1 of 6

Mountains of Letters: Tracing Literacy Across the Early Soviet South Caucasus��Jeremy Johnson��University of Michigan

2 of 6

3 of 6

Key to understanding the ways in which party officials used printed texts to construct

categories of Soviet modernity is the way the state and individuals produced and circulated text

through multiple channels, a process Thomas Wolf has referred to as "print socialism". Wolf

describes print socialism as "that enormous system dedicated to the production of socialist

imagery":

“One of the roots of the Soviet system was the assumption that a society could govern

itself through its citizens' dedication to creating a socialist society. Such a vision of a

different kind of polity was both made possible by, and could only be realized through,

the establishment of a new environment of texts and images – print socialism – that

would serve as the coduit for a kind of fusion of individual and collective purpose and

understanding. Representations of society would be vehicles of instruction and

enlightenment; they would foster the splicing of a self into the larger material of society

by portraying the project of social transformation as the most attractive and compelling

form of life.

Wolf's notion of print socialism assumes in the first place that a large enough literate public

exists to interpret this new environment of texts and images, such that national consciousness

comes to be influenced by this material. Primarily concerned with the print socialism of the late

Soviet period, when the population could safely be assumed to be literate, Wolf theorizes

"interpretation" on the level of the individual reader, failing to account for the oral component of

print socialism during this era. The method of oral transmission and reading alound as part of literacy classes transmitted many messages to large part of the population.

4 of 6

5 of 6

6 of 6

Disclaimer: The contents of these curricular materials were developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. The American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC) does not endorse the views of the papers and is not responsible for any inaccuracies. These curricular materials were developed from papers presented at the "Caucasus Connections" Conference, and we have left the authors' views and the data intact.