Lovell , Stephen How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 774 the Roman Emperor Constantine had done with Christianity. As Cronin remarks, Leont´ev’s idiosyncratic understanding of socialism owed much to his experience of monastic life on Athos, where the absence of private property was combined with strict authority and religious devotion. Cronin also makes interesting observations about the possible influence of non-Christian religions, particularly Zoroastrianism, on Leont´ev. On the other hand, little attention is paid to Leont´ev’s commentaries on practical political issues, such as the ‘Russification’ of minorities and the diplomatic aftermath of the 1877– 78 Russo-Turkish War. Cronin identifies echoes of Leont´ev’s thought in the writings of others, sometimes plausibly, as when he notes that Solov´ev’s On the Decline of the Medieval Worldview (1891) appears to have been directed against Leont´ev, and sometimes less so, as when he speculates that Stalin may have read Leont´ev as a seminarian. His book is especially valuable to an English-speaking audience as an introduction to some of the recent Russian scholarship on Leont´ev. While many aspects of Leont´ev’s life and thought still await more detailed exploration, Cronin’s biography vividly depicts the colourful career, penetrating intellect and literary talent which made him one of the most interesting, if not influential, Russian conservative thinkers of the nineteenth century. UCL SSEES James Day Lovell, Stephen. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2020. xi + 327 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £70.00. The focus of Stephen Lovell’s new book is public speaking and its contribution to the development of civil society in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. The broader theme is political culture, or ‘the ways in which culture both serves and constrains the exercise of power and the pursuit of legitimacy’ (p. 1). Its main forensic question is whether Russians, in the period under consideration, managed to transform the common attribute of speech into a tool of political discourse permitting members of society to organize public life effectively through self-controlled communication, intellectual exchange, compromise and respect for minority positions, while holding themselves and their government accountable. The book suggests that they did not. The seven chapters, divided chronologically and drawing on meticulous research, survey both political developments and how public speaking related to them. The main venues discussed are political, ecclesiastical and legal, with REVIEWS 775 only passing references to theatre, poetry reading and other high culture forms, and none to jokes and other lowbrow pursuits. One learns about draconian legal restrictions on political speech, the life and work of celebrated barristers, the printing of stenographic records in newspapers, and the ebb and flow of permissible public speech, among other analogous topics. The book reveals that contemporaries likened stenography to ‘high speed technologies such as steam, railway, telegraph, and photography’ (p. 28); reading the transcript of the trial of the assassins of Alexander II helped set the future Menshevik leader Martov on his revolutionary path; the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii was heckled at Moscow University for praising the foreign policy of Alexander III; and the remark about ‘Stolypin neckties’ had ‘a longer afterlife than any other phrase uttered’ in the Duma (p. 208). It matters to the story that late imperial Russia’s rulers and statesmen found it difficulttospeaktoordinarypeopleoreventoeducatedelites.Theemancipation manifesto of 1861, for example, was ‘written in an uncompromisingly foggy high-Church style’ (p. 17), and Nicholas II’s inability ‘to strike the right tone in speaking to the public became an increasing liability in the more expressive political culture of the turn of the century’ (p. 128). The church — ‘the only institution in Russia that was capable of speaking directly to the people’ (p. 38) — worked hard to cultivate this ability and enjoyed some notable successes, though among the biggest, Fr. Gapon’s movement, was the spark that set in motion the Revolution of 1905. A lot of public speech was aimed at bringing about revolution, starting with the ‘going-to-the-people’ movement of the early 1870s — ‘the first time members of educated society were...