The “Liquidation of Illiteracy” and Soviet State Formation on the Kazakh Frontier, 1920–40

This paper examines the conduct and reception of Soviet literacy campaigns among rural Kazakh communities in the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, from the end of the Bolshevik Revolution to the beginning of the Second World War, Kazakh communities were met with a new Soviet state’s ambitious demands for social, economic, political and cultural assimilation. These first two decades of Soviet rule devastated Kazakh society, as confiscations, famine, and forced settlement on collective farms led to overwhelming starvation, violence, and mass emigration. At the same time, cultural patterns and social structures established in the midst of this upheaval set a longer-term course for Kazakh participation in the new society.

The new state took for granted that Kazakhs, like other Soviet citizens, should not only live in a Soviet and modern way, but act and think as modern Soviet people. The ability to read and write (using official orthography, which changed twice over two decades) quickly emerged as a central component of this Soviet citizenship. Nonliterate people were citizens-in-progress, and records of people’s lives (told from their own perspectives or from those of government officials) noted their literacy or illiteracy as a factor as fundamental as age, economic position, marital status and ethnicity. The paper seeks to understand how this imperative of universal literacy shaped Kazakh participation in Soviet society, as it emerged in the midst of chaos and devastation. It looks specifically at three areas of impact for local communities: interactions with the state; gender relations; and religious practice.