Долой неграмотность! Грамотность — мост к процветанию твоего народа (Down with Illiteracy! Literacy Is a Bridge to the Prosperity of Your People)

A multilingual likbez (literacy-liquidation) poster. A stone bridge arches over a mountain valley: on the left, factories, an oil derrick and a tractor; on the right, a stone village and a man ploughing with oxen; two readers sit in the foreground. Under the Russian headline, slogans in several other scripts and languages repeat the message. 'Literacy is a bridge to prosperity' is a virtue-word promise with no stated mechanism: the glittering-generalities tell.

Date: 1925
Period: Interwar
Made by: North Caucasus Regional Society 'Down with Illiteracy' (Rostov-on-Don); artist A. Ovanesov
Region: Eastern Europe and Eurasia
Country: Soviet Union
Medium: Poster
Issuer type: Mixed
Regime: Soviet Union
Leader: Alexei Rykov
Audience: Domestic public
Purpose: Persuade or win support
Themes: Science and technology, Labor
Event: Likbez Literacy Campaign
Techniques: Glittering generalities
Source: Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source: Wikimedia Commons (scan from the Russian State Library), retrieved October 2, 2026
Rights: Public domain (published 1925, before 1931; Commons: Public Domain Mark 1.0)
A. Ovanesov, 1925. Russian State Library, via Wikimedia Commons. Basis checked on the Commons file page: published 1925, before 1931, in the USSR; Commons: Public Domain Mark 1.0 / faithful reproduction of a PD work; scan from the Russian State Library.

Text on the object

Original (Russian, with lines in several other languages and scripts) · read from the image, not independently checked

ДОЛОЙ НЕГРАМОТНОСТЬ!

[non-Russian slogan lines in Arabic, Latin-based and Cyrillic scripts: not transcribed]

ГРАМОТНОСТЬ — МОСТ К ПРОЦВЕТАНИЮ ТВОЕГО НАРОДА

[non-Russian repetitions of the same slogan in four further lines: not transcribed]

ИЗДАНИЕ С.К.КР.ОБЩ. «ДОЛОЙ НЕГРАМОТНОСТЬ»
А. ОВАНЕСОВ
[illegible: printer's imprint line at the foot]

English translation (machine translation by Claude, not verified by a fluent reader)

DOWN WITH ILLITERACY!

[non-Russian slogan lines: not transcribed]

LITERACY IS A BRIDGE TO THE PROSPERITY OF YOUR PEOPLE

[non-Russian repetitions: not transcribed]

PUBLISHED BY THE N. CAUCASUS REGIONAL SOCIETY 'DOWN WITH ILLITERACY'
A. OVANESOV
[illegible]

Only the Russian lines are transcribed. The other-language lines were not read, since no reader of them was available; they are described by their position and scripts only.