How a villager taught the Russian Empire to read

Ivan Sytin (1851–1934), the son of a ‘volost’ (rural district) clerk – a low-ranking official in the administration of the village of Gnezdnikovo, Kostroma Governorate – completed only three years of formal schooling. Nonetheless, he was a sharp-witted teenager and found work in a bookstore, where he rose from a store assistant to an independent entrepreneur.

At the age of 25, after marrying the daughter of a merchant and receiving a substantial dowry, he purchased his first lithographic press for color printing and opened a small workshop in Moscow. One of his early successes was the mass production of maps depicting military operations during the Russo-Turkish War, which proved highly popular. By 1879, Sytin had paid off his debts, purchased a house near the Kremlin and installed two lithographic presses there.

His publishing strategy was built on the principle of accessibility: books had to be inexpensive enough for even a poor peasant or artisan to afford. Starting with ‘lubok’ literature – mass-produced prints and booklets with simple texts, sold at fairs and often serving as the very first “reading material for the common people” – he gradually sought to "elevate" this literature by enlisting professional artists and renowned writers. He collaborated with the ‘Posrednik’ (‘Intermediary’) publishing house, founded on the initiative of Leo Tolstoy to produce accessible, moral and educational books for the common people. Thanks to Sytin, a broad readership was, for the first time, able to engage with the works of classic Russian authors, such as Nikolai Leskov, Vsevolod Garshin, Vladimir Korolenko and Tolstoy himself. By the beginning of the 20th century, the total annual circulation of popular, ‘lubochnye knigi’ (‘low-cost books’) in Russia reached four million copies – a figure comparable to the print runs of modern global bestsellers.

Education as a Business Venture

However, Sytin understood that fiction alone was not enough for public enlightenment. He launched an extensive program to publish educational materials and popular science literature. In 1887, he released his first school textbook – ‘Bukvar’ (‘Alphabet Book’) by Alexander Braykovsky – followed later by the famous ‘Russian Alphabet Book’ by Vasily Vakhterov and educational texts by Leo Tolstoy. Calendars also played a significant role; often the only printed material found in a peasant household, they combined calendar dates with simple educational content.

Among his major educational initiatives were the ‘Library for Self-Education’ series, the multi-volume ‘People’s Encyclopedia of Scientific and Applied Knowledge’ and the unfinished ‘Military Encyclopedia’. Sytin also acquired the ‘Russkoye Slovo’ (‘Russian Word’) newspaper, transforming it into the most affordable and one of the most widely circulated daily newspapers in Russia, with a print run reaching 1.2 million copies. By the early 20th century, his retail network consisted of 19 stores and 600 newsstands spanning the entire empire.

Protests & revolution

As the largest publishing house in the country, it was also a major employer, with thousands of workers employed at its printing facilities in Moscow. Yet, the working conditions there were far from ideal. It was with a strike at Sytin’s printing house on September 19 that the All-Russian political strike of 1905 began – a nationwide work stoppage centered on political demands and one of the pivotal events of the First Russian Revolution (1905–1907), the revolutionary crisis that swept across the Russian Empire.

Later, it was said in the salons of St. Petersburg that the strike had been sparked by "Sytin’s comma" – he had decided to cut costs by refusing to pay his typesetters for punctuation marks. The very man who had spent his life making books accessible to the common people was, at the same time, the "boss" against whom those same people had risen up.

Following the October Revolution of 1917, the ‘Sytin Partnership’ was nationalized and the printing house was renamed the ‘First Model Printing House’. Sytin himself remained in Russia and continued to work in publishing under Soviet rule until the end of his life.