In April 1936, Executive Secretary of the Child Welfare Council of Toronto Margaret Gould, travelled to the Soviet Union with her colleagues, Dora Wilensky and Kathleen Gorrie. Their trip to the U.S.S.R, sponsored by the Toronto Star, was part of a larger voyage to Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and England, with the intent to inspect the social services in each country, especially those available for women and children. Following her trip, Gould published a series of articles in the Star, which were combined and published in a 1937 monograph titled I Visit the Soviets. This book, comprised of eight chapters, contained Gould’s observations about education, recreation, nutrition and housing, family welfare and religion in the Soviet Union.

Gould wrote that the biggest limitation to “accurate” or balanced observations of the U.S.S.R. was tourists’ tendency to make comparisons between the Soviet Union and their home countries. She claimed her analysis of the Russian situation was more nuanced because of her study of Soviet history. Unlike other visitors, who “judge from their own ‘conditioned’ outlook and standards, and … fail, utterly, to understand,” she claimed to have treated her trip to the Soviet Union like “a laboratory, with the proper equipment,” that is, a prior understanding knowledge of the history of the people (iv). “Our Canadian eyes,” she wrote, “our Canadian standards, are of no help to us in judging this country. We need instead a knowledge of Russian history, Russian customs and psychology” (6). Russia’s past, not Canada’s present, was a fairer basis of comparison, according to Gould (iv).

Gould and her companions found the Soviet experiment exciting because they saw it as “the world’ first laboratory where plans for human betterment are being put into practice by and for the whole population, on a national scale and according to a national plan” (iii). Social services in Russia were helping people “help themselves” (iii). The peoples of the Soviet Union were “remaking their lives by working and sharing together” (iii). She claimed not to aim to vilify or praise developments and changes in the U.S.S.R., but rather stressed that the country and its peoples were the products of their own histories, that the Soviet Union, like any country or human being, “can neither be completely villainous nor completely angelic […] both will show the uneven marks of neglect or development” (iii).

Gould had difficulty reconciling the apparent gulf between citizens’ appearances and wealth. Under a section titled “Through the Looking-Glass,” she related an episode with a young workman who claimed that most tourists in the Soviet Union judged the wealth of a person based on his or her outward appearance, “by externals,” and indeed Gould had already formed the judgment that he was “unquestionably poor” (5). But the man claimed to be living well: “ ‘We eat enough,’” he said, “ ‘and I put money in the savings bank’” (6). Outside appearances, she found “were utterly misleading […] we are introduced to a man who looks obviously a peasant, and learn that he is a research assistant in the famous Pavlov Institute” (6). Peasants she met on board a ship on the Black Sea appeared “so ragged and beggarly” that “no one could suspect them of having even a couple of kopecks to rub together.” Yet, as she watched them, she saw that they did have money. She wrote, “they ate, played chess, talked, laughed, slept and had such a holiday on the Black Sea” (25). “When did a peasant,” she mused, “eat more than black bread and ‘kvass’? […] these peasants were picnicking on undreamed of luxury foods: smoked fish, ‘halva,’ fresh cucumbers, fruit, milk, sausage” (28). These were foods, Gould thought, that “only the baron, the lord of the manor” ate. She concluded that her own “North American” judgment of happiness was skewed to misunderstand the happiness and wealth of Soviets citizens:

We materialistic Americans need to revise our measure of values. We have to apply psychological and spiritual yardsticks when we go there. Over the Russian family’s head does not hang the deadly sword of fear. They need not fear sickness, incapacitation, or old age. At present, they do not fear unemployment either. These fears eat the hearts of better dressed workmen in other parts of the world (165).

Fears of want, of unemployment, of lack of medical attention, were fears thatSoviets had freed themselves from when they refashioned their lives by “working and sharing together” (iii).

In a chapter entitled “Personal Adventures,” Gould claimed to have spoken to many different kinds of people, and not only those employed in the social services in Russia. She and her colleagues “were entertained by Russian families in their homes,” spoke to children, students, artisans, soldiers, “old people, the ‘expropriated’ people, the pious people” (ii). The conversations she included in the book reflected Soviet people’s outlooks on their country’s situation. She was careful to point out that these views were diverse. Had life, as the official slogan claimed, “become better, comrades, life is more joyous”? Gould and her companions heard from s some workmen and their families that life was indeed better because their monthly income was considerably higher (9). Others felt life was better because they could purchase goods and children ate more butter and milk. The skilled workers, Gould found from her interviews, were the “aristocrats”; these workers, she found, were the ones to have benefitted the most from the Soviet plan.

Happiness was not, however, universal. “Complaints, arguments and lots of talk are common here,” Gould wrote (14). People complained about service at restaurants and crowded public transit systems and argued with the police (14-15). She saw generational gaps in people’s attitudes towards the new state. Older generations from the czarist days looked back with longing on their former class status and were deeply displeased at the idea of having to work for themselves. The younger people enjoyed their newfound ability to purchase extraneous (and pricey) goods (pastries, salted fish, more than one pair of boots, new dishes, etc.) with their saved earnings. “I began to classify the old and the young generations into the discontented and the contented” (22). Gould was amazed at the variation in attitudes towards the changing state of the USSR. In her view, Soviet social services seemed to make opportunity for many who had none before. Still, some spent their days “brood[ing] about the past,” while Gould heard others “plan and hope and enthuse about the future” (22).

Gould spent some time relating her experiences with homelessness and poverty in cities. “Social workers,” she wrote, could easily spot beggars, and “we can also tell the type of beggar he or she may be” (39). In the czarist times, Gould wrote, the ‘Bezprisornie’ (“without a roof”) were everywhere in Russian cities. They “were like gutter rats, and as gutter rats they were a serious menace to life and property. They infested the large cities” (40). She had heard from other tourists who had gone during the 1920s that in Moscow at that time, “it was impossible to walk a block on the street, without being accosted” (41). Yet, Gould found that the Soviet solution — criminalizing homelessness and “beggary” – was working. She was told by some Russians that aiding a poor person was equivalent to encouraging idleness, considered a “counter-revolutionary” act. Since everyone was required to contribute to the Soviet scheme with their work, and since work was supposed to exist in abundance everywhere, there was “no need” for begging. Those who were not punished were institutionalized in hospitals, factories or homes for the elderly. Like the dissolution of the upper classes that many of the elderly resented, this anti-beggary activity was part of the overall project to “liquidate” class difference. Gould was skeptical that outlawing poverty could actually remove it. She wrote that Russia may have “‘liquidated,’ or stamped out beggary, but we know that it not possible in one generation to ‘liquidate’ all the dark spots in human nature” (42). Gould remained disturbed by her encounters with beggars in Russian cities, finding that forcible institutionalization was not a sufficient solution in a country with such widespread, accessible social services.

Gould found that in Soviet Russia, education began at the pre-natal stage [for mothers] and was carried on at all stages and seemingly in all areas of life. “While waiting for the new generation of skilled and educated workers,” she saw, “there is a feverish attempt to enlighten the present one” (49). The “feverish attempt” affected everything from public school curriculum to the consumption of food to the production of toys and the publishing and selling of books. The goal of the education system, beginning its work even before birth, was “to make the Russian child a social being, a cooperating member of an active, dynamic community” (43). The system ran on three principles. First, “there is no education of an idle class. Everyone is expected to work, to be a productive member of society. Second, there should not be a snobbish gulf between the brain worker and the hand worker […] third, there should not be a gulf between the city worker and the rural worker” (51).

All education was free, as was necessary to production skilled workers and “intelligent cultured citizens” (48). She found that the “vocational” education system of Russia began its work early, in nursery school and kindergarten, where toddlers had “practical toys and tools and began to work co-operatively on practical, constructive tasks” (50). At the primary school level, Gould found the whole range of subjects taught through the age of seventeen. She was perhaps most struck by the level of guidance provided outside of the classroom. After school groups, like the children’s organization, the Pioneers provided extra-curricular educational space while evening classes were offered to educate parents on securing the success of their children. Teachers of day schools ran and organized both of these activities.

Children’s books were written with the express intent of preparing children to be future contributors to the Soviet social project. She observed that “whatever happens in the adult world is translated into children’s books” (60). In Leningrad, Gould entered what she thought was a children’s book store and found what appeared to be another classroom or recreation centre, filled with Russian children, small colourful chairs, and children’s books. It was a public reading room for children. The purpose of books in Soviet Russia, she observed, was to make the child know and understand the world around him […] books should influence a child to become strong, truthful, busy, unafraid of life” (62). Gould was amazed to find one book that described the Russian five-year plans to its young readers “in astonishingly simple language and illustrations” (60).

Gould found evidence that the Soviet state’s values had even affected the sphere of toy-making. She was introduced to the belief that toys had to be “artistic and accurately made” to develop the “social and work interests of the child” (66-67). She was surprised by the hands-on approach the government took even to toy sales, setting up a department in toy stores called “Pedagogical Consultation Sections” based on the philosophy that “the toy directs the child’s interest and creates conceptions in his mind” (63; 65). In 1931, “the government had appointed a commission consisting of artists, painters, carpenters, teachers, inventors, psychologists and toy makers, to go into this matter of new toys for the new Russian child” (65). A building up of a class of social beings was the driving force of an educational system that reached beyond the mother and child institutions and schools.

Some of “our most delightful memories,” wrote Gould, were formed in toyshops, where she and her colleagues watched children lead their parents around the store and pick what they wanted. “We saw a lot of sturdy youngsters strutting around the shops […] pointing out what they wanted, and it was bought for them” (64). This self-directed toy buying was part of the Soviet plan to develop people into “social beings” from youth. The Russians, Gould found, wanted to produce and sell “practical” toys for children to develop actively social and industrious people. At schools and daycares Gould saw construction toys that “taught them how to build, how to put together machines, how to assemble an automobile, a ship, an aeroplane” (65). Toys were also designed to encourage collective work and play. The most popular toy she saw was a conveyor built, at which both boys and girls in a line assembled toy machines or cars. She also noted a board game called “Kholkhoz,” named after collective farms, which permitted children “working together to organize a complete farm, with agricultural machinery, animals and people” (67). She ended her discussion of toys by recognizing that some might criticize this “toy consciousness” as a use of propaganda targeted toward malleable youth. Those she spoke to admitted readily that toys were “educators” by which the U.S.S.R could reach the understanding of its children.

The successes of social services in a nation hinged on its treatment and training of professionals in the social services, Gould believed. Gould was interested in Soviet school teachers who, prior to the revolution, were considered a threat to the regime. She discovered that a “continuous problem” in the U.S.S.R. was to “improve the teacher,” and numerous steps were being taken to do so. When teachers were raised to the “level” of factory workers in the 1930s, though, some continued to be considered suspicious because of their loyalties to the former government. But other teachers, she heard, “who rolled up [their] sleeves and helped to organize the new schools” had become heroes (54). Teachers received all the same social services as other workers in the U.S.S.R. Their union paid for special training, leave time, transportation and social insurance, to which the government contributed as well. Gould felt “tremendously interested” as a “professional” in social work, to see “how a sister profession grows and functions” (55). She discovered the Union provided a special fund for summer trips for teachers so they could travel and “study the country” (57). Gould found similarities in the attitude Russians had toward teachers and the Canadian attitude. When one teacher explained that teachers “ ‘play an important role in raising the level of cultural life,’” Gould thought to herself, “we think so too” (57). Yet, she saw differences in the systematic treatment of teachers, describing with great interest the lengthy measures the Soviets took to encourage teaching, and recognizing the much heavier, more “social work”-like workload a teacher, who might also find “herself the leader in local campaigns for sanitation, child welfare, literacy, etc.” could have there (57).

Gould was surprised at the degree of gender equality, and the lack of separation of boys and girls, in classrooms. “‘It interests me,’” she said to one Russian, “‘that your boys and girls have so many activities in common’” (67). When the woman laughed at Gould’s suggestion that boys and girls received separate educations in Canada, Gould pressed her about gendered education in Russia. “‘Doesn’t it lead to difficult situations, particularly among the older ones?’” she asked (68). The doctor responded that equality and openness in the classroom fostered respect among people. Sexuality, Gould was interested to find, was also not considered taboo. “Education authorities,” she wrote, consider that children should have sex explained in the proper light” to do so allowed for “the spread of healthy, sane, sex knowledge” and was intended to protect against sexually-transmitted diseases, some of which (venereal disease) were treated as serious, national threats. Gould saw sex education everywhere. Posters, radio commercials, magazines and cinema reels pushed the importance of safe, healthy and married sex.

Children’s theatres were of especial interest to Gould. Their “pedagogical” intent was as much a part of the social and education systems in the Soviet Union as were schools and teachers. At the theatre, Gould wrote, “We were enthralled.” (75). “What the children do out of school hours,” she wrote, is of “as much concern to the education department as what they do at school” (76). Writers, actors and producers consulted with child psychologists in producing plays that fit the understanding and tastes of the children. “The theatre here is taken seriously,” Gould found. “It is entertainment, yes, but not empty, soggy, meaningless entertainment, which leaves one with a sour taste in the mouth.” (77). Plays were interactive and dialogical, specially designed for Russian children, and the theatre house was warm, colourful and “luxurious” (76). She considered it a “place of spiritual warmth and revival, a place which fired the imagination, the minds and natural idealism of youngsters” (76-77). She was surprised by differences she saw in theatre operations between Kiev and Moscow: “Aha, we thought, so they want individualism in their art […] we were glad to hear that” (78). Specially constructed theatres and performances, Gould was excited to find, tied together recreation and education in the U.S.S.R.

Clubhouses for youth organizations, like the theatre, provided more “productive” recreational space. Outside of school, learning continued. Like schools, she found recreation centres and clubhouses to be “a combination of work and play.” Children were “urged to use their initiative. They are made to feel that Russia depends on them” (89). “Social work” was carried out by youths in these recreation centres and among the young “Pioneers”: cleaning streets, taking work at farms and factories, and looking after the successes of younger students. Pioneer camps sent their members to the country to teach reading and writing to peasants; camps made “children’s play activities” practical, directed towards the construction of the Soviet social project (92). Gould was asked about what social work Canadian students did in their communities.

Seeking information about the treatment of family and childhood in the Soviet Union, Gould and her companions visited relatives and friends and asked their hosts about family life, who questioned them about Canadian family life in return. She found family life to be “a common feature here” and that “family ties are very strong” (123). “Just as at home,” she wrote, mothers and wives cooked meals, fathers sat at the head of the table, and the whole family sat down to their meals together (122). One who “shirks” his or her family duty, Gould observed, meets with stern criticism. Parenthood and attention to family were considered part of good citizenship. Deserters and divorcées were considered “anti-social and ‘uncultured’” (124). Unregistered marriages, divorce and abortion were frowned on and highly regulated.

Greater attention was being paid by the Soviet government to remedy the discomforts and potential interruptions of life attendant to childbirth. Skeptical of the government’s “sweeping” plan to provide to every mother free medical care and hospital stay, a monthly sum for the first year of the baby’s life, nursery care while at work and extra time off work for nursing, she and her companions visited the Institute for Mother and Child. There, she found a “warm and personal” environment; “the beauty of this place held us spellbound,” she wrote (128). Its exhibits and employees were there to teach mothers how to care for themselves and their children. In spite of feeling spellbound by the Institution, she remained a little skeptical. She and her companions wondered “whether in such an ambitious program quality might not be sacrificed for quantity” (130).

Gould was interested in what appeared to her to be a higher degree of gender equality, making note of the particular position of one acquaintance whom she had met in Toronto. Both of the women she met were doctors, both with children. These working women with working husbands still found time to keep life at home “normal and comfortable” with homes “charmingly furnished with a good deal of warmth and colour” (131). They showed their relative comfort by treating Gould with a hospitality she found notable. One of the women was in fact a member of city council. She was able to carry on busily, Gould was told, because of the social services available to working mothers, and because of the high degree of activity expected of youths at schools and recreational spaces. A working mother had the benefit of services that “help them to maintain the quality of motherhood and homemaking, to combine this with an industrial occupation or a profession, and to enjoy her citizenship.” From her interactions with one family she visited, Gould wrote, “I learned that there is no discrimination against married women” (132). Even peasants and farm women, she was intrigued to find, occupied public positions. Women partook in sports with greater equality than in Canada, and many female athletes and artists were awarded honours for their work.

She and her companions did wonder a little about the interference of work with family life, and the effects of the creche in a young child’s world. Creches, pre-school daycares, Gould found, were everywhere in all kinds of varieties. Many were attached to factories, hospitals and universities. She saw night creches for children whose parents worked at night, and even some in railway stations, for children whose parents commuted. She was impressed by the architectural quality of some of these buildings, and by the high quality of training that staff received, but questioned whether children suffered: “‘it looks to us,’” Gould pointed out to a Russian woman, “‘that mothers here do not spend enough time with their children’” (143). She left unsatisfied with the answer that Russia was “planning” things to increase social services available to working mothers to further lighten their load.

Along with the gender equality she saw, Gould expressed interest in what appeared to be a greater degree of religious and ethnic tolerance. She spent some time describing “a new chapter” of Jewish history in Russia, comparing the lives of Jewish people in the U.S.S.R. to the realities they had faced in Russia historically. When she asked a hotel clerk in Kiev where to find “the Jewish district,” she was met with a “retort in a cold voice” (30). “‘There are no more Jewish districts. All people are equal’ ” (30). Gould noted that she found diverse peoples living peacefully in single districts, and that when she asked about it, people tended to be sharp: “‘We make no distinctions’ ” (30). She assumed the abruptness of people’s responses was an attempt to “wipe out the stigma of their past” (31). Culturally, she thought Jewish people had “complete freedom,” and she visited Jewish theatres and schools.

The government’s treatment of religious practice appeared fairly tolerant to Gould. It forbade other citizens “to interfere with each other’s practices” (149). Religion was considered a private concern; congregations financed their churches, and it was illegal to baptize a child without the consent of the child’s parents. Clergy were forbidden from providing any other services, apart from religious, to the public; all other services were considered secular and so must be maintained separately by the state. Public propaganda was illegal, and all publications were funded privately. Russians were especially resentful towards the religious entities they associated with tyranny and the vast socioeconomic gaps that characterized czarist Russia. One youth questioned Gould about Canada’s churches, asking whether they concerned themselves with “the workers’ cause” (155). Unable to answer the question herself, she resolved to bring it back to Canada and discuss it with religious people there.

She closed her book with a discussion of citizenship and the new Soviet Constitution. As a social worker, she felt particularly excited about stipulations identifying the state’s obligations to its citizens. Anyone who “performs useful work, by hand or by brain,” Gould found, was considered a citizen (157). The basic rights of a citizen included the right to employment, the right to rest and leisure, the right to employment security, the right to education, the right of equal pay (for men and women), freedom of speech, press, and assembly. It was the duty of both the state and the citizen to furnish these rights. Furthermore, all citizens of “sound mind” were enfranchised beings, irrespective of “social origin, property status and past activity” (157). It appeared to Gould that “citizenship carries with it more than the right to vote” (159). The disenfranchised, those who had formerly occupied positions of power and had not fled Russia after the Revolution, remained socially ostracized and isolated. This concerned her, although some whose status had changed assured her that life was better even for the formerly disenfranchised (161). Single party elections seemed to Gould to be, in comparison to the multiple party system in Canada, similar to autocracy. Yet, a Soviet man challenged her when she asked about this, forcing her to admit that “there was no difference in the underlying principle” because both liberal and conservative parties ultimately stood “for the protection and practice of capitalism” (161).

Gould concluded by re-emphasizing that North Americans’ materialistic standards were not adequate to judge the living conditions of people in the Soviet Union. She had attempted to convey a balanced, and not rosy, representation of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, she saw non-material differences between Canada and the U.S.S.R. from which she felt Canadians might learn. What Gould saw was a collective effort to improve economic conditions and overcome social difference. “To us,” she wrote, “the phrase ‘getting ahead’ means to get ahead of the other fellow. To the Russians, it means to get ahead ‘together with’ the other fellow, city with village, blacks with whites” (166). Though Canadians compared their ostensibly better living conditions with those of Russians in terms of materialism, Gould stressed the “intangible differences” that made made U.S.S.R stand out. The Russian citizen, she wrote, “helps to work it [the collective good] out and he reaps the benefits” (166). She emphasized the positive potential of the Five-Year Plans, the means by which the Russians had, in her mind, “hitched their wagon to a star” (166).