Likbez

"[7] The likbez campaign was started on December 26, 1919, when Vladimir Lenin signed the decree of the Soviet government "On Eradication of Illiteracy Among the Population of the RSFSR" ("О ликвидации безграмотности среди населения РСФСР").

Lenin had written in The Emancipation of Women that a woman's illiteracy would impair the "fighting spirit" of male party members and prevent wives from grasping their husbands' ideals.

Serving as a propaganda center rather than library, a literate peasant would act as the room's "red reader" and lead discussions on texts sent by the Party directive with members of the local community.

Attendance was most often mandatory, as the reading rooms proved to be one of the Party's most successful propaganda tools, where campaigns would take shape and the locals would hear about happenings in the outside world.

[18] In some extreme cases, during the 1922 famine, many districts required their illiterate male and female populations to attend literacy school in order to earn their food points.

[23] In the early years of the Likbez campaign, the State compulsarily enrolled millions of illiterate Soviets from both town and country in literacy schools, requiring these citizens to engage with the Leninist ideology of pro-literacy.

In this period, Komsomol members and Young Pioneer detachments were also commissioned to spread pro-literacy propaganda in the form of pamphlets and word of mouth to village illiterates.

In the early 1920s, the Bolshevik government emphasized local initiatives and de-emphasized centralized State control to parallel Lenin's New Economic Policy that had been instituted in 1921.

[25] The height of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic's (RSFR) People's Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) literacy campaign lasted until the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, 7 November 1927.

[26] The Russian Transport Union, with its educational administration's 40-50 million ruble annual spending capacity, was largely in charge of seeing to the promulgation of literacy initiatives, transmission of pro-literacy pamphlets, and dissemination of books and reading materials to Union-sponsored schools.

[26] Throughout the 1920s, spreading literacy in the Soviet transportation sector through the building of Union schools held symbolic importance for the State as a means of propaganda in and of itself.

These short stories, chastushki, poems, cartoons, and plays were spread through pamphlets, journals, and wall newspapers and were usually tales about young, single, illiterate women from the countryside.

In 1924, 90% of domestic workers coming from villages were illiterate and were referred to in Soviet literature and propaganda as the "third front," a subset of the population which needed to be raised up through literacy.

[26] As Stalin consolidated his power through the late 1920s, Soviet propaganda largely shifted its focus to center on rapid industrialization and centralized, State control of the economy.

The bodies for promoting literacy whose establishment Likbez had catalyzed throughout the Soviet Union remained in place, but the push for pro-literacy propaganda was not occurring with the same fervor as it had in the previous decade.

After the Civil War and Lenin's institution of the NEP Policy, propaganda posters began increasingly depicting the reforging of Soviet everyday life or byt[31].

[30] Much like the Orthodox Church had done with icons, the Soviet State used propaganda posters to "present symbols in a simple and easily identifiable way, even to barely literate peasants".

[33] Zhenotdel, the Russian Soviet Party's women's section, was a particular force in disseminating pro-literacy pamphlets and posters during the height of the Likbez campaign.

The plot line of women improving their stations in Soviet society through literacy was first introduced in the widely disseminated rags-to-riches tales of domestic workers in the early 1920s.

[34] By achieving literacy, the pamphlet's main character Riabnkova is able to gain autonomy and escape the clutches of her overbearing husband to become a contributing member of Soviet society.

[35] It was not until 1920 that Soviet artists generated a female counterpart for the commonly-used imagery of the male worker or blacksmith that had come into widespread use in post-Civil War propaganda.

Although census takers were given rather strict orders on what was deemed fully literate and even semi-literate, in remote provinces and parts of Central Asia standards were somewhat laxer than in locations with a closer proximity to Moscow.

[38] In non-Russian speaking areas of the Soviet population, Narkompros promoted the policy of Korenizatsiya (literally "putting down the roots") within the separate autonomous regions and republics to the extent that teaching Russian was considered a counter-revolutionary crime.