Although the image of a vast number of illiterate peasants was one of the stock tropes of Russian backwardness for the late imperial period, the actual state of literacy in imperial Russia was more complex. In terms of the other great powers during the fin de siècle, Russian literacy was definitely below par. The 1897 census estimated that approximately 33% of men and 14% of women in European Russia were literate Part of this was a byproduct of the rudimentary system of education available for the post-Emancipation peasantry. The primary educational schools available to the masses via the zemstva were often underfunded and understaffed. There were accounts from the period in which primary school graduates could only barely spell their names. The idealized peasant who lacked formal education but who nevertheless was wise became a stock character in Russian literature, with characters like Tolstoy's Platon Karataev being in the author's words the "eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth." Such stereotypes of a peasantry disinterested in learning did have some basis in fact. It was not atypical for parents to pull their children out of the school system once they had learned a rudimentary education necessary for peasant life. One of the legitimizing planks for the Baltic German population as a privileged class of state servitors was that this community had a firmly developed educational system and the Baltic Germans as a whole were more literate than their Great Russian counterparts, both elite and non-elite.

Yet, despite the continued presence of illiteracy inside Russia, there was a marked uptick in literacy by a number of metrics. The percentage of troops who were literate entering into the Russian Army in 1874 was 21% but had climbed up to 68% in 1913. By contrast, literacy in the 1870s British, French, and German armies hovered around 80%, which demonstrates not only how much Russian literacy had improved, but how far it still needed to go. Despite much hand-wringing among the obshchestvennost' (educated society) about the inability of the peasantry to buckle down and keep to their education, there were strong signs that older habits of prematurely ending a student's education were on the wane. Zemstvo commissions on education and teacher surveys did show that Russian primary school teachers did think their students were eager to learn and become literate. These sentiments are borne out by the mushrooming of popular peasant literature, often in the form of cheap broadsheets and popular literature and Russian publishing transformed from a cottage industry into something more akin to its contemporaries in Western Europe, the US, and Japan. The number of periodical journals and newspapers also grew in the growing Russian urban sphere and the easing of censorship after 1905 allowed for the press to cater to a greater variety of topics. Russian fiction also had a tendency to cater to the masses instead of the obshchestvennost'. For example, Russian versions of Sherlock Holmes featured the famous detective traveling to Russia and solving cases in Nizhny Novgorod and Siberia. Such quasi-fanfics, along with other genre fiction like adventure tales and murder mysteries, illustrates that Russian literary culture was becoming more tapped into global trends in literature and was increasingly aware of literature produced in the outside world (one of the Holmes' stories was penned under the nom de plume Not Doyle).

The Bolsheviks took it upon themselves to complete this trend as achieving mass literacy would have not only signified the transformation of Russia under Bolshevik rule, but it would make it easier to indoctrinate the masses. Lenin noted that "the illiterate person stands outside of politics," and placed a high priority upon achieving mass literacy even during the Civil War. Even though the urban proletariat was largely literate, there still were vast gulfs between urban and rural literacy rates. The Bolsheviks poured a great deal of resources into both children's literacy and adult literacy with programs for adults to learn their ABCs. Somewhat admirably, the Bolsheviks devoted more resources to making peasant women more literate than the empire's schools did, which is encapsulated in this famous poster in which a female child tells her mother it would be much easier for you to help me with this schoolwork if you learned to read. The Soviet state estimated that the literacy rate for the population as a whole had reached 55% in 1926, which was a growth from 32% in 1920. More importantly, the Soviet state had introduced and enforced compulsory education so that there was an unprecedented number of pupils enrolled in Soviet classrooms than at any time under the Romanovs. Despite the real problems of Soviet pedagogy which tended to treat children as little adults, this increase in education meant that literacy rates had climbed into the ninetieth percentile by 1939 for both older and younger Soviet citizens of both sexes.

Sources

Arnove, Robert F., and Harvey J. Graff. National Literacy Campaigns: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. New York: Plenum Press, 1987.

Brooks, Jeffrey. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Eklof, Ben. Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

McReynolds, Louise. Murder Most Russian True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.