The Printing Press As an Agent of Political Change in Early Twentieth-Century Russia

Abstract

Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change elegantly shows how the invention of moveable type helped put an end to cultural and intellectual parochialism in Europe. Through the new printing technology, works of classical antiquity, renaissance humanism, and scientific inquiry reached wide audiences; and thus, by buying the necessary books, Isaac Newton taught himself mathematics and went beyond Descartes.1 Because the scattered libraries, universities, and monasteries no longer were the exclusive centers of learning, Erasmus could leave the cloister to become a lay theologian and to publish his Biblical interpretations in works that sold widely. In the new interchange of ideas, scientists saw greater need for precision when they put their findings into print, just as they felt compelled to read and take into account what others had published. Rapid and massive printing technology has also affected politics, and this essay will show how the printers' movement-a direct result of the explosion in publishing in Russia-made political use of the printing press during the Revolution of 1905. Largely outside the focus of Eisenstein's work, the press as an agent of change in politics has been the subject of separate studies by Geoffrey Elton2 and Joseph Klaits,3 both showing how monarchical governments took advantage of the new medium. In the period under discussion here, however, advances in printing and publishing heightened the effects of the printing press far beyond what they had been in earlier periods. Most important for my purpose, the modern press fostered a new labor organization-that of the printers-whose methods proved to be strong examples for other Russian workers. The power to influence events which the printers momentarily secured in 1905 derived from their use of