It was actually the truth, thought. A huge percent of population was illiterate (some were able to read few words here and there). It was one of main focuses of Lenin - to teach peasants to write and read. This started before Lenin, thought - during Stolypin Reforms in 1906-1913 years. Before 1890s almost all peasants were illiterate, but percentage was lowering during 1900s and with Stolypin Reforms up to fifth of peasants received at least some basic education - but mostly because now peasants received their own land that was belonging to them and not to landlord (or later Kolgosp), so they had much more free time now. It was mostly self-education - as a lot of peasants were hungry for knowledge. This also increased amount of harvests by 20%.

That was one of goals of Stolypin Reform - to give good working or already a bit rich peasants more power and make them first of a kind of "middle class", so they will start supporting Empire like aristocracy, as aristocracy was not able anymore to hold all people with military, and they needed more support. So they decided to make some peasants to a richer class with more education (and land problem was huge issue as peasants were already starting to revolt around 1902-1904, and revolted in 1905, - plus economics of Empire was dying because 90% of resources belonged to aristocracy and they were doing nothing with it). Around quarter of all peasants benefited from this greatly, around half of peasants benefited from this at all, and last quarter either changed nothing or became even poorer, as they were not able to buy-out their land from landlord even with help of Peasant Bank, so they either went in big debts or moved to parts of Russian Empire with cheap land (like asian part and Syberia).

Basically all this was sponsored and paid from the personal pockets of Tsar, some merchants and some rich aristocracy - part wanted to not lose power due to revolution, part were siding with peasants and wanted to help them.

This not fixed the land issue, because many "between middle and poor" peasants were just selling their land to more rich peasants or to landlords and going away into cities without a land, or moving to Ural. This was one of big reasons of the revolution - 25% of peasants were not pleased by this reform, 50% were slightly displeased and 25% were happy with it. Poorer and bad working peasants were angry on better working or luckier peasants and were starting to speak against them. However, revolution was started by rich military and middle class city workers, not by peasants. It made huge damage to peasants as well, as most documents were destroyed and land was re-distributed with so-called "uravnilovka" (slur-sounding version of "forced equalization") where peasants were given same amount of land regardless of how they were working and if they were just alcoholics or had a lot of land previously, just "how many kids or family members you have" and X amount of land per person. That made population even more unhappy than it was with monarchy, that's when Bolsheviks appeared with October Revolution (which wasn't really revolution, as it was done by small amount of people, mostly cityfolks and immigrants from "sealed train", and was not widely supported by peasants, like it was in 1905, when peasants themselves with pitchforks were fighting against military).

The fact that middle class peasants were created to support Empire - it was one of reasons why Bolsheviks were afraid of those peasants and middle class, they thougth they will support Empire and will not be willing to share their land with government and Kolgosps.

A lot of more wealthy or literate peasants were imprisoned or murdered during revolution, there are memes about "Lenin reducing illiteracy".

Like this from early 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX_S1DXHW4Y

They are saying there "Lenin wrote a letter to a poor crowd" and then "What? No one can read it?" and peasants "Nah, we are all illiterate", and then they started sho1oting and caption appears "Painting: Bolsheviks reducing illiteracy".

I may be incorrect in some details, as I am telling from memory (and my last history classes were in university 13-14 years ago, as I was studying on engineering and IT speciality, so we had history only two years, not all six years), but should be close to how it was.

And why am I writing all this, lol? It is clearly huge off-topic in this conversation and in subsaidit in general. So I should just stop :D