Mykolaivka. Who needs a zemstvo school?

We all come from childhood, and we are inevitably bound to it through school. In 2018 the building of the former zemstvo school of the village of Mykolaivka, in the Pokrovsk district of Donetsk region, was granted the status of cultural and historical heritage of Ukraine.

The zemstvo school. Mykolaivka, Pokrovsk district, Donetsk region.

Not in every locality did institutions of public education open before the October Revolution, and, still more, survive through a century.

The Mykolaivka school, built under the tsar, closed by the communists and destroyed under the democrats, stands on the edge of a small village in a half-ruined state, in oblivion and desolation.

But still, it is the only architectural monument in Mykolaivka, where there are two and a half streets, about 300 residents, and not even a grocery shop.

The year of Mykolaivka's founding is recorded as 1810. Serfs resettled here from the Oryol governorate and, in memory of their native parts, called the village Raseika. The toponym endured, and the school, which children from the whole district attended, was called by its location — at Raseika.

In 1908 Mykolaivka numbered 57 households and 443 residents. This was the time of the building, in the Bakhmut uyezd, of single-class public schools, financed by the rural communities but mostly by the zemstvos, for which they were called zemstvo schools. In such institutions they taught arithmetic in the four operations, penmanship and the Law of God. Lessons ran from October to May, when a rural family could spare a helper for study. At Sviatky and Christmas the pupils went on holiday. The buildings of many zemstvo schools were not repaired; often schools were housed in cottages and in unsuited premises. But the pupils of Mykolaivka were lucky — they had a splendid Alma mater.

The Mykolaivka school is a rectangular-plan building with a high plinth, built of red brick in the style of Ukrainian Modern, which developed at the beginning of the 20th century. The large window openings are decorated with casings and squared window cornices. The axis of symmetry runs through the whole building and divides it into two halves. The double entrance doors are adorned with an arched flat brickwork and semicircular windows.

A relief cornice girdles the building. One climbs to the entrance up seven steps, which lends the school a solemnity and grandeur.

The ceramic floor tiles have survived, which were made in the city of Sloviansk at the factory of the joint-stock company 'Dziewulski and Lange'.

The architects used in their building elements of folk art and domestic construction. Perhaps that is why the former pupils considered this rural temple of learning their own home and remember it warmly, and their teachers with gratitude.

The zemstvo school, for 3 classes and 50 pupils, was built in the period 1903-1917. After the revolution, two classes — the first and the second — studied in one classroom in the school. The teacher gave them tasks in turn. If the first class was writing or reading, the second at that time listened to the explanation of new material. In a cupboard were kept exercise books, pens, nibs and reading books, which were handed out before the lesson. There was not enough ink in the school; it was sold to the pupils for money.

In the 1920s the teacher was Ivan Petrovych Mykhailevsky, who lived with his family in the other half of the building. The public teacher had a smallholding and an apiary. In the school yard there was a meteorological post, where the schoolchildren learned to observe the weather. After the war the school had 4 classrooms and a staff room. The heating was by stove. Early in the morning came the old women, as it then seemed to the children, and heated the building before lessons. It was always warm in the school; no one froze.

Through the large windows the rooms were filled with sunlight.

The pupils sat on benches at desks with a sloping surface. The wooden construction was all of a piece. In the school yard there was a shed for storing firewood and coal.

The cellar

The shed

In the arbour, surrounded by lilac bushes, the schoolchildren spent their time during breaks.

The ruins of the arbour

Sports and festive events were held in the school yard.

The road in front of the school

At the end of the 1960s, until the school's closure in 1973, the pupils were brought fresh milk at 2 kopecks a glass and buns at 5 kopecks, which were baked in the cookery of Novoekonomichne. The smell of the school breakfast stayed in the memory for life. In the last years the teachers at the school were: the headmistress Maria Pylypivna Firsova and the teachers Kateryna Yevstafiivna Zahovorych and Nadia Serhiivna Ryzhkova. With the opening in 1973 of a new school in Novoekonomichne and with the school reforms, the primary school in Mykolaivka was closed. For several years the settlement council provided flats in the premises for young specialists, and then a veterinary clinic occupied the building. One room was given to the Society of Hunters and Fishermen.

In the 1990s, with the collapse of the economy, the building was left ownerless and unattended. People came wishing to take it apart for the bricks, but it turned out to be not so simple to break down what had been built to last for centuries and for good deeds. In the years of the Hitlerite occupation the building came under fire, as the bullet marks testify, but the school did not collapse and was not lost.

With pain and bitterness I walked through the classrooms, imagining how the lessons had gone in them.

Even after decades the blessed atmosphere of this temple of learning has not vanished, despite the barbarism within its walls. The doors and floorboards have been torn out, in places the brick has been knocked out, the wiring ripped away. Vandalism and ignorance in an enlightening house, where they sowed the good, the reasonable, the eternal — boorishness and savagery in their purest form. I think these brutes are not from distant places but local ones, who dragged the goods off to their cottages.

It is impossible to justify the criminal inaction and indifference of the local authorities, who not only threw the public school — a public treasure, property, culture and history — to be torn apart, but also had a hand in it themselves.

The sturdy building could have served for many more years. The people who told me about the school believe that it could have been a repair workshop or a sewing atelier.

In 2018, within the framework of the 'Yellow Line' project, the building of the zemstvo school was entered on the list of vanishing objects of the architectural and decorative-cultural heritage of Eastern Ukraine. Caring residents of Mykolaivka and of the settlement of Novoekonomichne, on the initiative of the local historian Serhii Lukovenko, took part in a community work day to put the school yard in order. The activists set up an information board about the building of the zemstvo school in Mykolaivka.

Thanks to this event, its existence in the Pokrovsk district became known. I stood in the school yard, thought about the school, and did not want to leave. That Sunday was the professional holiday of education workers. I dedicate this account to the People's Teachers of the Mykolaivka school.