Likbez (Russian: ликбе́з, Russian pronunciation: [lʲɪɡˈbʲɛs]; a portmanteau of ликвида́ция безгра́мотности, likvidatsiya bezgramotnosti, [lʲɪkvʲɪˈdatsɨjə bʲɪzˈɡramətnəsʲtʲɪ], meaning "elimination of illiteracy") was a campaign of eradication of illiteracy in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. The term was also used for various schools and courses established during the campaign. Nowadays, this term is sometimes used in Russian as slang for teaching an unprepared audience the basic concepts of any science, process or phenomenon.
Background
In 1897, the overall literacy rate of the Russian Empire was an estimated 24%, with the rural literacy rate at 19.7%. There were few schools available to the population, particularly in rural areas. Until the early 20th century, there were still no specific curricular plans or guidelines in the zemstvo schools. In 1891, the literacy schools came under church administration, and maintained a largely religious curriculum, which emphasized the teaching of Old Church Slavonic. The peasantry was largely self-educated, and often relied on schools run by political dissidents for the latter period of tsarist rule. Facing a growing opposition from the general populace, Tsar Alexander II announced a decree that would raise the tuition fee for schools, thus preventing further social mobility for serfs who were allowed free mobility. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas II (1894–1917) liberals pushed for a universal education system, which scholars predict may have expanded if it were not for World War I.
Bolshevik literacy campaign
When the Bolshevik Party came to power in 1917, they faced a crumbling empire infamous for its perceived backwardness and poor education system. In 1917, within the remaining Tsarist territories, an estimated 37.9% of the male population above seven years old was literate and only 12.5% of the female population was literate.
Lenin's views on literacy were rooted in its economic and political benefits. "Without literacy," he declared, "There can be no politics, there can only be rumors, gossip and prejudice." 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"). According to this decree, all people aged 8 to 50 were required to become literate in their native language. 40,000 likbez stations (ликпункты) were set up as centers for education and achieving literacy.
Fighting for time and funding during the ensuing Russian Civil War of 1917–23, Narkompros, the Soviet Ministry of Education, quickly assembled the VeCheKa Likbez (Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия по ликвидации безграмотности (ВЧКл/б), the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy) which was to be responsible for the training of literacy teachers as well as organizing and propagating the literacy campaign. From the peasantry to trade unions, specific literacy percentage quotas were set for different sectors of Soviet society. For example, the trade union campaign aimed for 100% literacy for its workers by 1923. The Bolsheviks also believed that through literary campaigns they could easily promote Party ideology and shape the population's outlook. Women, given their low literacy rate, were regarded as having the highest potential for becoming the "modernizers" of Soviet society. Through the education of peasant women, the Bolsheviks hoped to break down the patriarchal domination of rural society. 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. In the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, the women's literacy campaign was largely carried out by members of the Ali Bayramov Club, a women's organization founded by Azeri Bolshevik women in Baku in 1920.
To further extend their reach to the peasant community, the Bolsheviks built reading rooms in villages across the country. 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.
By 1923, however, it was clear that the campaign had its shortcomings. For one thing, Narkompros was having difficulty competing for funding from the Politburo. The Narkompros budget for literacy education dropped from 2.8% in 1924–5 to 1.6% in 1927–8. Likbez literary schools were not established locally by order of Party elites—instead, they relied heavily on grassroots demand. Narkompros also found it hard to find educated teachers actually willing to live in the isolated conditions of the countryside.
In many cases, peasant and proletarian students met their educators and literacy teachers with hostility due to their "petty bourgeois" backgrounds. To solve this problem, local governments established a system of rewards for workers who attended class, granting special privileges to those who did. 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. Fearing they were not reaching out to the population and making the popular reading frenzy that they had hoped, the Politburo decided to heavily fund and promote clubs and societies such as the Down with Illiteracy society.
History
Early spread
Pro-literacy propaganda came into popular Soviet culture with the government's policy of likbez rooted in the Bolshevik push for mass literacy directly following the Bolshevik rise to power. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Anatoly Lunachersky, the Soviet People's Commissariat for Education made a conscious effort to introduce political propaganda into Soviet schools, particularly the labour schools that had been established in 1918 under the Statute on the Uniform Labour School. These propaganda pamphlets, required texts, and posters artistically embodied the core values of the Soviet push for literacy in both rural and urban settings, namely the concept espoused by Lenin that "Without literacy, there can be no politics, there can only be rumors, gossip and prejudice." This concept, the Soviet valuing of literacy, was later echoed in works like Trotsky's 1924 Literature and Revolution, in which Trotsky describes literature and reading as driving forces in the forging of a New Soviet Man.
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. Initial pro-literacy propaganda efforts included instituting spaces in villages, particularly, that would facilitate the spread of literacy through the countryside. For example, in the early 1920s, Bolsheviks built "Red Rooms," reading rooms in villages across Russia, to serve as propaganda centers by which texts sent by the Party were disseminated to local communities. In children's education, particularly, inoculation of illiteracy was presented by the State as a means by which children could most fully develop desirable qualities such as curiosity and patience. For children, the most widely used books in the early Likbez campaign to promote literacy were the Bible, Kniga Svyashchennogo Chtenia (Book of Holy Reading), Detsky Mir (Children's World) and Rodnoe Slovo (Native Word) by Konstantin D. Ushinsky. God and divine will were a common pro-literacy motif in propaganda throughout the Likbez campaign, but were especially present in its pre-1920 phase.
1920–1930
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. It was in this atmosphere that the Soviet government's Commissariat of Enlightenment most heavily launched its methodical literacy campaign by the Spring of 1923. 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.
From 1923 to 1927, Soviet pro-literacy propaganda became especially pushed by the Cheka's likbez agencies among Russian Trade Unions. In the pro-literacy propaganda campaigns within trade Unions, the Party-line contained in pamphlets and other pieces of propaganda focused on "true literacy" as the ideal literacy level for workers, a commitment that would require 6–8 months of additional enrollment in Union-sponsored literacy schools after a worker had initially achieved "semi literacy." In the mid-1920s, Cheka likbez commissions would routinely seek and publish reports of literacy rates from Unions as a means of spreading a competitive desire for literacy between towns and factories. In these reports, illiteracy was painted as a "weak opponent" to be overcome in a short period of time by reading State literature in libraries and "Red Rooms" or red corners. 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.
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. By promoting literacy in transport workers, specifically, the Komsomol and Cheka likbez units hoped to achieve symbolic victories in signaling the Likbez campaign's overall success. Even in the early Likbez campaign, the transportation sector already experienced relatively low illiteracy rates in workers due to the reading necessary to operate modes of transportation. As such, achieving high literacy in this population was a relatively easy goal and would show the Likbez campaign's success in a widespread and visible industry.