Another table looks at everyone aged 8 and up, including older generations who were born under Alexander II of Russia or even earlier. What’s interesting is that the RSFSR and Ukrainian SSR show very similar results, so it’s reasonable to assume nearby regions followed the same pattern.
Then you get the breakdown by age. And here it becomes really obvious what happened before the revolution. The highest literacy is among people aged 20 to 24 in 1920. That’s the group that went through school right before World War I.
In cities, literacy for people roughly between 13 and 29 stays above 80%, and for men it’s over 90%. Even in rural areas, male literacy is still pretty high. Women are lower, but still improving fast. In cities, over 60% are literate, and in the countryside around 30%. Younger girls show better numbers, which means things were clearly moving in the right direction before everything got disrupted.
There are also school surveys from 1911 and 1915 that back this up. In central regions, education for boys was basically already universal. Girls were behind, and some regions lagged more than others, especially Central Asia and remote Siberia. But the key point is that there was a plan, and it was being actively implemented.
By 1914, a number of districts had already completed universal education, many were close, and most of the rest were just a few years away. The system kept expanding right up to 1917. If things had continued normally, full coverage for children was expected in the early 1920s.
So when people say no one could read before the revolution, that just doesn’t hold up.
One more thing that often gets ignored. The high literacy numbers you see in the late 1930s didn’t come out of nowhere. A big part of that was the generation educated before the revolution, basically the younger cohorts formed under Nicholas II of Russia.
And there’s also a demographic factor. Older, less literate generations were gradually disappearing, which naturally pushed the average up.
