Literacy Unveiled: Citizenship, Nationality, Gender and the Campaigns to Eradicate Illiteracy in the Soviet South Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan) 1922-1936

Abstract

The campaigns to eradicate illiteracy are often presented as one of the “successful” early Soviet social and educational reforms. Even traditionalists, such as Richard Pipes, argue that these campaigns had a transformative effect on society at large, and that the outcomes were positive, at least as measured in increased literacy rates. Recent scholarship has addressed literacy in the Russian and Ukrainian contexts, but this work persistently deploys what critical literacies theorists call the “development paradigm,” which measures changing literacy rates in relation to other variables of development. This approach flattens literacy as a fixed, teleological category for the purpose of positivist inquiry, often linked to studies of state or institutional capacity. The resulting historiography has mainly focused on the bureaucracy of education and the development of party mechanisms as part of the larger push to transform society. Although many scholars of Soviet history address the achievement of mass literacy in the early Soviet period, few have taken the campaign to eradicate illiteracy as their central subject. Although I acknowledge the power of positivist data collection in shaping Soviet notions of literacy, my work addresses the experienced literacies of early Soviet citizens in social and cultural context within a dynamic nation-building project. I argue that ideas of literacy and illiteracy were central to Soviet attempts to forge modern citizens in the South Caucasus. Through the processes of creating scripts, defining literacy and illiteracy, and teaching citizens to read—as well as the intersection of the related processes of women’s liberation and unveiling and nation building—I demonstrate that the multiethnic and multilingual space of the South Caucasus shaped the nature of early Soviet citizenship. I challenge teleological understandings of literacy as a one-way, developmental process and instead suggest that citizens in the early Soviet period were constantly shifting between categories of literacy and illiteracy, as defined by state and non-state actors. Both literacy and illiteracy, I contend, were subjective and shifting categories that were the subject of competing claims for power in the region. The project seeks to overcome three significant methodological and historiographical problems unrelated to literacy. First, in contrast to the tendency of political history to see women’s history as an addendum or an aside to larger historical projects, this project understands women and men as central actors in the Soviet project. This politically important story is served best by actively integrating women’s voices into a project with gendered articulations. Second, this project is informed “from below and from the middle,” shifting away from Moscow-centered narratives that have dominated the historiography. This is a conscious effort to prioritize the reading of local sources and archives as closer to realities as experienced by Soviet citizens than sources mediated by longer channels of knowledge production and the power politics of the Soviet state. Third, this project explores possible solutions to archival gaps, particularly those caused by physical destruction of documents. Together, this dissertation sheds light on the role of language and literacy in the formation of nations under socialism.