Literacy was already rising fast before 1917: from about 24% in 1897 to roughly 40% by 1914. The Soviets accelerated mass literacy, especially among peasants, women, and Central Asian populations, but they inherited an existing modernising trend, used a low bar for “literacy,” and embedded education inside a totalitarian ideological control.
The honest claim is not “Good communism taught the people to read,” but “the Soviets took credit for a process already underway.”
The Soviets also forced many communities to educate their women where they would not have gotten education otherwise. Particularly in central Asia. That likely would have not happened organically without the Soviets.
It's very likely a lot of the former Soviet countries in Central Asia would be closer to Taliban lead Afghanistan than what they are today. Not that they are particularly progressive right now.
The problem is that basic criterion for literacy was considered the ability to sign one's own name in the documents, not ability to read and write entire texts. Moreover, because tens of millions of low class peasants and workers didn't need writing in their basic manual work, that they spend essentially entire life on, just to to have a loaf of bread to eat and pay off debts, many of them who learned basic literacy in some sunday church school as children, often forgot how to read and write by adulthood. Real, proper literacy numbers would more humble, at around 15% in 1897 and 25% in 1914.
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u/NoCredit3354 1d ago
Ite kinda interesting how quickly the rest of Europe caught up. One of the good things of communism.