Jesus Woj. Let's remember that this effort concerned raising a population that was, what, 90% illiterate into a literate, nay even, educated populace in one generation. My grandparents, in Romania, had a 6th grade education, but maintained a home lending library for their neighborhood -- part of a perpetual edcational outreach campaign. Every month, they would go to the library and haul home some thirty, forty books, which would then be available to everyone in the radius of four or five blocks.
The legacy of this outreach is that even now there is a ballet company in almost every middling and large town in the former soviet union. Can this be said of the U.S.
As for education: there was NO comparison between schools in Romania and the U.S. They were better by a level of magnitude. The result is that all Romanians and Russians that I know have first hand knowledge of the "classics" of world lit; it's just part of the curriculum. In 1976, I went for a visit in Romania and saw some theater in Bucharest: a dramatization of Diderot's "Rameau's Nephew". Not exactly "Cats," but the theater was packed and it was the best dramatic production I have ever seen. Comparable in craft and creativity to something Peter Sellars would put on except it was all taking place in a "communist backwater."
And, yes, they loved Kojak and rock and roll too.
Joanna