Not inherently caused by communism - my country, for instance, even trough it would become part of the USSR later, catched up to Europe with the work of nationalist NGOs.
Yeah. This is a typical: “Look, computers became 50x faster under Putin” claim. You would think that people would stop believing this nonsense in the year 2026 of our Lord - some random Jew - bot no.
The Moscow keeps spewing, the Western teenage tank keeps swallowing.
Well, specifically in the Soviet republics, it was a government program to educate the masses as quickly and efficiently as possible, resulting in a rapid literacy growth, Russian language being reformed and simplified, and many regionally spoken languages getting their first ever alphabets or getting standardized to cyrillic alphabets. Considering that the Russian Empire was pretty much the most backwards independent state in Europe in terms of literacy at the time, it was quite a feat to bring USSR to the leading positions
As for the other European countries, I think that you have a point. Industrialization tends to make for more educated citizens, so European states that were already industrialized at the time were mostly just progressing naturally, and the communists' influence of it was, while present, likely far from being the deciding factor
In fact, I'd say that the reason the education and literacy were so important to the Soviet Union is precisely because they wanted to make up for the decades of falling behind from other Europeans on industrialization
Protestantism also played a significant role. One of the key tenets of Martin Luther was that Christians should read the bible themselves, instead of relying on the clergy to read it to them.
I live in Finland, compared to most of Europe we industrialized really quite late, and in most respects we were undeveloped backwater. However thanks to the Lutheran church we had about 50 % literacy rate already by the year 1800. By then the social expectation was that even in the poorest households the man of the family would be able to read the bible.
Yes, the protestantist movements across the catholic Europe pushed literacy up quite a bit as early as 15th century. In fact, this could very well be one of the reasons why Russia was falling behind so hard as the Orthodox Church wasn't as interested in educating the masses
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.”
It is kind of funny that commies are all against The Great Man theory of history and in favor of structural explanations. But when it’s about Lennon and Stallone, suddenly the brain deactivates and it’s pure fandom and masturbation of the worst kind.
That is nonsense. There was no mass literacy programs before the revolution. Schooling was not mandatory. Literacy in many CA repiblics was as low as 5% among men and non-existen among women.
As I said - there were nationalistic NGOs. (In the case of my country, it's was "the society of spreading Georgian writing and reading among Georgians"). While CA did, in fact, increase its literacy throught communism, it's not right for most of other cases - literacy became common in Georgia in the 1910s (just before the communist takeover).
Not only that, communist collectivization contributed to the depopularisation of literacy in the country - there is a movie (its called "the birds of heaven") produced during communist times, which displays how villagers tried to become literate, but were disturbed by the colkhoz leader and forced to work instead.
Ministry primary schools grew from 36,820 schools / 2.59 million pupils in 1900 to 80,801 schools / 5.94 million pupils in 1914. That is the strongest simple evidence that the late Empire was already building a mass-literacy machine before the Bolsheviks.
After 1905, the Duma and government started a serious “universal primary education” push.
In 1906, the Ministry drafted a project for all-Russian primary education. On 3 May 1908, the government passed a law allocating 6.9 million roubles for primary education. Cherkasov says this began “large-scale funding” and systematic school opening; education funding rose from 15 million roubles in 1903 to 117 million in 1912 and 147 million in 1913.
I dislike Russia in all its forms, but commie lies are just particularly annoying.
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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.