the 1922 famine, many districts required their illiterate male and female populations to attend literacy school in order to earn their food points. Fearing they were not reaching out to the population and making the popular reading frenzy that they had hoped, the Politburo decided to heavily fund and promote clubs and societies such as the "Down with Illiteracy" society. History Early spread Pro-literacy propaganda came into popular Soviet culture with the government's policy of likbez rooted in the Bolshevik push for mass literacy directly following the Bolshevik rise to power. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Anatoly Lunachersky, the Soviet People's Commissariat for Education made a conscious effort to introduce political propaganda into Soviet schools, particularly the labour schools that had been established in 1918 with the Statute of the Uniform Labour School decree. These propaganda pamphlets, required texts, and posters artistically embodied the core values of the Soviet push for literacy in both rural and urban settings, namely the concept espoused by Lenin that "Without literacy, there can be no politics, there can only be rumors, gossip and prejudice." This concept, the Soviet valuing of literacy, was later echoed in works like Trotsky's 1924 Literature and Revolution, in which Trotsky describes literature and reading as driving forces in the forging of a new Communist man. In the early years of the Likbez campaign, the State compulsarily enrolled millions of illiterate Soviets from both town and country in literacy schools, requiring these citizens to engage with the Leninist ideology of pro-literacy. In this period, Komsomol members and Young Pioneer detachments were also commissioned to spread pro-literacy propaganda in the form of pamphlets and word of mouth to village illiterates. Initial pro-literacy propaganda efforts included instituting spaces in villages, particularly, that would facilitate the spread of literacy through the countryside. For example, in the early 1920s, Bolsheviks built "Red Rooms," reading rooms in villages across Russia, to serve as propaganda centers by which texts sent by the Party were disseminated to local communities. In children's education, particularly, inoculation of illiteracy was presented by the State as a means by which children could most fully develop desirable qualities such as curiosity and patience. For children, the most widely used books in the early Likbez campaign to promote literacy were the Bible, Kniga Svyashchennogo Chtenia (Book of Holy Reading), Detsky Mir (Children's World) and Rodnoe Slovo (Native Word) by Konstantin D. Ushinsky. God