Wasn't a dramatic rise in the literacy rate one of the major achievements of the first ten years of the Communist regime in Russia?

The Communists were dedicated to minimizing any and all achievements of both the tsarist and provisional regimes and inflating their own. Yes, they improved literacy, but not as drastically as they claimed, and one has to bear in mind that literacy would have increased under almost any conceivable regime during the twentieth century (short of the Khmer Rouge, of course).

I'll just quickly mention some things related to expanding literacy, in any language where it has not been the norm, second hand direct from a specialist in the field (not me, but someone whose name I will withhold).

- many literacy campaigns for languages fail for a simple reason, there's not enough interesting stuff to read. This is still a problem in Sub-Saharan Africa where most reading materials for most languages are limited to religious tracts.

- the single biggest factor for literacy isn't a perfect (or even very good) orthography or tradition of literacy, it's _authors_. Writers will willingly do the work to get people to read their magnum opuses (nb I don't want to know what the proper latin plural form is). If you want to develop literacy in a language, don't encourage reading, encourage writing.

Well, that's one thing Russia didn't lack.

So interesting to see your thoughts on this book! I was thinking of picking it up, as am fascinated by the rise of literacy in Russia, so it's good to find an endorsement of it.

Magna opera.

(I'm feeling unusually sadistic tonight.)