Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia by Michael s> Gorham (review)

Abstract

372 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 Gorham, Michael. Speaking in SovietTongues: Language Culture andthePoliticsof Voice in Revolutionay Russia.Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2003. xi + 266 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $40.00. TAKING its cue from the work of the Russian linguist Grigorii Vinokur (I896-1947) on 'language culture',Michael Gorham's fascinating,ambitious and originalmonograph offersa close examinationofthe relationshipbetween language, politics and social identity in Russia in the years following the Russian revolution. The focus is on culturalpracticesin differentsites,within the revolutionary state and among an enlarged reading community. The recurrenttheme is the dilemma of constituting'verbalauthority'over citizens with a propensityto 'misunderstand'Bolsheviklanguage orwrench it from its ideological moorings in pursuitof their own interests.In pursuingthis theme Gorham taps a rich vein of contemporary dictionaries, instruction manuals, newspapers and journals (e.g. Krasnaia nov'),novels and other material that reflected intense linguistic changes, including some reasonably well known studiesby Andre Mazon and Afanasii Selishchev. He has also made good use of archivematerials,for example in the Instituteof RussianLanguageand the Russian StateArchive for Literatureand the Arts. Gorham opens his account with a close discussionof the bewilderinglexical and stylisticchange during war and revolution, and the tensions inherent in appealing simultaneouslyto the authority of the political leadership and the voxpopuli.I defy any student of Russian history not to find this a stimulating and rewarding chapter to read. The subsequent discussion is organized around what the author calls four 'voices' or models of language: revolutionary ,popular,national, and party-state.He devotes a separatechapterto each. The firstof thesechapterstracesthe celebration,particularlyby contemporary Russian linguists, of rhetorical innovation by key figures such as Lenin, Trotskii and Maiakovskii. The next chapter directs attention to popular speech patterns (including those of Russian soldiersrecorded, in contentious circumstances, by the nurse Sof'ia Fedorchenko),and to campaigns to have popular and 'unrefined' speech reflected in the Russian press. Chapter four examines models of 'proletarian'language acquisition,paying close attention to thewritingsofworkersandvillagecorrespondents,andto therepresentation of a kind of plebeian text-messagingby half-forgottenauthorssuch as Nikolai Ognev (p. go). Chapterfivelooksat attemptsby Gor'kiiand othersto establish Russian as a 'canonical' language, in the face of what Lenin had termed its 'mangling'. The final two chapters trace the establishment of a different canon, in the form of Soviet Communism's 'patristictexts', and the role of schooling and journalism in the process of consolidatingpartiinost'. Gorham concludes that theparty-statevoice had triumphedby the mid-1930s, not only because of the state's monopoly of the means of communication, but also because it was able to drawupon elements of the other models in constituting its own authority.One example of this processwas the emergence by 1930 of more formulaicand less disjointednarrativesof the CivilWarperiod. Little of note seems to have escaped Gorham'sattention, although his brief discussion of vulgar language overlooked S. A. Smith's article on the social meaning of swearing in PastandPresent (i6o, I998, pp. I67-202). I also felt REVIEWS 373 that he might have said something about legal language and courtroom rhetoric in the early post-revolutionary period, and about the language of Soviet diplomacy. Finally, the author's tantalizing comparisons with the era of the French revolution or Nazi Germany (although not, alas, with the modern USA) deserved fuller elaboration. However, there remains a great deal to admire in this engaging, subtle and clearlywrittenbook, which should be required reading for all those interested in Russian social and cultural history,literature,linguistics,and culturalstudies. University ofManchester PETERGATRELL Goldman, Wendy Z. Women at theGates:Gender andIndustyin Stalin'sRussia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2002. xvii + 294 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. f 17.95: $23.00 (paperback). THE industrialization drive of Stalin's 'Revolution from Above' has been extensively analysed, and this book revisitsthis question from the perspective of women. In the introduction, Wendy Goldman rightly remarks upon the gender blindness of previous studies, and a few statistics support her point. Almost 4 million women entered the workforcebetween 1929 and I935, by which time women would constitute 42 per cent of all industrial workers (p. i). Indeed, in I932 and I933, women providedthe sole sourceof incoming workers (p. 266). Without doubt, therefore, this period represented a major break in the...