Likbez

Conditions and the decree

Literacy in Russia at the time of the revolution varied sharply by region and by sex. Rates among urban men were considerable, while those among rural women and in non-Russian regions were very low, and the majority of the population could not read or write. A Sovnarkom decree of 26 December 1919 imposed an obligation to study on every illiterate person between the ages of eight and fifty.

The decree provided that study could take place in the native language or in Russian. Combined with the work of devising scripts for languages that had none, this provision meant that likbez ran alongside the language policy of korenizatsiya.

Organization and method

The apparatus had three tiers. An All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy under the education commissariat directed policy, tens of thousands of likpunkty, or literacy stations, were set up locally, and the voluntary society Down with Illiteracy, founded in 1923, mobilized teachers and raised funds.

Political instruction was built into the content. Because Lenin regarded literacy as the precondition of political consciousness, courses in political literacy were made compulsory alongside reading and writing. The sentences in the primers themselves were composed around soviet power, labour, and cooperatives, and this combination defined the character of the campaign.

Results and limits

At the census of 1939 literacy among those aged sixteen to fifty approached ninety percent. As a case of adult education conducted on a mass scale in a short period, the campaign became a reference point in twentieth-century literacy policy.

Its limits were also clear. Gaps between city and countryside and between men and women persisted for decades, and early gains were often not retained, so that re-teaching was required. In some cases the definition of literacy itself extended no further than signing one's name and simple reading, which calls for care in reading the statistics.

The results nonetheless became the condition of other policies. Mass mobilization through newspapers and pamphlets, the expansion of technical education, and the popular reception of cultural policy all presupposed an expanded literate population. In that sense likbez is treated as the foundational work of early Soviet social policy.