Contents
 

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Contours of the Communication Gap
2. The Revolutionary Voice and the Resurrection of Meaning
3. Awkward Ambiguities of the Soviet Vox Populi
4. Models of Proletarian Language Acquisition
5. The Cleansing Authority of the Russian National Voice
6. Canonization of the Party-State Voice
7. Narrating the Party State
Epilogue: The Politics of Voice at the Margins of Soviet History

Author

Michael S. Gorham is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida.

Context

Thesis

The language culture of early Soviet Russia marked just such a tenuous state of symbolic affairs. Partly out of necessity, partly in the spirit of change, Bolshevik revolutionaries cast off old verbal models of identity and authority and replaced them with a cacophony of new words, phrases, and communicative contexts intended to define and help legitimatize the new Soviet order. Pitched to an audience composed largely of semiliterate peasants, however, the new Bolshevik message often fell on deaf ears.

Embraced by numerous sympathetic and newly empowered citizens, the voice of Bolshevism also evoked a variety of less desirable reactions, ranging from confusion and willful subversion to total disregard. Indeed, the earliest years of Bolshevik rule produced a communication gap that held little promise for the makings of a proletarian dictatorship. This gap drew the attention of language authorities—most notably Maxim Gorky—and gave rise to a society-wide debate over the appropriate voice of the new Soviet state and its citizenry.

Methodology

Drawing from history, literature, and sociology, Gorham offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of this critical debate, demonstrating how language ideologies and practices were invented, contested, and redefined. Speaking in Soviet Tongues shows how early Soviet language culture gave rise to unparalleled verbal creativity and utopian imagination while sowing the seeds for perhaps the most notorious forms of Orwellian "newspeak" known to the modern era.

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes 

-Soviet language ideology?
-Glas Naroda - voice of the people
-what are formal elements of Socialist realism (i.e. non-decadent language)
-search for linguistic iconicity of proletariat in early Soviet Russia, elusive, mostly peasants, tension between authenticity and aesthetics
-Рабкор vs. Селькор (worker correspondant vs. peasants)
-anxiety and anchoring of Bolshevik language "in the classes"
diminuation of newspapers. 
"with the classics the words don't get in the way"
the rout-modelled after war and peace
during seminal events of Bolshevik legitimacy in the Civil War (Fadaev)
stable authorial voice / authority of the naitonal voice

Voices: -the revolutionary -the popular -the national
"writ"ualization dogma
Apter and Soich - revolutionary discourse in mao's Republic