshops, I will say that later additional workshops were organized at the school: cartoning, metalworking, blacksmithing, and preparation. The carpentry shop was first mechanized with a horse-drawn drive, and then it was equipped with two internal combustion engines that powered a whole series of saws and woodworking machines. Finally, the school started its own brick factory, where bricks were made and fired for the construction of new buildings. I personally later had to work a little in a carpentry workshop, making lasts for a shoe shop, then in a basket shop that had great importance, because a lot of baskets were required to harvest vegetables and fruits. Last year During my time at school, I worked in a dissection room making stuffed animals and skeletons.
Even before moving outside the city, Vsevolod Fedorovich and other teachers secured the allocation of a large plot of land for the school. At this time, in accordance with the nationalization decree, all private land holdings with an area of ​​more than 8 hectares were taken away. The school received five such plots, adjacent to each other and with a total area of ​​slightly more than 50 hectares. Of these, more than half were occupied by gardens. In addition, 12 kilometers from the main school site, two more were received land plots near the village of Kibray, 70 hectares each. During the first years, this land was fully cultivated and served as a great help. Later, when the school was firmly on its feet, it abandoned the Kibray plots and was left with only the main land area, in Lunacharsky. The land was cultivated and the gardens were maintained in exemplary order. Agricultural work was carried out by students. Teachers, senior students, and about five Uzbeks - Kayum, Sharip-Khoja and others - worked as instructors. The school had fully mastered the complex system of irrigated agriculture. After putting the gardens in order, the school began to receive fruit harvests of up to 15,000 pounds annually. The trees were regularly pruned, hilled, watered, whitewashed, banded and sprayed. Outdated areas of the gardens had to be uprooted and planted with new trees. So, I myself had to take part in planting about four hectares of peaches and apple trees at the Sobennikovskaya dacha, and two hectares of an apricot orchard at the Kryukovskaya dacha. The harvest in the orchards was collected, most of it was dried, and the best varieties of apples and pears were put into winter storage. Drying fruit was a very labor-intensive job, which was performed mainly5 by elementary school students. Cutting and drying fruits was done using shredders and plywood boards that I knew from working at the hippodrome. Fresh fruit was preserved until spring and all students received fresh fruit every day during the winter, right up to the May Day holidays. After the end of the civil war, when railway communication with central Russia was established, Skoda began annually sending several wagons of fruit to Orenburg, Samara and Moscow for sale.
The school fields were also maintained in exemplary order, where almost all garden and field crops were cultivated: cabbage, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, melons, watermelons, onions, cucumbers, wheat, alfalfa, cotton, millet, etc.
Agricultural work in Central Asia requires a lot of time, effort, attention and specific knowledge - when and how to care for which crop. These works are completely different from either Russian or Ukrainian gardening. But with skillful and conscientious care, the land in Central Asia rewards the labor expended a hundredfold.
Under the conditions of Central Asian irrigated agriculture, all crops, except alfalfa and cereals, are planted in beds. All work, with the exception of plowing, harrowing and cultivation of some crops using horse cultivation at school, was done manually, using the so-called. "Ketmeney". Ketmen is a widespread Central Asian tool that replaces both a shovel and a hoe. It is similar in shape to the latter, but much larger, heavier and more regular in shape. When working, the ketmen has to be lifted over the shoulder, and then, making a chopping motion, it must be struck with a swing into the ground. The tool is beautiful, much more advanced than an ordinary shovel. The earth is dug up with ketmen, beds are made, numerous hills and other work are carried out. Ketmen is absolutely necessary when watering because with its help, the access of water into the complex system of grooves between the beds is opened and closed. Ketmen in Central Asia dig ditches tens and hundreds of kilometers long, dig multi-meter wells, etc. and so on.
Plowing was usually done by Sharip-Khoja or one of the other Uzbeks, grinding - crushing drying lumps of earth, with the help of a "mola" - a heavy log that is pulled by oxen and on which one of the senior students becomes a worker. Subsequently, starting in 1923, when the school started its own Fordson, plowing was carried out by senior students on a tractor, and grinding was replaced by harrowing using a disc harrow.
All other work - cutting the beds, hilling, planting, watering and harvesting - was carried out by the students themselves.

Sunday, October 10, 1948.
I just returned from the cinema, I watched “Valery Chkalov”. The role of Stalin in this film is played by Mdivani. Our Vsevolod Fedorovich looked very similar to this artist. And before, I have repeatedly noted the similarities between Stalin and Lubentsov. This similarity is especially noticeable in several simpler photographs, where Stalin is depicted not as an emphatically strong-willed statesman, but in a calmer manner or smiling. Compared to Mdivani, Vsevolod Fedorovich was a little fuller and “heavier.” In addition, he had a higher forehead, bluish-gray eyes and a slightly bushier mustache. The nose, chin, and general oval of the face were extremely similar. To top off the similarities , he also wore a semi-military uniform: a cap and a gray, well-fitting overcoat of soldier's cloth. The similarity was completely accidental, and there could be no question of any imitation. In the summer, Vsevolod Fedorovich wore a white shirt for issue, belted with a thin strap, and the same white Panama. However, all Trudoviks of both sexes wore Panamas in the summer. There was no similarity in behavior and speech. His speech was not interrupted by pauses, during which Mdivani seemed to be collecting his thoughts, but flowed freely and very consistently. In business cases with everyone He treated him like equals, but extremely seriously, so no one ever had any inclination to become familiar, although many were on first name terms with him.In moments of relaxation, he was cheerful and knew how to laugh sincerely and contagiously. Vsevolod Fedorovich’s energy, efficiency and erudition would be more than enough for a good dozen ordinary directors of ordinary scales. He enjoyed very great personal authority in the eyes of students, teachers and all school employees, and not as a “head”, but simply as “Vsevolod” (that’s what former teachers and students called him behind his back and still calls him that). Many people entered into disputes on business and principled grounds with him more than once; this was not forbidden, was not persecuted, and did not undermine his authority. In the entire team, he was simply the smartest and most far-sighted member of this team, and therefore his
a natural leader, not an appointed administrator.
Back to the continuation of the story.....
(The story, unfortunately, was not finished)

From the photo archive of Nesterov V.S.

All preserved photographs can be viewed here: