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Harold Smith
Michelle Kuhn
Russian 0870
December 6, 2005

Nikolai Ekk's The Road to Life and the Real Gorky Colony

How was the Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko able to successfully educate hundreds of juvenile delinquents? Nikolai Ekk's 1928 film "The Road to Life" is a fictional account of life at Makarenko's Gorky Colony. Although many of its scenes did not actually occur in real life, the film is an attempt to portray Makarenko's methods of raising children.

In the film, a character named Nikolai Sergeev plays the role of Makarenko. The children under his care were orphaned by the Russian Civil War and the resulting famine. They "collected themselves into roving bands that stayed alive by virtue of ingenious, bold thievery, and constituted a major social problem" (Leyda 284). The challenge before him of turning the children into good citizens was enormous.

In the beginning of the film, Sergeev contradicts another educator who insists on jail for the delinquents. Ekk focuses the camera on a close-up of Sergeev's face as he states confidently, "No, jail is no solution" (Road to Life). In his own book entitled The Road to Life, Makarenko also takes a strong stand when the Chief of the Gubernia Department of Public Education does not believe that intellectuals like Makarenko can handle delinquents (Makarenko v 1 ch 1). Instead of considering jail a solution, Makarenko sends delinquents there only if they refuse to even try to live at the commune. In fact, Makarenko consistently avoids using jail as a solution, even if it means lapses in discipline (Makarenko v 1 ch 2).

Similarly, in the film an orphan named Kolya steals some boots at a market. The camera shows a shot of a man's face from below, implying power, who then beats up Kolya. A high note is played each time the fist comes down. When the man is taken to the police station for "beating up an orphan," he shows the police a card saying, "A Friend of Children." The police reject this name for him and say, "You belong to the past" (Road to Life). While Kolya was a fictional character, the episode serves to show that Makarenko rejected beatings and harsh sentences.

In his book, Makarenko denounces life at a dilapidated reform school where the children report they were beaten (Makarenko v 2 ch 17). Instead, he and the Gubernia department chief both rejected the pre-revolutionary "reform schools for juvenile delinquents." Makarenko added, referring to the new Socialist Man that the Soviet Union hoped to produce, "Quite right! So we have to find new methods for the creation of the new man" (Makarenko v 1 ch 1).

The new method Makarenko found was collective labor. In the movie, the camera plays happy music as the children work. To show how a desire to work replaced their impulse to steal, the camera changes between shots of Mustapha cutting cloth from a woman's dress while he was a thief and shots of him cutting leather in the colony's shop. After he makes the leather, the camera shows a close-up of his smiling face, and the viewer can see he is proud of his work.

In fact, several scenes of children working happily occur throughout the film. For example, they show the children making chairs and boots, shaving down blocks of wood, and digging a railroad bed. After these happy scenes, the children are shown to be proud of their work. After one such sequence, the screen says, "Thus began the transformation" of the thieves into woodcarvers and mechanics (Road to Life).

In Makarenko's book there is no such character as Mustapha, and the film adds in a sequence where he cuts a woman's dress in order to provide humor. But the book does repeat over and again the positive effects of labor on the children. He writes, for example, "Having, without the slightest thought of personal advantage, fallen in love with farm work, they had gone in for it without a backward glance... They simply lived and enjoyed life, enjoying each day of intensive work, and looking forward to the morrow as to a holiday" (Makarenko v 2 ch 2).

The producers of the film version saw these results firsthand. They had "trained themselves (chiefly at the GPU labour commune of Lyuberets) in the teaching methods" of Makarenko (Leyda 284). According to the Soviet scholar Evgenii Medinsky, "His slogan was in, through, and for, the collective" (Medinsky 12). This meant that the colonists felt that the commune belonged to all of them. While taking a walk with one of the children during a spate of robberies, Makarenko told him, "it's you yourself who is being robbed" (Makarenko v 1 ch 4). Then at a meeting the children discussed the robberies and one said, "there must be no stealing in the colony." (Makarenko v 1 ch 4). When they found the thief, the children voiced their collective anger, and this persuaded him to never steal again.

The corresponding event in the movie begins by sliding the camera above a table as dishes are placed on tables one by one. Bells clang rhythmically to show the order of the commune. But the rhythm is broken when a child shouts, "Somebody stole the spoons!" (Road to Life) Sergeev decides not to provide them with spoons to show them the natural consequences of having something stolen. The children have to eat with their mouths, and the screen changes to a dog eating from a bowl. The children ask each other who stole the bowls and someone says, "Even the dog is better off." Then Mustapha stands up confidently and says angrily "No stealing here!"(Road to Life) This event shows that, just as in real life, the children took responsibility and enforced the rules themselves.

Thus, Ekk's film The Road to Life reflects many of the experiences of Makarenko and the children at the Gorky Colony, although it is not a reenactment of the events that occurred there. Makarenko rejected the harsh ways of the past. Instead, he transformed the children into good citizens using tolerance and instilling in them a love for both work and each other.

Works Cited


Ekk, Nikolai. The Road to Life. 1931.

Leyda, Jay. . Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Makarenko, Anton. The Road to Life. 2002. A.S. Makarenko Reference Archive. 6 December 2005. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/makarenko.

Medinsky, Evgenii. "A. S. Makarenko." The Road to Life. Anton Makarenko. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955.
 

 

I wrote this essay for my Russian film class at the University of Pittsburgh. Not long afterwards, the Makarenko scholar Dr. Zinovy Tenanboym from St. Petersburg sent me the following references from Makarenko's writings in regards to the movie. It turns out the book "Pedagogical Poem" was translated into English as "The Road to Life," based on the name of the movie. Although the movie is about Makarenko's communes, it's not based on the book!

1. There is "An experience of a Method of a Children's Labor Commune. (Materials for a book)." The editors of a 1986 eight volume collection of Makarenko's writings date this work of Makarenko from the end of 1932 to the beginningof 1933. During his life it was not published. In the eight volume collection this is in vol 1. Moscow 1986 beginning on page 166. In a 1958 seven volume collection it is on p 461. There is a chapter called "The Organizational Period," a long text of several pages, and basically all dedicated to a sharp criticsim of the "logic" (meaning bad pedagogical ideology) of the film "Road to Life."

2. "Fictional Literature about Raising Children" is a lecture on April 21, 1938 in the Moscow Polytechnical Museum. In the eight volume collection this is in vol. 7 Moscow 1986 from pages 26 on, and then pages 43-44. In the 1958 seven volume collection, it's vol. 7, p. 26. After his own lecture, Makarenko answered questions:

In some of their notes, people ask my opinion about the film "The Road to Life." "The Road to Life" is a frightening thing. This year my book [A Pedagogical Poem] was translated into English and published by a bourgeoise publishing company in London. The company put before me as a condition that it will print the book only under the name of "The Road to Life." They said, "Otherwise we can't, because if it will have the title "The Road to Life" people will buy out all the copies, but if it has another name, then who knows." And I didn't insist, so they printed it that way (the lecture hall's audience laughed).

I received several responses from Englishnewspapers, and they were all almost written like this: whoever saw "The Road to Life" and felt those deep emotions that it stirred must read "A Pedagogical Poem"- here the newspaper added in "The Road to Life."

So I can't escape from "The Road to Life," although there isn't anything in common between "The Road to Life" and "APedagogical Poem." I cannot accept it as appropriate to solve such an important question like the question of raising children with the help of a few movie shots with a spoon and such.

But it's all the same a film, and in it's time it had great significance. And in a film it wouldn't have been possible to show the pedagogical problem, but that proletarian humanism, that belief in a person, that passion which is in all of us, as it is shown there.

Of course, when the members of the Dzerzhinsky commune saw "The Road to Life," they only smiled, because they pleasantly sing orphan songs, and fondly remember that they sang them themselves. But when the main hero suddenly becomes a train conductor, then the members of the commune get disappointed, was it worth putting out the picture, wouldn't it have been better if he was a pilot! And that's right!

There are alot of unfortunate things in the film, and no one needs the death of Mustapha, it doesn't convince anyone of anything, and the thieving little Maline, and toy train- all this paints the picture in an artificial light, but the basic tone is taken correctly.

Now I'll write a script. I feel like taking a new theme for the picture. I believe that it is enough to show the heroics that we passed by already on the pedagogical path. We don't need to show Martynovs- the romanticism of the struggle of humanity with mass orphanry has ended. There are already beautiful collectives ready, where for weeks no bad remarks are to be made to the children. They need to show a prepared Soviet collective, where this "raw material" is digested imperceptibly for the eye.

Makarenko vol. 7 Moscow 1986 page 184. A letter to A. Romitsyn about "The Road to Life."

Moscow, August 31, 1938.
Dear Comrade Romitsyn!

Your letter hurt me in a different way. I knew even without it that the script for "Flags on the Towers" would not be accepted, and knew that this cause of this lies in the effects of the the thematic, and even more the subjective, and even more the ideological standards, which are accepted in our cinematography and from which we cannot escape for some reason. I knew well that I needed to write something like the script for "The Seventh Graders" (a film is now being made according to this script), where a model group of blessed pioneers and good uncles is mandatory.

Something else hurt me. What can be found in common between my script and in "The Aristocrats" or in "The Road to Life?" I portray a happy and active children's collective in the moments of the highest and prettiest electvation of its life, portray a real, live, corner of socialism, in which all the appearances of our "adult" life are portrayed on screen, and, above all, reflect a struggle with an opponent. I counted on that such a corner of life, shown to children, would give alot of living political and ethical impulses for their personal development, communicate to them the beginnings of the Soviet nobleness of character that is so important. I could expect letters about how this artistic goal is poorly accomplished in the script, but I could in no way have expected a comparison of my work with "The Road to Life." In my script there are "normal" children and youths, and the theme of repetition does not arise at all.

All of this surprises me so much that I am even inclined to doubt whether my script was read with sufficient attention.

Makarenko vol. 7 Moscow 1986 page 193, in "On the Story 'The Flags on the Towers,' a Meeting with Readers in Leningrad's S. M. Kirov Palace of Culture, Oct. 18, 1938."

In Makarenko's concluding remarks: If there is a real organization of a children's collective, than you can work wonders. They show us in the moviepicture "The Road to Life," how harmful and degenerate the young fellows are. I would say this: someone came into decent humane conditions, and the next day became decent. What other happiness is needed? This is happiness itself! And so it always is in a well-built children's commune. All children love discipline...

The Russian word "disiplina" has a different connotation than in English. It means order, not punishment. It is not a verb. So Makarenko is saying kids like order and structure in their lives, the kind of self-discipline and responsibility they have when they work as a unit. (Actually, the meanings of discipline and punishment are different in English too, but not many people know that.)