> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

It didn't. The central (though far from only) divergence of Leninism from classical Marxism to allow it to work in early 20th Century Russia, which wasn't the kind of advanced (even by mid-late 19th Century standards) liberal industrial capitalist regime to which the Communist Manifesto was directed, was the adoption of vanguardism, in which broad class consciousness and awareness of class theory by the proletariat was abandoned as a requirement for Communist revolution in favor of authoritarian leadership of the masses by a narrow intellectual elite.

A major justification for Leninism was the belief by Russian Communists of the time that what you describe could not happen in Russia.

(I don't assert that the reason for that is or is not anything to do with culture of reading, but the Communist Revolution certainly does not support your thesis in the way you suggest.)