> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders

> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television? Firstly, the leaders whom the Bolsheviks overthrew in October 1917 were not familiar to most Russians. The Provisional Government instituted after the February Revolution was a messy affair. Committed Bolsheviks were a minority at the time of the Russian Revolution. However, there were just enough of them in the railroads, ports, army and other key infrastructure that they could carry out a coup against the Provisional Government. As with many radical movements, most of the ordinary Bolshevik sympathizers had never actually read the foundational texts of Communism (Marx' writings are often a challenge even for intellectuals). They only knew some simple agitprop distillations thereof. That the Communist regime spent the whole 1920s and early 1930s carrying out literacy campaigns and establishing written standards for most of Russia's languages also underscores how little of a culture of reading existed in the country pre-1917 outside the elite cities like Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.