ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses these and other related questions concerning the use of print in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. For the organs of Soviet power, literacy was connected with instrumental considerations: ‘the system of people’s education of the socialist state must be a means of mobilisation of the poor middle-class masses for socialist construction. As a rule, the words which represented Soviet power were the first to be written by illiterates; these words, as it were, became perceptually privileged. Even more sophisticated was the idea that peasant readers should be made not only into peasant critics but into peasant writers as well. In this case, professional writers and journalists should of course give them some guidance and mediate the exchange between the peasant readers and peasant writers. Reading was becoming one of the main forms of establishing new links between the hitherto alienated masses and Soviet power.
