Foreign News: Bubnov

“A nice person to be Commisar of Education!”—that was what Bolshevist intellectuals thought but dared not say last week when they heard that Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin had placed in charge of Russia’s schools and universities bold, dashing, ruthless General Andrei Bubnov (pronounced Boobnoff). Dictator Stalin himself is not exactly educated, speaks no language except Russian, has to look up places like “Portugal” in a dog-eared atlas. He knows well enough that General Bubnov was expelled from the Moscow School of Agriculture 26 years ago as a “dangerous radical” and has had little or no formal education since. More important in the Dictator’s eyes is the fact that Bubnov fought valiantly as a commander of guerrilla bands during the Red Revolution, swashbuckled himself into the Supreme Military Council (General Staff), and is sufficiently literate to have edited for several years the Soviet Army’s propaganda magazine Red Star. Kicked out of the Ministry of Education, last week, to make room for General Bubnov, was high-strung, sensitive, super-cultured Anatole Lunacharsky. He encouraged esthetic dancing, once directed an educational motion picture in which his wife was instructively seduced. A good many unesthetic people predict that Bubnov will not do worse.