Shamil Rahmanzade Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, Institute of History, “The History of Caucasus” Department shamil-rahman@mail.ru “ELIMINATION” OF ILLITERACY AMONG WOMEN IN THE SOVIET AZERBAIJAN SSR IN THE 1920s AND 1930s AS A PART OF SOVIET LITERACY POLITICS Shamil Rahmanzade Abstract: The article presents the history of politics to eliminate illiteracy among women in the Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920s and 1930s as a part of Soviet “cultural revolution”. This process took place in the context of the so-called “early modernization strategies” of the Soviet authorities, aimed at the formation of a new sociocultural reality. The modernization reality of the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to a new type of Azerbaijani woman: military-sports, strong- willed, technically oriented, responsive to the latest achievements of world practice. Measures for the development of women's education were coupled with efforts aimed at the emancipation of women, at introducing them to socially active life. In fact, Soviet cultural practices destroyed the traditional gender order based on the unconditional total dominance of men (such dominance was considered as socially determined inequalities to be eliminated), as well as contributed to the transformation of women into the actively creative subject of Modernity. The solution of the female problem in Azerbaijan was overshadowed by the mass repressions carried out in the country at the end of the 1930s, as a result of which many leading women of Azerbaijan, who stood at the origins of the female movement in Azerbaijan, were arrested, expelled and executed. According to generally accepted terminology, the cultural revolution is a process of radical restructuring of the cultural and ideological life of society during the period of building socialism in the USSR. It is, along with industrialization and collectivization, the fundamental direction of modernization achievements in the Soviet Union, designed, in essence, to transform an agrarian (traditional) society into an industrial (modern) one. “Industrialization, collectivization, the creation of a new army — all these were parts of a large program of modernization of the USSR. The main thing in it was the transformation of a person with a peasant type of thinking ... into a person ... similar in a number of ways to a person of modern industrial society" (Kara-Murza 2008, 383).