page_title: Likbez
section_title: Pro-literacy posters
hierarchical_section_title: Likbez / Pro-literacy posters
caption_attribution_description: English: Soviet propoganda poster 1925
context_page_description: Likbez was a campaign of eradication of illiteracy in Soviet Russia and Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. The term was also used for various schools and courses established during the campaign. Nowadays this term is sometimes used in Russian as a slang for answers on common questions.
context_section_description: Pro-literacy propaganda posters were a cheap way for the State Publishing House in Leningrad and other Soviet State bodies to reach a wide audience. Moreover, posters could be understood even by illiterate citizens. Propaganda posters had been an important weapon for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War 1918-1921, but they remained in use even after the war's conclusion. After the Civil War and Lenin's institution of the NEP Policy, propaganda posters began increasingly depicting the reforging of Soviet everyday life or byt.
  Propaganda posters of the 1920s focused on the need to build a new world and way of life after the destruction of the Civil War. While the Bolsheviks were experienced in the use of print media to spread ideas, they recognized that print media could not work to imprint Soviet ideology on the USSR as a whole, since most Soviets were illiterate and could not even understand Soviet staple texts such as those of Marx or Lenin.
  Due to the prevalence of religion in mass Russian pre-revolutionary culture, Soviet citizens were used to looking at religious icons and learning from the images and symbolism that they saw. Much like the Orthodox Church had done with icons, the Soviet State used propaganda posters to "present symbols in a simple and easily identifiable way, even to barely literate peasants". Pro-literacy propaganda posters sold Communist ideology to the population by portraying the benefits of literacy to individuals, specifically. In the early years of the Soviet Union, particularly in the early-mid 1920s, propaganda posters were used to spread literacy while at the same time indoctrinating the masses in Marxist–Leninist thought.
caption: 1925 propaganda poster: "Peasant woman, consolidate the unity of workers and peasants."
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