This is a page from a book of “Illustrated Russian language” which I often used at age 5-6 in my preparation for school, 1st grade, in the Soviet Russia.
We’re on page 59, and the new word to learn is “beet” (репқа). The 7-step beet story goes:
1. A peasant plants a seed. The second day finds a gigantic overgrown beet, big problem!
2. He tries and tries to get it out, all in vain. Calls he’s wife for help – nothing.
3. She calls their daughter for help – still not enough.
6. Dog comes – nothing.
5. Cat – nope.
6. Until finally, the mouse saved the day. Uraaa!
The moral of the soviet story was that the combined brute power of the family solved the difficult harvesting problem. The other hidden “moral” of the story was that the Soviet lands have the richest soils of all, things grow on it by themselves, just wait, the sole problem comes at harvest, the crops grow enormous, but of course, who would mind something like that; in USSR there was no such thing as diminishing returns to labor.
The un-perverted moral of the story is that:
What makes soil a rich resource is its most valued use; you can cultivate thousands of giant beets on your land, but if nobody wants beets, or if there are restrictions on how you could make use of it, than the whole agricultural dream is highly impoverishing. All in all, these sort of stories fooled people into dreaming and hoping for an overnight miracle that would pull them out of poverty. Unfortunately, the giant beet never came. Land plus labor and self sufficiency never was and never will be the key to prosperity no matter how fat the Soviet chernozem…
Finally, a call for a scary thought of brainwashing as education:
= besides seeing this story in my preschool books, I also had it printed on my toys. On cube games, the puzzle type of games when you have to rearrange the printed sides of cubes so that to reconstruct the whole picture.
