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- Raissa Maximovna's Club
By Julia Kachalova
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In the not so distant past, which is associated
with the empty counters, the cold war and the ardent expressions of fidelity
to the Cause of the Great Lenin, the so-called friendly circle was the
only possible way build a bridge between the public and the private life.
The friendly circle was a specific type of the self-organization of people
into non-formal public groups, born in the setting of reprisals and the
suppression of the personality. The part, which the friendly circle played
in the life of the Soviet man, was exceptionally great. First, it was a
source of the links, whose value was no less than that of the freely convertible
currency.
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Second, it to a certain measure assumed upon itself the functions of
the social security. And third, it is precisely within this circle of the
single-minded people that the citizens' political convictions took shape,
which were a far cry from those declared at the official meetings. And
finally, the most manifest aspect of the part, played by the friendly circle,
was the possibility of a frank communication and of spending the free time
together.
Our life has drastically changed over the recent decade. The money,
which only yesterday could not buy anything, has become the only deficit.
The problem of the property differentiation of the once homogeneous society
has come into a bold relief. The state has started to demand from its citizens
not to show their fidelity, but to pay the taxes. The Scriptures are now
taught at school. Political anecdotes are openly ventilated on the television,
and the number of the parties can in the nearest future catch up with the
numbers of the country's adult population.
The friendly circle has not survived these changes. The drive for the
money, which has replaced the values of socialism, and a sharp property
stratification, have in many cases caused the dissolution of the former
friendly links. The individual aspects of the integral problem, dealt with
in the past by the friendly circle, have been taken over by the public
and the corporative associations, by the public movements, by the charity
foundations and by the self-support groups. And these days we are witnessing
an unabating growth of popularity of the club-type organizations, which
is a proof that the need to establish new friendly links among the people
with a certain similarity of the concepts, the values and the ways of life
is coming to the fore. People are as a rule getting together in a club
to resolve the problem of communication and of their free time. But their
goals are not restricted to this alone.
The Club of Raissa Maximovna Gorbacheva
has been in existence for less than a year now. An idea to develop her
own socially-important projects, apart from the public activity of her
husband, has come to the spouse of the ex-President of the USSR under the
impact of a multitude of letters, telephone calls and petitions. In all
of them, one and the same question was asked: "You are a woman,
who has managed to destroy the stereotype of the spouse of the first person
of the state, which prevailed in this country for many a year, and to win
recognition of your own social role; why, then, don't you make use of your
potential today?"
One Dutch businessman and public figure, devoting much of his efforts
to charity, has helped to translate this idea into life. One day he has
also asked Raissa Maximovna, why does she not make independent efforts
to try and improve the present position of women in Russia, which is very
precarious, indeed, apart from the activity of her husband. And he has
allocated a certain sum of money, which helped to turn the idea into the
concrete form of Raissa Maximovna's Club.
Today the Club membership consists of 18 persons - 16 women and two
men. Raissa Maximovna Gorbacheva is the President of the Club, and her
daughter, Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya - its Vice-President and chief
organizer of all the Club events. What is it, then, that unites the women
- members of Raissa Maximovna's Club? Irina Virganskaya emphasizes three
points, which are, in her opinion, the most important.
"First of all, all the Club members are the people, who have
realized themselves on the personality, the social and the professional
plane, and who have created for themselves their own name and status in
society. Secondly, they are the people, loyal to our family. We have not
been planning to start a broad political movement, so we have invited only
those people, with whom it is pleasant for us to communicate. And finally,
all members of our Club occupy an active stand in life."
It is probably an active stand in life, typical of the Club members,
that underlies the fact that, when discussing their mission, they have
unanimously decided: they cannot be satisfied with only the pleasure of
communication. The name of Raissa Maximovna, still associated with an image
of the first lady of the state, also imposes certain responsibility, not
letting them reduce the Club's work to a nice pastime alone. Raissa
Maximovna's Club, Irina Virganskaya went on to say, unites representatives
of the intelligentsia, the public figures; this is why we have selected
those forms of work, which are interesting to us and which help us resolve
the problems of great social importance. Today there are many urgent problems,
requiring close attention. To raise a problem, to trigger a public discussion
and a broad response, to render support to practical projects - these are
the goals, which the Club sets itself.
The first public discussion was organized by the Raissa Maximovna's
Club on October 30, 1997, under the name, Russia Today: A Woman's View.
It was attended by the representatives of highly different social groups
and public organizations, so that the range of the raised problems was
very wide. Irina Mikhailovna estimates this first experience rather critically:
"We wanted, first, to initiate a public discussion, and second,
to announce the Club's existence. The media were very active, so that our
second task was fulfilled. As to the public discussion, I think it was
poorly organized. Our principal error, in my opinion, was that we brought
together the people, occupied with vastly different problems (the Soldiers'
Mothers Committee, the associations of women artists, of business women,
etc.). As a result, each of the invited groups raised its own problems
for the most part, while hardly listening to what the others were saying."
The Club members took a different approach to prepare for the second
get-together, to selecting the problem and the would-be participants, too.
Into the focus of the public discussion, held under the name, Our Children:
the Future Image and the Educational Practice, was placed the multifaceted
problem of the upbringing. Raissa Maximovna Gorbacheva said at the opening
of the get-together, that the choice was not made at random: "There
are a great many problems in Russia today, and all of them are urgent and
painful. But no matter in what situation society finds itself, it just
has to think about the future, which is embodied in its children."
The fact that taking part in the discussion were the scholars, pedagogues
and journalists, the heads of non-profit organizations and public figures,
as well as representatives of the authorities, has made it possible to
consider the problem of bringing up the growing generation from different
angles.
Lilia Shevtsova, politologist. "...
We do not see an interest of the state to tackling this problem. Do you
remember The Seven Problems, proclaimed by the young reformers in 1997?
Do you remember The Twelve Problems, also proclaimed, but this time by
the Government? Are there the problems of the youth, or of the children,
among them? You can hardly recollect this now. Of course, we can explain
this by objective reasons: the state is weak, the new society is at the
stage of consolodation, and the problems have been accumulating... Now
there are two roads before us. The first is to try and draw in the state,
just to make it listen. And the other is the initiative on the part of
the citizens, a search for the interested people. And of course, there
exist the initiative, the people and the means, besides the state."
Shalva Amonashvili, Honorary Academician
of the Russian Acedemy of Education: "The face of the school is
the teacher. Any reform in the sphere of education will fail, or will stop
halfway, if the teacher is not renovated. I see two types of the teacher:
The first is characterized by an authoriatarian way of thinking, and the
other - by a humanist one... I have met many teachers in different cities
of Russia. And I am aware how urgently are the Russian teachers striving
for the new. But the teachers' training at the higher educational establishments
is far from perfect. Up to this day, we have been working by the old plans,
and as a result we reproduce the former type of the teacher - of an authoritarian
make."
Marina Arutyunyan, psychologist:
"In the given context, people rarely speak about the situation,
in which the parents have found themselves. And this is a very complicated
problem. The parents have come under a numerous pressure from all sides.
They are relied upon by the elder generation, and by the growing children
as well. Our studies confirm that the middle-aged have succumbed under
the sense of their inability to help their children, as they grow up, on
the professional, the moral and the educational plane - in fact, on any
plane at all. The parents' anxiety, it seems to me, is not the last factor
in the negative phenomena we are faced with every day."
Sergei Sokolov,
teacher and journalist (the New Gazette): "Our children
lack elementary behavioural models, those notorious stereotypes, on which
they can orient. Formerly, such models were formed at school. Today, with
all my respect for the teachers, this does not take place any longer, because
the teacher is no authority. The family is no authority either. Because
a lack of confidence in the adults is passed over to the children, and
they start to perceive the adults as their peers, whom they can even teach
a lesson or two... What is it then, that actually serves to educate our
children, proposing to them new stereotypes and a new set of myths? It
is no other than the mass culture, which may have either the sign of minus,
or the sign of plus. It is here that the leading role, presently assumed
by the media, is manifested as a means of education. And what is typical
today of the journals and the newspapers? First of all, a mercantile consciousness...
Besides, we see an extreme aggressiveness of the printed matter and of
the TV programmes, manifest in the choice of the material and in the manner
of presenting it by the TV dictors: their intonation alone may plunge a
child into a state of profound depression. Disputes have been held for
a long time on the issue, whether aggression on the TV screen can take
off psychological complexes. It can do so in a healthy society, but in
our society it is just the opposite: it can only provoke them."
Olga Zdravomyslova,
sociologist: "What do we expect from our children? We expect
that they can achieve that, in which we have ourselves failed. We want
our children to be capable of achieving an individual success. The past
generations of Soviet people have never set themselves the goal of achieving
an individual success ... so that our children have to orient themselves
onto the American model of achieving success, because there is no Russian
model in existence. But for the American model of success, we have no ethical
grounds elaborated in the present-day Russian culture, and this is a serious
handicap... One of the myths of the era of the transformations and revolutions
says that a deep gap appears between the generations. However, we do no
proff of this in our studies. The children have no other model, except
for that provided by the parents, but they are faced with a fundamentally
different life problem... Much have been said here about the fact that
the values and the norms are upset, and that we should create an army of
salvation for children. It seems to me that all of us are trying to understand,
whether we can achieve success and at the same time remain moral in our
society, relying on the Russian culture (and not taking over a ready-made
model, be it an American or a West European one)."
***
The above citations from the reports of
some participants in the debates give a very approximate idea of the different
approaches to education, expressed in the course of the discussion. On
the whole, one of the central goals, set in this get-together, was an attempt
at bringing closer the pedagogues theoreticians and the people, engaged
in the practical work of educating the growing generation, at assisting
them to reach a better mutual understanding and thus to build a bridge
between theory and practice.
"As we analyse the strong and the weak points of this event,"
says Irina Virganskaya, "we should point it out that on the
whole we have succeeded in delineating the circle of problems, involved
in the upbringing of children in contemporary Russia, in launching a public
discussion and in calling forth a public response. However, in the course
of the discussion itself, the gap between the theoretians and the people,
engaged in the live, practical work, have come into the limelight. The
former see the tasks, faced by the practitioners, as trifling, while the
latter accuse the theoreticians of being too much aloof from the realities.
So finally we all have been aware that the problem of the gap, existing
between theory and practice, should be resolved not in words, but by a
different means."
The Club members have decided to select the most interesting out of
the practical projects, submitted during the discussion, and to try and
find support for them. Thus, the public discussion was followed by another,
though a small-scale, event, to which we invited representatives of the
three organizations, whose projects were selected by the Club members as
the most promising, a few honorary guests and the would-be sponsors. In
the opinion of the participants, this event, held jointly with the Obshchaya
(Common) Gazette, was a success, and its concrete practical outcome has
demonstrated that this form of work is very promising. Here is what Elena
Topoleva, a Club member, said: 'The typical distinction of Raissa Maximovna's
Club from the majority of similar entities consists in that here they are
not satisfied with only debating the problems but are looking for the promising
non-profit projects and are trying to support them. This is not always
expressed in a monetary form, for the practice proves that rather often,
publicity alone is enough for making a successful start."
Now, the problem of homeless children is on the Club's agenda. "At
our next event, we shall try to analyze the sources of the child homelessness
and why this problem has assumed so frightening dimensions," says
Irina Virganiskaya. "In the course of the discussion, we shall
once again put forth certain practical projects, and then we are planning
to stage a large-scale charity action. We are often asked," Irina
goes on, "why is it that the Club does not concentrate its attention
on some individual problem. It is possible that, if the Club members represented
a single profession or were engaged in a uniform sphere of activity, we
would have tried to tackle a single concrete problem. But as it is, all
of us are quite different people, and we are united not by any professional
interest, but by a deep conviction that the civil society is unimaginable
without public initiatives. In no country across the world (the more so
in this country) can the state embrace the entire circle of problems. The
vacuum must be filled in, and who must do this? It is the non-profit organizations
and private initiatives, of course! And it is precisely at rendering assistance
to the public organizations, which assume upon themselves the resolution
of various socially important problems, that the activity of our Club it
aimed."
Well, we wish success on
this noble road to Raissa Maximovna's Club from the bottom of our hearts!
