literacy stemming from Union membership. These short stories, chastushki, poems, cartoons, and plays were spread through pamphlets, journals, and wall newspapers and were usually tales about young, single, illiterate women from the countryside. In these pieces of propaganda, it was when the downtrodden women became acquainted with local Soviet officials that the women's luck began to change. In the plot lines of most of these works, the main characters, who had usually fled their countryside homes after being taken advantage of sexually, experienced reversals of fortunes after meeting Soviet officials in their new, urban homes. These officials would rescue the women from the abuses they were suffering as ill-paid and ill-respected domestic servants by encouraging the women to join a Union. At this point in the story, the women would receive not only Union protection but also an education as a result of Union membership and access to Union schools and reading materials. Ultimately, the story's heroine, the domestic worker, would become fully literate as well as active in her local worker's committee (mestkom). Often, the women in these works of pro-literacy propaganda were portrayed as using their new literacy and subsequent heightened foothold in Union society to become Soviet delegates themselves and help second generations of downtrodden women by teaching them to read and write. In these rags to riches propaganda tales, literacy was the vehicle by which women were able to lift up their status as workers within Unions and Soviet society. In 1924, 90% of domestic workers coming from villages were illiterate and were referred to in Soviet literature and propaganda as the "third front," a subset of the population which needed to be raised up through literacy. The focus on spreading the desire for literacy among trade unions through pamphlets, building of schools, and the dissemination of state-approved literature largely petered out by 1925 when Cheka likbez realized it could not achieve its high literary goals by 1933, the date of the Narkompros deadline for compulsory secondary education throughout the Soviet Union. After 1925, greater flexibility in literacy class structures and attendance within Soviet trade unions was gradually introduced. In the mid-1920s, posters had become a "quintessential form of propaganda" in Likbez. Throughout the 1920s, though pro-literacy propaganda was still taking on its earlier forms, it was increasingly contained in propaganda posters. 1930-1936 As Stalin consolidated his power through the late 1920s, Soviet propaganda largely shifted