What importance did the Soviet government attach to the elimination of illiteracy?

The implementation of the program to eradicate illiteracy is due to the legacy left by tsarist Russia: the literacy rate of the population in the country, at the time the Bolsheviks came to power, did not exceed 30%. To implement the socialist principles of social structure and the formation of an industrially developed state, the Soviet Union needed conscientious citizens and qualified specialists. In the course of events, within the framework of the “educational program”, the literacy level of the adult population of the USSR by 1939 increased, practically, up to 90%. The state, in the course of the first five-year plans, from an agrarian one turned into an industrial one.