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Public and Private Values in the Soviet Press, 1921-1928

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jeffrey Brooks
Jeffrey Brooks*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
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Extract

The Bolsheviks created a new system for the production and distribution of the printed word to replace the prerevolutionary print media. This innovation was in many respects the most remarkable of the early revolutionary years, since it led to the radical dichotomy between public and private codes of behavior that has plagued Soviet society ever since.

The central feature of the new information system was a publishing monopoly, with corresponding prepublication censorship of all reading material. The link between producers and consumers that the market had provided was cut, and Bolshevik publishers did not have to offer what consumers wished to read. The result was to alter abruptly the flow of printed information and particularly the flow to and from the lower levels of the reading public.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 16 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989

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References

This essay draws on a paper presented at the "Conference on Popular Culture—East and West" at Indiana University (1986) and my final report to the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (1985). Research was supported by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (contract number 628-7) and by the International Research and Exchange Board.

1. Slukhovskii, M. I., Kniga i derevnia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928), 109 Google Scholar.

2. Brooks, Jeffrey, “Studies of the Reader in the 1920s,” Russian History, nos. 2–3 (1982), 187–202 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Breakdown in the Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917–27” in Bolshevik Culture, ed. Abbott Gleason et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 151–174. Citations to newspapersare given by the month, the day, and the year. B is for Bednota, RG is for Rabochaia gazeta, RM is for Rabochaia Moskva, KG is for Krest'ianskaia gazeta, and G is for Gudok.

3. Rabochaia Moskva began as the organ of the Moscow Soviet, was reconstituted as RabochaiaMoskva in 1922, and bore this name until 1939; subsequently, it became Moskovskaia Pravda.

4. Shafir, La., Rabochaia gazeta i ee chitatel’ (Moscow, 1926), 91–108 Google Scholar.

5. Vareikis, I., Zadachi partii v oblasti pechati (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), 11 Google Scholar.

6. Gans, Herbert J., Deciding What's News (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 241 Google Scholar.

7. Mickiewicz, Ellen Propper, Media and the Russian Public (New York, 1981), 58, 121Google Scholar; Shafir, Rabochaia gazeta, 100.

8. La. Shafir, Gazela i derevnia, (Moscow-Leningrad, 1924), 68Google Scholar.

9. Shafir, Rabochaia gazela, 91–108.

10. Hohendahl, Peter, “Jürgen Habermas: ‘The Public Sphere’ (1964),” New German Critique 1 (1974): 45–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; a translation of a Habermas article labeled, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” follows Hohendahl's article.

11. Brooks, “Studies of the Reader in the 1920s. “

12. Steklov, Iu. M., Sovetskaia demokratiia (Moscow, 1929), 203 Google Scholar.

13. Meromskii, A. and Putnik, P., Derevnia za knigoi (Moscow, 1931), 37 Google Scholar.

14. Glebov, A., Pamialka sel'kora (Moscow, 1926), 13 Google Scholar.

15. Shafir, Gazeta i derevnia, 134.

16. For discussions of this group in the prerevolutionary era see Wildman, Allan K., The Making of a Workers’ Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 Google Scholar; Kanatchikov, S., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia, ed. Zelnik, Reginald E. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Brooks, Jeffrey, “Popular Philistinism and the Course of RussianModernism” in Literature and History, ed. Morson, Gary Saul (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), 90–110 Google Scholar.e Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Education and Social Mobility inthe Soviet Union, 1921–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 3–4, 50–51, 239–243Google Scholar; Bailes, Kendall E., Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1978 Google Scholar and, more generally, Robin, Regine, Le Réalisme socialiste: Une aesthétique impossible (Paris: Payot, 1986 Google Scholar; Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda Stale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dunham, Vera S., In Stalin's Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976 Google Scholar.

17. Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, vol. 4, part 1 (Moscow, 1970).

18. For a discussion of the new language, see Selishchev, A. M., lazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi (Moscow, 1926), and Patrick Seriot, “Officialese,” Sociocriticism 2, no. 1 (1986): 195–219.Google Scholar

19. Shafir, Ia., Gazeta i derevnia (Moscow, 1924), 33–35 Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 75–89, 65.

21. Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia (1936; reprint, New York: Mentor, n.d.), 6–7.Google Scholar