Literacy and labour: The Russian literacy campaign within the trade unions, 1923–27

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IN 1923 GLAVPOLITPROSVET, the political enlightenment section of the Soviet commissariat for education, Narkompros, and its literacy commission, Cheka likbez, launched a new literacy campaign with the primary emphasis on trade union membership, both employed and unemployed.1 According to the trade union part of the plan, unions would be fully literate by 1 May 1925.2 After that date Cheka likbez would concentrate entirely on the non-union workers and the peasantry. The 17 million illiterate adults in Russia were to be fully literate by 7 November 1927, the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (see Table 1).3 Two factors motivated Cheka likbez and Glavpolitprosvet to begin their campaign with trade unions: illiteracy would be most easily overcome among the unions, and an industrialised state needed a literate work force.4 Union members enjoyed relatively high literacy compared to non-union workers and the peasantry,5 which still made up the majority of the Russian population. Yet though union literacy rates were higher than non-union rates, unions were still not fully literate. The union sector of the population was where success was most needed and seemed most likely. Party activists and literacy campaigners during NEP could hope that a level of heightened political and social awareness, such as had obtained among workers during 1917, would strengthen the appeal of literacy training among seasoned unionists.6 This article explores how unions conducted their portion of the literacy effort throughout the 1923-27 period, and how unions reacted to both the demands of the campaign organisers at Cheka likbez and the demands of a changing union population. I will limit my discussion to how the unions' structured nature benefited the campaign and how union expansion caused an extension of union literacy efforts. Below I present evidence to suggest that unions were desirable, though not ideal, organisations upon which to call for support of a state-sponsored literacy drive. By using the trade union, essentially an arm of the state, the Soviet Union in the 1920s repeated policy used by other European states in earlier eras.7 Though Soviet writers who treat the issue of literacy after the revolution try to emphasise the backwardness of tsarist education and the low level of literacy in Russia, education and literacy both had gained firm footholds in Russia prior to 1917.8 If Imperial Russia was slow to grasp the significance of literacy and education in relation to economic development, by the latter half of the nineteenth century