Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World

Governance, and the Soviet

Internationalist Imagination Porter
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Reds in Blue
 Reds in Blue
UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet
Internationalist Imagination
LOUIS HOWARD PORTER
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
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Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the First Book
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ISBN 978–0–19–765630–3
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197656303.001.0001
For L. J. and Georgia
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Really-Existing World Governance and Soviet Social

ism

PART I. CONVERGING INTERNATIONALISMS

1. Dual Power in World Governance: The USSR Out of UNESCO, 19
45–1953
2. The Key to the Whole System: The USSR in UNESCO, 1954–195
9
3. Strange Bedfellows: The USSR and UNESCO in a Changing Worl
d, 1960–1967

PART II. EVERYDAY WORLD GOVERNANCE

4. “No Neutral Men”: Soviet International Civil Servants and Life in
the Soviet Colony in Paris
5. Working for the World: Soviet International Civil Servants in the
UNESCO Secretariat
6. Gathering for One World: Soviet Participation in UNESCO’s Intern
ational Public Sphere
7. Reading a Better World: Soviet Participation in UNESCO’s Readin
g Public

Conclusion: A University in the Air

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

When I stumbled onto this topic about a decade ago, I had no idea
what I was doing or getting myself into. This changed only thanks to
the colleagues, friends, and family who helped me figure it out along
the way. In its initial form as a dissertation written at the University
of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the project benefited from
the thoughtful and compassionate mentorship of my graduate
adviser, Donald J. Raleigh, who generously shared his immense
knowledge of the field of Soviet history while allowing me the
independence to follow my own intellectual journey. His advice on
how to navigate the complexities of the historical profession was
crucial in ensuring this book’s completion. I also learned a lot from
other members of my dissertation committee (Chad Bryant, Louise
McReynolds, Eren Tasar, and Susan Pennybacker), all of whom
improved the story I tell here by helping me place it in broader
chronological and geographical contexts. Before I defended my
dissertation before this committee, I presented an earlier version of
chapter 5 at the Carolina Seminar: Russia and Its Empires, East and
West, where fellow graduate students (including, among others,
Dakota Irvin and Virginia Olmsted-McGraw) asked insightful
questions.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020, I
moved my family halfway across the country to start a new job at
Texas State University. Having never spent more than forty-eight
hours in Texas and unsettled by the anxieties of lockdown, I could
not have foreseen the supportive and vibrant communities that
would welcome me in the Lone Star state. Since then, I have had
the good fortune of working with an exceptional group of scholars in
the Department of History at Taylor-Murphy Hall. The Swinney
Writing Group (Margaret Menninger, Carrie Ritter, Elizabeth Bishop,
and other colleagues) workshopped a segment of this book, giving
me a better understanding of how I wanted to organize the
chapters. More important, the History Department at Texas State has
treated me like a human being, offering kindness and empathy when
life intervened. It is hard to imagine a better department chair than
Jeff Helgeson, whose flexibility and empathy have made the book
writing process considerably less stressful. Likewise, the mentorship
of Ken Margerison, who continued to offer words of wisdom even
after his retirement, has clarified and enriched my time at Texas
State. I am also thankful to José Carlos de la Puente for easing me
into my service duties in the department, thereby giving me the time
needed to put the finishing touches on this book. Last, I have been
incredibly lucky to work alongside Miranda Sachs and Justin
Randolph, who have extended a helping hand when my family was
going through difficult times.
The thinking behind this book has been shaped by diverse
feedback from scholars in the field. At the annual meetings of the
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
and the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies (SCSS), discussants,
chairs, co-panelists, and members of panel audiences offered
perceptive observations and probing questions that led me to
sudden epiphanies. Other scholars have improved my approach to
this subject through extensive written reflections. Parts of chapter 7
of this book have been published as “ ‘Our International Journal’: UN
Publications and Soviet Internationalism After Stalin,” Russian
Review 80, no. 4 (2021): 641–60. As I developed this article, the
constructive comments of the Russian Review editorial team
(particularly Associate Editor Brigid O’Keeffe) and the journal’s
reviewers inspired me to reframe my project and sharpen its
arguments.
In the course of conducting research and writing, I received
financial and other forms of aid from a variety of sources. The
Fulbright US Student Program and various grants from the UNC
Department of History kickstarted my archival work in Russia and at
the UNESCO Archives in Paris, France. At these archives, I unearthed
documents with the assistance of knowledgeable specialists
(particularly archivists Adele Torrance and Eng Sengsavang at
UNESCO). In addition, I completed my dissertation with the help of a
writing fellowship from the UNC Graduate School; wrote a proposal
for the book while living on funds from ASEEES’s Robert C.
Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize; and used a Research
Enhancement Program (REP) grant from Texas State to take a last-
minute research trip. As the book became a reality, it also received
funds from the ASEEES First Book Subvention Program. Moreover,
the inclusion of the photos in this book would not have been
possible without the permissions and audiovisual teams at various
repositories (UNESCO, Eastview Information Services, Alamy, and
the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library), while Corinne Schwab
graciously assented to my reproduction of an excellent photo taken
by her father, Éric Schwab.
At Oxford University Press (OUP), I had the privilege of working
with Susan Ferber, who patiently guided me through the process of
writing my first book. Her astute comments and incisive edits on the
penultimate draft made what follows a much better read. Similarly,
the two scholars she selected to review the manuscript offered both
encouraging words and gentle criticisms, cajoling me to make
important changes that I might otherwise have been too stubborn to
make. I also appreciate the hard work of the copyediting, indexing,
and other professionals at OUP and appreciate their steering this
book through production.
And finally, my family has made possible my career, providing me
with the kind of love and support necessary to keep my eyes on the
prize. I am thankful beyond words to my wife, Liz, who has put up
with the erratic work schedule, long trips abroad, and financial
precarity part and parcel to this profession. Her confidence in me
has seen me through. My parents, Karen and Lou, are the best
anyone could have, having my back and cheering me on during
every stretch of this crazy trip called life. I have grown to appreciate
their love and guidance even more since the arrival into the world of
my two rays of sunshine, Louis James and Georgia Porter. Through
rain, wind, and water, seeing their shining faces makes this all
worthwhile.
 Abbreviations

AN SSSR Academy of Sciences of the USSR

BMS UNESCO Bureau for Relations with Member States
BPM UNESCO Bureau of Personnel and Management
BSE Great Soviet Encyclopedia
BSSR Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
CAME Conference of Allied Ministers of Education
CBS Columbia Broadcasting System
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
COMINFORM Communist Information Bureau
COMINTERN Communist International
CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
DST Direction de la surveillance du territoire
ECOSOC UN Economic and Social Council
EEC European Economic Community
EPTA UN Expanded Program of Technical Assistance
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FRG Federal Republic of Germany
GDR German Democratic Republic
GKES State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations
GKKS State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries
IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency
ICSAB International Civil Service Advisory Board
IDA International Development Association
IIB International Institute of Bibliography
IIL Soviet Foreign Literature Publishing House
IINiT USSR Institute for the History of Science and Technology
IIT Bombay Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
ILO International Labor Organization
KPSS Communist Party of the Soviet Union
MGPIIIa Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages
MID USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs
MINEDEUROPE Ministers of Education of Member States of the European Region
MINVUZ USSR Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NKID USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs
OAS Organization of American States
OAS Organisation de l’armée secrete
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
PRC People’s Republic of China
TAB UN Technical Assistance Board
TsK KPSS Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
UDC Universal Decimal Classification System
Ukrainian SSR Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
UN United Nations
UNCSW UN Commission on the Status of Women
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
UNKRA United Nations Reconstruction Agency, Korea
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
VGBIL USSR All-Union State Library of Foreign Literature
VOKS USSR All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with the Abroad
WHO World Health Organization
Reds in Blue
 Introduction
Really-Existing World Governance and Sovie
t Socialism

In August 1974, the American magazine Saturday Review published

a special issue, “2024 A.D.—A Probe into the Future.” Released the
same month that President Richard M. Nixon resigned from the
presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the issue
presented essays in which an assortment of American and foreign
luminaries (Neil Armstrong, Norman Podhoretz, Kurt Waldheim,
Milovan Djilas, and others) predicted the fate of the world in fifty
years. Among the contributors to the magazine was nuclear physicist
turned disarmament activist Andrei Sakharov, who shared his take
on humanity’s prospects from the USSR. In his contribution, the
Soviet scientist looked to the future to clarify the problems of the
present, enumerating the many “destructive tendencies of
contemporary life” in the 1970s, from environmental degradation to
the threat of nuclear war. For Sakharov, the fight against these
threats necessitated that humanity reverse “the disintegration of the
world into antagonistic groups of states” and instead facilitate the
“convergence of the socialist and capitalist systems.” In his eyes, an
important institutional mechanism for the realization of this
convergence already existed. “A major role must be played,” he
declared, “by international organizations, such as the United Nations
and UNESCO, in which I would like to see the beginning of a world
government with guiding principles based on global human rights.”
Sakharov went on to outline “several futurological hypotheses”
built on this premise of global integration through world governance.
He foresaw in 2024 an earth divided into a “Work Territory (WT)”
and “Preserve Territory (PT).” The smaller WT zone, “where people
will spend most of their time,” would consist of “giant automated
and semi-automated factories” as well as “super-cities” of apartment
buildings with cutting-edge technology. These urban cores would be
encircled by sprawling suburbs, which in turn would give way to
stretches of farmland producing enough to feed the world’s
population. In the air above the WT, “flying cities” powered by solar
and nuclear energy would orbit the earth. Beneath the earth’s
surface, a “system of subterranean cities for sleep and
entertainment, with service stations for underground transportation
and mining” would bustle out of sight. Meanwhile, the larger PT
zone would function as a world park, “set aside for maintaining the
earth’s ecological balance, for leisure activities, and for man to
actively reestablish his own natural balance.”
This extravagant prophesy was premised on the emancipatory
potential of the global exchange of knowledge and information.
Sakharov envisioned the world of the 2020s as not only enjoying the
fruits of spectacular technological leaps (such as the replacement of
the automobile with “a battery-powered vehicle on mechanical
‘legs’ ”), but also the creation of a “single global telephone and
videophone system” as well as a “universal information system
(UIS).” The latter, he dreamed, would “give everyone access at any
given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been
published or any magazine or any fact.” Obviously, Sakharov
cautioned, such an advanced information network would not exist
until “far in the future, more than fifty years from now.” But once it
did appear, the network’s “true historic role” would be “to break
down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries
and people.”1
Sakharov’s identification of the UN system, and the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
in particular, as the building blocks for this future world order reveals
a deeper truth about these institutions and the Soviet experience of
them. After the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, Soviet citizens from a
range of backgrounds worked in the bureaucracies, attended the
conferences, and read the publications of noncommunist
international organizations. In the course of participating in these
activities, they experimented with novel ideas and practices based
on the premise of world governance. This experimentation, though
at times leading to grandiose schemes, remained far more grounded
in the realities of the twentieth century than Sakharov’s fantastical
reverie. Nevertheless, the discourses and practices in which
international organizations included a small but influential part of the
Soviet population contained the promise and possibility of a better
world in the future. For these Soviet internationalists, the UN
method of world governance offered a flawed yet important tool for
solving the world’s problems. It encouraged them to declare
membership in an international community and to act out of a sense
of world civic duty to address these problems. Citizens of the USSR
and of the world, Soviet participants in international organizations
used these bodies to imagine and work for global change for the
benefit of their country and humanity writ large.

This book is a history of these works and imaginations. Examining

Soviet participation in UNESCO from the country’s enrollment in the
organization in 1954 to the eve of détente in 1967, it chronicles the
rich experiences of Soviet citizens in the distinct milieus made by
international organizations. Due to a widely held assumption that the
world needed to transcend the nationalist belligerence that had led
to the massively destructive conflicts of the first half of the twentieth
century, the number of international organizations grew
exponentially in the postwar era. The rise of this constellation of
internationalist entities, which revolved around the newly created UN
and its specialized agencies, heralded the advent of multilateral
diplomacy as a major tool for solving global issues in every
imaginable sphere of human activity. These organizations sought to
reform the established order through varying degrees of
institutionalized cooperation among peaceful nations. As a result,
they extended to the world’s population ideas of world governance,
world civic duty, and international community.
 Sakharov’s singling out of UNESCO reflects its unique status both
within the Soviet Union and the wider mid-twentieth-century world.
While the continued rapid growth in the number of international
organizations has since marginalized it as just one of many such
institutions, this UN specialized agency represented one of the most
radical and idealistic inventions of the postwar movement for world
governance.2 Founded in 1946 and headquartered in Paris, UNESCO
oversaw multilateral diplomacy in the expansive spheres of
education, science, and culture. The organization hosted
conferences for scholars and other professionals, released
publications on a variety of subjects, and provided educational
technical assistance around the globe. It operated as both a force in
its own right in the fields under its mandate and as an
intergovernmental sponsor of dozens of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs).3
Before Stalin’s death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an
ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international
organizations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it
opposed making the world body much more than a coalition of the
great powers that had emerged as victors from the war.4 It refused
to join UNESCO and other major UN agencies beyond the Security
Council and General Assembly. In these early years of the Cold War,
the Soviet state accused UNESCO in particular of spreading
“cosmopolitanism,” an epithet drawn from the xenophobic and anti-
Semitic campaigns inside the Soviet Union that coincided with the
ratcheting up of international tensions. After Stalin’s death, however,
the new Soviet leadership joined UNESCO and a number of other
international organizations, including the International Labor
Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).5
Soviet entry into these institutions marked a watershed moment
in Soviet thinking about world governance. From the 1950s onward,
noncommunist international organizations became legitimate options
in the toolkit from which the Soviet state drew to conduct diplomacy
in areas beyond direct negotiations over war and peace. Although
the USSR continued to boycott a handful of these organizations over
specific ideological concerns, the majority of them were redefined as
progressive phenomena central to post-Stalinist foreign policy. In
1959, G. A. Mozhaev, an international legal scholar working for the
Soviet UNESCO Commission—which oversaw the country’s
participation in the UN agency—framed noncommunist international
organizations as positive forces on the world stage in a
groundbreaking Marxist-Leninist analysis. “The huge increase in
international organizations and the enhancement of their role in
international life,” he theorized, reflected “the objective process of
the further complication and development of international relations,
caused by the unprecedented rise of science and technology and the
enormous growth of the consciousness of peoples.”
Mozhaev predicted that such institutions would only become more
important as the world became more interconnected. “There is every
reason to believe that in the future, with the acceleration of social
progress, the role of international organizations in the system of
world political, economic, scientific-technical, and cultural relations
will steadily grow.” Moreover, no international organization had more
strategic importance than UNESCO. In Mozhaev’s words, the agency
deserved special attention as “the largest and most important
international organization in the areas of education, science, and
culture.” As an intergovernmental sun around which a multitude of
NGOs orbited, UNESCO was also “the key to the whole system of
international nongovernmental organizations of an ideological
nature.”6
The normalization of Soviet relations with UNESCO after 1953
enabled Soviet nationals to engage in global discussions on topics
ranging from their individual professions to worldwide problems.
Recent histories of Soviet internationalism have shown the
aftereffects at home and abroad of the country’s bilateral cultural
diplomacy with countries, blocs, or particular “worlds.”7 But the role
of international organizations—and particularly the UN—in the
practice of Soviet internationalism remains understudied, even as the
world body has attracted renewed interest over the last two
decades.8 Scholars have recast the UN as more than an alternative
setting for diplomacy by exploring how it was embedded in and
shaped global processes.9
By putting these hitherto siloed scholarships on Soviet and UN
internationalisms in conversation, this book provides the first history
of the Soviet reception of world governance through international
organization. At first glance, the histories of UNESCO’s method of
world governance and the socialist internationalism of the Soviet
state run on parallel tracks, forming unique intellectual genealogies
as dichotomous as the Cold War. The juxtaposition of the symbolic
imagery of UNESCO and the USSR illustrates the divergent end-goals
of these two internationalist institutions. On the one hand, the
hammer and sickle on the red backdrop of the Soviet flag evokes the
militant struggle born out of the French revolutionary tradition and
aimed at uniting workers of the world to upend the established order
under a star pointing to the five inhabited continents.10 On the other
hand, the substitution of the “UNESCO” acronym for the columns of
the Parthenon on the UNESCO logo is emblematic of the
organization’s ambition to serve as the preserver of the culture and
knowledge built atop the foundation of the established order.
Harkening back to a time before the revolutionary tradition extolled
by the Soviet Union, the UNESCO logo manifests the organization’s
mission to act as the keeper of the tradition of the Enlightenment
and as the reincarnation of the genteel “Republic of Letters” that
preceded the upheaval unleashed by the French Revolution.
Figure I.1 These two Soviet stamps from 1976 depict the symbolic imagery of
the USSR (left) and UNESCO (right). They reflect how both Soviet and UNESCO
internationalisms harbored global aspirations but differed in their self-conceptions
as (respectively) disruptor or curator of the established order. Courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons and Dreamstime.com. © Bob Suir.

The oppositional end-goals of these two institutionalized

internationalisms, however, conceal their critical points of theoretical
convergence. Just as Marxism took as self-evident certain
presuppositions and frameworks born out of the Enlightenment,
Soviet internationalism shared presuppositions and frameworks with
the internationalist currents of thought that would inform UNESCO.
All such internationalisms rely on specific features of modernity, such
as new means of travel and communication, to imagine international
community.11 Both Soviet and UNESCO internationalisms also sought
to mobilize this international community to international civic action,
appealing to a sense of civic duty to make a better world. Both
belong, in other words, to what historian Mark Mazower calls a
“larger genus of secular internationalist utopias,” all of which
harbored “a vision of a better future for mankind, one that lies
within our grasp and power and promises our collective
emancipation.”12
More concretely, Soviet engagement with UNESCO continued a
tradition of Russian and Soviet experimentation with noncommunist
visions of world governance, world civic duty, and international
community. Indeed, Soviet enrollment in UNESCO and other UN
agencies institutionalized long-standing efforts by Russian and later
Soviet citizens to imagine and work for a better world through
worldwide civic action and governance. As far back as the late
nineteenth century, movements such as the one to globalize
Esperanto—an international language invented in the Russian Empire
and officially endorsed by UNESCO in 1954—extended to Russian
subjects of the Tsar a sense of world civic duty and creative
belonging to international community.13 Likewise, historians have
traced the kind of popularly mandated world governance that would
inform the UN system back to the Russian Empire and its last ruler,
Nicholas II, who initiated the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conferences on
international law. Unlike earlier instances of great-power
multilateralism, these highly publicized “peace conferences” inspired
citizens from around the world to imagine themselves as part of an
international community with influence over world governance.
Members of the Russian educated public readily joined this
community, organizing meetings and collecting thousands of
signatures in favor of world governance at the Hague.14 In the same
spirit, representatives of the Russian Duma, the quasi-parliamentary
body created after the 1905 revolution, took an active part before
1914 in the Interparliamentary Union (IPU), the first international
organization practicing world governance based on popular
representation of an imagined international community.15
The cataclysms of the Great War and the 1917 revolution
disrupted the ties between the country and such noncommunist
movements for world governance. The new Soviet state refused to
join the IPU, only returning to it in 1955—a year after Soviet
enrollment in UNESCO.16 The Soviet state also sat out the League of
Nations, the interwar predecessor to the postwar UN, for all but five
years of its existence. Consequently, the USSR had a fleeting official
presence at UNESCO’s direct institutional predecessor, the League’s
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.17 Instead,
Soviet leaders promoted their own extensive apparatuses for
international solidarity, such as the Communist International
(Comintern) and the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with the
Abroad (VOKS).18
Yet neither the League nor the Soviet diplomatic complex had a
monopoly on interwar initiatives premised on world governance,
world civic duty, and international community. In fact, UNESCO’s
method of world governance through intellectual and cultural
exchange had antecedents in other, lesser-known projects for global
integration, a number of which earned the support of members of
the Soviet educated public from the interwar period.
Before the Second World War, for example, the ambition to put
intellectual exchange in the service of world governance took on its
most fantastical incarnation in the utopian schemes of Belgian
pioneer of information science Paul Otlet. Founder of the
International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) in Brussels, Otlet worked
to create a “Universal Bibliography,” or a reference database for all
printed texts in existence. To organize this universal corpus of
knowledge, he developed the Universal Decimal Classification
System (UDC), a modified version of the Dewey Decimal System.
These ventures constituted the information building blocks of a more
far-reaching plan to create a global information “depot” that would
house international associations, a library, museum, and
“international university.” This “Mundaneum,” as Otlet called it, would
also be the seat of a world government that, accompanied by the
creation of a world calendar and world language, would facilitate
global intellectual integration.19 Otlet’s dream of realizing world
government through intellectual exchange anticipated the aspirations
that some of its founders brought to UNESCO. Picking up where
Otlet left off, UNESCO would act as a world “depot” for knowledge;
serve as an intergovernmental hub for NGOs; and operate as a
leading international organization for information and library science.
Otlet’s internationalist project also acquired an ardent fan base
among Soviet librarians and bibliographers.20 After 1917, his UDC
rose to power alongside the Bolsheviks. In the early 1920s, the
young Soviet state mandated the use of the UDC in libraries and in
the Knizhnaia letopis’, the national bibliography released by the
USSR State Central Book Chamber.21
Other interwar predecessors to UNESCO would similarly inspire
Soviet citizens. The city of Bruges played host in the 1930s to world
congresses calling for international action to protect culture in times
of war. These congresses were part of an international grassroots
movement inspired by the idiosyncratic ideas of Russian émigré
painter Nicholas Roerich. In the late 1920s, Roerich had called for an
international pact that would safeguard cultural and intellectual
heritage from the mass destruction of war. This proposal culminated
in an Inter-American treaty known as the “Roerich Pact,” which
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed at a ceremony in the
White House in 1935.22
Roerich’s movement was based on a conviction that peace
depended on—in the words of one Roerich supporter—“the
sensitizing of human consciousness” through global cultural
conservation. This belief presaged UNESCO’s core premise that, in
the words of its charter, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is
in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be
constructed.”23 In addition, Roerich’s international treaty was the
immediate predecessor to UNESCO’s various agreements to protect
world heritage in the postwar era.24 The Russian émigré’s thinking
would also influence Soviet internationalism. After Stalin’s death,
Soviet authorities incorporated Roerich’s work into their own
message of “world peace,” commemorating his life and activism as
part of a shared internationalist tradition.25
Like Roerich and Otlet, UNESCO and the Soviet state practiced
“transformative agendas” to reconstruct “the minds of men” through
universal enlightenment. They conceived of intellectual exchange—
and the globalization of information, knowledge, and culture in
particular—as a means of refashioning subjects of the present into
citizens of better worlds to come.26 The hopes of UNESCO’s founders
that the organization would act as an intellectual and moral center
for the world echoed on a global level the utopian pretensions of the
Russian (and later Soviet) intelligentsia to serve “as the conscience
of the nation” by exemplifying “the learning of all humanity” and
employing this learning to create “new people.” Yet while the
Bolsheviks launched campaigns to create a “new Soviet man,”
UNESCO aimed to mold a new internationalist man exhibiting an
“internationally minded” consciousness.27 If Stalin considered Soviet
writers “engineers of the human soul” for socialism, UNESCO viewed
itself as an engineer of the human mind for peace. As this book will
show, the Soviet experience of the UN agency reflected these
homologous utopian premises, which encompassed a spectrum—
from red to blue—of internationalist modernity.

The theoretical convergences of Soviet and UNESCO

internationalisms translated into similarities in how the two played
out in practice. In the end, both Soviet socialism and world
governance suffered the same fate—that of idealistic projects
realized in institutions (the USSR and the UN) best known for their
failures to live up to their promises. As such, they epitomize the
chasm between idealistic aspirations and actual implementation.
Attempts to bridge this chasm have thus defined the historical
scholarship on both institutions. In the case of the Soviet Union,
historian Michael David-Fox argues for the field “to move beyond
conceptual frameworks that segregate intentions and consequences,
ideas and circumstances, political programs and social reality, above
and below.” Rather, he advocates an examination of the
“interrelationships” of these opposites.28 In the case of international
organizations, historian Glenda Sluga similarly notes that “the history
of internationalism travels along a characteristic narrative line from
utopia to disillusionment, but no more than the tales that can be told
of imagined national communities.”29 This common tension between
the ideal and the real opens up an opportunity to write a history of
the Soviet encounter with world governance that highlights the
convergence of the two projects in practice and elucidates their
interrelationship.
In both contexts, the slippage and interplay between the ideal
and the real reflected utopian ambitions adjusted to the world as it
existed in the twentieth century. For instance, both universalist
projects ironically became defenders of the nation as the pillar of
world order. For its part, the USSR opposed more maximalist forms
of world government and vigorously protected the principle of
national sovereignty on the world stage.30 So did the UN. The world
body consisted of an inelegant amalgam of great-power diplomacy
and multilateral cooperation among nations glued together by
institutions mimicking the features of the modern state on a world
scale (civil service, branches of government, specialized ministries,
etc.). It thus reflected ambitions for varying degrees of world
governance mugged by the reality of national sovereignty and great-
power politics.31 Like the “really-existing” (as opposed to idealistic)
socialism of the USSR, the UN’s brand of “really-existing” world
governance accommodated lofty designs to the real world, emerging
out of the collision of diverse visions for global integration with the
exigencies of postwar international affairs.32
Part I of this book is a chronological history that begins at the
moment of this collision in the aftermath of the Second World War.
As chapter 1 shows, the USSR rejected UNESCO and much of the
rest of the UN system during the organization’s formative phase in
the late 1940s and early 1950s. This boycott would prove a
consequential mistake, allowing the West to shape the burgeoning
international organizational system, and hence world governance, in
its “really-existing” form. Chapter 2 turns to the years after Stalin’s
death in 1953, when the USSR entered UNESCO as part of a broader
recommitment to making a better world. Initiated by the new Soviet
leader N. S. Khrushchev in the context of his foreign policy of
“peaceful coexistence,” Soviet accession to UNESCO reflected the
optimistic faith in the superiority of the socialist system sweeping the
country in the 1950s. Inspired by this faith, Soviet officials set out to
demonstrate their system’s superiority within the walls of an
organization claiming to represent a universal international
community inclusive of both sides of the Cold War.
This utopian claim to universality, however, concealed the
persistence of the Western biases ingrained in the UN before 1953.
The source of these biases lay in the bureaucracies, or secretariats,
of the world body and its agencies—the less glamorous core of the
international organizational system that has been overlooked in favor
of its representative organs in New York (the Security Council and
General Assembly) and at its specialized agencies in Western
Europe.33 The authority to implement the programs adopted by
these representative organs lay in the international archipelago of
UN secretariats scattered from Manhattan to Paris and Geneva. Just
as the bureaucracy of a nation-state determines the implementation
of legislation drawn up by elected officials, the secretariats of the UN
system had considerable latitude to flesh out the resolutions passed
by the community of nations. Put simply, the delegations of member
states to different UN agencies showed up for debates or votes on
proposals and then left for their missions. The international civil
servants employed by UN secretariats then executed these proposals
and kept the organization running from day to day. These
bureaucrats acted as the carriers of the institutional memory and
culture of the UN. This UN “deep state,” more than any other feature
of the UN system, was the most concrete realization of world
government achieved by twentieth-century internationalists.34
An analysis of the world body that centers this bureaucratic core
reveals another similarity in the interplay of the ideal and the real in
the Soviet and UN contexts. Viewed in this way, the UN resembled
the USSR as an amalgamation of utopianism and bureaucracy,
employing practices and structures of the modern state to realize
universalist visions on an international scale. If the USSR amounted
to what Michael David-Fox has called an “intelligentsia-statist
modernity,” the UN—and UNESCO in particular—were a much less
coercive but nevertheless similar hybridization of intellectual
messianism and bureaucracy.35 In the case of UNESCO, the utopian
visions of men such as Otlet and Roerich became mired and
muddled in the agency’s red tape. Staffed with a ragtag bunch of
do-gooder pen-pushers with specialties in every imaginable field of
education, science, or culture, the UNESCO Secretariat grounded
fanciful intellectualism in the banalities of clericalism. Just as the
Soviet intelligentsia represented what historian Martin Malia
describes (drawing on Lev Trotsky and Milovan Djilas) as a “ ‘new
class’ ” or “ ‘bureaucracy’ ” of “white-collar personnel” shorn of the
“ ‘critical’ thought” of their prerevolutionary predecessors, UNESCO’s
overwhelmingly Western corps of bureaucratic intellectuals at once
personified and betrayed the utopianism of their internationalist
forebears.36
This “new class” of bureaucrat-internationalists perpetuated the
West’s advantage in UNESCO. As the third chapter makes clear, this
remained the case even as the composition of UNESCO
representative bodies (the UNESCO General Conference, or its
equivalent of the UN General Assembly, and the UNESCO Executive
Board, its veto-less version of the UN Security Council) changed as a
consequence of the acceleration of decolonization in the 1960s. The
induction of new countries as UNESCO member states eroded
Western hegemony over these representative bodies. But contrary to
the initial hopes of Soviet officials, the diminishment of Western
power and the crystallization of a new bloc of nations from the
“developing world” throughout the decade did not lead to a
strengthening of the socialist bloc in the international organizational
system. Instead, the bipolar world gave way to a pluralist one in
which this system began to fracture, but only after Soviet
internationalism had come to fully embrace UNESCO, and its method
of world governance, as staples in its repertoire.
While the UN reflected the realities of the world it sought to govern,
the world body nevertheless still bore the traces of its utopian
blueprints, continuing to embody the promise and possibility of other
forms of world unity not yet in existence. For this reason,
anthropologists of international organizations have characterized
them as “palaces of hope”—a designation these institutions have
lived up to since their founding.37 In the West, the creation of the
UN led to widespread anticipation in the early postwar years of a
more powerful world state governing a peaceful world community.38
In contrast, the American Right interpreted this prospect as a threat,
casting the UN as a proto-totalitarian menace harboring aspirations
interchangeable with the Soviet drive for global communism. In
1964, for example, John Stormer used his anticommunist manifesto,
None Dare Call It Treason, to accuse UN Secretary-General U Thant
of desiring a “one-world socialistic government financed by the
United States” as the ultimate “synthesis” of the dialectic of history.3
9 A decade earlier, Usher L. Burdick, Republican congressman from

North Dakota, declared that UNESCO in particular was “the most

dastardly undertaking of all that the United Nations had theretofore
contrived.” Under the guise of “spreading universal learning” for
“mutual understanding,” he charged, the agency conspired to
“create public opinion for the coming world government.”40
Unlike Stormer and Burdick, Soviet citizens who participated in
UNESCO activities after 1954 did not see in the UN a communist
proto-world state. They did, however, recognize the kernel of truth
that gave rise to this outlandish conflation—the homologous utopian
aspirations of the Soviet and UN projects for one world. As a result,
these Soviet citizens embraced “really-existing” world governance
because it extended to them a promise of world unity and peace
consonant with the core utopian promise of the Soviet state. In this
respect, the UN and USSR had in common not only their existence
as embers of utopias past, but also their ability to act as sparks for
utopias future. Of course, the Soviet state throughout its existence
based its legitimacy on keeping this spark alive. From the 1917
revolution onward, it relied on what historian Mark Steinberg calls a
“utopian impulse” to mobilize its citizens to build communism.41
Embedded in “really-existing socialism,” this impulse would take on a
new intensity just as the country joined UNESCO in the era of
optimism and “romanticism” that saw the launch of Sputnik, the
World Youth Festival, and the Cuban Revolution. As many Soviet
citizens during this time looked to the country’s past to reignite the
global emancipatory potential of the communist project, utopianism
pervaded Soviet prophesies of “catching up and overtaking the USA,”
the immanency of communism, and the spread of revolution in the
decolonizing world.42
Likewise, the UN’s method of world governance presented its own
brand of “romantic,” globally minded optimism, inviting Soviet
citizens to work toward and imagine a brighter future. It engaged
them in utopia as a means and an ends latent in the present.43 Just
as Soviet socialism promised the possibility of working to end class
conflict, UNESCO promised a way to work for a future without
international conflict. And just as socialism promised what theorist
Ruth Levitas has described as a “utopia of non-alienation” by means
of “the collective action of the working class,” the UN agency offered
universal belonging through world civic action.44
For the small but influential group of Soviet citizens active in the
UN agency, UNESCO’s visions of peace and international community
through enlightenment harmonized with the Soviet conception of
historical evolution toward universal futurity. Like the “imaginary
West” of the post-Stalin era, UNESCO’s ways of working for and
imagining a better world became “reinterpreted” as part of the
Soviet internationalist repertoire.45 Through the practice of “really-
existing” world governance, Soviet UNESCO participants came to
support the UN’s method of world governance and repurposed the
world body for their own internationalist expression. The reality of
the Cold War thus became imbued with practices, visions, and even
transient realizations of one-world unity amid the divisions of the
present.
Part II of this book turns its focus to these creative Soviet
practices of “everyday” world governance.46 Organized thematically,
it tells the stories of members of the Soviet intelligentsia who
participated in the three international publics formed by UNESCO. Ch
apters 4 and 5 chronicle the lives of Soviet white-collar professionals
who worked for world governance as public international civil
servants in the UNESCO bureaucracy. Chapter 6 explores the
thinking of Soviet scholars and intellectuals who contributed to the
international public sphere of UNESCO gatherings and collaborative
projects. Finally, chapter 7 illustrates UNESCO’s influence beyond the
privileged elite who traveled abroad. It demonstrates how the
international reading public of UNESCO publications encouraged
Soviet readers deep inside the USSR to experiment with ideas of
world governance, world civic duty, and international community.
The well-studied high diplomacy of Cold War confrontation in the
UN has for too long overshadowed these day-to-day Soviet
experiences of UN world governance. The UN system transformed
the lives of a diverse selection of Soviet citizens, who encountered it
not as neutral territory but as both a microcosm of world politics and
a sui generis universe. Whether engaging with UNESCO in-person or
from afar, Soviet citizens navigated the agency as a social, cultural,
and ideological complex suffused with an abundance of meanings
and power relations.
If the abundance of meanings inspired in Soviet UNESCO
participants hope for future world unity and peace, the organization’s
complex power relations grounded them in the divisions of the day.
Notwithstanding the frustrations arising from the latter, these
patriotic Soviet citizens came to view the UN system as a flawed but
valid vehicle for the expression of international solidarity and
activism for peace and a better world. Coexisting and overlapping
with the internationalism of the Soviet state, the UN’s brand of
internationalism extended to Soviet internationalists a means of
participating in a wider world while preserving their loyalties to the
Soviet project. In the process, they lived Cold War reality in its one-
world development.47
 PART I
CONVERGING INTERNATIONALISMS
 1
Dual Power in World Governance
The USSR Out of UNESCO, 1945–1953

In early 1947, Leonard S. Kenworthy, a UNESCO official, traveled to

the Western-occupied zones of Germany to give a lecture about the
new international organization to students enrolled in an American
literature class at the University of Frankfurt. Seated in a defunct
bomb shelter, the audience of German youth “listened intently” to
the UNESCO envoy’s talk. “When the period of questioning came,”
Kenworthy reported back to UNESCO, “they pounced upon this
opportunity.” In preparation for the lecture, the students, who had
come of age under the tutelage of the Nazis, read UNESCO: Its
Purpose and Its Philosophy, a small treatise in which UNESCO’s first
director-general, Julian Huxley, cast the organization as a vehicle for
fostering international intellectual exchange for the purpose of global
integration. Unsurprisingly, a handful of those enrolled in the course
reacted with skepticism to this internationalist ideology conceived as
the antithesis to the nationalist “New Order” of Nazism. “You can’t
develop world loyalty,” one of the German listeners chirped, “with an
eclectic philosophy like that!” Kenworthy characterized the response
of this group, which likely represented “the ‘cream of the crop’ of
German youth,” as mixed. As he relayed back to his superiors, they
“were alert, penetrating, and ready to be shown, but not ready to be
kidded.”1
The reluctance of some of these German students to embrace the
message delivered by Kenworthy illuminates the worldview informing
UNESCO’s architects and the historical juncture out of which the
organization emerged. Convinced that the inherent tribalism of
nationalist allegiance and an ignorance of other peoples had fueled
the revanchist regimes of the Second World War, UNESCO’s founders
set out to instrumentalize information, knowledge, and culture for
international-community building, world civic action, and world
governance. This internationalist project reflected a larger postwar
campaign to enhance the power of international organizations and,
in its more extreme iterations, forge a single world government
responsible for a cosmopolitan “world citizenship” that would either
coincide with, or replace, nationality as the primary form of
identification across the globe.
If the violent nationalism of the Axis powers lent a sense of
urgency to the mission of UNESCO and these various blueprints for
“one world,” however, new tensions challenged and shaped the
evolution of this internationalist crusade. Within months of
Kenworthy’s 1947 lecture in Germany, UNESCO’s utopian project ran
up against the Cold War and a fracturing of the world into two. The
new organization’s method of “really-existing” world governance,
with which Soviet citizens would experiment after 1954, emerged
out of this collision between hopes for the future and the world as it
was after the war.

The Missing Member State

UNESCO originated in a series of wartime brainstorming sessions in
London about how to reconstruct the educational and cultural
institutions of a Europe ravaged by the Nazi imperial project. In
October 1942, the president of the British Board of Education, R. A.
Butler, invited the ministers of education of European governments
waiting out the war in Britain to come together to tackle
“educational questions affecting the Allied countries of Europe and
the United Kingdom both during the war period and in the postwar
period.”2 The next month, ministers from governments-in-exile and
the British government attended the first meeting of the Conference
of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME).3 By 1945, CAME had
evolved into a multibranched agency with an executive bureau that
oversaw seven commissions dedicated to amassing data on the
resources of educational, scientific, and cultural institutions in
Europe.4
Early on in its work, the conference had recognized the necessity
of creating a new institution to take over its mission of overseeing
the expansive task of reconstructing Europe’s intellectual
infrastructure. As Jan Opocensky, a UNESCO participant and
historian, observed in his 1949 history of the agency, CAME not only
resolved to provide “educational relief” but also “explore[d] plans for
the formation of a permanent organization for inter-allied and
subsequently international cooperation in education matters in the
postwar period.”5 Serious deliberations over the form and mandate
of such an organization accelerated after CAME extended its
membership to the rest of the United Nations coalition. In the fall of
1943, the conference requested that the Soviet Union, the United
States, China, and other friendly governments send emissaries to its
gatherings.6 Early the next year, the United States sent a delegation
to a meeting of the conference. As historian Charles Dorn argues,
the American delegation, led by the pioneer of liberal internationalist
education, Senator J. William Fulbright, made sure that any postwar
“educational and cultural organization” would be incorporated into
the UN. By 1945, the United States also ended up shifting the
conversation from plotting a reconstruction agency to designing an
international organization that would promote exchange on a long-
term basis. In November 1945, a preparatory conference to establish
UNESCO convened in London.7
Although the Soviet embassy in London dispatched its first
secretary as an observer to CAME in 1943, it kept a cautious
distance from the proceedings of the conference. The Soviet Union
declined to send representatives to work on CAME’s multiple
commissions, replying tersely to some of these invitations that it did
“not have anybody here qualified for this purpose.”8 When the Soviet
first secretary started to show up at sessions of the conference’s
executive bureau, he remained aloof and asked only brief clarifying
questions over the years.9 In late 1943, the Soviet observer
approached his American counterpart at CAME to learn whether the
Americans intended to officially join the conference without
demanding “organizational changes.” In the course of their
conversation, the Soviet official conveyed his government’s wariness
about the nature and objectives of the gathering. According to the
American diplomat, the socialist representative expressed anxiety
over the possibility that any international “cultural conference” would
grant all states equal voting rights no matter their size. This
arrangement, he warned, “would give undue and perhaps dangerous
influence to small states.” He also revealed Soviet concerns about
the threat to sovereignty any future international educational
organization would pose. Although the country “might not feel great
hesitancy” about an organization whose “activities were confined to
the exchange of purely technical information,” it would be “extremely
reluctant to participate” in any organ that “undertook to deal with
the subject matter introduced in the curricula of national schools.”
Overall, the American observer surmised that the “USSR would
prefer to conduct its cultural relations bilaterally.”10
In the months leading up to the November 1945 preparatory
conference for the establishment of UNESCO, the Soviet ambassador
to the United Kingdom, F. T. Gusev, justified the USSR’s insistence on
spurning the inchoate international organization by arguing that only
the UN could authorize the creation of intergovernmental
organizations. “In the opinion of the Soviet govt [sic],” Gusev wrote
to American officials, “measures for the preparation and creation of
an organization for matters of enlightenment and culture . . . should
be taken by the Social-Economic Council of the . . . United Nations
after the formation of such council in the forthcoming first session of
the General Assembly.”11 Although UNESCO would fall under the
purview of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) after
1946, the two bodies had yet to iron out their future relationship.
The position of CAME as the architect of UNESCO therefore provided
the Soviet Union with an opportunity to delegitimize the enterprise
on the basis of its origins outside the UN.
 Continuing its work without Soviet involvement, the preparatory
conference aimed to produce an international organization oriented
toward impacting–in Opocensky’s words–“ ‘the man on the street.’ ”12
In his opening address to the conference, British prime minister
Clement Attlee made the case for a far-reaching “democratic”
approach to international educational cooperation as a method of
world governance, enunciating words that would become part of the
most famous line of the UNESCO Charter: “All of us hope to educate
our people for the world we want to build. Our watchword is
‘educate so that the minds of the people shall be attuned to peace.’ .
. . [W]ars begin in the minds of men. And we are to live in a world
of democracies, where the mind of the common man will be all
important.”13 Meanwhile, the British and American embassies in
Moscow unsuccessfully tried to convince the Soviet People’s
Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) to do its part in the genesis
of UNESCO, writing a letter to A. Ia. Vyshinskii and following up by
sending their officers to urge NKID “to reconsider their previous
decision and to send a delegation to the conference.”14
The following November, the first session of the UNESCO General
Conference opened under the presidency of former French Prime
Minister Léon Blum. The delegates elected Julian Huxley as
UNESCO’s first director-general and approved a series of programs
designed, in line with the preamble of the agency’s charter, to
construct “the defenses of peace” in the “minds of men.”15 The
international atmosphere of the time made these programs seem all
the more urgent to the conference’s attendees. That spring, the
continued presence of Soviet troops in Iran had sparked the first
major international crisis brought before the new UN Security
Council. In the midst of this crisis, former British prime minister
Winston Churchill had raised tensions further, delivering his famous
“Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri.16 But UNESCO still
harbored hope that the USSR would join its ranks, kindled by the
words of some Soviet emissaries. At the founding conference of the
WHO (World Health Organization) that summer in New York, the
Ukrainian delegate proposed that all educational issues concerning
public health fall under the purview of UNESCO. Over dinner with the
UNESCO observer to the UN, Valere Darchambeau, Soviet delegates
to the WHO conference claimed that the USSR would soon “step in”
to UNESCO. “We assume,” Darchambeau reasoned, “that this
indication could not be given to us without something being decided
on this subject.”17 Two months after the closing of the conference,
however, higher-ranking Soviet officials contradicted this statement.
In a meeting in February 1947, Director-General Huxley urged the
Soviet representative to the UN, A. A. Gromyko, to convince his
government to reconsider its eschewal of UNESCO. Gromyko
repeated Gusev’s assertion that all UN specialized agencies had to
result from the deliberations of ECOSOC. “UNESCO,” he claimed,
“was established contrary to the stipulations of the [UN] Charter at
the initiative of the British and American governments without taking
into account the protest of the USSR.” When Huxley challenged his
assertion that all such organizations had to originate in ECOSOC,
Gromyko replied that, “in general, the USSR does not participate in
the work of specialized institutions that it had not helped to create.”
At the same time, the Soviet diplomat promised to “reflect” on
Huxley’s remarks and requested documents about the international
organization.18
Thus the United States, the United Kingdom, and European
governments exiled in London during the war provided the officials
and intellectuals who laid the foundation for UNESCO with very little
input from the USSR. Apart from Yugoslavia and three countries that
would soon undergo socialist takeovers (Hungary, Poland, and
Czechoslovakia), the majority of non-Western nations involved in
CAME and the first session of the UNESCO General Conference either
fell within the spheres of influence of Western European states or
would align with the West as tensions escalated between the
capitalist and socialist worlds in the coming years.19 The absence of
the USSR from UNESCO reveals the drastic differences and subtle
similarities between how Stalin and UNESCO’s founders understood
world order and the use of knowledge to transform that order at the
start of the Cold War.
 During the Second World War and after, Stalin made clear his
preference for great-power diplomacy over more democratic forms
of world governance. As indicated by the Soviet observer to CAME,
the USSR had deep reservations about the power UNESCO gave to
“small states.” In the wartime summits that would culminate in the
birth of the UN in San Francisco, Soviet dignitaries clearly favored
limiting the world body’s portfolio to security-related matters and the
preservation of peace between the victorious allies in the spirit of
nineteenth-century congresses among the great powers of Europe.
At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in the fall of 1944, the USSR
relented to pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom
on this issue, begrudgingly allowing for the formation of ECOSOC,
which would oversee a constellation of new specialized agencies.
Whereas the Soviet Union had managed to safeguard its power to
veto any resolution in the Security Council, other UN organs,
including UNESCO, operated on the basis of majority rule and
granted equal suffrage to all states, thereby leaving the USSR with
no means of quashing undesirable programs.20
UNESCO’s specialization in areas fundamental to the Soviet
project–information, knowledge, and culture–meant that its
democratic brand of world governance posed a unique threat to the
hegemony of the Soviet state at home. More generally, in the 1940s,
Soviet officials viewed multilateral exchange among nations as a
zero-sum game for domination rather than cooperation for mutual
benefit. In the case of the financial institutions of the Bretton Woods
system, for instance, historian Vladislav Zubok points to several
motives behind the Soviet determination to forgo participation,
including a disinclination to become indebted to foreign nations as
well as a fear of “economic and financial penetration” due to what
Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov described decades later as the fear
that the Americans would “draw” the USSR into their “company” but
in a “subordinate role.”21 In light of Western domination of UNESCO,
Soviet leaders must have likewise worried about the prospect of
having to conform to the dictates of a potentially hostile majority of
member states intent on the “penetration” of Soviet cultural and
educational institutions. Proposals introduced at the organization’s
first general conference—including the “study” of constructing a
“worldwide radio network” and a “comprehensive revision of
textbooks and related teaching materials”—likely reinforced Soviet
fears.22
Moreover, the hope, no matter how far-fetched, that UNESCO and
the UN system in general might lay the basis for more maximalist
forms of world governance posed a direct threat to Soviet
sovereignty. The Soviet state under Stalin understood that such
hopes had particular resonance in the postwar moment in the West.
Glenda Sluga has designated this moment, which lasted for much of
the 1940s, as the “apogee of internationalism,” during which “ ‘world
government’ was a rhetorical commonplace” in Western public
discourse, while “cosmopolitanism . . . in its literal translation ‘world
citizenship’ ” became a virtuous buzzword among the educated
public.23 Since UNESCO functioned as the primary intergovernmental
body engaged in instilling in the world’s population “international
understanding,” it brimmed with members of the Western
intelligentsia who ascribed to such utopian ideas and viewed the
organization as the seed of more radical global integration. For some
of UNESCO’s founders, global political centralization stood as a
distant aim of the organization’s activities. Huxley, as its first
director-general, conceived of the organization as a mechanism to
cultivate a global corpus of knowledge that would pave the way for
global integration under a single political entity. In UNESCO: Its
Purpose and Its Philosophy, he declared its “general philosophy”
should “be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and
evolutionary in background.” Just as Otlet had based his call for
world government on a perceived worldwide trend toward global
intellectual integration, so too did Huxley pin his hopes for a future
world government on the universalization of knowledge. Depicting
world history as on a trajectory toward the unification of knowledge
through exchange, Huxley maintained that UNESCO should help
aggregate from the nations of the world a “unified pool of tradition,”
particularly in the sphere of science. By doing so, it would lay the
foundation for a future global community and “must envisage some
form of world political unity, whether through a single world
government or otherwise, as the only certain means for avoiding
war.” While such “world political unity” remained a “remote ideal,”
Huxley cautioned, UNESCO could “do a great deal to lay the
foundations on which world political unity can later be built.” This
included highlighting in its “educational program” the “ultimate
need” for such unity and working to “familiarize all peoples with the
implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations
to a world organization.”24
The few socialist delegates to UNESCO intimated that the USSR’s
hostility to the organization derived in part from an animosity toward
Huxley’s promises of utopia through world governance. At the first
general conference, the Yugoslav delegate, M. V. Ribnikar,
expounded on the misgivings of Soviet loyalists about UNESCO’s
aspirations for global integration. “UNESCO,” Ribnikar quipped, “has
even elaborated its own philosophy, labeled ‘World Scientific
Humanism,’ which according to the program, will be forcibly
disseminated to and imposed upon the peoples of the world.”
Castigating proposals for UNESCO’s first program for their “persistent
tendency” toward a “casting of the various national cultures in a
standard mould,” he dismissed Huxley’s philosophy as “a kind of
philosophic Esperanto” and expressed opposition to “any attempt to
create any kind of cultural centralization.” UNESCO’s potential
embrace of Huxley’s philosophy and rejection of dialectical
materialism, he feared, “would lead to the enslavement of thought
and the spirit of creation” while “subjecting science to metaphysics.”2
5

Inside the USSR, such pie-in-the-sky discussions of world

governance served as fodder for Soviet propagandists eager to
highlight the threat from the West. In his “two camps” speech to the
Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in September 1947 on
the mounting hostility between the capitalist and socialist blocs, A.
A. Zhdanov portrayed supporters of a future world government as
putting a universalist gloss on Western conspiracies for global
domination. “One of the directions taken by the ideological
‘campaign’ which accompanies the plan for enslaving Europe,”
Zhdanov declared, “is an attack on the principle of national
sovereignty, a call to reject the sovereign rights of peoples,
counterposing to them the idea of ‘world government.’ ” This
aspiration, which “bourgeois intellectuals from among the dreamers
and pacifists” had “seized on,” was “used not only as a means of
pressure for the ideological disarmament of peoples who are
defending their independence from encroachments by American
imperialism, but also as a slogan specially directed against the Soviet
Union.”26
As the Cold War escalated, the utopia of a post-national world,
reframed in this way as the dystopia of Western domination, also
shaped the language of Stalin’s anti-Semitic attacks on the Soviet
intelligentsia. At the height of the “anticosmopolitan campaign” of
the late 1940s, an article in Pravda, “Cosmopolitanism—the
Ideological Weapon of American Reaction,” again referred to the
aspiration for one world as antithetical to Soviet ideological and
cultural purity. “The word ‘cosmopolitan’ translated from Greek
means world citizen,” the author of the article expounded.
“Cosmopolitanism is the preaching of so-called ‘world citizenship,’ the
rejection of affiliation with any nation, the elimination of national
traditions and cultures of peoples under the pretext of creating a
‘world,’ ‘universal,’ culture.” As an example of this “expanding” trend
in “the bourgeois states of Europe,” the writer derisively recounted a
recent meeting in England of “ ‘scholars and philosophers’ ” who
dismissed “all patriotism” as “ ‘idolatry.’ ”27
The campaigns kicked off by these pronouncements accelerated
an ongoing retrenchment in the Soviet Union that placed knowledge
in the service of the communist project and its global struggle in the
new Cold War. If UNESCO sought to harness knowledge to remake
“the minds of men” for peace, the Soviet state in the postwar period
attempted to radically revise knowledge to transform its own
people’s consciousness. Even before Zhdanov’s “two camps” speech,
Stalin had started to rebuild the Soviet ideological “fortress,”
denouncing members of the Soviet elite perceived as “kowtowing” or
showing “servility” before the West.28 As historian Ethan Pollock has
detailed, the Soviet academy witnessed in these early postwar years
a series of debates on history, philosophy, science, and linguistics
into which Stalin intervened as the “coryphaeus of science,”
conducting a “chorus” of scholars who served on the “philosophical
front” of the Cold War. Over time, these “open discussions” resulted
in the retrofitting of Soviet scholarship and knowledge to conform to
the postwar propaganda needs of the Soviet state.29
The triumph of the spurious theories of Soviet geneticist T. D.
Lysenko represented the most extreme example of this
weaponization of knowledge.30 The Soviet pseudoscientist’s claims
to have upended the basic laws of biology both mimicked and made
a mockery of UNESCO’s project to use knowledge to transform the
world. Just as Ribnikar had accused UNESCO of “subjecting science
to metaphysics,” the international organization’s architects
condemned the so-called “Lysenko Affair” as the perversion of
science in the service of ideology. After Huxley resigned from his
post as head of UNESCO, he became an outspoken critic of
Lysenko’s digressions from scientific consensus. Having previously
expressed admiration for the scientific rationality of Soviet state
planning, Huxley denounced what he regarded as the USSR’s
betrayal of the universality of science in his 1949 book, Soviet
Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity.31
The mutual animosity between UNESCO and the USSR derived
from their competing aspirations to instrumentalize knowledge for
their respective political projects. Both lamented the other’s
“subjecting” of science to projects aiming to transform
consciousness. On the one hand, the Soviet state under Stalin
rejected UNESCO’s utopian claim that it acted as an agent of a
better future through intellectual exchange, accusing it instead of
using such exchange as a means of domination. On the other hand,
Soviet officials weaponized knowledge to remake the “minds of men”
within their borders, drawing the ire of UNESCO officials for
engaging in the revision of knowledge to serve the communist
project.
The Soviet usage of the term “cosmopolitan” as an epithet
therefore reflects the intense antagonism engendered by the two
projects’ similarities as much as their differences. Viewed in an
international context, accusations of “cosmopolitanism” in the late-
Stalinist war on the intelligentsia carried weight because of the
fascination in the West with the “one-world” promise and Soviet
anxieties over the threat this promise posed to their own utopian
project. As the principal noncommunist internationalist institution in
the contested areas of education, science, and culture, UNESCO
stood out as the ultimate achievement of the “dreamers and
pacifists” whom the Soviet state viewed as little more than
apologists for Western imperialism but nevertheless feared as
competitors for the mantle of champions for a better world.

UNESCO through the Cold War

Regardless of how the USSR viewed UNESCO, the international
organization did its best to ignore the seemingly inexorable march
toward a new war between the capitalist and socialist blocs,
concentrating its resources on projects perceived as “above” politics
and in the supposedly “universal” realms of education, science, and
culture. In 1947, its first year of full operations, UNESCO launched
plans for the Hylean-Amazon Institute in Brazil; initiated three “pilot
projects” on “fundamental education” in Haiti, China, and British East
Africa; and sponsored research on “international understanding.”32
Yet as optimism about the possibility of a lasting peace degenerated
into alarm over the threat of a new world war, UNESCO dipped its
toes into more contentious issues. In particular, the agency
collaborated with Western governments in the reconstruction of the
so-called “ex-enemy” nations.
In the case of Germany, UNESCO proceeded cautiously due to the
raw feelings harbored by many of its member states toward the
former Axis power. The first session of the general conference
passed a resolution proposed by the Dutch delegate that authorized
the organization to explore measures aimed at the country’s
“reeducation.”33 Over the ensuing months, UNESCO sent its officials
to the Western zones of the defeated power with the mission of
ascertaining the best ways to reintegrate it into the international
community and refashion its political culture.34 Encouraged by the
favorable assessments transmitted by his colleagues on the ground,
Director-General Huxley notified the American, British, and French
governments in January 1947 that he intended to broach the subject
of UNESCO’s formal entry into Germany with the Allied Control
Authority overseeing occupation of the country.35 While the British
and American governments welcomed this move, the French
expressed apprehension that the USSR might respond to this
overture negatively. “Their fear,” an assistant to the director-general
wrote in April, “is that agreement on their part to UNESCO’s entry
into the French zone of occupation, even though accompanied by
similar activity in the British and American zones, might antagonize
the Soviet authorities.” The French government therefore wanted a
“quadripartite” rather than a “tripartite” process.36
At first, the French got their wish. That spring, the Soviet,
American, British, and French members of a branch of the Allied
Control Authority unanimously recommended that the Authority
begin discussions with UNESCO about possible assistance to
Germany.37 Soon after the adoption of this recommendation,
however, the situation in Europe took a turn for the worse. In June
1947, Secretary of State George Marshall announced an economic
plan to consolidate Western Europe into a prosperous region
immune to the spread of communism. The USSR interpreted this
“European Recovery Program” as little more than a plot to “encircle”
them economically. Then, in September, Zhdanov gave his “two
camps” speech, putting yet another nail in the coffin of the former
Grand Alliance.38 In the midst of this deterioration in relations
between the superpowers, UNESCO dispatched another intermediary
to Germany for further investigation. That fall, the second session of
the UNESCO General Conference, held in Mexico City, also voted to
endorse UNESCO’s entry into negotiations with the Allied Control
Authority.39 But in early 1948, the UNESCO leadership realized that it
risked entangling the organization in the Cold War if it persevered in
establishing itself on the frontlines of the conflict. “The situation in
Germany,” Huxley wrote in January, “is now so delicate that we are
anxious to consider every step most carefully.”40 Days later, the
Allied Control Authority notified UNESCO that it was “unable to agree
to enter into negotiations,” thereby breaking off its nearly yearlong
relationship with the UN agency.41 According to advisers to the
British military governor, the authority’s refusal to negotiate “was of
course the consequence of Soviet obstructive tactics in the
coordinating committee, where the Soviet representative took the
line that UNESCO activity in Germany was ‘premature.’ ” The Western
occupying forces, they argued, should react to this behavior by
advertising themselves as “promoting and encouraging UNESCO in
its desire to function in Germany (and by contrast that it should be
equally well known that it is the Russians who are trying to block
this).”42
Undeterred by this rejection, Huxley penned separate letters to
the British, French, American, and Soviet military governments
without alerting the UNESCO Executive Board, effectively
circumventing the Allied Control Authority.43 After the heads of the
Western zones agreed in their responses to leave out their Soviet
counterpart and correspond with UNESCO independently, the
executive board held an extraordinary session in April to consider its
options. In a report prepared for the session, Walter Laves, the
American UNESCO deputy director-general, described his meetings
with the military chiefs in the three Western zones and assured the
board that these authorities wanted to team up with UNESCO. “The
time has come for UNESCO to move as rapidly, judiciously and
circumspectly as possible toward helping in reeducating the German
people so that they may participate once more in international
society,” he asserted. “That time,” he warned, “is running short. . . .
The potential threat to peace continues in Germany unless the
United Nations can be successful in this task. The threat is not only
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Op die delwerye
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
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Title: Op die delwerye

Vyf sketse uit die lewe

Author: P. I. Hoogenhout

Release date: November 13, 2023 [eBook #72114]

Language: Afrikaans

Original publication: Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1925

Credits: Kobus Meyer, Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OP DIE

DELWERYE ***
 OP DIE DELWERYE
VYF SKETSE UIT DIE LEWE

OP DIE DELWERYE

VYF SKETSE UIT DIE LEWE

DEUR
IMKER HOOGENHOUT
MASKEW MILLER BEPERK
KAAPSTAD
 VOORWOORD.
Die Delwerye! wat roep dit voor ons oog?
Armoede! Ellende! Ontaarding! Sedeloosheid!
Dis wat die meeste mense, met g’n bekendheid daarvan, dink.
Die Delwerye! daar lê skatte begrawe—en die mense stroom van
al die dele van Suid-Afrika daarheen in die mening dat dié skatte
hulle uit hulle armoede sal red en hulle ellende sal laat ophou, dog
teleurstelling wag die meeste, en teleurstelling bring bitterheid van
gevoel teen die samelewing, teen die Kerk en soms teen God.
Die Delwerye! daar lê skatte begrawe,—skatte van menselewens,
van mensekrag, van mensemateriaal. Skatte vir die Staat, vir die
Kerk, vir die Letterkunde. Die Staat moet rekening hou met die
Delwerye, want tevergeefs sal ons die Russiese Bolsjewisme buite
ons grense probeer hou, terwyl ons die gees van daardie kwaad
kweek in ons eie midde. Die Kerk moet planne beraam om die Troos
en Krag wat die Evangelie alleen kan gee, meer gereeld en gedurig
te bring aan dié wat anders hulle troos sal soek in wêreldse middels:
brandewyn en ydel vermake. Die skrywers kan gerus hulle aandag
wy aan die opeengehoopte mensemateriaal wat skatte inhou wat
ons opbloeiende letterkunde tot groter heerlikheid sal bring.
Die Skrywer van die „Delwerysketse” doen baanbrekerswerk—
prospekteerwerk. Hier en daar, soos sy opvoedkundige werk hom
toegelaat het en in aanraking met die delwersgemeenskap gebring
het, het hy gate gemaak en orals het hy bewyse gekry van
diamanthoudende grond. Hy het gesien watter skatte daar verborge
lê en het gedronge gevoel om dit aan die wêreld van Staat en Kerk
en Letterkunde bekend te stel. Vir dié ontdekking sal ons hom altyd
dankbaar bly, en ons sal altyd sy „Ontdekkersregte” in ag neem en
respekteer.
 Delwerswerk is op die oog morsig—in die stowwerige aarde en in
die morsige klei moet gegrawe word. Hope waardelose „rof” word
deur die „bebe” afgeskud voor ’n mens met die wassery kan begin.
Die wassery is ’n eentonige besigheid, en dis tog ’n kuns—nie te
vinnig nie, ook nie te stadig moet die masjien draai nie, en die
„porrel” moet steeds dieselfde dikte hou. Jou klere en gesig word
meesal vuil bespat en gee vir die meeste ’n afkeer van die werk. Al
die kante van die delwerswerk word deur die Skrywer getoon: die
„rof”—die vloeker en drinker; die „porrel”—die mengelmoes-
gemeenskap wat deur die lewensmasjien deurmekaar gedraai word,
’n ondeursigtige moddermassa; die sif, waarmee die „gravitating”
geskied en die egte diamant sy karakter bewys deur bo te lê as die
sif omgekeer word. Die egte diamant word maar hier en daar gekry;
’n geoefende oog is nodig om, as die sif omgekeer word, uit die
miljoene blink klippies die ware diamant te sien, maar as die
edelgesteente in ons hand lê en ons bewonder sy skoonheid, dan
vergeet ons die harde werk, die vuil klere en al die waardelose
weggekrapte „was” in ons blydskap oor die skat wat ons uitgehaal
het.
In die hoop dat dit die Skrywer mag geluk om deur sy sketse by
ons Volk op te wek ’n groter belangstelling in en groter liefde vir die
skatte wat begrawe lê in die delwerye, beveel ons die lesing daarvan
van harte aan by almal wat Suid-Afrika en sy Volk liefhet.
E. J. J. van der HORST.
Wolmaransstad, 26 Februarie 1925.
 ANNIE LOSPER.
I.
Die taak van die onderwyser op die delwerye is seker nie een van
ongemengde genot nie. Die hele atmosfeer van die diekens, soos
die delwers sal sê, is nie juis bereken om skoolhou ’n plesier te
maak nie. Die toestande waaronder die kinders opgroei, is so
hemeltergend benard dat dit ’n wonder is dat daar nog van een iets
teregkom. Die woning bestaan gewoonlik net uit een lokaaltjie, wat
so klein is dat ’n groot man hom moeilik tussen die paar kaste en
bankies waaruit die huisraad bestaan, kan beweeg. In hierdie
kamertjie word gekook en geëet en geslaap en, moenie skrik nie,
babetjies gebore. Dat baie kindertjies dus opgroei sonder enige
gevoel van skaamte of kiesheid of reinheid, kan niemand bevreem
nie.
Maar wat die werk van die onderwyser nog die meeste bemoeilik,
is die ondervoeding waaraan so baie delwerskinders ly. As ’n mens
die bleek gesiggies en die maer beentjies sien, dan bloei jou hart vir
hulle, en in die winter gaan dit eers swaar. Ek het meisies gesien wat
net ’n dun linnerokkie aan het sonder enige onderklere, en seuns
wat byna nakend loop. En op die kaal vlaktes waar die delwerye
meesal gevind word, kan dit raak koud word.
Die sanitêre reëling is uiters primitief, en epidemies van
maagkoors of ander besmetlike siektes is glad geen uitsondering
nie. Die wonder is dat daar nie meer mense jaarliks aan aansteeklike
siektes op die delwerye omkom nie, en temeer as verder in gedagte
gehou word dat daar geen enkele hospitaal op die diekens te vind is
nie!
Toe, leer nou kinders wat so sonder tug opgroei en daarby nog
gedurig honger ly. En tog verseker die goeie onderwyser(es) my dat
die delwerskinders gou aan tug en gesag gewend word. ’n Paar
meesters beweer selfs dat hulle liewer hierdie natuurkinders van
meet af aan in hulle klas wil hê as hulle meer-bevoorregte boeties en
sussies. Hoe dit ook al sy, ek het baie respek vir die onderwyser wat
’n sukses van sy werk in die delwerskool maak en daar aanbly, en
nie die eerste die beste geleentheid te baat neem om daarvandaan
te vlug nie.
Dis opmerklik hoe gou die delwer die goeie meester van sy
swakker kollega onderskei en dan vir laasgenoemde die lewe op die
delwery onmoontlik maak.
„Waarom stuur julle hierdie nuwe onderwyser nie liewers terug
normaalskool-toe nie?” vra ’n delwer eendag aan my.
„En wat is daar dan verkeerd met hom?”
„Kyk, Meneer, ’n meester wat heeldag sy keel hees skree voor ’n
klas, kan nie alte veel beteken nie. As ek die hele liewe dag my
kaffers moet rondskree, dan sou hulle later nie na my luister as ek
ordentlik met hulle praat nie. En dis mos darem nie nodig om soos ’n
mal mens te kere te gaan as jy iets aan ’n kind wil duidelik maak nie.
Party seuns sê die meester is gek, terwyl ’n paar dogters dit weer so
op hulle senuwees kry dat hulle weier om langer skool-toe te gaan.
My kind, wat aanstaande jaar in sy klas moet kom, huil nou al as sy
daaraan dink. Julle moet die vent wegvat, anders raak hy een van
die dae goed opgedons. Ek weet van ’n hele paar delwers wat lus
voel vir sy vel.”
Nou redeneer nou met so ’n man, temeer daar hy reg is. Wat skeel
dit hom dat hy die wet sal oortree as hy vir Meester opdons? Die
natuurmens redeneer nie, hy tree handelend op, en dis wonderlik
hoe fyn sy gevoel van reg en onreg ontwikkel is.
Soms egter kry Meester dit opdraand, omdat een of ander
voorman op die diekens ’n ander sienswyse oor aanvanklike
leermetodes toegedaan is.
„Jy moet die kinders die A, B, C leer,” het ’n vader die
onderwyseres een môre in die skool-lokaal voor al die kinders kom
teregwys. „Wat vir ’n gemors is daardie klank-affêre? As ek vir my
Kosie saans laat woorde spel, kan ek hom nie volg nie. My kind
moet net soos sy pape voor hom geleer word!” En toe die
onderwyseres haar hieraan nie steur nie, moes sy voor die
skoolkommissie verskyn en wou hierdie opvoedkundige liggaam
haar met alle geweld dwing om Gert Janse se metodiek te volg en in
die toekoms toe te pas. Die kwessie is selfs na die Skoolraad verwys
en, moenie lag nie, ’n deputasie moes uitgestuur word om die
skoolkommissie tot ander insigte te beweeg.
Dieselfde onderwyseres het later deur haar ywer en toewyding so
die harte van die delwers gesteel, dat hulle stilletjies ’n paar lede van
die Skoolkommissie na die Onderwys-departement afgevaardig het
om beleefd te vra dat haar salaris met £100 per jaar sou verhoog
word, mits sy op Syferlaagte aanbly en nie binne tien jaar sou trou
nie. En toe die Departement aan hierdie vriendelike versoek geen
gehoor gee nie, het die Kommissie my „kaalkop die waarheid vertel
en verseker dat beide ek en die Departement net ’n blooming wash-
out was en deur generaal Kemp moes uitgeskop word!” „En doen ou
Kempie dit nie, dan sal ons so wragtiewaar nie weer vir hom stem
nie!”

II.
Die skoolgebou op Syferlaagte was skaars geskik vir ’n koeistal; ja
ek twyfel of ’n ryk boer sou bereid gewees het om sy volbloed vee
daarin te huisves, en in so ’n lokaal moes ondervoede en onderklede
kinders aldag vyf uur deurbring. Oorspronklik was die gebou bedoel
gewees vir ’n koeliewinkel, waar so min lig en lug as moontlik vereis
word, want dit is nie in die belang van die verkoper dat sy kliënt alte
goed die ware wat hy koop, moet kan besigtig nie. Die hele gebou
het twee klein venstertjies en ’n deur gehad. Die sinkmure was van
binne nie met hout uitgevoer nie; daar was geen plafon nie, en die
vloer was van grond.
In die hartjie van die somer het die sink so warm geword dat ’n
mens dit nie met jou kaal hand kon aanraak nie; voeg nou daarby
nog die asempies van 62 leerlinge wat almal in die een lokaal
ingeprop is, en dan sal jy ’n flou denkbeeld kry van hoe die lug so
teen twaalfuur in die skoolgebou moet wees.
 Buite kry ’n mens net die uitgegrawe kleims en die hope dooie
grond en gruis. ’n Boom is ’n onbekende iets. Maar stof, as die wind
waai, hang soos ’n bruin sluier oor die delwerye en verpes die
atmosfeer in die skool nog meer. En, leser, hierdie beskrywing is nie
uit die duim gesuie nie; dis getrou aan die waarheid.
Onder sulke omstandighede moet die onderwyseres onderrig gee
en moet die kinders opgevoed word!
En die outoriteite is nie altoos te blameer nie, want ’n delwery is
iets wat dikwels in ’n dag se tyd ontstaan en soms binne ’n jaar se
tyd verlate is. Inteendeel, dis prysenswaardig dat daar tog ’n poging
aangewend word om onderwys te verskaf aan die honderde
kindertjies wat anders vir kwaadgeld sou rondloop.
„Toe, begin maar,” sê ek aan die onderwyseres by die aanvang
van die skool, „en gaan voort net soos gewoonlik.”
Sy open met gebed en laat toe sing: „Heer, waar dan heen” en wat
daar op volg, wat my nogal as heeltemal treffend voorgekom het. Ja,
ek weet nie van nog ’n gesang wat so toepaslik is vir die delwerye
nie.
Daarna het sy die sondvloed met die leerlinge behandel; en al het
sy dit nou nie juis altyd streng ortodoks gedoen nie, tog het sy
meesterlik daarin geslaag om dit interessant voor te dra en die
kinders se aandag te boei.
Na afloop van die les sê sy: „Nou, kinders, kan julle vrae stel oor
enigiets wat julle nie duidelik is nie.”
„Juffrou,” en agter in die klas gaan ’n vuil handjie omhoog, „het
Noag vlieë en vlooie ook in die ark geneem?”—Hierdie insektetjies is
vreeslik lastig op die diekens.
„Ek dink seker, Kosie,” antwoord die onderwyseres.
„Maar hoor dis jammer dat die ding nie vergaan het nie,” weer van
Kosie.
„Maar, Kosie, dan sou die mense en die diere ook mos saam
verongeluk het, en dan sou geeneen van ons mos vandag hier
gewees het nie,” herneem Juffrou.
 „Ja, dis ook weer waar,” sê Kosie. Dog op sy gesiggie is ’n
onverskillige uitdrukking duidelik leesbaar, en dis nie moeilik om te
ontsyfer wat in sy breintjie omgaan nie: As die mens moes gespaar
gebly het om sy lewe op die delwerye te slyt, dan was die redding
van Noag en sy kroos ’n groot fout.
„Juffrou,” en vlak voor haar word ’n handjie omhoog gehou van ’n
meisietjie met groot blou kykers en ’n maer gesiggie wat van
ondervoeding getuig, „Juffrou, glo Juffrou alles wat in die Bybel
staan?”
„Hoekom vra jy dit, Miemie?” sê die onderwyseres sonder om
haarself te kompromiteer.
„Omdat my pa sê dis somar alles kaf, maar Mammie sê weer dis
alles die heilige waarheid. En al glo ek vir my mammie, want sy is so
goed, tog wil ek graag weet wat Juffrou dink.”
„Ek stem saam met jou mammie,” bevestig Juffrou.
Hier val ek in: „Waar is jou ouer sustertjie, Miemie?”
„Sy is siek, Meneer, baie siek. Sy laat groete weet en sal tog so
bly wees as Meneer net vir haar ’n oomblikkie wil kom besoek
voordat Meneer wegry. Sy het so vorentoe gekyk na die inspeksie,
maar nou...” en hier swem klein Miemie se oë in die trane.
„Nou goed. Sê vir Annie ek kom haar vanmiddag besoek en sy
moet gou gesond word.”
Dis snaaks dat ek vir Annie Losper so goed onthou het. Ek kon
sedert my vorige besoek nooit haar gesiggie uit my geheue verban
nie. Uit ’n allerarmoedigste huisgesin, het tog haar oë en die soet
uitdrukking van die gesiggie somar dadelik ’n mens getref. In haar
klas was sy maklik nommer een in elke opsig, en die onderwyseres,
iemand van lang ervaring, het my verseker dat sy nog nooit van te
vore so ’n kind in haar klas gehad het nie. Haar opmerking verlede
jaar was dan ook snaaks genoeg: „Ek glo nie sy is vir hierdie wêreld
nie!”
Eindelik was die inspeksie afgeloop en kon die skool vir die dag
sluit. Die werk was baie bevredigend, en die juffrou en die kinders
het ’n pluimpie gekry.
Nou wag daar nog ’n paar lede van die Skoolkommissie; maar ook
hulle moeilikhede is ten laaste opgelos, en nou was ek net haastig
om weg te kom.
Onder al die werksaamhede van die dag het ek Annie glad
vergeet.

III.
Die delwer het heelwat goeie hoedanighede, en as ’n mens geleer
het om sy minder beskaafde karaktertrekke nie raak te sien nie, dan
begin jy hom werklik liefkry.
Dit was al na drie toe ek kon vertrek, en ek het nog nie eers die
tyd kon vind om te eet nie. Ek het my derhalwe gehaas om by die
huis te kom. Voordat ek egter die delwery uit was, bars daar ’n
vreeslike onweer los wat my verplig om in die eerste die beste huisie
skuiling te soek. My gasheer was ’n man van sowat dertig somers en
ongetroud. Aan alles in die hutjie kon ’n mens merk dat hy beter dae
geken het. Sy opmerking by my binnekoms was dan ook vreemd
genoeg: „Jy het seker gedink toe jy by my deur instap:

„Man wants but little here below,

Nor wants that little long!”

„Jy het reg geraai,” antwoord ek, „maar wat soek jy hier op die
delwery?”
„My naam is Fanie Renier en ek is ’n teruggekeerde soldaat wat
vir reg en geregtigheid onskadelik gemaak is,” sê hy op ’n bitter toon,
„en wat toe na die delwerye gestuur is met £20 om hier te kom
vrek!... Maar het jy al geëet?”
„Nee, ou broer, maar moenie moeite maak nie; kos is seker by jou
nie alte volop nie.”
Sonder om hom aan my te steur steek hy ’n Primus-stofie op, bak
gou ’n paar eiers, braai ’n stukkie vleis en sit vir my dit voor met ’n
stukkie droë brood en koffie.... Ek het later uitgevind dat hy my sy
laaste leeftog voorgesit het en dat hy die volgende dag sonder kos
moes bly. Vandaar dan ook die gesegde in Transvaal: „By ’n trekker
en ’n delwer is ’n mens altyd welkom.”
Die weer het eindelik opgeklaar, en na ’n hartlike dankie aan my
nuwe kennis wou ek op die moter klim.
„Kyk hier,” sê hy, terwyl hy my aan die arm vat, „kan julle dan niks
doen vir die mense wat hier langs my woon nie? Die toestand van
hierdie famielie is allerellendigs. Die vader suip soos ’n vis, die
moeder is in die bed met ’n babetjie, die oudste dogtertjie lê siek, en
die ander kinders word totaal verwaarloos. Ek glo nie daar is ’n
stukkie kos in daardie huisie te kry nie. So ver ek kon het ek gehelp,
maar op die oomblik is ek self poot-uit. Kan jy nie nog ’n oomblikkie
spaar om saam met my te gaan kyk nie?”
Om die waarheid te sê, het ek maar min lus daarvoor gevoel,
maar meer om my gasheer tevrede te stel as om enige ander rede
het ek ingewillig.
Die famielie het maar ’n paar tree van Fanie se huisie gewoon, en
ons was dus gou by ons bestemming. Nou het ek al gewoon geword
om enige pondokkie op ’n delwery as geskik vir menslike verblyf te
beskou, maar so ’n krot as waar ons nou voor staan, het ek nog
nooit gesien nie. Hoe enige persoon in so iets kan lewe, is vir my
nou nog ’n raaisel! Die hutjie het bestaan uit ’n klompie oopgevlekte
parafienblikke wat op een of ander manier aan mekaar getimmer
was, met seilsakke hier en daar tussenin om as vensters te dien.
Ons kruip hande-viervoet in, en ons oë moes eers gewoon word
aan die half-duister voor ons iets binne kon onderskei.
„Ruk daardie sak solank af asseblief,” sê ek aan Fanie, „sodat ’n
mens kan sien en asem kan skep.”
Hy doen dit op my versoek, en toe ontvou hom daar ’n toneel aan
ons oë, so hartverskeurend soos ek nog nooit van te vore gesien het
nie of hoop om ooit weer getuie van te wees nie.
In die een hoek op ’n klomp sakke wat oor droë gras gesprei is, lê
die moeder met haar babetjie, en onder by die voetenent op ’n paar
sakke die siek dogtertjie, wat niemand anders as Annie Losper was
nie. My nuwe kennis en ek kon ons met moeite omdraai in die
kamertjie.
„Die dokter was vanmôre hier,” fluister Renier in my oor, „en hy sê
daar is nie hoop vir Annie nie. Haar liggaampie is deur gedurige
ondervoeding te uitgeput om die siekte af te skud.”
Dis my later meegedeel dat Renier ses maande na hierdie voorval
nog altyd doktersrekening afbetaal het.
„Dag, Annie,” groet ek so opgewek as ek kon onder die treurige
omstandighede, „en hoe gaan dit met jou, my kind?”
„Nie alte sleg nie, Meneer, maar ek was tog so spyt dat ek nie
vandag op skool kon wees nie,” antwoord sy met ’n flou glimlaggie,
en haar stemmetjie was so swak dat ek haar amper nie kon verstaan
nie.
„Ag, moenie vir jou kwel nie, my kind; jy sal tog in ieder geval
oorgeplaas word na ’n hoër standerd. Hou maar vir jou stil sodat jy
gou kan gesond word. Aanstaande jaar hoop ek seker om jou weer
eerste in jou klas te sien staan.”
’n Hemelse glimlaggie speel om die bleek ou mondjie. Sy skud
haar koppie en nouliks hoorbaar fluister sy: „Aanstaande jaar sal ek
nie meer op skool wees nie.”
„Ag nee wat, Annie, jy is nog glad te jonk om uit die skool te gaan,”
en ek maak asof ek haar nie reg begryp het nie, „en die
onderwyseres sal dit mos nooit toelaat nie. Maar moenie meer praat
nie; dit maak jou alte moeg. Probeer liewer om ’n bietjie te rus.”
Ek moes nou my oor vlak teen haar mondjie hou om te hoor wat
sy sê. Gelukkig het Renier die moeder besig gehou en sy het dus nie
gemerk wat hier by haar plaasvind nie.
„Meneer,” en sy kyk my stip in die oë, „sal Meneer nie asseblief vir
my saggies Psalm 23 opsê nie? Ek het dit laas nog by die inspeksie
vir Meneer opgesê.”
Dis die eerste keer wat ek die rol van sieke-trooster en predikant
moes vervul, maar ek het dit gedoen so goed as ek kon. Ek het haar
uitgeteerde handjies in myne geneem en toe daardie mooi Psalm so
goed as ek kon opgesê. Toe ek klaar was, kon ek nog ’n flou dankie
hoor en daarna die woorde: „Al gaan ek ook in die dal van die
skaduwee van die dood, dan sou ek nie kwaad vrees nie.” Toe breek
die mooi blou ogies, die handjies word koud, en Annie Losper was in
’n beter wêreld oorgeplant.
Die handjies het ek eerbiedig op die borsie gekruis, ’n sagte
soentjie op die voorkoppie gedruk, en toe letterlik die pondokkie
uitgevlug. My gemoed was te vol; ek kon die droefheid en hartseer
ook nie aansien nie.
Uit die tent kom die angsgeskrei van ’n gebroke moederhart: „O,
my God! My kind! My kind!”
Buite het ek vir Renier gewag. Aan sy gesig kon ek sien dat ook
hy ontroerd was. Daar is geen woord tussen ons gewissel nie, net ’n
warm handdruk wedersyds, en toe het ek op die moter geklim en
huis-toe gery.
 HENDRIK BLITS.
I.
Wat Hendrik Blits se regte naam was, kon niemand van die
delwers my vertel nie. Hierdie bynaam het hy verwerf, eerstens
omdat hy hom gereeld elke naweek dronk gedrink het aan
kafferblits, en twedens omdat sy taal dan by sulke geleenthede so
sterk gekleur was.
My kennismaking met Hendrik was nogal baie buitengewoon. Op
’n koue môre in Julie het ek my op Diamantkuil bevind, waar ek in
gesprek was met die hoof van die Goewerment-skool, toe hy die
opmerking maak: „Allewêreld, hoe mishandel so ’n Groot Lawaai
weer vanoggend die stomme donkies!”
Groot Lawaai was die naam van ’n groot, vierkantige lummel van
’n vent. Hy was ’n baster en ’n boelie so groot as wat daar te vinde
is. Om sy grootte en krag het die delwers hom met respek behandel
en verder maar so veel moontlik uit sy pad gebly. Ek kyk in die
rigting waar die hoof wys, en daar sien ek ’n waterwa met veertien
donkies bespan, krakend en waggelend die spruit se wal uitkom. Dit
was duidelik dat die donkies so skaars-skaars die wa kon uitbring.
En g’n wonder nie! Gras was daar op die hele delwery nie genoeg vir
’n paar honderd sprinkane nie, laat staan ’n paar honderd diere. En
op hierdie veld moet die arme donkies nou snags hulle pense
volvreet, na ’n dag van swaar trek en mishandeling.
’n Diamantkoper wat ook vroeër gedelf het, het eendag die
onderstaande opmerking in my teenwoordigheid gemaak: „Twee
dinge dank ek die liewe Vader dat ek nie is nie: ’n delwer se donkie
en ’n delwer se vrou!” Sedert dié tyd het ek eersgenoemde bewering
ongelukkig al oor en oor gestaaf gesien.
 Wel, die veertien donkies van Groot Lawaai was g’n uitsondering
nie; die arme diere was letterlik net vel en been. Om hulle aan die
gang te hou, loop hy op en af langs die span, en terwyl hy die
gruwelikste vloekwoorde uitstoot, gésel hy die donkies
meedogenloos met ’n groot handsambok. ’n Mens kon die doef,
doef, van die houe seker ’n myl ver hoor.
„Maar is hier dan niemand op Diamantkuil om ’n stop aan sulke
wreedheid te sit nie?” vra ek, en ek voel hoe die bloed na my kop toe
bruis.
„Nee,” sê die hoof, „almal is bang vir Groot Lawaai, want hy is ’n
vreeslike woestaard.”
Al nader en nader kom die wa, en al harder en harder klink die
doef, doef van die sambok.
Ek het my al klaar voorgeneem om met die vent te gaan praat en,
as dit nie help nie, die poliesie van die mishandeling van die esels te
gaan verwittig, toe daar skielik uit ’n onverwagte oord ’n ander vir die
donkies in die bres spring.
„O magtig!” roep die hoof verbaasd uit, „wat gaan Hendrik Blits
nou maak? Groot Lawaai sal hom vermorsel. Laat ons nader stap
om, indien moontlik, die rusie te voorkom.”
Ek het nooit die persoon opgemerk wat g’n vyftig tree van ons af
onder ’n doringboom gelê en slaap het nie, voordat die opmerking
van die onderwyser nie my aandag by hom bepaal het nie. Ewe op
sy gemak staan Hendrik Blits op, rek hom uit, gooi sy flenterbaadjie
van hom af en stap reguit na Groot Lawaai toe.
„Kyk hier, jou gemene boelie, as jy nog ’n slag jou arm oplig om
die donkies te slaan, dan dons ek vir jou op. Het jy my begryp, jou
vervloekte baster?”
Die Groot Lawaai se gesig was die moeite werd om te sien. Dis
amper ongelooflik dat ’n mens se gelaatstrekke so kan verander. Die
duiwel, soos hy my in my kinderjare op sy lelikste afgeskilder is, sou
vir hierdie bakkies geskrik het.
 „Jou verd...de kind!” brul Groot Lawaai woedend, „sal jy vir my
kom belet om my eie diere vrek te slaan as ek wil? Jakob! Jou
d..der!” en met hierdie vloek slaan hy die hotagter donkie oor die kop
netso hard as hy kan. Toe draai hy na Hendrik Blits en sê smalend:
„En nou gaan ek van jou frikkadel maak, jou vieslike dronklap.”
’n Mens sou nooit sulke ratheid by Hendrik gesoek het nie, maar
voor jy mes kon sê, ruk hy die handsambok uit die baster se hand uit
en gebied: „Trek uit jou baadjie; ek wil jou op gelyke voet ontmoet,
sodat jy nie naderhand behoef te vertel dat ek jou onder ’n hendikep
’n pak slae gegee het nie. Toe, maak gou as jy nie te lafhartig is nie!”
En Hendrik gooi die sambok neer en plaas sy voet daarop.
Groot Lawaai het hom nie tweemaal laat nooi nie. Hy pluk sy
baadjie uit en onder ’n stroom van die profaanste vloeke loop hy vir
Hendrik storm. Van natuur is ek nie iemand wat behae skep in rusie
en bakleiery nie, maar hierdie môre het ek die mieks-op—soos die
delwers sal sê—eerlik geniet, en my hele siel was aan Hendrik se
kant.
’n Man wat baie woedend is, kan nie goed boks nie. Groot Lawaai
was seker tweemaal so sterk as Hendrik Blits, maar waar
laasgenoemde kortgeskiet het in krag, het sy ratheid en kennis van
boks hierdie tekortkoming meer as vergoed.
Hy duik onder Groot Lawaai se arm deur, en voordat die baster sy
ewewig kan herwin, kry hy ’n opstopper op sy kinnebak wat hom
soos ’n besopene laat waggel. Arrie! maar dit het die boelie darem
nie verwag nie. Hierdie veragtelike skepsel wat hy tot stof sou
vermorsel, het hom so wrintig-waar amper onderstebo geslaan. Hy
sal nou sy taktiek verander en versigtiger te werk gaan. Soos ’n
mierkat om ’n slang begin Groot Lawaai al om Hendrik Blits te dans,
totdat hy skielik buk en die handsambok gryp en voordat Hendrik
kan keer, hom ’n hou oer sy gesig gee dat die bloed so tussen vel en
vleis wys.
„Eina! maar dis gemeen!” skree die onderwyser, en hy tel ’n klip op
wat goed ’n paar pond weeg. „Ek voel by my kool lus om die vloek
se kop hiermee te verbrysel!” en hy hef die steen dreigend omhoog.