It is impossible to establish how important a precondition literacy is for industrial growth, for the creation of a modern society and polity. Until recently, the commonly accepted wisdom has been that it was extremely important. A short time ago, however, a historian argued persuasively that the correlation was more apparent than real, and that intellectuals, historians, and even politicians have overstated the importance of literacy. Similarly, it has been generally assumed that for mass mobilization, which is a characteristic feature of a totalitarian society, the printed word was crucial. Modern experience, on the contrary, shows that though literacy is helpful, the masses can be reached by other means.

Lenin and his comrades, however, firmly believed that a literate peasantry was essential in order for the Russian people to understand the message of socialism. Nothing expresses this conviction more clearly than Lenin's famous sentences: “The illiterate person stands outside of politics. First it is necessary to teach him the alphabet. Without it there are only rumors, fairy tales, and prejudices, but not politics.” After the Bolsheviks had won the Civil War and embarked on the great task of economic reconstruction, a new motive appeared in their public statements about literacy. Now they stressed that literacy was essential for building a modern economy. In this respect the work of the prominent Soviet statistician S. G. Strumilin acquired great significance. In a book published in 1924 he purported to show that a literate worker was so much more productive than an illiterate one that in the course of a year and a half the government regained all the expenses invested in a five-year education.