alt Hacker News> These were previously peasants still under feudal lords.
What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.
> Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
And you think the communists taught the peasants to read for the benefit of the peasants? It is to laugh.
> This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs
I'm not ignoring them at all. Where did I say that it was perfectly okay for tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs to kill people?
Indeed, if you look at how societies under tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs are run, they basically have the same problem I described: one person, or a small elite, at the top thinks they know enough to run an entire society. But they don't. And their attempts to do it cause massive human suffering and death.
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People who are illiterate and ignorant despite being intellectually capable were a burden to society and overal considered undesirable. The goal was to improve the quality of living for all people in society and educated workers, engineers and burocrats were needed
> What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.
The Alai region was not "feudal" in the European sense but it was a tribal system where power was centralized in a layer of elite lords. While pastures were communal and not "owned" by individuals, livestock was private and literate, wealthy aristocratic elites owned massive herds using their prestige to command the loyalty of poorer tribal members
The Soviet government was actively working to replace the Arabic literacy of these elites with Latin and Cyrillic script to break the their influence