How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860-1930 0199546428, 9780199546428

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OXFORD STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY General Editors

SIMON DIXON MARK MAZOWER AND JAMES RETALLACK

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How Russia Learned to Talk A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930 STEPHEN LOVELL

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Stephen Lovell 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946068 ISBN 978–0–19–954642–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements This book has been in gestation for a long time, and I can hardly do justice to the many people who have provided me with insights and practical assistance. But I must at least mention the colleagues who were kind enough to read and comment on draft chapters: Daniel Beer, Simon Dixon, Laura Engelstein, Simon Franklin, Diane Koenker, Gabriella Safran, and Steve Smith. By far the longest contribution has come from Simon Dixon, who as series editor has provided friendly counsel from the very beginning. I have also benefited from considerable institutional support: an AHRC Fellowship in 2010–11 allowed me to make my first serious progress with the project, and sabbatical leave from my own department at King’s College London in 2016–17 gave me the time to complete a draft. In between, I was able to gather some material for this book alongside another project during an idyllic year at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg in Konstanz in 2012–13. Of the various places where I have worked, the Slavonic Library of the National Library of Finland deserves special mention, and in particular Irina Lukka. My editors at Oxford University Press have tolerated a quite excessive delay in delivering the manuscript. I have greatly appreciated the good-humoured expertise of Robert Faber and Cathryn Steele. I also gratefully acknowledge the helpful contributions of the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and manuscript. This book contains in revised form some material that has already appeared in the following two articles: ‘Glasnost’ in Practice: Public Speaking in the Age of Alexander II’, Past and Present, 218/1 (2013): 127–58, © Past and Present Society. ‘Stenography and the Public Sphere in Modern Russia’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 56/2-3 (2015): 291–325, © EHESS, Paris. I thank the editors of these journals for their permission to reuse the material here. Finally, a note on transliteration: I have used the Library of Congress system, with exceptions for well-known historical figures (thus ‘Trotsky’, not ‘Trotskii’; ‘Gogol’, not ‘Gogol’’; ‘Tolstoy’, not ‘Tolstoi’).

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Contents List of Figures Abbreviations

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Introduction: Talking as History

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1. Glasnost’ in Practice: Public Speaking in the Reform Era, 1856–67

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2. Trials and Tribulations: The Long 1870s, 1867–81

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3. Small Deeds and Muffled Voices: The Age of Counter-Reform, 1881–95

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4. The Rise of Political Speech, 1895–1905

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5. Public Speaking in the Age of the State Duma

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6. Revolutionary Talk, 1917–18

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7. Soviet Talk

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Epilogue

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Bibliography Index

301 321

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List of Figures 1.1. Vasilii Perov, The Village Sermon (1861).

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2.1. ‘A Provincial Courtroom’.

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3.1. Drawing of trial of assassins of Alexander II.

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4.1. Gapon with St Petersburg governor Ivan Fullon at the opening of a section of his worker assembly, 1904.

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5.1. The Presidium of the First State Duma, 1906.

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5.2. An editor dictates the stenographer’s text to a typist.

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5.3. A peasant deputy in his lodgings in St Petersburg.

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5.4. The ‘lobby’ of the State Duma.

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5.5. Photograph of Alad’in, Zhilkin, and Anikin.

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5.6. Portrait of Fedor Golovin.

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5.7. Photograph by Karl Bulla of S. V. Nechitailo.

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5.8. Portrait of Vladimir Purishkevich.

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6.1. Kerensky exhorts a regiment.

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7.1. Lenin gives a speech at the Third Congress of the Communist International.

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Abbreviations B&E

Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ izd. Brokgauza i Efrona, 41 vols (St Petersburg, 1890–1904) GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii GD SO Gosudarstvennaia duma: Stenograficheskie otchety (St Petersburg/Petrograd, 1906–17) GM Golos minuvshego HJ Historical Journal IA Istoricheskii arkhiv JCH Journal of Contemporary History JfGO Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas JMH Journal of Modern History KA Krasnyi arkhiv KiS Katorga i ssylka Mosk ved Moskovskie vedomosti NV Novoe vremia OZ Otechestvennye zapiski PG Peterburgskaia gazeta PL Peterburgskii listok PO Pravoslavnoe obozrenie P&P Past and Present PSS Polnoe sobranie sochinenii PSZ Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii RB Russkoe bogatstvo RGIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv RM Russkaia mysl’ RR Russian Review RS Russkoe slovo RV Russkie vedomosti SEER Slavonic and East European Review SO Syn otechestva SPb ved Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti SR Slavic Review TKDA Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii TsV Tserkovnyi vestnik VE Vestnik Evropy VI Voprosy istorii VS Voprosy stenografii ZhMNP Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia

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Introduction Talking as History

The subject of this book is both ridiculously broad and ridiculously narrow. On the one hand, it might be described as Russian political culture in the period 1860–1930. Here ‘culture’ is to be understood as the various processes and practices of creating meaning in Russian society, and ‘political culture’ denotes the ways in which culture both serves and constrains the exercise of power and the pursuit of legitimacy. On the other hand, this study focuses on the act of speech and its representation, and neglects important subjects like ideology, social movements, and political organization. It is about form more than content. The history of speech presents obvious epistemological difficulties: how can we reliably know anything about something so self-evidently ephemeral? Almost all of the period treated in this book comes before the advent of broadcasting or large-scale sound reproduction. Apart from a few scratchy gramophone recordings dating back to the late nineteenth century, we cannot in a literal sense ‘hear’ Russia talking in the late imperial era.¹ Instead, this study will mostly rely on various forms of writing about speaking. Yet, as Vladimir Nabokov once reminded us, it is wise to be sceptical about the documentary value of such written traces: we should be wary of the ‘slick kind of reminiscences where the author . . . with quiet impudence sets down reams and reams of dialogue . . . which no human brain could have preserved in anything approaching that particular form’.²

Why Speaking? Besides the epistemological concerns, there is a commonsensical objection to the subject of speaking in modern Russia: does talk really count for much? A principal theme of work on modern Russian culture is its scribal bias. A cult of literature was central to Russian nation-building from the 1880s until late in the Soviet ¹ The first speech recording in Russia may be a phonogram of Lev Tolstoy made in February 1885. There were further literary recordings in the early twentieth century, as Silver Age poets were invited to declaim their work. See Peter Brang, Zvuchashchee slovo: Zametki po teorii i istorii deklamatsionnogo iskusstva v Rossii (Moscow, 2010), 10. ² Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Chapter Sixteen’ or ‘On Conclusive Evidence’, in Speak, Memory (London, 1998), 238. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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period: Russia’s great writers were also taken to be its best sons (rarely daughters) and its most quintessential expression.³ If we take a broader social perspective, the adoption of literacy remains the most compelling and important story in modern Russian culture, told best by Jeffrey Brooks in his When Russia Learned to Read.⁴ To summarize crudely, from the 1860s onwards Russia was on a trajectory from orality to literacy. The vibrant popular print culture of the last third of the nineteenth century was joined by a politicized press in the early twentieth century; all this culminated in the massive scripturalization of Soviet culture in the Stalin era.⁵ The authority of Soviet leaders was literally underwritten: by their articles and speeches in the newspapers, by the reams of exegesis that they elicited, and by the collected works (fifty-five volumes for Lenin, thirteen for Stalin at his death) that stood on the shelves of so many aspirational Soviet families. From the early 1930s onwards, the ideal Soviet citizen was a diligent and self-improving reader.⁶ If reading and writing came to command impeccable authority in Russian culture, talking was often treated with ambivalence and outright hostility. The most striking examples come from peasant culture, which was eloquent on the advantages of silence and the perils of speech. In his collection of peasant sayings, first published during the reform era of the early 1860s, Vladimir Dal’ had a lengthy section devoted to this theme.⁷ The costs of reckless talk were likewise underlined by the tsarist state, which prosecuted lèse-majesté with vigour and issued laws on various ‘crimes of the tongue’.⁸ In educated society, similarly, we find a long tradition of disparagement of talking to excess. In their ABC of Communism (1919), Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii made withering reference to the govoril’ni (talking shops) of parliamentary ‘democratic republics’.⁹ Russian conservatives had been making such objections for decades.¹⁰ On a visit to London in 1861, Lev Tolstoy found Palmerston tedious in the House of Commons.¹¹ In the Soviet era, the most ³ On the event that effectively inaugurated the cult, see Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989). ⁴ Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, 1985). ⁵ A process that Brooks himself has described in his content analysis of the Soviet press over its first three decades, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000). ⁶ E. A. Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia: Sotsial’nye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi literatury (St Petersburg, 1997). ⁷ V. Dal’, Poslovitsy russkogo naroda (Moscow, 1862). ⁸ The phrase is taken from Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1997). Late imperial Russia had more in common with seventeenth-century Massachusetts than with contemporary Chicago or New York. On lèse-majesté, treated with special vigilance under Peter I, see M. I. Semevskii, Slovo i delo! 1700–1725 (St Petersburg, 1884). ⁹ N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (Monmouth, 2007), 180–3. ¹⁰ Notably Konstantin P. Pobednostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman (Ann Arbor, 1965), 32–49 on parliamentary representative democracy as ‘the great falsehood of our time’. ¹¹ A. V. Knowles, ‘Some Aspects of L. N. Tolstoy’s Visit to London in 1861: An Examination of the Evidence’, SEER 56 (1978): 112–14.

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prominent parliamentarian of revolutionary Russia, Aleksandr Kerensky, was subjected to relentless caricature, most famously in Sergei Eisenstein’s October, while the main internal enemy, Trotsky, was distrusted and disparaged for his excessive oratory as well as for his arrogance, aloofness, and political heresies. Pedagogy matched political practice: rhetoric was dropped from the school curriculum in the 1930s.¹² In the late Soviet era, Mikhail Gorbachev was derided for his loquacity, and public speaking of the glasnost era was commonly referred to as ‘Hyde Park’ oratory (i.e. Speakers’ Corner).¹³ Several observers have noted that the Russian word for ‘talking shop’, govoril’nia, is also the literal translation of the foreign-sounding parlament. The post-Soviet Duma has seemed to many Russians to prove the point.¹⁴ In 2003, the incoming speaker of the Duma, Boris Gryzlov, was reported as declaring: ‘Parliament is no place for discussion.’¹⁵ In short, there is plenty of fuel here for Western observers who see in Russian culture an antipathy to free speech and deliberative democracy that transcends superficial political differences. Partly because of the obstacles to unscripted public speech created by the tsarist and Soviet states alike, there is also a long tradition of Russians stereotyping themselves as poor or reluctant speakers. For radicals in the 1820s and beyond, the ‘silence’ of Russian society was a prominent metaphor for its disempowerment.¹⁶ From the 1860s onwards, a wide range of educated observers bemoaned the poor state of Russian oratory, whether in the church, the municipal assembly, or various more mundane settings. In the early twentieth century, the verbal indiscipline of the parliamentarians in the State Duma was an idée fixe of public discourse. Yet the critics of Russian speech culture protest a little too much. One reason for the warnings against unrestrained speech in peasant culture, and for the tsarist authorities’ policing of speech, was precisely that talk mattered a great deal. For all its burgeoning print culture, the Russian Empire remained only weakly literate in 1914, and speech was the best or the only way of getting messages across to a significant part of the population. As the extravagant French ambassador Maurice Paléologue opined in January 1916, the vigilance with which the government policed public speaking was easily explained: ‘the Russians are affected infinitely

¹² For more on the anti-rhetorical rhetoric of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s, see A. P. Romanenko, Sovetskaia slovesnaia kul’tura: Obraz ritora (Saratov, 2000), chap. 2. ¹³ For one typical sceptical view of Gorbachev’s suspicious fluency, see a short memoir by the head of the ideological department of the Leningrad party committee, in O. N. Ansberg and A. D. Margolis, Obshchestvennaia zhizn’ Leningrada v gody perestroiki. 1985–1991: Sbornik materialov (St Petersburg, 2009), 412. ¹⁴ As noted in Andrei Kolesnikov, ‘Vsia vlast’ Sovetam’, Izvestiia, 26 March 2002, 2. ¹⁵ In fact, he did not utter these precise words, but this pithy journalist’s summary of the gist of his remarks soon gained the status of apocryphal truth. ¹⁶ I owe this insight to Gabriella Safran, whom I thank for sharing with me sections of her book in progress on listening in nineteenth-century Russia.

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more by the spoken than the written word. To begin with, they are an imaginative race, and consequently always desire to hear and see those who speak to them. In the second place, nine-tenths of the population cannot read. Lastly, the long winter nights and the debates of the mir have trained the moujik for centuries to verbal improvisation.’ By the second year of war, with the authority of the tsarist regime plummeting, there was every prospect that the ‘orators of the peasant assemblies’ would foment further unrest and make common cause with their counterparts in the ‘socialist and revolutionary proletariat’.¹⁷ Nor—and here is a fundamental premise of this book—was it true that Russia was an oratorical tabula rasa until the surge of revolutionary talk in the early twentieth century. From the 1860s onwards, it acquired new institutions—law courts and various forms of local assembly—where oral persuasion was paramount. The reform era of Alexander II opened new paths for Russian society, but it also untied tongues.

Russia’s Rhetorical Legacy It would, however, be rash to assume that public speech in Russia began only in the 1860s. Medieval Rus evidently had some able rhetoricians among its churchmen, and the oral dimension of its diplomats’ discourse seems to have been more prominent than in the practice of their successors or their Byzantine and Western European contemporaries.¹⁸ Muscovite Russia could even claim its own heritage of oral political deliberation. The irregularly summoned land assemblies (sobory) of the Muscovite period had brought the Tsar into unmediated contact with the ‘best people’ of his realm. Even if the composition and proceedings of these gatherings were constrained by estate distinctions, and even if the assemblies had no formal powers, they were perhaps not so very different from equivalent consultative bodies in early modern Western Europe. In 1767, moreover, Catherine II convened a Legislative Commission with a rich and diverse cast of elected representatives that would be unsurpassed until the State Duma in 1906. And nineteenth-century Russians with telescopic memories could look back to the popular assemblies (veche, pl. vecha) of pre-Muscovite Russia, which survived in the northwestern states of Pskov and Novgorod as late as the fifteenth century.¹⁹

¹⁷ Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs (London, 1923), 2: 163. ¹⁸ As argued in D. S. Likhachev, ‘Russkii posol’skii obychai XI-XIII vekov’, Istoricheskie zapiski, 18 (1946): 42–55. On virtuoso churchmen, see Simon Franklin (ed.), Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’ (Cambridge, MA, 1991). ¹⁹ For a fairly typical example of the late imperial interest in the ancient precedents, see Vasilii Latkin, Zemskie sobory drevnei Rusi, ikh istoriia i organizatsiia sravnitel’no s zapadno-evropeiskimi predstavitel’nymi uchrezhdeniiami (St Petersburg, 1885).

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This account of the Russian heritage was, however, open to a few objections. Russia’s estates had always lacked the social roots and political leverage of their counterparts in France and the Holy Roman Empire. When the Romanov state had grown strong enough in the mid-seventeenth century to dispense with the ritual of wider consultation, the sobor had died a rapid death. Catherine’s Commission was the first and only such gathering in the eighteenth century, and it can be called ‘deliberative’ only if it is understood that the outcome of the deliberations was entirely pre-determined: the central agenda item was the 526 paragraphs of Catherine’s own ‘Instruction’, which were read out in their entirety to the delegates over five whole sessions. The absence of deliberative politics did not mean, however, that Russian rulers lacked rhetorical awareness, or that the spoken word was not a significant tool of persuasion and loyalty-building. Catherine evidently wrote her Instruction with the awareness that many of her delegates would not be able or willing to read it; her short paragraphs were designed to make it more digestible to the listening audience.²⁰ Tsarist addresses to the people were issued periodically over the following decades, often in response to some crisis, and the promulgation was oral; priests usually provided the mouthpieces for the ruler’s word. With some delay, and not without controversy, Russia had followed the panEuropean rhetorical trajectory from antiquity to the middle ages and a little beyond. Rhetoric was a prominent part of the cultural inheritance Russia received via Latin-educated churchmen in the southwestern lands brought under Moscow’s control in the seventeenth century; it carried with it the promise of a stable hierarchical order of cultural expression and a ‘ceremonial grammar’ for the Russian state as it consolidated its new dynasty and its territorial gains. Early modern Russia’s first work on the subject dated back to the early seventeenth century, rhetoric received much more attention in the eighteenth century, and the pace of publication in this area quickened noticeably in the early nineteenth century (at least in part in response to the creation of new educational institutions such as universities, gymnasiums, and seminaries).²¹ In the middle of the seventeenth century, the rise of the sermon as an important supplement to the liturgy opened up new rhetorical prospects before elite churchmen.²² In the eighteenth century, the Jesuit-educated Feofan Prokopovich put forward a model of rhetoric to fit the Petrine state: one that would preserve order and authority while avoiding the rigidity of scholasticism. In mid-century, with Lomonosov and Sumarokov, ²⁰ Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (London, 2010), 171. ²¹ V. I. Annushkin, Pervaia russkaia ‘Ritorika’ XVII veka (Moscow, 1999) and V. I. Annushkin, Istoriia russkoi ritoriki. Khrestomatiia: Uchebnoe posobie (Moscow, 2002). Note also ‘Bibliografiia oratorskogo iskusstva (XVIII-IX-XX vv.)’, in V. K. Serezhnikov, Muzyka slova i shkola oratora, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1930), 200–17, which dates back to 1744 and numbers sixteen titles for the eighteenth century and a further twenty-eight for the period 1800–30. ²² Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1992), chap. 7.

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Russia debated its own version of the baroque.²³ In Russia as elsewhere, this was largely a matter of synthesizing existing traditions in a compelling new symbolic order, and rhetoric was the single most important tool to that end.²⁴ But these were increasingly theories of written discourse. Symptomatic was the fate of the ode, a genre that faded in the mid-eighteenth century with the weakening of the ceremonial and performative court culture that had nourished it.²⁵ In its transition from court ceremony to an incipient literary culture of journal and essay, Russia was following a general European pattern. Rhetoric, which started in Athens as the art of oral persuasion, mutated into the art of prose composition; what made for effective writing was assumed also to be good for oral delivery from throne or pulpit. Medieval Europe saw a transition from ‘speakerly’ to ‘writerly’ rhetorics: the latter laid claim to the ‘cultural cachet of oratory’ while at the same time establishing the written word as the basic currency of eloquence. The arrival of print tended to bolster the precedence of the written word over its spoken delivery.²⁶ Nonetheless, Renaissance self-cultivation and early modern venues for oral persuasion such as city councils kept rhetoric qua oratory alive and relatively well.²⁷ Then, between the 1640s and the 1880s, in Britain, America, and France, a combination of religious awakening, constitutionalism, and republicanism brought a strong revival of the notion of rhetoric as oral, even unscripted discourse. Russia, of course, did not have the same political or religious stimuli, and did not produce the same ‘outpouring of handbooks of declamation and elocution’ that we find in Western Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth.²⁸ It was telling that Lomonosov’s Short Handbook of Eloquence, which was in high demand in the mid-eighteenth century and went through three or four editions in the author’s lifetime, was devoted primarily to the task of establishing the norms of the literary language; a planned further volume on oratory seems never to have been written.²⁹ By the early nineteenth century, however, there were significant stirrings of interest in the spoken dimension of eloquence. A. Merzliakov’s Short Rhetoric (1828), written for the ‘noble ²³ Renate Lachmann, Die Zerstörung der schönen Rede: Rhetorische Tradition und Konzepte des Poetischen (Munich, 1994), 35 (for notion of ‘ceremonial grammar’), chap. 6 (for Lomonosov and Sumarokov), chap. 8 (for Feofan Prokopovich). ²⁴ L. I. Sazonova, Literaturnaia kul’tura Rossii. Rannee Novoe vremia (Moscow, 2006), e.g. 32. ²⁵ James von Geldern, ‘The Ode as Performative Genre’, SR 50 (1991): 927–39. ²⁶ Ben McCorkle, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study (Carbondale, 2012), chaps. 2–3, quotation 66. ²⁷ The paradigmatic example is Venice: see Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007). ²⁸ T. M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago, 1990), 243–4. ²⁹ M. V. Lomonosov, ‘Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiiu. Kniga pervaia, v kotoroi soderzhitsia ritorika, pokazuiushchaia obshchie pravila oboego kasnorechiia, to est’ oratorii i poezii, sochinennaia v pol’zu liubiashchikh slovesnye nauki’ (written 1744–47, first published 1748), PSS (Moscow, 1950–83), 7: 807–11. Admittedly, Lomonosov’s shorter unpublished ‘Kratkoe rukovodstvo k ritorike’ (probably 1743) did find room for a couple of pages on delivery (in the chapter ‘O proiznoshenii’, ibid., 77–9).

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charges of the Moscow University boarding school’, discussed the orator’s need to ‘arouse passions’: the public speaker ‘should not forget about the art of proclamation [provozglashenie]’, which demanded ‘volume and radiance of voice, pleasant changes as it is raised or lowered, and its speed and duration varied, and finally the ability to accord tone with the content of the speech and the passions that reign in it’.³⁰ Metropolitan Filaret, the leading ecclesiast of the age, was no advocate of improvisation in preaching, but he did at least seek to loosen the strict formal rules of the eighteenth-century sermon.³¹ All this did not quite amount to an Elocutionary Movement, but something was afoot. Yet the best known commentary on the rhetorical literature of the age is a fiercely dismissive article by the crusading literary critic Vissarion Belinskii. In a review of 1839, Belinskii demolished two authoritative recent works on rhetoric and slovesnost’; one of them, by Nikolai Koshanskii, Pushkin’s former professor at the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, had already been through six editions. For Belinskii, these works were ‘anachronisms’ and the worst form of scholasticism, whose main purpose was to invoke the prestige of ancient orators in order to bolster presentday officialese.³² But we should not conclude from Belinskii’s indictment that Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century was some oratorical desert. Public speaking took place regularly, even if it was of a formal and ritual nature: there were sermons, manifestos, decrees, commands, formal addresses. Many of these circulated in written form, but they reached their first audience largely through the medium of speech. The Napoleonic Wars nudged even the emperor into oratorical action: Alexander I’s manifestos and speeches were carefully composed by leading advisers such as Shishkov and Speranskii. His successor and younger brother Nicholas took lessons in declamation and gave a speech to calm the people during the cholera epidemic of 1831. On the other side of the main political divide of the time, the Decembrists borrowed from church oratory in their appeals to the people. Perhaps the most receptive rhetorician of the age was Aleksandr Pushkin, who almost certainly acquainted himself with the oratorical legacy of 1812—the speeches of Napoleon and of Russia’s generals—when studying at the Lyceum. Famously, he then declaimed his own ‘Memories in Tsarskoe Selo’ (‘Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele’), a poem that has a clear debt to the rhetoric of 1812, at a public examination in January 1815.³³ Later, post-Romantic commentators tended to assume that Pushkin quickly liberated himself from the ³⁰ A. Merzliakov, Kratkaia ritorika, ili pravila, otnosiashchiesia ko vsem rodam sochinenii prozaicheskikh (Moscow, 1828). ³¹ Robert L. Nichols, ‘Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, 1782–1867’ and Archbishop Mark (Arndt), ‘Mitropolit Moskovskii Filaret (Drozdov) i ego mesto v kontekste russkoi propovedi’, both in Vladimir Tsurikov, Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow 1782–1867: Perspectives on the Man, His Works, and His Times (Jordanville, NY, 2003), 16–19, 52–104. ³² V. G. Belinskii, PSS (Moscow, 1953–59), 9: 318–22. ³³ N. I. Mikhailova, ‘Vitiistva groznyi dar . . . ’: A.S. Pushkin i russkaia oratorskaia kul’tura ego vremeni (Moscow, 1999), 10–73.

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‘scholasticism’ he imbibed in his adolescence. But in fact his relationship to rhetoric was much more flexible than that, and its traces are present not only in his obviously ‘oratorical’ poems.³⁴ The close and interactive relationship in this era between manuscript and print has long been recognized as a crucial element in literary production in the ‘Age of Pushkin’. But the relationship between speech and writing was no less mutually enriching. At the Society for Lovers of Russian Literature, an important centre of literary life that flourished in the first decade after the Napoleonic Wars, works were delivered orally at meetings, and oratory was considered a genre fit for publication like poems, histories, criticism, and so on.³⁵ Pushkin’s taste for declamation far outlasted his schooldays: he made a huge impression on acquaintances for his sing-song delivery of lyric poetry, while his direct, compelling rendition of the sprawling drama Boris Godunov struck listeners for the way it eschewed the lofty declamatory style of his teachers. Even after Pushkin, it remained normal practice for writers to have listeners rather than readers as the first audience of their works. Dostoevsky, for example, started reading aloud in his early twenties, and this was common in his literary circles of the 1840s. The practice leaves a trace in his much later novel The Idiot, where one of the heroines declaims Pushkin.³⁶ Perhaps the most passionate advocate of the oral dimension of writing was Nikolai Gogol. In his eccentric Selected Correspondence with Friends, he insisted on the oral and communal function of literature. Russia might lack loquacious talkers of the parliamentary type (rechistye govoruny, in Gogol’s pleonastic expression), but it was ripe for ‘skilled readers’ who might deliver morally elevating works to their listeners.³⁷ The spoken word gained a presence not only in the familiar gatherings of literary society but also in the incipient institutions of civic life. In the early nineteenth century these were accessible to only a tiny privileged minority, but they had brought a new quality to ‘public’ discourse over the few decades of their existence. Catherine’s Charter to the Nobility in 1785 established provincial societies of nobles, while noble assemblies met every three years (and sometimes for ‘extraordinary sessions’ as well). The political stakes of these gatherings remained purely local and corporate, and they could only provide a conduit for petitions to St Petersburg, not engage the higher levels of government in meaningful dialogue.³⁸ But the provincial societies provided a new stimulus for developing courteous forms of social interaction within a broader public. The Moscow noble assembly (founded 1783) soon became a social hub for the local elite. ³⁴ A. B. Rogachevskii, Ritoricheskie traditsii v tvorchestve A. S. Pushkina (Moscow, 1994). ³⁵ R. N. Kleimenova, Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti. 1811–1930 (Moscow, 2002), 9. ³⁶ Brang, Zvuchashchee slovo, 53–6, 61–4. ³⁷ Letter 5, dated 1843, in N. V. Gogol’, PSS (Moscow, 1937–52), 8: 233–4. Note also letter 14, where Gogol makes a similar argument in favour of theatre (despite church disapproval). ³⁸ G. M. Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility, 1881–1905 (New Brunswick, 1984), 45.

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Renowned for its lavish balls, it also carefully promoted the values of ‘decency, respect and modest behaviour’ and proscribed blasphemous and otherwise offensive speech.³⁹ Theatre was perhaps the single most important provider of public speech in Russian provincial towns. Western Siberia was among the most precocious regions in this regard: in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Barnaul, Tobolsk, and Tomsk all had theatres. Tobolsk, the regional cultural centre, had one of the first professional theatres, and performances could be attended by as many as 560 spectators. In the 1840s, the newly refurbished theatre in Ostashkov (Tver province) had a capacity of 450 for a town of fewer than 10,000 people— though admittedly for a long time it was the only theatre outside the capitals in Moscow and Tver provinces. And then there were clubs and noble assemblies that spread to the district (uezd) towns in Tver region in the 1840s.⁴⁰ Russia as a whole had more than 170 serf theatres by the early nineteenth century, most of them in towns: in this era theatre was a state-promoted vehicle of urban civility.⁴¹ The other main venues for persuasive, and more or less ‘public’, speech in prereform Russia were institutions of learning. As early as the 1830s, there were teachers in provincial gimnazii who explicitly rejected the teachings of Koshanskii, stating their belief in practice over theory and releasing their students from slavish imitation of exemplars. Meanwhile, the St Petersburg educational district was taking more interest in practical methods of teaching language: pupils were to be trained in declamation (‘expressive reading’) and were expected to acquire the ability to summarize in speech and writing a literary text read out to them. In 1846, the programme for Russian language and literature of a Moscow gymnasium emphasized the need to develop in students the capacity for written and oral communication, ‘because it is extremely important in life to be able to express one’s thoughts quickly, coherently, logically and pleasantly’. In 1852, an instruction approved by the Minister of Enlightenment reminded gymnasium teachers of the importance of raising standards of speech. All these developments would go further with the teacher conferences of the 1860s, which expressed a firm consensus on the importance of the practical method and the priority of ‘living speech’ (zhivaia rech’).⁴² In other words, when Belinskii advocated a more vigorous and performative rhetoric in 1839, he was not whistling in the wind but stating a view that was fast ³⁹ Aleksandr Barsukov, Rossiiskoe blagorodnoe sobranie v Moskve po sokhranivshimsia arkhivnym dokumentam (Moscow, 1886), 5. Quotation from rules drawn up in 1803. ⁴⁰ A. I. Kupriianov, Gorodskaia kul’tura russkoi provintsii: Konets XVIII—pervaia polovina XIX veka (Moscow, 2007), 118, 149–50, 156. ⁴¹ Murray Frame, School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (New Haven, 2006), 37. ⁴² M. S. Lapatukhin, ‘Iz istorii prepodavaniia russkogo iazyka v srednikh uchebnykh zavedeniiakh Rossii (dorevoliutsionnyi period)’, Uchenye zapiski. Kalininskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet 34 (1963): 96–100, 160–2, 169–70.

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becoming the mainstream in educated society. In the second third of the nineteenth century, university-educated literary intellectuals were the most enthusiastic adopters of the spoken word, and this was reflected even in the ostensibly ossified genre of handbooks of rhetoric. It was now necessary to establish the place of oratory (denoted more commonly by the lofty Russian word vitiistvo than by the borrowed oratorstvo that took over in the second half of the nineteenth century) in the literary arts—and to show it to be no less significant than poetry and prose. Its distinctive quality, of course, was that it could be judged only by spoken words, not by the residue on the page. Rhetoric could also play its part in the invention of Russian national culture. By the Romantic era it was felt necessary to make ambitious claims for the rhetorical lineage of the Russians, which extended back via Kievan Rus to ancient Greece.⁴³ The future Slavophile luminary Iurii Samarin wrote a master’s thesis on the sermons of Stefan Iavorskii and Feofan Prokopovich, who exemplified the ‘Southern’ and ‘Protestant’ approaches to rhetoric, respectively. Samarin also offered extensive reflections on the nature of spoken eloquence (krasnorechie). Even if oratory did not rise to the status of an independent art, its emotional dimension made it rhetorically distinctive: its role was to ‘arouse lively sympathy for general principles’, to ‘act on the whole person’ by means of ‘pathos, the artistic element and poetic expression’. The preacher should possess ‘deep conviction’ and use voice and gesture to convey that to the listener, but his ‘subjectivity’ should not be so prominent as to form an obstacle to perceiving the general truth he was trying to communicate.⁴⁴ Ahead of his time, in this as in other areas, was Mikhail Speranskii, who wrote a textbook on eloquence during his years at the Alexander Nevsky Seminary in the 1790s. Although the work circulated in manuscript, it was not published until 1844, when its message almost certainly had a more receptive (and by no means only ecclesiastical) audience. Speranskii insisted that true eloquence required genuine feeling on the part of the orator: ‘the only means of arousing the passions is to feel them oneself. But one doesn’t need to be in the circumstances that usually inflame them’—imagination could stand in for emotional stimulus. This power of sentiment and imagination was in large measure a gift of nature; even the ‘coarsest’ peoples could exhibit it. The task of the preacher was to encourage the listener to embrace truth by ‘touching the heart’. To be sure, this represented a ‘lack of true enlightenment’: most people were more susceptible to emotion than to reflection. But the eloquent orator had to take this into account.⁴⁵ Still another variety of eloquence was the military. In 1847, Petr Lebedev, professor at the Imperial Military Academy and a renowned lecturer, made the army case for the importance of effective speech. In Lebedev’s view, men in all ⁴³ Vasilii Iakimov, O krasnorechii v Rossii do Lomonosova (Kharkov, 1838), 6–7, 12. ⁴⁴ Iurii Samarin, Stefan Iavorskii i Feofan Prokopovich kak propovedniki (Moscow, 1844), 5–6, 24–5. ⁴⁵ M. Speranskii, Pravila vysshego krasnorechiia (Moscow, 1844), 5, 13, 29, 201.

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fields of state activity needed the ‘gift of the word’, and the absence of such eloquence was invariably a sign of dysfunction in military command. Fortunately, Russia had a tradition of martial eloquence that made it the equal of Hannibal, Henry IV, and Napoleon: ‘We Russians can say with pride that we have and always have had both mighty soldiers [bogatyri-soldaty] and heroic commanders [geroi-nachal’niki] who know how to move and amuse the soldier’s soul; even in deepest antiquity brave Russian forces [druzhiny] went into battle led by their skalds and bards, who reminded them of the glory of the motherland, of heroic campaigns, and battles through adversity with the enemy.’ Lebedev also made an ingenious effort to reconcile the glorious rhetorical tradition of antiquity with the less obviously oratorical practice of modern times: the commands and bulletins of the present day would ‘take a worthy place in the chronicles of military eloquence’—these texts, ‘drawn with the blade of a victorious sword’, were able to convey a general’s intentions to the ‘mass’ of soldiers through their ‘simplicity, clarity and lively feeling’.⁴⁶ But if we turn from the principles of eloquence to its practice, we need to look above all to the lecture halls of Moscow University. It was symptomatic that Samarin’s dissertation on Orthodox and Catholic sermons itself became a spoken event, as the author gave a public defence of his work on 3 June 1844. Among the attentive listeners was Petr Chaadaev, who noted the large and enthusiastic audience (which included women as well as men) and the impressive demeanour of the young Samarin, even if Chaadaev disagreed with his critique of Western Christianity.⁴⁷ Especially well qualified to comment on the place of lecturing in the university of the 1840s was the censor-professor Aleksandr Nikitenko, who in 1841 drew up a set of ‘Rules on public lectures’, but who also had strong views as a practitioner. As he noted in his diary in summer 1841, his aspiration was to ‘turn the lectern into a tribune’, to ‘act more on people’s feelings and will than to develop before them a scholarly theory’; he felt himself to be ‘more an orator than a professor’. For the following winter he planned a course of public lectures, where he hoped to replicate his success in the university lecture hall—though he admitted he was apprehensive, not least because he preferred not to read from a text.⁴⁸ The greatest impression of any public speaker in this era was made by Timofei Granovskii in his course of lectures on medieval European history in the winter of 1843–4. After starting his lecturing career in 1839, Granovskii soon acquired a reputation for his semi-improvised style of lecturing and the attention he paid to ⁴⁶ P. Lebedev, Neskol’ko slov o voennom krasnorechii (St Petersburg, 1847), 5, 12–13. Like the literary orators of his time, Lebedev was operating productively at the interface of speech and writing. In addition to his distinguished career as a lecturer, he would serve as editor of Russkii invalid in a lively phase of its history (1855–61). For basic biographical information, see the entry on Lebedev in B&E, 17: 417 (1896). ⁴⁷ Letter to A. I. Turgenev, June 1844, in P. Ia. Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma, 2 vols (Moscow, 1991), 2: 168–71. ⁴⁸ A. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1955), 1: 229, 234–6.

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his students. Contemporaries were unanimous on the impact of his lectures of 1843–4, and on the new kind of audience it attracted (including many women). As Granovskii himself wrote to a friend in December 1843, ‘there’s no room in the hall, the ladies arrive half an hour early to get places close to the front’.⁴⁹ Writing many years later, E. A. Drashusova could only dimly remember the content of the lectures, but like many women in aristocratic and literary circles, she had attended them assiduously and shared the general ecstatic response. Granovskii made an immediate impression for his ‘noble and poetic appearance’, soulful look, long hair, and rather sickly air, and his slight lisp did not weaken the effect of his eloquence.⁵⁰ The aura of the lectures was enhanced by the fact that they left no written traces beyond the outline that Granovskii had submitted to the authorities for approval.⁵¹ Besides fashioning for himself a new kind of intellectual celebrity, Granovskii was making a contribution to the most compelling intellectual debate of the time: the Slavophile-Westernizer controversy. Mid-century intellectuals were beginning to probe the more combative capacities of the spoken word. Late in the reign of Nicholas I, Slavophiles and Westernizers alike seized the occasion of the centenary of Moscow University to hold meetings and reinvigorate their sense of common purpose.⁵² And the intelligentsia could hardly fail to consider its talk political when it was so attentively policed by the authorities. Almost from the moment of its creation in 1826, the notorious Third Section was receiving reports on gatherings of Petersburg literary society. In September 1827, the writerinformer Faddei Bulgarin reported to the authorities that writers, understandably enough at this nervy post-Decembrist moment, had let their societies and intimate gatherings lapse in recent times. A recent dinner at the home of the journal editor P. P. Svin’in had given them an opportunity to renew their discussions, though the atmosphere had remained edgy; but a discussion at the housewarming of the writer O. M. Somov had been less constrained.⁵³ The most draconian intervention in the life of the intelligentsia by the Nicholaevan police state came in 1849, when the members of a rather innocuous Fourierist discussion circle assembled by Mikhail Petrashevskii were arrested and made to account for their every word.⁵⁴

⁴⁹ T. N. Granovskii i ego perepiska (Moscow, 1897), 461. ⁵⁰ ‘Vospominaniia E.A. Drashusovoi (1842–1847)’, Rossiiskii arkhiv (2004): 183. ⁵¹ Priscilla Roosevelt takes this fact as ‘symbolic of the voicelessness of the intelligentsia of the Remarkable Decade’ (in her Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofei Granovsky [Newtonville, 1986], 79), though it may also suggest that ‘voice’ (as distinct from heavily censored print) was becoming the primary medium of intelligentsia discourse. ⁵² David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801–1881 (London, 1992), 212. ⁵³ Vidok Figliarin: Pis’ma i agenturnye zapiski F.V. Bulgarina v III otdelenie (Moscow, 1998), 205. ⁵⁴ See for example the detailed interrogation of Petrashevskii himself on 2–3 June 1849, in Delo petrashevtsev (Moscow and Leningrad, 1937), 1: 98–102.

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Speech and Technology Public speaking is significant not just for its direct effects on the physically present audience that hears it but also for its ramifications when rendered in other media. The most influential version of this insight is Walter Ong’s theory of ‘secondary orality’, which showed how the spoken word mutated in the age of audio-visual media: radio and television created entirely new ways of speaking (and listening).⁵⁵ What is less often appreciated is that the nineteenth-century world enjoyed a form of secondary orality even before the advent of broadcasting. Public speaking was ‘heard’ by audiences primarily when they read it on the printed page.⁵⁶ This did not mean that orality was subjected to the hegemony of literacy: if anything, the rhetorical balance of power between speech and writing tilted back a little towards the former. When reproduced in countless newspaper copies, speech (much of it at least purportedly verbatim) entered an intense and interactive relationship with the written standard. America was the quintessential case: over the course of the nineteenth century, this ‘nation of speechifiers’ traded patrician oratory for a more demotic eloquence.⁵⁷ Even though the newspaper established itself as the most powerful medium of political discourse, print adopted or mimicked elements of spoken rhetoric (most obviously, in the early nineteenth century, through emphatic punctuation and typography).⁵⁸ Something similar can be said about Russia. Quite obviously, the only reason we can even attempt to tell the story of speaking in imperial Russia is the fact that it left abundant traces in writing. If anything, the relationship between speech and writing in modern rhetoric was even closer in Russia than elsewhere. Eighteenthcentury America or revolutionary France might have enjoyed oratory in its ‘pure’ form (John Adams’s reputedly best speech—his riposte to John Dickinson during the debate on independence—was never recorded),⁵⁹ but Russia’s cautious embrace of public speaking in the 1860s coincided with the start of the rapid growth of the newspaper press. Not only did public speech exemplify the new spirit of glasnost’, it had a protected status: words spoken in certain settings— zemstvos, city dumas, above all courtrooms—enjoyed a (qualified) freedom from censorship that was no small consideration in illiberal Russia. ⁵⁵ Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982). ⁵⁶ Actually, in England the process dates back to the 1770s, at a time when press reporting became a fact of parliamentary life (even if it was not universally acknowledged as a good or legitimate thing). See Christopher Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760–1800 (Oxford, 2012), esp. chap. 4. ⁵⁷ See Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago, 2009), and Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990). ⁵⁸ Andrew W. Robertson, The Language of Democracy: Political Rhetoric in the United States and Britain, 1790–1900 (Charlottesville, 2005). ⁵⁹ Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, 2000), 202–3.

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The relationship between speech and print also worked in the other direction: much printed material had an audience of listeners rather than silent, solitary readers.⁶⁰ In sociocultural terms, Russia at the end of the nineteenth century had more in common with England in the Stuart period than with the Britain of Gladstone and Disraeli: its literacy rate was still significantly lower than that of England in 1700. For this reason, texts continued to be read aloud to peasant and worker audiences.⁶¹ The conclusion of a historian of early modern England holds good for Russia in the late nineteenth century: ‘There was no necessary antithesis between oral and literate forms of communication and preservation; the one did not have to destroy or undermine the other. If anything, the written word tended to augment the spoken.’⁶² From the 1850s onwards, the educated elite made new efforts to recognize the ambient orality of Russian society. Ethnographers and dialectologists recorded and analysed the varieties of popular speech in the empire.⁶³ Literature too was infused with an ethnographic sensibility. Practically all major writers of the time spent time recording how people ‘really’ spoke— whether the peasants of Turgenev, Nekrasov, and Tolstoy; the merchants of Ostrovsky; the convicts and petty bourgeois of Dostoevsky; or the priests and wanderers of Leskov.⁶⁴ But speech made its deepest and most direct inroads into written culture when recorded in purportedly objective form. In the reform era and beyond, the printed page was able to preserve much of the ‘spokenness’ of speech thanks to Russia’s adoption of an important new technique: stenography. The journalists and newspaper editors of the burgeoning daily press now had a means of rendering speech faithfully; this marked a break with the condescension and stylization of earlier eras, offering Russian society a new way of contemplating (and ‘hearing’) itself. Again, there are many parallels with other European countries. The print culture of political speech reached its apogee in Victorian Britain: from the early 1870s onwards, a combination of booming daily press, excellent telegraph connections, and expanding electorate made extra-parliamentary speechmaking the most

⁶⁰ Cf. nineteenth-century Latin America, where the coexistence of modern republicanism and established Catholic practices of proselytizing gave the relationship between print and speech a similarly dynamic quality. Iván Jaksic (ed.), The Political Power of the Word: Press and Oratory in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (London, 2002). ⁶¹ On the extent of reading aloud in the village, see evidence from the very end of the nineteenth century presented in B. M. Firsov and I. G. Kiseleva, Byt velikorusskikh krest’ian-zemlepashtsev. Opisanie materialov etnograficheskogo biuro kniazia V. N. Tenisheva. (Na primere Vladimirskoi gubernii) (St Petersburg, 1993), e.g. 163–4. ⁶² Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 5. ⁶³ See I. A. Ossovetskii, ‘Nachal’nye etapy razvitiia russkoi dialektologii’ and S. S. Vysotskii, ‘Razvitie russkoi dialektologii v kontse XIX v. i v nachale XX v. (do Velikoi Oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii)’, in V. V. Gornung (ed.), Istoriia russkoi dialektologii (Moscow, 1961), 7–29 (esp. 18–29), 30–66. ⁶⁴ See articles by Gabriella Safran, Anna Schur, and Alexander Ogden in the cluster ‘Literature, Authority, and Listening in Late Imperial Russia’, RR, 72 (2013).

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influential genre of political life.⁶⁵ In quantitative terms, Britain comfortably led the rest of the European field. But in qualitative terms, Russia’s version of the ‘stenographic age’ has special claims to our attention: the documentary record of speech had heightened significance in a society where cultural cleavages were so stark, and where public speech was still so vulnerable to the exercise of absolute power.

Public Speech and the Political Imagination Stenography made the spoken word newly salient in Russia as elsewhere in the nineteenth-century world. This opened a new chapter in a very old story: that of public speech in the political imagination. The unmediated spoken encounter is a foundational myth of most political (not to mention religious) communities. Sometimes it takes the form of the leader gathering together the led, his authority and authenticity underwritten by his physical and acoustic presence: charisma has generally not been mute. But often the community comes together for some form of deliberation or even contestation. Oral persuasion has been central to political practice—and, just as importantly, to the political imagination—since at least the ancient Greeks. It spawned an elaborate science (rhetoric) that made with ease the jump from antiquity to the middle ages and beyond. For Renaissance humanists, rhetoric was a real-world skill more valuable than any other. Scholars of early modern politics have shown that spoken rhetoric was not a matter of empty ritual: the art of oratory was alive even under absolutism. Even if disagreement was less openly expressed than in modern politics, speakers were able to convey their political positions rather than merely paying homage to the monarch.⁶⁶ Public speech is inflected differently according to the religious idioms available at a given time; according to varieties of colonial encounter; and, most obviously, according to the power structures and political institutions in existence. Its ramifications multiplied with the rising power of representative assemblies. Once constitutional monarchy or republicanism triumphed, it was easy to dismiss absolutist rhetoric as dry scholasticism as compared to the vigorous speech of the popular tribune. There were three special cases that together constituted the gold standard of political oratory in the modern world: Britain, where parliament had made a

⁶⁵ H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Britain, 1860–1950’, in P. J. Waller (ed.) Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987), 34–58, and Joseph S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 2001). ⁶⁶ Jörg Feuchter and Johannes Helmrath, Politische Redekultur in der Vormoderne (Frankfurt, 2008).

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purportedly seamless transition from middle ages to modernity; France, which had a heroic if contested revolutionary legacy and a nineteenth-century tradition of fiery oratory; and America, which had a revolutionary legacy, a powerful religious culture where the spoken Word of God carried all before it, and a vigorous culture of political debate in the nineteenth century.⁶⁷ The case for the importance of political speech is easy to make for these three countries, which had flourishing (if fractious) parliamentary bodies, and where rhetoric made a successful transition to the modern world. In many other places, however, the spoken word had much to prove in the nineteenth century. It did not have the same anchoring in constitutions and parliaments. Here, ‘rhetoric’ still connoted rulebound book-learning. There were not the institutions—whether parliaments or churches—to relaunch the art of oral persuasion. But there is an important story to be told about rhetoric even in political cultures at some distance from republicanism or liberal democracy. A case in point is Germany, some of whose states had significant (if mostly illiberal) traditions of political assembly and adopted stenography well before Russia.⁶⁸ The provincial diets became more vocal towards the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Prussian king was not immune to the changing rhetorical climate: Frederick William IV was the first of his line to give a spontaneous public address (in his response to the homage of the Prussian Estates). When this aroused expectations he was not willing to satisfy, he found himself drawn into political contention, which culminated in an oratorical duel between the king and the United Diet in 1847.⁶⁹ The 1848 revolution then unleashed a wave of constitutionalism whose effects outlasted the reassertion of monarchical order in 1849. A generation later, parliamentarianism would reach a new level with the creation of the Reichstag in the unified Germany. By the Anglo-French standard, to be sure, its powers were pitifully limited. But the Reichstag was a remarkable rhetorical showcase for socialists, Poles, and Catholics as well as Junkers, and election campaigns fostered a rich culture of grassroots public speaking.⁷⁰ From 1890, moreover, Germany had a rhetorically incontinent emperor: Wilhelm II just could not stop talking, and his utterances were gratefully picked up and disseminated by the print media of the fin de siècle.⁷¹ ⁶⁷ See again Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers and Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence. ⁶⁸ The Bavarian diet was the first to acquire a stenographer (in 1819); Prussia, Westphalia, and Silesia followed in the 1840s. See Dirk Götschmann, Bayerischer Parlamentarismus im Vormärz: Die Ständeversammlung des Königreichs Bayern 1819–1848 (Düsseldorf, 2002), 182–7, and Herbert Obenaus, Anfänge des Parlamentarismus in Preussen bis 1848 (Düsseldorf, 1984), 379. ⁶⁹ Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006), 440, 460–1. ⁷⁰ Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000); Hans-Peter Goldberg, Bismarck und seine Gegner: Die politische Rhetorik im kaiserlichen Reichstag (Düsseldorf, 1998). ⁷¹ Michael A. Obst, ‘Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche’: Kaiser Wilhelm II. als politischer Redner (Paderborn, 2010).

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The Russian Empire, of course, was not Germany: here there was no vibrant regionalism, universal male suffrage was not remotely in prospect, and the emperor remained thoroughly autocratic. But rulership, in Russia just as much as elsewhere, required rhetoric, and the parameters and possibilities of political communication were changing fast after mid-century. There were three main reasons for this. The first was the principle of glasnost’, which was roughly equivalent to ‘publicity’ but did not imply liberal safeguards for free speech. From the 1860s onwards, governance and law in Russia were to be a good deal more public. Naturally, the ruler imagined this would take place on his terms and to advance his goals: to improve the flow of useful information to the centre, to reduce corruption and diffuse discontent, and to add yet more legitimacy to imperial rule. In reality, glasnost’ quickly became contested territory, as educated society chose to interpret it as freedom to say what one wanted. Although the government regularly tugged at the reins from 1866 onwards, glasnost’ had established itself as a core value of Russian public life, to be cherished even as it was flouted. Its cause was immeasurably aided by the second great driving force of rhetorical modernization: the rapid development of communications technology. The circulation of the daily press rose from a few thousand for the most successful newspapers in the 1860s to the tens of thousands and beyond in the early twentieth century, and many of these newspapers carried verbatim accounts of public speech.⁷² The third main factor in the rise of modern Russian rhetoric was the increasing need to create the impression of political participation. Even on a symbolic level, this participation was not ‘democratic’—at least not until 1905. But it still represented a marked change from the earlier model whereby the Tsar spoke and the narod was enigmatically silent. Ironically, the last blast of the unmitigated high-tolow discourse was the emancipation manifesto of 1861, a document written in uncompromisingly foggy high-Church style and read out by priests. But in the reform era and afterwards, an increasing number of people had the opportunity to take part in public deliberation, and at least a few of them were peasants. Even when the emperor or his plenipotentiaries did address his subjects, they had to make more effort to be understood. Glasnost’ (albeit illiberal), participation (albeit undemocratic), modern communications: these, then, were the challenges faced by reform-era autocracy. The spoken word could help with all of them. The very word glasnost’ had embedded in it the word for ‘voice’ (glas/golos), and nothing better symbolized the new ‘publicity’ of the age than members of various social orders holding forth in zemstvo assembly halls or courtrooms. Likewise, speaking was the quintessential act of public participation, instantly validated by the physical presence of speaker ⁷² For figures on circulation, see Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991), appendixes.

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and listeners. Finally, stenography ensured that imperial Russian voices would be extensively ‘heard’ on the printed page. Much less clear was how exactly public speech—in both its symbolic and its communicative aspects—would affect Russian political culture. As the abundant literature on Britain, America, and France has shown, the stories vary significantly from place to place even where there are apparent similarities in political outcomes (such as republicanism). Political speech in early America, for example, was shaped by its distinctive social, intellectual, and political contexts: by efforts to build community and police transgression from the pulpit, by encounters between highly lettered Europeans and speech-oriented native Americans, and (eventually) by an Enlightenment-infused republicanism. The result was that oratory served as a ‘vehicle of national embodiment’.⁷³ The rest of this book will attempt to describe Russia’s distinctive domestication of public speaking in the post-1860 era. It may be regarded as a case study in the rhetoric of illiberal modernity, thus providing a useful counterweight to the excellent studies of Britain and America that have tended to set the norms of modern political rhetoric. In this as in so many other areas, Russia was selfconsciously a latecomer. The art of oral persuasion was widely reckoned to have no significant native roots, Russian society was deemed ‘tongue-tied’, and the trope of ‘backwardness’ had much currency. In this Russia was akin less to America than to Japan, which adopted Western rhetoric (and stenography) in the Meiji period.⁷⁴ Nonetheless, Russia had an educated public for whom Demosthenes and Cicero were part of the cultural heritage (however peripherally). What really set Russia apart was, on the one hand, the barriers between the educated public and the government (lawyers, however gifted as orators, could not become congressmen) and, on the other, the chasm between the educated public and the bulk of the population. The lack of representative government fuelled perceptions of backwardness, leaving much political rhetoric unconsummated until 1905. It also inspired observers of Slavophile inclination to search for native Russian traditions of public deliberation, whether in the peasant skhod or in the consultative sobory of the seventeenth century.⁷⁵ As for the deep cultural fractures between the learned few and the unlettered many, the spoken word, as a universally accessible medium, had at least the potential to heal those divides—and perhaps even, at long last, to let the subaltern speak.

⁷³ Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, quotation 267. ⁷⁴ Massimiliano Tomasi, Rhetoric in Modern Japan: Western Influences on the Development of Narrative and Oratorical Style (Honolulu, 2004); Miyako Inoue, ‘Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth Century Japan’, Language and Communication 31 (2011): 181–90. ⁷⁵ The search continues to the present day: see I. G. Lukoianov, U istokov rossiiskogo parlamentarizma: Istoriko-dokumental’noe izdanie (St Petersburg, 2003), which has a foreword by Boris Gryzlov, then Speaker of the State Duma.

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The Structure of This Book Even if the spoken word can be shown to have political and cultural salience, that leaves the question of how to tell its story. At least in chronological terms, the parameters—the start and end dates of this study—are clear enough. Not coincidentally, the technological and political milestones align quite neatly. The reform era of Alexander II launched a slogan—glasnost’—that implied greatly expanded opportunities for public expression, including through the spoken word. Largely to enable glasnost’, the authorities encouraged the spread of a new technique that permitted the verbatim reproduction and dissemination of speech: stenography. The end of this study falls in the early 1930s, when Soviet political discourse and ritual hardened. Stenography continued to be widely used in Soviet institutions, but it lost its function as a documentary record of public speech—partly because speech was now subordinate to the Stalinist script, but also because radio was now becoming the main means for disseminating such speech. This book, then, offers a history of what might be called a ‘stenographic age’ stretching from the Great Reforms to incipient Stalinism. How, though, to structure this history? There are three obvious axes of analysis: space, chronology, and agency. The story of public speech can be divided up according to the venues where it occurred, the developments (mostly political) that significantly changed (for better or worse) the possibilities and meanings of public speech, or the people (whether whole categories or notable individuals) who practised oratory. After some hesitation, I have adopted a primarily chronological division of my material: the chapters begin and end at moments of palpable change in the conditions and ramifications of spoken rhetoric. Meaningful breaks in the story come in the late 1860s (with the passing of the first flush of glasnost’), in 1881 (with the assassination of Alexander II and resultant crackdown), and in the mid-1890s (with the emergence of a newly energized and combative ‘public’), while the enormous ruptures of 1905 and 1917 almost go without saying. At the same time, it is hard not to agree with nineteenth-century rhetoricians that oratory was divided into the three main categories of political (or proto-political), ecclesiastical, and legal. The zemstvo and municipal assemblies, the newly open courts, and the churches all had their different modes of operation, their own distinctive types of speaker, and their own trajectories: the zemstvo took the limelight in the mid-1860s, the courtroom seized the Russian public’s attention in the 1870s, while the 1880s were most notable for the emergence of a vanguard of church rhetoricians. That is not to mention still other venues—the university, the theatre, the street—that might variously influence all three basic types of oratory. Church, courtroom, and zemstvo, then, all have their own stories, and I have tried to do justice to these. But I have also tried to weave them together in an effort to provide a broad characterization of the rhetorical culture of each moment in the

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story (whether the 1860s or the 1890s or the 1920s). The primacy of chronology has two main justifications. The first is that chronological specificity is a useful test of cultural history, which otherwise might slide into generalities and emphasize representation at the expense of agency; such specificity is especially salutary when we treat so inherently slippery a subject as speech. The second justification is that, while the divides between different speech communities in late imperial Russia were palpable, they were also not impermeable. Although the different arenas of speech have their own distinct histories, it is equally true that at many moments in my story—especially from the late nineteenth century onwards—it becomes hard, and in fact misleading, to keep those histories separate. Lawyers, churchmen, zemstvo activists, professors, and parliamentarians were sometimes the same people, and they were increasingly competing with each other in the public sphere. The educated elites had to reassess their rhetorical prerogatives when merchants and peasants could be heard in many of the same places as gentry, or when Jews and Georgians could be heard alongside Russians. The rhetorical ferment of the turn of the century culminated in the 1905 revolution, which did much to break down the barriers between different modes of speech and speech communities in the Russian Empire. Its most obvious fruit was the first Russian parliament, which included among its deputies zemstvo luminaries (mainly provincial landowners), lawyers, churchmen, non-Russians, and dozens of peasants. The longest chapter examines public speech in the Duma age, which had its most concentrated expression in the Tauride Palace but spilled over into most parts of Russian society as lawyers and churchmen became no less political than the parliamentarians. Like a few recent works in cultural history, this book connects late imperial and early Soviet periods. It contends that the Bolsheviks, like all the less successful political actors of the period 1917–21, were facing the same rhetorical challenges as their tsarist predecessors: above all, how to combine authority, authenticity, and participation, all this in the face of a large and diverse population and rapidly changing media of communication. Chapter 6 examines the revolution and Civil War as a rhetorical crucible, while Chapter 7 shows how the Bolsheviks, over the first decade of their rule, learned how to talk—and to make others talk. While Stalinism and radio brought an end to the ‘stenographic age’, they did not bring an end to speechifying. Public speaking—with or without the stenographer present— remained immensely significant in Russian life after 1930, and I will sketch out in the epilogue how its later story might be told.

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1 Glasnost’ in Practice Public Speaking in the Reform Era, 1856–67

The post-emancipation era was undoubtedly, in Jeffrey Brooks’s famous phrase, the age when ‘Russia learned to read’: peasants discovered more uses for the written word, urban literacy rates made steady progress, a vigorous daily press developed in the capitals from the 1860s onwards, and popular literature became a vibrant modern industry. Yet this was also the age when Russia learned to speak. From the early 1860s onwards, Russia acquired or revived several forms of public assembly and disputation: university debates, municipal councils, zemstvo assemblies, law courts. Even if the government later tried to set stricter parameters for public speaking, these various arenas for speech proved extremely habit-forming. Developments in Russia in the 1860s might almost be construed as a transition from literacy to orality. Instead of drafting formal petitions to the Tsar or receiving his edicts, Russian subjects might now hope to address him in person, or hear him speak. Before the Great Reforms, justice was administered largely in writing: evidence was gathered by the prosecutor and processed by the judge. The introduction of jury trials turned lawyers into orators and gave the common people a starring role, whether as speakers (witnesses and defendants) or as listeners (jury members). New varieties of assembly—above all the zemstvos—allowed members of different estates to conduct public deliberations together. All this marked a wrenching change of practice. ‘Traditional’ peasant society might have been primarily oral, but, like most traditional societies, it was suspicious of the spoken word, conscious of its dangerous properties, and anxious to keep it safely enclosed in ritual forms. The lexicographer Vladimir Dal’, in a rich collection of folk wisdom that was published in the reform era, provided a long list of peasant sayings that emphasized the advantages of silence over speech: ‘Better to speak too little than too much’, ‘Once you’ve said a word, you can’t get it back in your throat’, ‘Words are not axe-heads, but people die from them’, and, most straightforwardly, ‘My tongue is my enemy’.¹ Tsarist legislation shared with the peasantry an awareness of the dangerous powers of speech. The 1845 criminal code, the most eloquent and informative tsarist statement on criminal justice, included penalties for giving public speeches

¹ V. Dal’, Poslovitsy russkogo naroda (Moscow, 1862), 433–46. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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that, even without ‘direct and clear incitement to rise up against the Supreme Power’, made efforts to ‘dispute or cast doubt on the inviolability of its rights’. The punishments included removal of estate privileges, hard labour for 4–6 years, and corporal punishment if appropriate (art. 274). Speeches that disseminated false rumours with the aim of undermining the government were also liable to severe punishment (art. 296). Verbal abuse of an official in his workplace carried a punishment of 3–6 months in prison or 1–3 weeks’ arrest (art. 309). Slightly milder punishments were specified for abuse of officials while they were going about their business: if it could be shown that this was not an insult directed at the office itself but was the result of drunkenness, ignorance, or misunderstanding, then a public apology and a fine were sufficient (art. 313). Verbal abuse of private individuals in an official place was also a criminal matter (art. 314).² The criminal code also offered protection to officials at much lower levels of Russia’s pre-eminently hierarchical society. Abuse of representatives of the rural district (volost) or village administration was punished by arrest for 1–3 days or a fine from twenty-five kopecks to three rubles, and the perpetrator was to ask forgiveness at the village assembly (art. 316). Those guilty of spreading rumours that might ‘stir up people’s minds’ (vozbudit’ bespokoistvo v umakh) or disrupt social order and peace were to face a prison sentence; the severity of the crime was judged by its consequences (art. 1157). There were also provisions governing places of entertainment: if a performer were to let slip indecent words or gestures, he might face arrest for a period from three days to three weeks (art. 1304). A similar, more general, provision covered public meetings or ‘other, more or less formal gatherings’ (art. 1305). A further set of provisions covered offences of a more general nature. Insults regarding another person’s wife or members of his family (even if dead), or accusations of illegal or dishonourable behaviour, could be reported by the victim; sanctions included public apology and, in some cases, the payment of compensation (art. 2013). If the insult took place in a public place, or in church, or was delivered in premeditated fashion, or was directed at a person ‘who, by his standing, title or particular relationship to the guilty party had the right to particular respect from him’, then the punishment was stiffer (art. 2014). Yet another article covered insults delivered to a parent or grandparent: this carried a penalty of six months to one year in a house of confinement (art. 2015). Finally, insults delivered during arguments in drinking establishments and markets were to be punished by a modest fine (from fifty kopecks to one ruble: art. 2016). The 1864 statute on punishments to be imposed by the mirovoi sud, effectively the post-emancipation court for the lower classes, was somewhat less elaborate in its provisions, but still went into some detail. Insults, whether written ² ‘Ulozhenie o Nakazaniiakh Ugolovnykh i Ispravitel’nykh’ (15 August 1845), no. 19283, PSZ, vol. 20 (St Petersburg, 1846).

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or oral, with prior intention to offend, or in a public place, or to a personage deserving of respect, or to a woman, were punished by detention for not more than one month or a fine of not more than 100 rubles (art. 131). Insulting an older relative might result in detention for not more than three months (art. 132). A separate article (no. 136) covered slander.³ A social history of township (volost) courts in the period 1905–17 shows just how seriously peasants took such offences against honour right to the end of the tsarist period: verbal insults were the single largest category of criminal charge, accounting for 21 per cent of cases in a large sample from Moscow province.⁴ Nor did the authorities take abusive language lightly. As late as 1904, there was a police crackdown on swearing in St Petersburg, and prosecutions for blasphemy (bogokhul’stvo) swelled in the period 1905–7.⁵ It almost goes without saying that, when the honour and prerogatives of the ruler himself were at stake, the spoken word came under especially close scrutiny.

Towards a New Publichnost’ In the reform era, then, the tsarist authorities, like the peasantry, had to overcome, or at least assuage, their inherent distrust of the spoken word. No less a figure than the new Emperor himself was a pioneering exponent of political speech. The story of the emancipation settlement had many twists and turns, but its essential precondition was Alexander II’s strenuous efforts to communicate more effectively with his nobles. In the mid-1850s he went on nothing short of a public relations offensive, addressing gentry assemblies in the provinces in a more direct, less formal way than his predecessors. From the very start of his reign he brought a new style of communication to court life. His speech to the diplomatic corps at the start of March 1855 did the rounds in manuscript and made a considerable impression—especially on its first listeners, who were struck by its impassioned style of delivery. In April 1856 came a celebrated speech to the Moscow gentry hinting that the nobles should themselves start thinking about how to achieve the emancipation of the serfs (although there was some uncertainty as to what exactly he had said, and numerous different versions of his speech were circulating). Alexander retained his commitment to face-to-face communication as the momentum for emancipation gathered. He took the unprecedented step of involving nobles in the discussion of state policy, and on a trip to the provinces in 1858 he adopted an interactive style in his dealings with the local gentry. ³ ‘Ustav o nakazaniiakh, nalagaemykh Mirovymi Sud’iami’ (20 November 1864), no. 41478, PSZ, vol. 39 (1864). ⁴ Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917 (Bloomington, 2004), 126–7. ⁵ S. A. Smith, ‘The Social Meanings of Swearing: Workers and Bad Language in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia’, P&P, no. 160 (1998): 174–5.

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On the eve of emancipation, at the end of January 1861, he gave an eloquent speech to the State Council that was widely commended in government circles.⁶ Alexander encountered more of his subjects, in a wider range of locations, than his predecessors. His travels around the empire had started almost twenty years before he came to the throne, in 1837, when he made an eight-month tour of Russia and was greatly moved by the popular acclaim he received. As Emperor he visited Crimea in September and October 1855 and western parts of the empire in 1856. Everywhere he cultivated a noticeably less forbidding persona than his father, the imposing Nicholas I. His speeches were less formal and polished than was customary for a ruler. At times, as in Alexander’s address to the nobility in Warsaw in May 1856, this led him to say more than he meant.⁷ But he had undoubtedly brought a new style to rulership. Even his coronation was innovative: for the first time in the history of the Romanov dynasty, peasants were present at the ceremony. Together with the slight relaxing of etiquette at the court, this sent out a powerful signal that the style of relationship between ruler and ruled was changing. Alexander invited—on a symbolic level—deliberative politics of a new kind. He also worked on a ‘scenario’ of the people’s love for their monarch. Although scenes of popular enthusiasm were heavily stage-managed, this again implied a new role for public gesture and public speech.⁸ Even so, Alexander’s rhetoric did not always elicit the desired response. The gentry was directed to form provincial committees to discuss reform, and their representatives were summoned to St Petersburg in 1859, but it was hard to get them to voice full-throated support for the emerging government policy; St Petersburg and Tver were the only provinces to show any enthusiasm or initiative.⁹ By the autumn of 1859, the converse problem was becoming apparent: the provincial gentry committees were becoming too independent and outspoken, and embryonic liberal and conservative ‘parties’ were beginning to form. When the government placed firm limits on their discussions, restricting the gentry to matters of local implementation, the response was unprecedented indignation and mobilization, both from conservatives and liberals. Meetings of provincial gentry assemblies, habitually placid and loyal gatherings, were remarkably heated as members of varying political views expressed their dissatisfaction with the government’s high-handed treatment; the Tver gentry, always in the

⁶ Much later, the speech was published in Zhurnaly i memorii obshchego sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo Soveta po krest’ianskomu delu: S 28 ianvaria po 14 marta 1861 goda (Petrograd, 1915), 3–6. On the Emperor’s public speaking career, see D. A. Obolenskii, Zapiski kniazia Dmitriia Aleksandrovicha Obolenskogo (St Petersburg, 2005), 64, 122, 184. ⁷ Obolenskii, Zapiski, 134. ⁸ My account summarizes the treatment in Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton, 2000), chs 1–2. ⁹ Frederick S. Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870 (Princeton, 1972), 202.

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vanguard, went so far as to send a petition to the Emperor (for which its marshal of the nobility was sent into administrative exile).¹⁰ The Emperor’s attempt to foster something approaching a constructive conversation with his landowners had not worked out as planned. But the implications of publichnost’ went far beyond the short-lived, and partly coerced, consultation between government and gentry in the late 1850s. Publichnost’ was inseparable from the other great keyword of the era: glasnost’, literally ‘voiceness’, but usually translated as ‘openness’ or ‘publicity’. In this instance, however, the literal meaning is not so misleading: here was an opportunity for sections of Russian society to give expression to their views in face-to-face communication in new arenas such as municipal assemblies and law courts. Especially to begin with, at least as important as what they said was the mere fact of them saying it. The novelty, indeed foreignness, of public speaking was recorded in the diary of Minister of the Interior Petr Valuev, who consistently used the English word ‘speech’ to describe what he heard and delivered at numerous meetings and dinners in the early 1860s.¹¹ This was fast becoming a loquacious age: in February 1861, the leading journal of the moment, Sovremennik (The Contemporary), reported that ‘these days all our celebrations are filled from start to finish with various kinds of speech’.¹² Delivering impromptu speeches on matters of dispute was a party game at the high-spirited gatherings of ‘progressive’ youth in the early 1860s.¹³ V. A Sollogub, a writer who had seen service in Tiflis, was a prominent speaker at Caucasus veterans’ evenings that were held annually from 1861. At the second such event in February 1862, he prefaced his remarks with a quasi-apology that was becoming de rigueur: ‘In the present times no meeting can make do without a speech.’¹⁴ Another contribution to Russia’s infant public sphere came from meetings of learned societies, which were accorded greater coverage in the press of the glasnost’ era; one of them—a Congress of Rural Landowners to mark the centenary of the Free Economic Society in 1865—was the subject of one of the very first full verbatim reports.¹⁵ Commerce provided yet another new source of public speech. In 1860, Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) reported that foreign newspapers had been commenting on the eloquence of Russian shareholders.¹⁶ Over the

¹⁰ Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge, 1968), chaps 6–7. ¹¹ P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik P. A. Valueva, Ministra Vnutrennikh Del, 2 vols (Moscow, 1961), for example 1:90. The word remained in use, even by government ministers: see D. A. Miliutin, Dnevnik. 1879–1881, ed. L. G. Zakharova (Moscow, 2010): 263 (diary entry of January 1881). ¹² ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Sovremennik, no. 2, sec. 2 (1861): 362–3. ¹³ As recounted in E. N. Vodovozova, Na zare zhizni (Moscow, 1964), 2: 37–8. ¹⁴ Rechi, skazannye na kavkazskikh vecherakh v S. Peterburge 1861–1872 (St Petersburg, 1873). ¹⁵ S”ezd sel’skikh khoziaev v S.-Peterburge v 1865 godu po sluchaiu stoletnego iubileia Imperatorskogo Vol’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva (St Petersburg, 1866). ¹⁶ ‘Sovremennaia khronika Rossii’, OZ, vol. 132 (1860): 21.

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coming few decades, stenographic reports of shareholder meetings would appear both in the press and as separate publications. The fashion for speech-making required orators to exert themselves in new ways. Engaging the audience was now crucial, as newspapers urged in their numerous reports on public lectures. As Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News) observed in February 1863, ‘the reading of public lectures is not at all any easy task; it is especially difficult for people without long experience of pedagogic techniques; it becomes even more difficult when the speaker has to cram a wide range of information into the narrow limits of one or two lectures’.¹⁷ The Petersburg professor Nikolai Kostomarov made the extreme suggestion that university lectures be thrown open to the public. His suggestion was taken up by the new Minister of Education, A. V. Golovnin, who introduced public lectures in the building of the city duma. But they were soon closed down: as the more conservative professor Boris Chicherin observed, there were too many rabblerousers in Russian society to make such events appropriate.¹⁸

Speech and Print The fact of these new forms of public oral communication was significant enough. But their broader impact depended on the means available for their wider dissemination. The spoken word was potentially available not only to its ‘live’ audience but to a reading public. Modernity, in Russia as in other places, did not replace orality with literacy; rather, it placed the two modes of communication in a new, more dynamic relationship. Public speaking needed the newspaper, but the reverse was also true: in the newspaper age of the nineteenth century, with its enormous appetite for tightly packed columns of newsprint, long verbatim accounts of speeches were a positive blessing to hard-pressed editors.¹⁹ What was needed was a new linking technology: a way of writing that could keep up with the spoken word. The first Russian work on stenography was published in 1820, but it was not until the late 1850s that interest in the subject really began. One of the pioneers was the military man M. I. Ivanin (1801–74), who apparently devised his system in his youth but only published it in 1858. Ivanin later claimed that his method enabled students to become proficient in 3–4 months; it had already been tried out with success in teaching topographers in Petersburg and Moscow and (more recently) stenographers for the Petersburg city duma. The teacher of these courses, ¹⁷ ‘Publichnye lektsii v pol’zu moskovskogo zoologicheskogo sada’, Mosk ved, 12 February 1863, 2. ¹⁸ Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina: Moskovskii universitet (Moscow, 1929), 52, 56. ¹⁹ For the classic example of Britain, see H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Britain, 1860–1950’, in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987), and Joseph S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 2001).

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a certain Artobolevskii, was later reckoned to have gone too far in self-promotion, promising students unrealistic results after a single lesson; the quality of stenographic reports in the early days of the new courts showed that many stenographers were still inadequately trained.²⁰ It was the imminent introduction of new public institutions—above all, the open courts and the zemstvos—that made the more systematic training of stenographers a matter of urgency. The Emperor ordered the Ministry of Education to set up appropriate training in state-run educational institutions. A competition was announced to find the best textbook on the subject.²¹ At the end of 1864 a free course of lectures on stenography opened in Petersburg; other such courses were advertised in the newspapers. Textbooks advocating various methods were on the market. A polemic had even started in the journals about the relative merits of the various systems.²² The new skill was taken up with particular enthusiasm by women, who were soon outperforming and outnumbering men on stenography courses.²³ Most of the men who opted for stenography had only modest education and only very rarely knew foreign languages, which was an obstacle to rendering adequately scholarly speech.²⁴ A course in St Petersburg in 1866 had to accept everyone due to a shortage of applicants. In the event, however, 100 students turned up on the first day of tuition in April 1866, most having signed up at the last minute. Although the rate of attrition was quite high, there were still more than sixty students attending in June; many then dropped out after the summer vacation.²⁵ One textbook stenographer biography was that of Iul. K-n who decided to swap her ‘idle and dependent’ life in Poltava for gainful activity in Kharkov, which was home to no fewer than seven circuit courts and one of only three Bar councils in the Russian Empire. She soon met a local prosecutor, who suggested that she train as a stenographer. The chairman of the Kharkov court system was Baron Nikolai Tornau, who had adapted Gabelsberger’s German system to the Russian language and was the author of one of the main published guides to stenography. It was at Tornau’s instigation that stenography courses were opened at the university. For this young woman, as for many of her female intelligentsia contemporaries, stenography was a stimulating and socially valuable profession: she and her colleagues were responsible for ‘transmitting to the press speeches and actions in the institutions where the proclaimed principles of

²⁰ M. Ivanin, ‘Teoriia stenografii dlia russkogo iazyka’, OZ, vol. 166 (May 1866): 182–3; ‘M.I. Ivanin i ego sistema stenografii’, Stenograf, no. 2 (February 1908): 1–6. ²¹ ZhMNP, ch. 121 (March 1864), otd. I, 84–7. ²² ‘Peterburgskoe obozrenie’, PL, 7 February 1865, 2. ²³ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 11 (1868): 7. ²⁴ ‘O kursakh stenografii v S.-Peterburge’, ZhMNP, ch. 144 (July 1869), otd. IV, 1–12. ²⁵ ‘Svedeniia o khode i rezul’tatakh prepodavaniia stenografii vo vtoroi i shestoi S.-Peterburgskikh gimnaziiakh’, ZhMNP, ch. 133 (March 1867), otd. III, 346–53.

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social justice, self-administration and economic management by the people were first being applied’.²⁶ In a speech to launch the new course in Kharkov, Tornau hailed this development as an innovative piece of collaboration between university and zemstvo and as evidence of the increasing powers of engaged public opinion (obshchestvennost’). This new means of recording ‘live speech’ (zhivoe slovo) was nothing less than a means of achieving the key goals of the reform age—publichnost’ and glasnost’. If publichnost’ were to be maintained, there had to be a way of transmitting speeches faithfully to the ‘public’. Stenography would also hold orators to account. Speakers would now know that their words could be taken down accurately and subjected to criticism: ‘Stenography records all roughness and inaccuracy in speech with the same unpleasant directness as photography shows up facial imperfections.’²⁷ The early advocates of stenography went even further, arguing that this new technique of writing had brought about something close to a communications revolution in the modern world. For the first time ever, human beings had a technology that allowed the written word to keep pace with speech and accurately record it. In the words of one of stenography’s Russian pioneers, ‘how many works of genius, eloquent sermons, happy improvisations, clever and lively discussions have remained unknown, lost to posterity, due to the incapacity of ordinary writing to transfer them to paper?’²⁸ No wonder enthusiasts could promote stenography as a sign of human genius and progress. Its economic and civilizational benefits were almost too numerous to mention. Shorthand writing was not merely a means of recording public debate, but also a boon for students (who could save time when writing down lectures), for lawyers (who would be able to put their speeches in compressed note form on small pieces of paper), for investigators (who could record testimony), and for bureaucrats when taking down requests and complaints. The invention of stenography was ‘comparable to the invention of printing, which gave the opportunity for the rapid spread of education by accelerating the exchange of ideas’.²⁹ Stenography had enormous significance for an age of high-speed technologies such as steam, railway, telegraph, and photography. How could ‘ordinary writing, which lags so far behind thought, behind the spoken word, fully satisfy the activities and demands of our age?’³⁰ ²⁶ Iul. K-n, ‘Na razvalinakh glasnogo suda: Iz vospominanii zhenshchiny-stenografa kontsa 60-kh i 70-kh godov’, VE, no. 7 (1906): 221–3, quotation 221. ²⁷ N. E. Tornau, Rech’, proiznesennaia 3 ianvaria 1868 goda v Khar’kovskom universitete Baronom Tornau, pri otkrytii kursa stenografii I. A. Ustinovym (Kharkov, 1868), 4–5. ²⁸ M. Ivanin, O stenografii ili iskusstve skoropisi, v primenenii ee k russkomu iazyku (St Petersburg, 1858), 20. ²⁹ S. Dlusskii, Chto takoe stenografiia? Znachenie ee v istoricheskom, obshchestvennom i pedagogicheskom otnosheniiakh (St Petersburg, 1874), quotation 25. ³⁰ Ivanin, O stenografii, 20–1.

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The first use of the new communication technology to record a public event came on 19 March 1860, when a debate in St Petersburg University between the well-known historians Nikolai Kostomarov and Mikhail Pogodin was taken down (and subsequently published) verbatim. Kostomarov had just published an article casting doubt on the ‘Norman’ theory of the origins of Rus to which Pogodin adhered, and soon afterwards the Moscow-based Pogodin issued him, in person, in the St Petersburg Public Library, with a challenge to a verbal ‘duel’. Pogodin later claimed that this challenge had been a mere turn of phrase, but Kostomarov felt he had little choice but to take it seriously. The public debate duly took place a few days later.³¹ Contemporary commentators stressed the novelty of this kind of public verbal jousting. The main precedent for academic public speaking to draw in a wider public was Timofei Granovskii’s lectures on medieval history in the winter of 1843–4, which gave the Slavophile-Westernizer controversy a public airing and drew a large, mixed, and enthusiastic audience (see Introduction). As Aleksandr Herzen noted in his diary, this was publichnost’ of a new kind.³² One of very few dissenting voices in the chorus of admiration was Mikhail Pogodin, who dismissed Granovskii as ‘not a professor, but a German student who has read too many French newspapers’.³³ Pogodin’s strong feelings were dictated not only by his Slavophile views but also by his own ambitions as a public speaker. He had built up a reputation as an orator as well as a historian. An early public speaking triumph for him came on 26 June 1830, when he was entrusted with delivering a speech on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Moscow University. In 1855, Pogodin had petitioned the new Tsar regarding the creation of a national duma, and he would soon be active as an orator on the floor of the Moscow city duma after it opened in 1863.³⁴ A cut-and-thrust debate with Kostomarov was, however, something quite different from a set-piece speech. The character of the audience was also novel: this was a paying public (the gate receipts went into a student hardship fund), and by all accounts quite a rowdy one. Of course, no one’s mind was changed by the debate (as Kostomarov later admitted). The students who flocked to the event thunderously applauded their own professor, ‘sometimes not even allowing him to

³¹ Kostomarov’s version of events can be found in N. I. Kostomarov, Istoricheskie proizvedeniia: Avtobiografiia (Kiev, 1989), 529. A longer account from Pogodin’s point of view is N. P. Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M. P. Pogodina, vol. 17 (St Petersburg, 1903), 272–95. ³² Ch. Vetrinskii, T.N. Granovskii i ego vremia (St Petersburg, 1905), 225. Another admiring witness was the future professor Boris Chicherin: B. N. Chicherin, Moskva sorokovykh godov (Moscow, 1929), 7–8. ³³ Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy, vol. 7 (St Petersburg, 1893), 115. ³⁴ Some idea of the range of Pogodin’s career as a public speaker is given by the 600-page collection Rechi, proiznesennye M. P. Pogodinym v torzhestvennykh i prochikh sobraniiakh, 1830–1872 (Moscow, 1872). On the 1830 speech, see Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy, vol. 3 (St Petersburg, 1890).

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get as far as a comma’, while maintaining an icy silence during Pogodin’s contributions.³⁵ According to another eye-witness, the students in the respective camps formed a tight cordon around the two speakers’ podiums and signalled to their comrades when to applaud and when to hiss.³⁶ The fastidious scholar-censor Aleksandr Nikitenko felt that the occasion had yielded more heat than light.³⁷ Kostomarov’s sympathizers in the Petersburg press wrote up the occasion in a way favourable to their man; Pogodin returned to his Slavophile stronghold in Moscow with his head held high. What is perhaps more worthy of note is the extent to which the two parties felt their way into this new medium of discussion. Kostomarov’s suggestion had been to invite a jury of experts to deliver a verdict, but Pogodin had insisted on a more open-ended format. By his own account, Kostomarov had misgivings about subjecting a matter of scholarly dispute to the less well-informed scrutiny of a paying public. In the event, however, the two men proceeded from the formal exchange of prepared written texts to an unscripted, and quite witty, exchange of views. This was a clear advance on an earlier highprofile public debate (regarding the alleged mismanagement of a Petersburg shipping company), where each side had only had the right to speak once on each question; consequently each speaker had stuck to his position, with no real exchange of views or resolution.³⁸ In Moscow, Petersburg, and Kiev, professors were beginning to project their voice beyond the university auditorium.³⁹ Educated society was exploring a more public and combative way of carrying on discussion.

Literature, Theatre and the Search for the Popular Voice An even more striking contribution to the new public orality of the early 1860s came from the literary profession. Writers sometimes found that their work spoke more loudly from the lecture podium than from the printed page, and that oral delivery might sway the audience just as much as intellectual content. As Raffaella Vassena observes of the literary readings that were the height of fashion in the early 1860s, ‘texts that would otherwise have been innocuous acquired, when read publicly, an ideological potential’. But the texts were not always innocuous: a few

³⁵ Tsiprinus, ‘Studii o glasnosti, po povodu neponimaniia ee v nashei publitsistike’, SO, no. 50 (10 December 1861): 1507–11. ³⁶ A. D. Galakhov, Zapiski cheloveka (Moscow, 1999), 240. ³⁷ A. V. Nikitenko, Zapiski i dnevnik (Moscow, 2005), 2: 170. ³⁸ The novel character of the event is noted in Tsiprinus, ‘Studii o glasnosti’. For a detailed account of the debate, see Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy, vol. 17 (1903): 272–95. ³⁹ In Kiev, a noted lecturer was V. Ia. Shul’gin, later to become a leading light of the ‘Little Russian’ strain of Russian nationalism and the father of one of the most renowned (or notorious) orators of the State Duma, Vasilii Shul’gin. See V. M. Khizhniakov, Vospominaniia zemskogo deiatelia (Petrograd, 1916), 44.

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days after an explosive reading on 2 March 1862 that included Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, the authorities introduced new rules on public readings that dented their popularity until the late 1870s.⁴⁰ In the 1860s the spoken word did not impose itself on the written merely through lectures, readings, and the stenographic transcript. It was increasingly becoming inscribed in literature itself. Dostoevsky’s prison memoir was in part the result of putatively ethnographic methods as the writer noted down verbatim examples of popular speech from his convict interlocutors in the 1850s. The works of Turgenev included more than 8,000 dialect or colloquial words.⁴¹ But in the reform era the most successful and influential attempts to bring popular inflections to the educated audience came in the theatre. The imperial monopoly placed firm limits on the number of theatres in the two capitals, but Russia’s stage culture overall became significantly more diverse and vibrant in this period. A new cohort of Russian authors saw their works performed. The theatre press became more vigorous, as more publications were permitted to carry reviews of productions in the Imperial Theatre, while preliminary censorship for this kind of material was abolished in 1862. The monopoly did not apply in the provinces, where the number of theatres more than doubled from about forty in the late 1850s to just over one hundred in the early 1870s, largely in response to a rise in the urban population after emancipation. Even in the capitals, the monopoly was not absolute in that various clubs and societies had the right to organize events.⁴² Theatre could be said to be in the vanguard of a transformation in the codes governing public speaking. The Russian stage had already come a long way from the declamatory norms of French Classicism that were adopted by Russia’s first professional actors in the late eighteenth century. In the 1830s, the serf actor Mikhail Shchepkin at Moscow’s Malyi Theatre had led a move in the direction of ‘realistic’ acting, showing that comic actors were ‘more capable of interpreting the emergent realistic drama than were those performers dwelling on the empyrean heights of romantic melodrama’; in the view of Aleksandr Herzen, he was the first Russian actor to be ‘unstagey on stage’. But Shchepkin’s version of realism had always had a good deal of literary polish—he was notable for his diligence in memorizing text and his respect for authors—and he had difficulty accommodating himself to the more ethnographic realism of mid-century.⁴³

⁴⁰ Raffaella Vassena, ‘ “Chudo nevedomoi sily”: Public Literary Readings in the Era of the Great Reforms’, RR, 73 (2014): 48, 58–61. ⁴¹ Iu. A. Bel’chikov, Russkii literaturnyi iazyk vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1974), 72. ⁴² Murray Frame, School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (New Haven, 2006), 75, 84–6. ⁴³ Laurence Senelick, Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin (Westport, CT, 1984), 134–5, 185–92; Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven, 2005), 408.

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At the forefront of this new realism was Aleksandr Ostrovsky, who from the early 1850s brought authentic merchant speech to the Petersburg stage and sent the declamatory style of acting profoundly out of fashion.⁴⁴ When first introduced to Moscow’s literary elite in the late 1840s, Ostrovsky had made an awkward impression. But over the following decade his failure to conform to established notions of literariness became a strength rather than a weakness. His ability— acquired through his family background and his own experience as a clerk in the Moscow commercial court—to capture with apparently ethnographic precision the inflections of Moscow common speech made him the quintessential voice of the 1850s. And it was precisely his voice that brought his new works to the attention of the literary public: as the actor and sketch-writer Ivan Gorbunov recalled, scarcely a day went by without Ostrovsky heading off somewhere to read out a new play. The ethnographer S. V. Maksimov opined that, thanks to Ostrovsky, ‘theatre had turned from a temple of amusements into a school’ where members of the intelligentsia could go to inform themselves about how non-elite Muscovites ‘really’ spoke. Ostrovsky himself eagerly collected new words and expressions.⁴⁵ Ostrovsky was also a point of connection between the culture of the 1850s and the era of glasnost’—both in the sense that he moved from the nationalist Pochvennik group to the more radical Sovremennik set, and from the Moscow Malyi to the St Petersburg Aleksandrinsky, and in the sense that he helped to turn reading aloud from an important practice in the literary milieu to a significant public phenomenon. Along with Aleksei Pisemskii and Aleksei Potekhin, he launched the practice of literary readings in well-to-do private homes, and in due course a fee was charged for attending such occasions.⁴⁶ In late 1859, a group of writers including Ostrovsky proposed a series of public readings to raise money for the charity Litfond, and the series of events they held from January 1860 met an enthusiastic response from the paying public. Even if the censor sometimes imposed cuts on the works to be read out, there were still memorable events such as a rehearsed performance of Gogol’s Government Inspector with Dostoevsky taking the role of the postmaster.⁴⁷ By all accounts, Potekhin and Pisemskii were more animated as readers than Ostrovsky, but all three men were vehicles of the raznochinets language that

⁴⁴ Richard Stites is rightly sceptical about the extent to which acting norms became what we might understand as ‘realistic’: the ham style of performance was surely still widespread and popular. But he recognizes that the drift to Moscow of lower-class provincial actors unschooled in the conventions of classical drama brought a shift towards what contemporaries identified as ‘realistic’, and that Ostrovsky’s work was the most concentrated expression of this development. See Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 274–6. ⁴⁵ A. I. Reviakin (ed.), A.N. Ostrovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1966), 52, 102, 109. ⁴⁶ M. Lobanov, Ostrovskii (Moscow, 1989), 158; Reviakin, A. N. Ostrovskii, 114. ⁴⁷ Vassena, ‘ “Chudo nevedomoi sily” ’, 49–57.

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challenged the noble literary standard on page and on stage in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁴⁸ The intelligentsia’s attitude to non-standard speech had started to change in the 1840s, and by the 1860s demotic language was all the rage; the works of the lexicographer Dal’ were the intelligentsia’s favourite reference work, and the style of ‘landowner’s literature’ was giving way to a ‘nationaldemocratic’ diction. Theatre as a whole became vastly more ‘conversational’ from the 1860s onwards.⁴⁹ One consequence was that Moscow pronunciation— specifically, the pronunciation of the Malyi Theatre—became the model for emulation (as opposed to Petersburg pronunciation, which was more heavily influenced by written norms).⁵⁰ In the 1860s, as in the better-known polemic between Karamzin and Shishkov in the early nineteenth century, language was central to national self-imagining. The main issue now was not what the Russian standard language should be (that question had largely been settled by the 1840s) but how the Russian language should be described and analysed—and here the benchmark was not the literary standard but ‘popular speech’. Debate centred on the taxonomy of the Russian verb. Linguistic patriots could point to the lack of an elaborate system of tenses in Russian; verb usage often seemed elliptical when compared to Romance or Germanic languages, and meaning was unstable and context-dependent. This search for national distinctiveness as expressed in language was an undertaking that broke down the normal distinctions between ‘Slavophile’ and ‘progressive’; it also, like the plays of Ostrovsky, called into question the hegemony of the recently enshrined literary language. From now on, ‘popular’ speech would be an object of fascination for educated society, even if it was often misheard.⁵¹

Speech and Political Control: The Year of 1861 In the early 1860s, as we have seen, professors and litterateurs were working productively at the interface between speech and writing. Yet, although their debates were considerably less esoteric to contemporaries than they might now appear, their preoccupations were largely unpolitical, and they were speaking more to each other than to society at large. What really raised the stakes of the ⁴⁸ On their respective styles of performance, see a memoir by the ethnographer S. V. Maksimov, in Reviakin, A. N. Ostrovskii, 114–15. ⁴⁹ M. V. Panov, Istoriia russkogo literaturnogo proiznosheniia XVIII–XX vv. (Moscow, 1990), 89–90, 94–5; V. V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVII–XIX vekov, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1982), chap. 10. ⁵⁰ On the difference between the two, see V. O. Vinokur, Biografiia i kul’tura. Russkoe stsenicheskoe proiznoshenie (Moscow, 1997), 106, and Oksana Bulgakova, Golos kak kul’turnyi fenomen (Moscow, 2015), 127. ⁵¹ Boris M. Gasparov, ‘The Language Situation and Linguistic Polemic in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia’, in Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt (eds), Aspects of the Slavic Language Question (New Haven, 1984), 297–333.

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new orality was the fact that it was taking place at a time of profound social restructuring. As the drift towards fundamental reform became clearer, so the authorities fretted more about the effects of undisciplined speech on a suddenly less stable society. In 1857, the Third Section seemed in control of the public mood. The worst it had to worry about was a phalanstery in St Petersburg that engaged in ‘music, composing verse, and high-spirited conversations’. Although the group ‘had absolutely no political aims’, its activities were deemed undesirable; a firm word with the main participants had been sufficient to reduce sharply the size and frequency of their gatherings. By 1858, however, Russia’s highest police agency was reflecting anxiously on the fact that the ‘transformations’ under way in Russia might lay bare the conflicting interests of different groups, especially gentry and peasants, and lead the younger generation to get carried away.⁵² The slogan of glasnost’ was not empty: government policy was designed not only to set appropriate limits for public expression but also to expand the opportunities for such expression and encourage the public to make appropriate use of these. In the late 1850s, ‘public opinion’ was a fashionable concept, and it was possible to imagine that it would provide an appreciative audience for state policy. As time went on, the goal of expanding the public sphere while still controlling it would be shown to contain an internal contradiction.⁵³ But in 1860 it was still possible to believe it feasible. Crucial to the success of the enterprise was for the government to take the lead and set the terms of public discussion. Glasnost’ was a powerful tool; the government had to make sure that it used it to its advantage. By far the most important test of the state’s communicative capacity was the emancipation of the peasantry. A complex and contested piece of legislation had to be transmitted to a largely unlettered rural population in a way that would be accessible yet authoritative and defuse any potential unrest. The emancipation decree was dated 19 February but promulgated on 5 March (the last day of the Shrovetide carnival) in Moscow and Petersburg; it was then read out in churches around Russia over the next two months. According to a loyal senior official, the reading of the decree on 5 March passed off without incident in the capital: not only did the peasants fail to cause trouble, they crossed themselves at the concluding words. In a speech to officers at the Manège, the Emperor expressed his hope that his audience would continue to give him loyal service. His words were greeted by large hurrahs, which were promptly picked up and amplified by a crowd of not less than a thousand in the square outside.⁵⁴

⁵² M. V. Sidorova and E. I. Shcherbakova, Rossiia pod nadzorom: Otchety III otdeleniia 1827–1869 (Moscow, 2006), 447, 472. ⁵³ V. G. Chernukha, Pravitel’stvennaia politika v otnoshenii pechati 60–70-e gody XIX veka (Leningrad, 1989), 6. ⁵⁴ Obolenskii, Zapiski, 188.

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Such triumphalist accounts conveniently overlooked the extent to which this was an uncomfortable new departure in public communication. The government was trying to put across a message to millions of peasants across European Russia; and, despite the paternalistic idiom that informed many descriptions of the decree’s initial reception, it was requiring of listeners more than just passive obedience. The verdict of posterity has largely been that the decree was a failure: its high-flown language was incomprehensible to the peasantry and may even have helped to trigger the uprisings that followed in parts of the Empire.⁵⁵ Yet, if the decree was a failure, this was not the result of insouciance. The Editorial Commission responsible for drafting the manifesto was eager for it to be comprehensible, but it faced a task with few precedents. Over the previous halfcentury, there had only been a few occasions when the Tsar had attempted to communicate with the whole of his people (the Napoleonic invasion in 1812, the accession of Nicholas I, the uprisings of 1826, and the cholera riots of 1831). How was the government to find an effective language for proclamations to the whole population, particularly given that the content (a complex and fundamental change in property relations) was so out of keeping with the conventional patriarchal rhetoric of Russian rulers?⁵⁶ The initial ambition was to create a more secular and liberal idiom for the proclamation, but drafts by Iurii Samarin and Dmitrii Miliutin were rejected as being too detailed and insufficiently solemn. Instead, Metropolitan Filaret—the ‘poet laureate of Orthodoxy’—was brought in. Here was the most venerable and eminent churchman in Russia. Filaret had a staggeringly long record of drafting public addresses: he had been giving high-profile sermons since the 1800s; he spoke at Kutuzov’s funeral in 1813; he had administered the oath of allegiance to Nicholas I in Moscow in December 1825; he had composed a manifesto to calm the people in the wake of the cholera riots in 1831; most recently he had delivered a welcome address at the gates of the Assumption Cathedral on the occasion of Alexander’s coronation. Solemnity was one quality he would undoubtedly provide. Given the lack of obvious alternative—the absence of a secular idiom of rulership—the liberal Tsar was forced to fall back on theocratic rhetoric. The state was doing away with the main paternalistic relationship in Russian society in thoroughly paternalistic language that emphasized the beneficence of the nobility and the need for the peasants’ gratitude. In an access of wishful thinking, the authorities assumed that the common people instinctively understood church language (which was the Slavo-Russian of Lomonosov with a few extra Slavicisms thrown in for good measure during the ⁵⁵ The classsic account in Gr. Dzhanshiev, Epokha velikikh reform, 6th ed. (Moscow, 1896), 4–5 states that the main reaction to the decree was confusion. ⁵⁶ My account of the Manifesto’s composition draws on Michelle R. Viise, ‘Filaret Drozdov and the Language of Official Proclamations in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Slavic and East European Journal, 44 (2000): 553–82.

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nineteenth century). They were bolstered in this belief by senior ecclesiasts, who lobbied in favour of the continued vitality of church language. But this assumption was no longer warranted (if it ever had been). Secular Karamzinian language would have been a better choice, but it was considered wholly inappropriate for formal occasions. Yet, if peasants were perplexed or dissatisfied by the emancipation decree, that was not necessarily because they misunderstood it. The incomprehension seems to have had a significant element of wilfulness. As an estate manager in Kazan province later recalled, the peasants struggled to find someone literate to read out the decree. In the village he observed, as in many others, that person was the priest, who read out the imperial manifesto with aplomb but declined to deliver a sermon or otherwise to interpret the document. All the peasants were able to retain was that ‘for two years everything would be as before’. Subsequently, the peasants hunted down in the text of the emancipation statutes the one occurrence of the word that really interested them: volia (freedom).⁵⁷ Within a matter of weeks, moreover, the authorities were served an uncomfortable reminder that even churchmen might use the spoken word to undesirable ends. In April 1861, several hundred Kazan students—many of them from the local ecclesiastical academy—held a requiem for the peasants killed in the village of Bezdna four days earlier in the worst of the disturbances following the emancipation decree. The regime’s response revealed its extreme nervousness about any hint of politically minded public assembly. The eulogy given by Professor A. P. Shchapov of the ecclesiastical academy came under especially close scrutiny. The Emperor himself insisted on a full investigation; Shchapov was arrested, and student participants were subjected to interrogation to establish what exactly had been said that day. They wriggled off the hook by claiming (implausibly, given the modest size of the chapel where the eulogy had been delivered) that they had not been able to hear what Shchapov had said.⁵⁸ The Kazan students were not alone in hoping that the spoken word would prove unpoliceable. In the capital there were plenty more people—of a far more secular disposition—ready to seize on opportunities for public speech. On 20 November 1861 came one of the formative moments in the history of the Russian radical movement: the funeral of the celebrated literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov. Obituaries had appeared in the papers on 18 November, and on the day of the funeral, by one account, ‘the whole of Liteinyi was crammed with people, although the funeral was extremely modest, without flowers or wreaths’. ⁵⁷ N. A. Krylov, ‘Vospominaniia mirovogo posrednika pervogo prizyva o vvedenii v deistvie Polozhenii 19-go fevralia 1861 g.’, Russkaia starina, 74/4 (1892): 96–7; Russkaia starina 74/6 (1892): 617–18. ⁵⁸ See Gregory L. Freeze, ‘A Social Mission for Russian Orthodoxy: The Kazan Requiem of 1861 for the Peasants in Bezdna’, in Ezra Mendelsohn and Marshall S. Shatz (eds), Imperial Russia 1700–1917: State, Society, Opposition (DeKalb, 1988).

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More than 200 people were reported to have taken part in the procession. Nekrasov and Chernyshevsky gave moving speeches at the cemetery. Secret police reports reveal parts of Nekrasov’s speech that never found their way into the published record; it was difficult for those present to hear his words, as he broke down in tears. Chernyshevsky gave a longer and more direct speech, reading extracts from Dobroliubov’s diary that concerned the critic’s conflicts with the censorship. Radical funerals would from this moment on be a contested public arena: when crowds of students went to the Volkovo cemetery on 17 November 1886 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dobroliubov’s death, the gates were barred by police.⁵⁹ The main long-term incubator of radicalism in Russian society was the university, and here too the events of 1861 would prove formative for later political culture. A student corporate identity had first awakened in the late 1850s, and its main expression was a kind of semi-spontaneous gathering called the skhodka. These student meetings could take place at very short notice, in response to a specific issue or grievance, and might be held outside in the university courtyard or in an auditorium. To begin with the process was inchoate, but before long the meetings gained more structure with the election of a president and to holding of formal votes. The underlying egalitarianism of Russian student culture made it very different from its German counterpart. When student claims to representation were challenged in 1861 by the government’s attempt to prohibit skhodki, this precipitated a remarkable escalation: students at St Petersburg University marched across town to demand a meeting with the rector. Although this was granted, its results were unsatisfactory, and two days later the authorities dispersed further student gatherings. The students then declared a strike, and official closure of the university followed in December. Professors exercised little in the way of calming influence: some, like Nikitenko, looked on in helpless disapproval, while others actively supported the students.⁶⁰ The Third Section reported on the harmful effects of public lectures by professors, designed to replace the suspended university lectures, which in 1861–2 fanned the flames of student unrest.⁶¹ Here was a template for future student radicalism that could not be suppressed by the more hierarchical University Statute of 1863, which strengthened the powers of the professoriate at the expense of the students.⁶² ⁵⁹ N. A. Dobroliubov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1961), 360, 364, 401; V. Zhdanov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov, 1836–1861 (Moscow, 1955), 522–3, 532. On the public significance of radical funerals, see Tom Trice, ‘Rites of Protest: Populist Funerals in Imperial St. Petersburg, 1876–1878’, SR 60 (2001): 50–74. ⁶⁰ Nikitenko, Zapiski i dnevnik, 2: 281, 283. For disapproving accounts of the parallel events in Moscow University—one from a professor, the other from a student—see Svin’in, Vospominaniia studenta, 6–7, 9–10 and B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina: Moskovskii universitet (Moscow, 1929), 14–15. ⁶¹ Sidorova and Shcherbakova, Rossiia pod nadzorom, 592. ⁶² Christopher Ely, Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia (DeKalb, 2016), 49–52; Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and

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At the same time as radicalism brewed among urban youth, the government was still having to contend with the activism of middle-aged rural landowners that had been unleashed by the unsatisfactory consultation period of 1859–60. Throughout the winter of 1861/2, provincial gentry assemblies debated the difficulties of emancipation from the landowner’s point of view, in particular the difficulty of making peasants perform their labour obligations and the shortage of agricultural capital. These material grievances led them into broader political terrain: to demands for judicial reform, for the lifting of censorship, and (especially) for the introduction of local self-government. This amounted to a movement that was at least implicitly constitutionalist. The government was feeling the pressure, to the extent that in 1862 Valuev, the Minister of the Interior, put forward a proposal for limited political representation. This was firmly rejected by the Emperor, but glasnost’ had come dangerously close to producing a liberal talking-shop, or at the very least a consultative assembly of the land, which in the early 1860s was unthinkable even for the least austere of tsars.⁶³

The State’s Mouth in the Village: Orthodox Homiletics and the Reform Era By the end of 1861, many different sections of educated society were becoming conscious of Russia’s various communication failures: between government and gentry, gentry and peasantry; even—not that this could be stated openly—between ruler and ruled. Perhaps the best hope of healing the last and most damaging of these rifts lay in the Orthodox Church: as the promulgation of the emancipation manifesto had shown, here was the only institution in Russia that was capable of ‘speaking’ directly to the people. The manifesto spread outwards across the empire in the weeks following 5 March, from imperial capital to diocesan cathedral to district and village churches, in the process taking on the character of ‘religious celebration’.⁶⁴ But the reform era did not leave untouched even this most conservative of institutions. The Orthodox Church, too, was embarking on an extended period of self-examination: how was the priesthood best to perform its moral and social mission in light of the weakening of traditional hierarchies in the 1860s— and in view of the fact that now, with the onset of glasnost’, it had rather more the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley, 1989), 55–6; Daniel R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 1975), chap. 4; Alain Besançon, Education et société en Russie dans le second tiers du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1974), 131–64. ⁶³ Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry, chaps 9–10. ⁶⁴ Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh, 2011), 196–7. On the use of the church to instil in the peasant audience the requisite reverence for the proclamation, see also Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, 1985), 6.

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Figure 1.1. Vasilii Perov, The Village Sermon (1861). Source: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9F%D0%B5% D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0% B4%D1%8C.jpg

competition for the people’s ear? The question was posed sharply in Vasilii Perov’s painting The Village Sermon (1861), winner of the top prize at the Academy, which showed a priest raising his arm in a conventional homiletic gesture—but facing an entirely disengaged set of parishioners (see Figure 1.1).⁶⁵ ⁶⁵ Perov profited from the reformist spirit at the Academy at this moment: even two years earlier he would not have been allowed such latitude in his choice of subject, and certainly would not have received a gold medal for it. He also seems to have responded closely to the events of his time: the initial

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The spoken word, naturally, had a prominent role in Orthodox ritual. But this was not human speech but the Word of God: scripture, not sermon. Churches were ill equipped for preaching: in the 1840s, only two churches in Moscow had pulpits.⁶⁶ There was, moreover, reason to suppose that the roots of rhetorical inadequacy lay deep in Orthodox tradition. According to one influential contemporary reading of Church history, the Eastern Greek Church had produced plenty of fine orators but few theoretical underpinnings; the Latin West was the source of homiletics. Gregory the Dialogist (the Eastern Christian name for Pope Gregory I) was a crucial figure because he combined aptitude as a preacher with distinction as a theorist; he was the first figure of such magnitude to place due emphasis on the moral content of preaching rather than its adherence to the rules of homiletics.⁶⁷ In more recent times, an Orthodox homiletic tradition had struggled to assert itself in the face of imported models: the ‘German tyranny’ of Protestantism was held to have stunted the growth of Orthodox preaching in the eighteenth century.⁶⁸ It was still possible to take an optimistic view of the homiletic potential of the Orthodox tradition. The use of Latin in the Western Church was deemed to create a barrier between the Word and the believer that did not exist in the Eastern Church.⁶⁹ The Greco-Russian tradition was held to avoid the dialectical and rationalistic excesses of the Latin and Protestant traditions, opening more space for emotional connection with listeners.⁷⁰ But that left a formidable set of practical difficulties. Ambitions to achieve a new quality of engagement with the Orthodox faithful counted for little if the Church could not produce a suitable supply of capable preachers. Here, by all accounts, there was much work to be done. The spoken word was not a prominent part of the training of Orthodox priests.⁷¹ A former student at the Moscow Theological Academy in the 1840s recalled that sermons were a low priority for students and teachers alike. The

sketch he submitted was less controversial, but the social critique became more pronounced as he worked on the painting in the year of emancipation. See Rosalind P. Gray, Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 160–2. ⁶⁶ S. M. Dixon, ‘Church, State and Society in Late Imperial Russia: The Diocese of St Petersburg, 1880–1914’, PhD thesis (University of London, 1993), 134. ⁶⁷ V. Pevnitskii, ‘Gomiletika Grigoriia Dvoeslova’, TKDA (January 1865): 35–74; see also V. Pevnitskii, ‘Propovednicheskie trudy sv. Grigoriia Dvoeslova’, TKDA (September 1865): 3–105. ⁶⁸ N. Kataev, Ocherk istorii russkoi tserkovnoi propovedi, 2nd ed. (Odessa, 1883), 170. ⁶⁹ See A. Stefanovskii, ‘O kharaktere bogosluzheniia zapadnoi tserkvi’, PO, no. 11 (1860): 369–80. ⁷⁰ Russkoe propovednichestvo: Istoricheskii ego obzor i vzgliad na sovremennoe ego napravlenie (St Petersburg, 1871), 9–17. ⁷¹ There were, of course, exceptions. According to an official history of the St Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy, as early as 1811 Bishop Feofilakt of Riazan’ suggested making city churches with large audiences available to students to give sermons on Sundays and holidays. Each student was to give at least three sermons per year. This idea was approved, with the prior censorship of sermons entrusted to the rector of the academy; the best of the sermons were published. See Ilarion Chistovich, Istoriia S. Peterburgskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii (St Petersburg, 1857), 206–7.

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department of homiletics was unquestionably the lowest-status part of the institution. This squared with his experience of growing up in Kolomna in the 1830s, where the local priest delivered sermons only reluctantly.⁷² The only sermons a nineteenth-century Russian priest was likely to deliver were written by other people. They were also unlikely to make much reference to contemporary social issues. A study of 1,321 sermons from the first half of the nineteenth century found that five-sixths were entirely devoted to timeless spiritual questions.⁷³ Sermons were conceived as literary works; their delivery in church was at best a secondary consideration. Yet the written heritage provided an important source of orientation when the Church sought to revive its homiletic mission. In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century thousands of Russian sermons were published, and a canon of the leading preachers took shape. The founding figure was Platon Levshin, Metropolitan of Moscow and court preacher under Catherine the Great, apparently known in his own time as ‘the second Chrysostom’, who left behind twenty volumes of published writings and hundreds of sermons.⁷⁴ The other-worldly Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724–83) became a cult figure in the nineteenth century; numerous editions of his sermons were published from the 1820s onwards.⁷⁵ But the towering church rhetorician of the age was Metropolitan Filaret, renowned for his intellectual precision and dialectical rigour. Filaret (Drozdov, b. 1782) made his preaching career at the Trinity-St Sergius Lavra in the early nineteenth century; his patron was none other than Platon Levshin. He then moved to St Petersburg as a monk and drew attention for his sermons; the Chief Procurator, Golitsyn, was an influential admirer. His career of high-profile orations was launched. Filaret’s sermons were held up as a literary model and widely published from the 1820s onwards. His most productive period was the 1840s–50s, when he would typically produce a dozen or more sermons per year. In total, 445 individual texts have come down to us. The largest part of this corpus comprised sermons on the sanctification of churches (a total of sixty-six); the next largest was sermons on the tsars’ days (fifty-seven); then came speeches to the Tsar and members of the Tsar’s family (thirty-nine). By far the leading preacher of his elongated era, Filaret took an austere view of his role and was emphatically against improvised sermons.⁷⁶ As we have seen, the government turned to ⁷² N. Giliarov-Platonov, Iz perezhitogo, 2 vols (Moscow, 1886), 1: 167–8, 2: 204–6. ⁷³ Gregory L. Freeze, ‘The Orthodox Church and Serfdom in Prereform Russia’, SR 48 (1989): 363, quoted in Dixon, ‘Church, State and Society’, 133–4. ⁷⁴ A. Nadezhdin, Mitropolit Moskovskii Platon Levshin, kak propovednik (Kazan, 1882). ⁷⁵ Russkoe propovednichestvo, 246. ⁷⁶ Arkhiepiskop Mark (Arndt), ‘Mitropolit Moskovskii Filaret (Drozdov) i ego mesto v kontekste russkoi propovedi’, in Vladimir Tsurikov (ed.), Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow 1782–1867: Perspectives on the Man, His Works, and His Times (Jordanville, NY: 2003), 52–104. On the start of Filaret’s preaching career in the Academy, see also Korsunskii, ‘Propovednicheskaia deiatel’nost’ Vasiliia Mikhailovicha Drozdova (v posledstvii Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo), 1803-1808 gg.’, Vera i razum, kn. 1 (February 1884): 290–1. On his rhetorical style, see Russkoe propovednichestvo, 270.

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him again in its hour of greatest need, asking him to draft the emancipation proclamation of 1861, even though he was by then a very old man. Filaret might still have been the rhetorician of choice for ceremonial occasions, but his was not the only authoritative model of ecclesiastical discourse in the early reform era. He might better be regarded as one end of a spectrum, embodying the principles of rigour and reason. At the pole of emotion and affect stood the recently departed Innokentii of Kherson (1800–57), who was widely commended for his striking and dramatic imagery. Innokentii’s ability to sway an audience was renowned: here was another preacher to be known as the ‘Slavic Chrysostom’.⁷⁷ He had come to prominence for his campaign of patriotic preaching during the Crimean War, which had shown the benefit, and indeed the necessity, of ‘practical sermons’. The Orthodox homiletic tradition as normally conceived did not permit much direct engagement with the needs of the public. But the desperate defence of the Crimea, and the need to bolster the faithful who were holding the line against Muslim Tatars and Catholic Frenchmen, had made such diffidence unsustainable.⁷⁸ By the late 1850s, an increasing number of churchmen were taking the view that priests simply could not stand apart from the issues of the day. Even if they did not discuss current affairs directly, it was imperative for them to address their parishioners on such questions as the upbringing of young people or the education of women. As a contributor to the journal of the St Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy wrote: ‘Given the general intellectual ferment in our society, is it possible for a preacher to stay indifferent—a silent witness of this ferment? Should he remain silent when everything around him is speaking and inviting his reply?’⁷⁹ Apollos (Beliaev), whose extensive career as preacher and pedagogue had taken him to Kiev, Astrakhan, St Petersburg, and Novgorod before he was appointed Bishop of Viatka in 1866, was one of those who heeded the call. In ‘A Few Thoughts on What Russia Needs Most of All at the Present Time’, he took aim at ‘the spirit of the West, the spirit of darkness’ and warned of the susceptibility of educated society to evils such as spiritism. This was not quite hard-hitting social commentary, but it still represented a more engagé style of preaching than had been conventional a generation earlier.⁸⁰ A sharper commentator was Ioann (Sokolov), later to be Bishop of Smolensk and rector of the Kazan theological academy in the early reform era. As early as 1859, Ioann was unafraid to ⁷⁷ Razumikhin, Istoriia russkoi propovedi, 141–2; also characterization in P. Zavedeev, Istoriia russkogo propovednichestva ot XVII veka do nastoiashchego vremeni (Tula, 1879), 210–29; Russkoe propovednichestvo, 247. ⁷⁸ See the account of Innokentii’s activities during the war in Mara Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (DeKalb, 2010), 133–40. ⁷⁹ F. Nadezhdin, ‘O neobkhodimosti propovedyvat’ v nashe vremia v nashem obshchestve’, Khristianskoe chtenie, 1859, sec. 2, 362. ⁸⁰ Apollos, ‘Neskol’ko myslei o tom, chto v nastoiashchee vremia nuzhnee dlia Rossii’, in his Pastyrskie nastavleniia (St Petersburg, 1867), 134–9.

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pronounce on the significance of the coming emancipation; he railed against the emptiness and negativity of modern life, but he was able to change his tone to one of homely paternal advice when speaking to the common people.⁸¹ In the late 1850s and early 1860s, clergymen were asking more searching questions about the relationship between the Church and society. Before the reform era public preaching had been the prerogative of hierarchs, who formed an educated elite and were not bound by the same prior censorship as parish clergy.⁸² Now, on the pages of the new church periodicals, sermons were discussed as a much broader social imperative. The pastoral mission of the Church was much invoked. Priests were given detailed instructions on how to take account of the varieties of people found within the congregation: men and women, rich and poor, healthy and sick. This was an avowedly more practical approach than traditional homiletics.⁸³ One guide to pastoral work from early in the reform era drew directly on the author’s practical experience: he would return home from meetings with members of the congregation and note down his conversations. Volume 1 was for priests in the rural areas; volumes 2–3 for those in the towns. Readers were, for example, shown how to confront a parishioner who had recently been drunk and foul-mouthed, explaining to him the full sinfulness of obscene language.⁸⁴ A noted popular preacher of the time was Rodion Putiatin (1807–69), whose collection of simple ‘lessons’ (poucheniia) had gone through seventeen editions by 1872.⁸⁵ The sense that the Church needed to broaden its social mission was especially acute in the capital. Father Jean Soyard, a visiting Dominican monk, achieved a notable success in 1858 when he preached at Petersburg’s Catholic church. Metropolitan Grigorii (Postnikov) loosened the preliminary censorship of sermons and instructed the city’s clergy to fight back by preaching more actively. The Petersburg ecclesiastical academy also reflected the new, more socially engaged spirit of the age. Its new rector, Ioann Ianyshev, was the first parish priest to head one of these elite institutions. Ioann was himself a talented preacher and encouraged his students to give public sermons. He also presided over important changes in the academy’s statutes: students were allowed more freedom, they were admitted from outside the clerical estate, and auditors were permitted on all courses. The curriculum became more general and more demanding, with a greater emphasis on independent intellectual activity and the development of communication skills.⁸⁶

⁸¹ Razumikhin, Istoriia russkoi propovedi, 150, 154–5. ⁸² Jennifer Hedda, His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2008), 59. ⁸³ Arkhimandrit Kirill, Pastyrskoe bogoslovie (St Petersburg, 1854). ⁸⁴ ‘Razgovor o privychke k skvernosloviiu i raznym rugatel’stvam’, in Domashnie nastavleniia pastyria (Razgovory i perepiska) (Moscow, 1862), 1: 246–55. ⁸⁵ Razumikhin, Istoriia russkoi propovedi, 164–5. ⁸⁶ Hedda, His Kingdom Come, 34–41.

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Such sophistication was still very far from the norm. Orthodox priests had traditionally been trained to write out their sermons on paper, not to improvise. In the 1860s, however, this began to be discussed as a failing. An article of 1861 in a leading church journal was uncompromising in putting the blame on priests for the failure of the spoken word to reach the hearts and minds of the faithful. Many village priests simply did not give sermons, even on Sundays. Those who did often relied on printed or old manuscript texts that reeked of scholasticism. They did not understand that, in order to get through to the common people, a preacher needed to drop all pretensions to eloquence and speak instead in simple, lively, and heartfelt terms. The priest needed to be a ‘pastor’, not an orator. The seminaries were doing a poor job of preparing their students for this part of their future career.⁸⁷ The point was taken up again the following year: seminary teaching was far too abstract, and sermons were taught in the same way as classical oratory; often only the introduction and conclusion distinguished a Russian priest’s sermon from an academic treatise. Priests needed to remember that they were not speaking to an educated audience and keep sermons direct and vivid. Admittedly, it was hard to sway listeners who were completely ignorant of church doctrine—here literacy schools and catechism classes were essential.⁸⁸ In the 1860s, the church journals were providing priests with a good deal of advice on how to improve their performance. Village priests could now consult numerous collections of exemplary speeches and sermons, some of them responding directly to contemporary events. They were given practical advice on delivery (the recommendation was to speak simply without attempting to show off erudition or succumbing to mysticism or fanaticism).⁸⁹ Collections of sermons were reviewed in the ecclesiastical journals, with an important criterion being their ability to connect with listeners.⁹⁰ Yet many contemporaries found that real progress was limited by the poverty and low educational level of much of the clergy and by the Church’s powerful conservatism (exemplified most obviously by the fact that sermons still had to pass preliminary ecclesiastical censorship).⁹¹ Many priests treated the liturgy as a mere ritual, rushing over the text as they read and showing no signs of understanding its meaning, let alone communicating that meaning to the faithful. This only strengthened the pre-existing disposition of the Russian people to treat scripture in quasi-pagan fashion as a source of words with magic powers rather than a set of moral teachings. Words and concepts had become dangerously detached from one another, and it was time for more

⁸⁷ E.G., ‘Propoved’ sel’skogo pastyria kak sredstvo narodnogo obrazovaniia’, PO, vol. 6 (1861): 531–40. ⁸⁸ I.P., ‘Ob usloviiakh uspekha tserkovnoi propovedi v narode’, PO, no. 1 (1862): 6–30. ⁸⁹ P. Nechaev, Glavneishie usloviia uspeshnogo propovednichestva (St Petersburg, 1868). ⁹⁰ For example in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie in the early 1860s. ⁹¹ On censorship constraints, see ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, VE, no. 5 (1873): 360–1.

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effective preaching to heal this breach.⁹² By the end of the 1860s, the failure to communicate the Church’s teaching to the common people had become a recurring theme of ecclesiastical discourse.

Glasnost’ and the New Municipal Politics If the reform era was unsettling for the ‘second estate’ of the clergy, this was doubly true for the first. The stakes were high for the landowning gentry, as emancipation transformed the legal and economic order of the village, threatening both the gentry’s privileges and its prosperity. Sensitivities were heightened by the fact that the government had sought gentry participation in the preparation of reform only then to curtail it drastically. The result was that, from 1859 onwards, even this instinctively loyal and conservative class was moved to some feisty rhetoric. As we have seen, the dissatisfaction peaked in 1861–2, when a succession of provincial noble assemblies debated eminently political matters.⁹³ The Third Section, which assiduously followed the conduct of the unusually well-attended meetings of the gentry assemblies in 1861, reported that a gathering in St Petersburg had drawn an audience of several hundred that loudly applauded speeches denouncing ‘progressive ideas’.⁹⁴ At least in formal terms, the practice of debate endured. Tambov landowner and Moscow University professor Boris Chicherin, on arriving in Petersburg in late 1862 to serve as tutor to the heir to the throne, took the opportunity to sit in on meetings of the Petersburg noble assembly. ‘For the first time in Russia’, he later wrote in his memoirs, ‘I saw a perfectly parliamentary setting’. The chair, Count Petr Pavlovich Shuvalov, did an excellent job, and the speakers came to the centre of the room and delivered speeches in orderly sequence. This was quite unlike any other noble assembly Chicherin had ever encountered. The content of the speeches, however, left much to be desired: ‘everything was limited to the kind of vague phraseology that orators use when they essentially don’t know what they want.’ The nobility in the capitals compared poorly with the provincial nobility, which was already engaged in practical measures instead of complaining about the government.⁹⁵ Moscow, however, was a rather different matter. Here, Chicherin noted, there were a few men who were establishing a reputation as the leading orators of their class: Iurii Samarin, Vladimir Cherkasskii, Pavel Golokhvastov. Moscow also had ⁹² ‘Nesvetlye storony nashei tserkovnoi zhizni (Iz eparkhial’nykh vedomostei)’, Khristianskoe chtenie, 1868, sec. 1, 146–83. ⁹³ Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry, chap. 9. ⁹⁴ Sidorova and Shcherbakova (eds), Rossiia pod nadzorom, 558. ⁹⁵ B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina: Moskovskii universitet (Moscow, 1929), 89–90.

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a stronger streak of independence born partly of distance from the capital. The 1862 elections to the Moscow noble assembly were heated, with Golokhvastov expressing fierce opposition to the Petersburg bureaucratic clique that had pressed through an emancipation settlement held to be disfavourable to the nobility. The English Club, favoured haunt of the Moscow nobility, had a ‘talking room’ (govoril’nia), where Samarin, Golokhvastov, and others held forth on the reforms emanating from Petersburg. In January 1865, the noble assembly hall was packed for another heated debate in which a succession of speakers took aim at the government bureaucracy, uttering the very words ‘Ministry of the Interior’ with disdain. That same Ministry issued a rescript at the end of the month firmly reminding the gentry of the prerogatives of autocracy. Resentment simmered on into the gentry elections of 1866.⁹⁶ A gentry fronde had little chance of cohering in nineteenth-century Russia, but Moscow’s orators were at least given a new opportunity to assert themselves in the city duma, a form of public gathering quite different from the ossified gentlemen’s clubs that the noble assemblies were increasingly reputed to be. Before the 1860s, the only city in the empire to have such a municipal council was St Petersburg, but its powers were severely circumscribed. In the 1860s the institution spread to Moscow and Odessa, and even in St Petersburg it changed its nature, as elections were introduced and the duma was given a wider remit in urban self-government. Moscow quickly established itself as the vanguard of the new, more public urban self-administration. As the Petersburg paper Golos noted in April 1863, Moscow had already done far more than the capital to advance the cause of glasnost’.⁹⁷ Its duma elections in January and February 1863 seized the attention of the educated public: here was an unprecedented case of political deliberation across the full range of Russian society. One hundred representatives were to be elected from each of the five estates; from each hundred, thirty-five would go forward as delegates to the duma. On 20 January, for example, 274 hereditary nobles attended their own electoral meeting. Forty candidates went forward to the ballot, but only nine of them received more votes in favour than against. According to the labour-intensive voting method of the time, all voters cast votes for and against each of the candidates by placing balls in the appropriate urns.⁹⁸ With the elections concluded, expectations ran high that the duma would set a new example of cooperation across social divides. The main Moscow paper, Mikhail Katkov’s Moskovskie vedomosti, reported avidly on proceedings, letting readers know that speeches were listened to respectfully and that there were ‘no

⁹⁶ D. Nikiforov, Moskva v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra II (Moscow, 1904), 71, 96, 121–2; Chernukha, Vnutrenniaia politika, 45–6, 48. ⁹⁷ ‘Vsednevnaia zhizn’, Golos, 14 April 1863, 345. ⁹⁸ Mosk ved, 22 January 1863, 2.

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signs of hostility between one estate and another’.⁹⁹ On the meeting to elect the mayor on 16 March, the paper commented: ‘This was the whole city of Moscow in miniature. Everyone present could not help but feel himself not a merchant or a noble, not a meshchanin [townsperson, petty bourgeois] or a tsekhovoi [artisan], but a living member of a large whole, and every person breathed more broadly and deeply.’¹⁰⁰ At the same time, the paper was uncomfortable with the notion that the duma might be used as a forum for politicking. ‘Here there is no place for politics or metaphysics. Panegyrics to the candidates and their virtues are also, of course, not possible, while tournaments of eloquence are even less desirable and even less in accord with the interests of the city.’¹⁰¹ The new mayor, Prince A. A. Shcherbatov, gave a modest acceptance speech, which was only appropriate, since he was an untried figure. There had been no election campaign, no rousing speeches in favour of one or another candidate. It was clearly Shcherbatov’s social position that had clinched it: his father was a former Governor-General of the city.¹⁰² The Moscow duma opened on 10 April 1863 with a prayer and oath-taking in Chudov monastery, performed by bishop Savva of Mozhaisk according to a text approved by the ubiquitous Filaret. As Savva declared, other countries had to fight for such forms of estate and city representation, but in Russia they were simply granted by a benevolent autocrat.¹⁰³ The Governor-General gave a welcome address and promptly left, while mayor Shcherbatov read out a letter to the throne that was full of loyal sentiments. In its editorial to mark the occasion, Moskovskie vedomosti issued a stirring patriotic cry: ‘All trivial and artificial notions, all the barren flowers of our so-called education must give way to the basic, powerful, eternal forces that form the foundation of national [vsenarodnaia] life.’¹⁰⁴ To mark the start of his tenure as mayor, Shcherbatov held, in a private capacity, a dinner for 220 guests at the English Club. The dinner was splendid, but the Moskovskie vedomosti correspondent found that the content left something to be desired: unfortunately, we still don’t know how to organize dinners with speeches . . . It’s not enough just to pronounce toasts, it would be desirable to have some exchange of ideas of public significance. This does not require any oratorical artistry; but you do need strict rules, which are only possible if the verbal as well as the gastronomic part of the evening has its master of ceremonies.¹⁰⁵

⁹⁹ Mosk ved, 22 February 1863, 2. ¹⁰⁰ Mosk ved, 19 March 1863, 1. ¹⁰¹ Mosk ved, 6 March 1863, 1. ¹⁰² Mosk ved, 19 March 1863, 1; 21 March 1863, 2. On the 1863 elections, see also L. F. Pisar’kova, Gorodskie reformy v Rossii i Moskovskaia duma (Moscow, 2010), 95–103. ¹⁰³ N. Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M. P. Pogodina, vol. 21 (1907), 73. ¹⁰⁴ Mosk ved, 13 April 1863, 1. ¹⁰⁵ Mosk ved, 13 April 1863, 2.

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This raised the question of the procedural substance of the new municipal body. Once the excitement of the elections had worn off, the press began to find the content of duma debates underwhelming. As an editorial in Moskovskie vedomosti opined in 1864, it was unfair to hold the duma to the standards of representative assemblies in other countries that brought together the very best people in the country for whom political activity was the main focus of their considerable energies. There was no time in the Moscow duma for multiple readings of bills, as in the English parliament; nor could duma deputies be expected to get to grips with the intricacies of gas lighting (which was the main issue of the day). Bodies of opinion in the duma remained shapeless and shifting: ‘in the dumas there cannot be organized parties, there can only be more or less accidental comings together.’¹⁰⁶ Even a decade later, municipal elections would show how far Moscow still was from full-blooded political life. The absurdly large number of candidates prevented the creation of clear parties and constituencies. Personal acquaintance always seemed to count more than the public good. The situation was reminiscent of when the city postal system was set up and people sent unnecessary letters merely to take advantage of it. In just the same way, hundreds of candidates were putting themselves forward only to be rejected. And then there was the matter of the poor turnout. This was not just the fault of the general public. The problem was the lack of glasnost’: the fact that the public was not given enough information on how members of the duma were performing their duties, ‘whether they were just sitting and keeping quiet and signing the minutes or discussing and speaking, and if so, what exactly they are saying’. The Moscow duma badly needed its own publication where stenographic records of debates, and lists of attendance, would be provided.¹⁰⁷ There was also the question of how the different estates would relate to each other as they conducted their face-to-face business: would the press’s confident assessments of cross-estate harmony be borne out in practice? Cultural differences, at least, seem to have been palpable. Members of the Moscow gentry reportedly competed in eloquence as they discussed the prospects of the duma at an electoral meeting. They evidently had a low opinion of the ability of merchants to make cogent speeches, while the merchants were taken aback by the loquacity of their social betters. When the duma started its business, according to one observer of merchant stock, there was no grandstanding: in the 1860s ‘merchant and artisan delegates expressed their views concisely, without pursuing questions that were alien to them and without resorting to foolish oratorical techniques’.¹⁰⁸ ¹⁰⁶ Mosk ved, 4 August 1864, 1. ¹⁰⁷ [A.A. Maikov], ‘Moskovskie gorodskie vybory (Pis’mo iz Moskvy)’, OZ, vol. 206 (January 1873): 78–80. ¹⁰⁸ N. A. Naidenov, Vospominaniia o vidennom, slyshannom i ispytannom (Moscow, 2007), 133–4, 139.

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Zemstvo Parliamentarianism The municipal assemblies were a striking new departure in political culture. In political content, however, they were rather less impressive: they were, after all, dominated by an urban oligarchy. Even when that oligarchy changed character in the 1870s, with the increased representation of the merchantry, its concerns remained limited to urban management and infrastructure. The key issue was always what to pay for and how to pay for it, and nobles and merchants could both show themselves reluctant to sanction increases in their own tax burden. The zemstvos, the new institutions of rural self-administration, were a rather different matter. They lay at the heart of the politically crucial three-way relationship between the regime, the educated public, and the peasantry. They formed a network of broadly like-minded activists that quickly spread across much of rural Russia. From the very beginning, the government would be acutely sensitive to any suspicion that a national zemstvo ‘movement’ was gaining momentum. More importantly for the present discussion of political rhetoric, the zemstvos had powerful symbolic value as the voice of profoundest Russia. As Count A. P. Shuvalov pronounced at the opening session of the St Petersburg zemstvo, ‘We are speaking, we are being heard, we will be judged by our fellowcountrymen’.¹⁰⁹ From the spring of 1865 onwards, the newspapers were full of reports on the opening of zemstvo assemblies in most parts of European Russia. The opening ceremonies were thoroughly patriarchal: the provincial governor would come along to deliver a speech emphasizing the Emperor’s generosity in granting the zemstvo and the need for the zemstvo members to justify the trust placed in them. Once the governor withdrew, however, debates could become heated. The first point on the agenda was the appointment of the zemstvo executive, the uprava or ‘zemstvo board’. In Smolensk the question of whether to appoint a commission to decide the make-up and salary of the zemstvo board provoked ‘heated and lengthy debate’, which the correspondent of Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (St Petersburg News) was unable to record adequately: the hall of the city Duma is rather large, but the table where just the chair and the secretary were sitting was very small; the deputies wandered around the hall in small groups and were surrounded by members of the public, so that all these groups were talking at the same time, and it was impossible to follow who was saying what.

¹⁰⁹ Zasedaniia S. Peterburgskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia pervogo sozyva 1865 g. Chast’ vtoraia: Stenograficheskie protokoly zasedanii (St Petersburg, 1866), 62.

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The chairman was powerless to restore order. The assembly then transferred to a private house, where the table was large enough to accommodate all the deputies and meetings became more orderly.¹¹⁰ The chaotic nature of zemstvo debates was a recurring complaint in the early days. As the correspondent of Moskovskie vedomosti noted acerbically: ‘One must admit that it is much easier to draw up rules for the conduct of meetings with points like “The deputies must speak one at a time” . . . than to observe these rules.’ The Russian zemstvo assembly made for a sobering contrast with a debating club the author had observed in a London tavern. Sitting with their beer, ‘everyone strictly waited for their turn, heard each other out to the end with remarkable patience . . . the remarks of the chairman were accepted respectfully by all’.¹¹¹ As a report on the Kursk zemstvo assembly observed, Russians made poor listeners: they rushed to make their comments before a speaker had even had time to finish, ‘as if afraid to forget the point to which they wanted to object or what they wanted to say’. Public speaking had thus been turned into ‘a private conversation, with all its disorder, interruption, undermining of the opponent and failure to hear what he is saying’.¹¹² In Novotvorzhskii district in Tver province, the enlightened and authoritative P. A. Bakunin had to exert himself to maintain order. His measured and rational style of exposition was not always shared by the delegates, especially those from the towns who had a strong sense of the practical interests they wanted to defend. On occasion, Bakunin intervened to insist on orderly and courteous debate.¹¹³ That is not to say that there were no formal rules in zemstvo assemblies. In many cases, rules of order (nakazy) were adopted in imitation of Western procedure (though they differed a great deal in their level of detail). But their observance tended to lapse over time as the disciplinary functions of the chairman came to the fore.¹¹⁴ In any case, rules of order only encouraged what became a regular bugbear of journalists: ‘zemstvo parliamentarianism’, or liberal phrasemongering.¹¹⁵ A sketch-writer in Golos expressed the hope that the Petersburg zemstvo would ‘devote the greater part of its activities to real business’ and spend less time on ‘eloquence and making an impression’. While it was pleasant to be ¹¹⁰ ‘Zemskoe delo v Smolenskoi gubernii’, Spb ved, 7 January 1866, 1. ¹¹¹ Ign. Z-ii, ‘Novgorod-Severskoe uezdnoe zemskoe sobranie’, Mosk ved, 29 July 1865, 3. Similar on disorderly zemstvo proceedings is ‘Voronezhskoe uezdnoe zemskoe sobranie’, Mosk ved, 12 October 1865, 2. ¹¹² ‘Zasedaniia kurskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia’, SPb ved, 11 October 1865, 1. ¹¹³ V. N. Lind, ‘Vospominaniia’, RM, no. 6 (1916): 68. The author was at this time completing his university studies in St Petersburg; in 1868 he was himself elected to the district zemstvo. ¹¹⁴ Boris Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let (St Petersburg, 1909–11), 3: 71–3. On the disciplinary side, see art. 54 of the zemstvo statutes, ‘Prava i obiazannosti predsedatelei sobraniia’, for example in the contemporary handbook E. G. Valitskii, Zemskie uchrezhdeniia: nastol’naia kniga dlia zemskikh glasnykh (Moscow, 1871). ¹¹⁵ N. Koliupanov, ‘Obshchii vzgliad na pervyi period istorii zemskikh sobranii v Rossii’, VE, no. 4 (1867): 120.

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considered a bold orator, zemstvo assemblies were not debating competitions but a crucial, and still vulnerable, experiment in self-government. Here, as in other reports, the presence of a large number of ladies in the early sessions was taken as a metonym for showy and ineffectual speech-making.¹¹⁶ Ultimately, however, the style of zemstvo debates was less significant than the question of who got to speak. Was this new institution giving a voice to the rural majority, or did it merely perpetuate gentry hegemony? Although the zemstvos were a remarkable experiment in cross-estate collaboration, they did not constitute a radical challenge to social divisions and hierarchies. Elections were conducted by curia, according to estate principles; not only were peasants underrepresented in this system, they often voted for gentry candidates whether out of habitual deference or because of the absence of well-established alternatives.¹¹⁷ The result was that peasants made up more than a third of delegates at district (uezd) level, but only about 10 per cent in the provincial assemblies whose members were elected by the districts.¹¹⁸ Nonetheless, almost four in ten delegates to local zemstvo assemblies were muzhiki, and this gave educated society the opportunity to study how peasants spoke not among themselves or when addressing their (former) masters but in a ‘public’ setting. In fact, this encounter between different speech cultures had begun three or four years earlier. Translating the emancipation settlement from broad principle into local practice had required a switch from coercion to persuasion in gentry dealings with the peasantry.¹¹⁹ The chief persuaders had been the ‘peace mediators’, usually recruited from the less reactionary sections of the province’s gentry. Decisions were made at the arbitration assemblies, which predictably were dominated by the landowning gentry. The peasants’ recent masters forcefully defended their interests, if necessary in defiance of the arbitrator. The peasants were less vocal, and adopted very different rhetorical strategies in defence of their interests: they were timid, beseeching, making appeals to pity and justice. If they met a rebuttal, they tended not to persist.¹²⁰ But outside the assembly the peace mediators made extensive efforts to convey to peasants the substance of the legislation and to secure consensus. In the process, they were regular participant-observers in village assemblies, where peasants were far less decorous and respectful than in the presence of the landowners. In the peasants’ own gatherings it was hard to secure anything approaching an orderly discussion, ¹¹⁶ ‘Vsednevnaia zhizn’’, Golos, 8 January 1867, 2. ¹¹⁷ A. Iu. Shutov, Zemskie vybory v istorii Rossii (1864–1917 gg.) (Moscow, 1997), 86–7. ¹¹⁸ Fedor A. Petrov, ‘Crowning the Edifice: The Zemstvo, Local Self-Government, and the Constitutional Movement, 1864–1881’, in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (eds), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington, 1994), 198–9. ¹¹⁹ For a study of the process, see Roxanne Easley, ‘Opening Public Space: The Peace Arbitrator and Rural Politicization, 1861–1864’, SR, 61 (2002): 707–31, esp. 714. ¹²⁰ An account of a gentry-dominated assembly is Voroponov, ‘Sorok let tomu nazad’, VE, no. 7 (1904): 22–3.

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as the more thoughtful members of the community were drowned out by the full-throated ‘shriekers’ (krikuny).¹²¹ If the peace mediator gained the peasants’ trust, he could provide them with a more informed view of the emancipation legislation and of their prospects. But combating peasant rumour and incomprehension required strenuous effort and clarity of communication—qualities that were not much in evidence in the clergy, the traditional mouthpiece of the government in the village.¹²² When the zemstvos began their work, the peasantry was accorded at least a symbolic role. In the St Petersburg provincial assembly, the token peasant delegate gave a speech couched in a forelock-tugging idiom: ‘Gentlemen, I accept your choice, though I wasn’t expecting to be elected, and thank you cordially that you are paying attention to the rural estate. Not only my electors but all peasants from the whole guberniia will thank you when they find out.’ For this contribution he received ‘loud applause’.¹²³ The boulevard press also took note of his election: the correspondent of Peterburgskii listok (The Petersburg Sheet) observed that ‘We shall not, unlike some people, succumb to despair and pour scorn on this election, being quite sure that any environment can contain sensible and practical people with honest beliefs’. Indeed, just a week later the paper commended the man for a ‘thorough and practical’ contribution to a discussion on the causes and cures of drunkenness among the peasantry.¹²⁴ A few months later, the same newspaper referred with heavy irony to the prickly noble sense of honour which ‘does not allow the notion that un mougik might reason effectively’.¹²⁵ Evidence to the contrary was not limited to the capital. The Kursk zemstvo had no more than ten peasant representatives, but they proved self-assertive and responsible. They put forward a candidate for election to the zemstvo board. Even though he was not voted in, they made a good impression, showing none of the ‘tactlessness’ that was reported in peasant delegates from other parts of Russia. The Kursk peasants were impeccably serious and diligent, dutifully making notes of any factual or statistical information on pieces of paper.¹²⁶ The liberal Vestnik Evropy gave a broadly positive assessment of the peasant contribution and criticized the misguided efforts in some places to keep the rural estate out of zemstvo affairs.¹²⁷ The future

¹²¹ As reported in P. Bezvestnyi, ‘Iz dnevnika mirovogo posrednika 1861–1862 goda’, Russkii vestnik, no. 8 (1863): 819–20. ¹²² ‘Dnevnik mirovogo posrednika Aleksandra Andreevicha Polovtsova’, Russkaia starina, no. 2 (1914): 297–301. ¹²³ Zasedaniia S. Peterburgskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia pervogo sozyva 1865 g. Chast’ vtoraia. Stenograficheskie protokoly zasedanii (St Petersburg, 1866), 46–7. ¹²⁴ ‘Peterburgskoe obozrenie’, PL, 12 December 1865, 1; ‘Peterburgskoe obozrenie’, PL, 19 December 1865, 1. ¹²⁵ ‘Nashe zhit’e-byt’e’, PL, 13 March 1866, 1. ¹²⁶ ‘Zasedaniia kurskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia’, SPb ved, no. 266 (11 October 1865): 1. ¹²⁷ N. Koliupanov, ‘Obshchii vzgliad na pervyi period istorii zemskikh sobranii v Rossii’, VE, vol. 4 (December 1867): 11.

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zemstvo luminary Ivan Petrunkevich was much impressed by the peasant delegates on his first visit to a zemstvo assembly in 1865.¹²⁸ In general, however, it seems that peasants in the 1860s were reluctant to speak. The insistence of Moskovskie vedomosti that there was no antagonism between the estates in the zemstvo may have contained an element of wishful thinking, but it probably also reflected the deferential disposition of peasant delegates in the early days of the zemstvo. Boris Chicherin recalled the peasant deputies being treated as equals in his own district zemstvo assembly, but he admitted they mainly played the role of ‘silent spectators’.¹²⁹ The curial election system for the zemstvo ensured that the different estates would continue to know their places; the unequal system of representation gave almost no contemporaries pause. The most influential group in the zemstvo would be the middling gentry: it showed itself resistant both to the ‘aristocratization’ of the institution (through automatic representation for the largest landowners) and its ‘democratization’ (by alleviating the severe underrepresentation of the peasantry).¹³⁰ Whatever its social composition, the zemstvo was an important test of the principle of glasnost’: would its proceedings be made available to the public? Most zemstvo men saw some degree of glasnost’ as essential to their undertaking, but that left open the question of what forms it would take. Various provinces mooted and established publications to make zemstvo affairs more widely known. A few assemblies stated a preference for the fullest possible record of their deliberations: through stenography. St Petersburg led the way in producing and publishing transcripts of its debates, and there were a few other examples (such as Kherson and Ekaterinoslav) in the late 1860s; the Moscow zemstvo assembly had its debates recorded by stenographers, though the transcripts were not published. But in most places the issue of stenography was not even raised. No doubt this was in part a matter of resources—no district (uezd) assemblies, for example, had stenographers—but zemstvo delegates probably also had more fundamental reservations. The Elizavetgrad assembly in Ukraine articulated the case against: the zemstvos needed firmer legal guarantees before making their deliberations public in such minute detail. From 1866 onwards, zemstvo publications were subjected to gubernatorial censorship, and it was unclear what, if any, protections zemstvo delegates enjoyed for the words they uttered in their assemblies.¹³¹ As Vestnik Evropy commented in June 1866, most zemstvos did not have the opportunity to publish what they were doing: only a few provincial newspapers were willing to publish full reports.¹³² ¹²⁸ Charles E. Timberlake, ‘Ivan Il'ich Petrunkevich: Russian Liberalism in Microcosm’, in Charles E. Timberlake (ed.), Essays on Russian Liberalism (Columbia, Missouri, 1972), 20. ¹²⁹ B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina: Zemstvo i moskovskaia duma (Moscow, 1934), 22. ¹³⁰ Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 3: 64. ¹³¹ Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 3: 65–70. ¹³² ‘Obzor nachala deiatel’nosti gubernskikh zemskikh sobranii’, VE, vol. 2 (June 1866): 15–16.

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Although relations between zemstvos and government authorities had been largely harmonious in 1865–6, Dmitrii Karakozov’s failed assassination attempt of April 1866 provoked government retrenchment in various areas. The most damaging consequence for the zemstvos was a law of 21 November 1866 that reduced their powers of taxation. This led to a conflict that marked the end of any honeymoon period of zemstvo glasnost’. In January 1867, the St Petersburg zemstvo assembly expressed strong opposition to the new law and resolved to petition the government to reconsider it. The Petersburg zemstvo men also expressed their determination to make their defiance more widely known. In a debate on the rules for publication of zemstvo proceedings one speaker argued, to general enthusiasm, that the zemstvo, as a government institution, should be released from preliminary censorship. He had ordered publication of 200 copies of the debates and proposed to send these reports out to other zemstvos. He wished to avoid the distortions that zemstvo debates often suffered when they were published in the press. In this way, the Petersburg zemstvo could serve as a model of glasnost’ for the rest of Russia. The chairman Count Shuvalov commented more soberly that the publication of debates was not only a right but an obligation of the zemstvo; each delegate, moreover, should receive several copies.¹³³ Soon after this, on 16 January 1867, the St Petersburg zemstvo assembly was shut down by decree of the Emperor on the grounds that it had served to undermine the authority of the government. This was the prelude to a new law of 13 June 1867 that significantly expanded the powers and responsibilities of the chairman of the assembly. If any disorder or illegal activity took place in a meeting, the chairman could be punished if he did not intervene in timely fashion. His role in steering the discussion and keeping it on track was correspondingly expanded. Members of the zemstvo who continued the discussion even after the chairman had declared the meeting closed were subject to fines from 25 to 100 rubles, while the instigators of such behaviour could be banned from the assembly for a period from three to nine years (and, depending on the content of the debate, they might be liable to more severe punishment). The new legislation also posed a direct threat to glasnost’: the chairman had the right to decide whether the public would be open to the public, and if the governor ordered that meetings be held in closed session, then the chairman was bound to obey. A further law left the publishing of reports on public meetings—whether in the zemstvo or in municipal assemblies—likewise to the discretion of the governor. The effects were soon felt, as reports on the zemstvo almost disappeared from the press. This was a severe blow, as the impact of the zemstvo depended on the printed word: it was crucial ¹³³ ‘Zemskoe delo’, Golos, 17 January 1867, 2–3. For fuller accounts, see Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 3: 120–5 and James A. Malloy, Jr, ‘Russian Liberalism and the Closing of the 1867 St. Petersburg Zemstvo’, Canadian Slavic Studies, 4 (1970): 653–70.

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that newspapers have the right to publish zemstvo debates in full, even if their freedom to discuss those debates was circumscribed. In the courts it was often noticeable that lawyers were much less engaged in their performance when they could see no stenographer was present and their words would not reach a wider public—and the courts were in general much better provided with stenographers than the zemstvo. Unlike lawyers, moreover, zemstvo orators were not trained to speak and to make a case; without the stimulus of publichnost’, they remained indifferent to the impression they made.¹³⁴ Only the following year, Baron Korf was already looking back wistfully at the great excitement of the early zemstvo speeches and debates. Glasnost’, it turned out, had soon been limited by law. Readers could no longer hope to obtain ‘photographs’ from the zemstvo assembly; reports were now ‘retouched’ by censorship.¹³⁵

The New Courts The other great hope of glasnost’ was the courtroom. The shift from written process to oral and public legal proceedings was, aside from the fact of peasant emancipation, the most eye-catching policy of the reform era. Orality became the overriding principle of the ‘peace courts’ (mirovoi sud) designed for minor offences and used in practice largely by the peasants and the urban lower estates: here no preliminary documentation was required, and even the initial claim (iskovaia pros’ba) could be delivered in speech rather than writing.¹³⁶ More striking for educated society was the transformation of the higher courts (of which the circuit courts were the first instance). A healthy minority (fourteen votes) on the reform commission had been in favour of prohibiting the introduction of new information in court, which would have meant that preliminary documentation exchanged between the two sides would have remained supreme. But the majority (nineteen votes) ruled otherwise. By giving oral testimony equal status with written evidence, and by introducing the principle of oral and public disputation, the 1864 statutes opened vast new rhetorical prospects for the Russian courts.¹³⁷ At a stroke, Russia’s legal system moved to the continental European vanguard: the 1864 statutes were more protective of the principle of orality than other contemporary legal systems, for example placing tight restrictions on the ¹³⁴ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 1 (1868): 50–5. ¹³⁵ Baron N. Korf, ‘Vopros o narodnom obrazovanii v moskovskom zemskom sobranii 1868 goda’, VE, no. 5 (1868): 352–3. More generally on the law of June 1867 and its consequences over the following years, see Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 3: 125–40. ¹³⁶ A law of 15 June 1912 extended even further the scope of orality in the mirovoi sud: now only formal appeals had to be presented in writing. I. D. Mordukhai-Boltovskoi, ‘Grazhdanskii protsess’, in Sudebnye ustavy 20 noiabria 1864 g. za piat’desiat let (Petrograd, 1914), 1: 499–501. ¹³⁷ See the account of the principle of orality (ustnost’) as it emerged in the legal reform, see Mordukhai-Boltovskoi, ‘Grazhdanskii protsess’, 1: 547–55.

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admissibility of testimony from witnesses who were unable to present themselves in court.¹³⁸ The principle of orality required a new class of rhetoricians, and so the legal reform also called into existence a Russian Bar. In contrast to the English and French systems, Russian lawyers would combine the functions of solicitor and barrister. Although they would achieve renown for their courtroom exploits, the meat and drink of their profession was civil law, and much of what the ‘sworn advocates’ (prisiazhnye poverennye) did was written and procedural rather than oratorical.¹³⁹ The role of soaring oratory was greatly diminished when there was no jury present.¹⁴⁰ But Russia also failed to adopt the Prussian model according to which lawyers would have become a variety of civil servant and the state would have gained considerable leverage over the legal profession. The Prussian option was given serious consideration in the late 1850s, and seemed for a while to enjoy official favour. But opinion shifted, thanks in part to a contribution from a young professor of civil law, Konstantin Pobedonostsev.¹⁴¹ The result was that the Russian state had no significant influence over the advokatura, which was an independent and self-governing profession with a strong sense of its corporate ethos and an increasingly antagonistic attitude to the authorities. Despite numerous provocations, for the half-century of the Russian Bar’s existence, the government never rescinded its privileged status, which was wholly anomalous in an autocratic state otherwise eager to repress independent public expression as soon as it strayed anywhere near politics. As one historian rightly sums up, ‘Speeches like those delivered by the Russian lawyers would be impossible in any other autocracy, and what the lawyers said during the trials would never have been tolerated in tsarist Russia anywhere but in court’.¹⁴² The transformed character of court proceedings gave the first cohort of ‘new’ lawyers the aura of missionaries and pioneers. They denied all connection to their predecessors, the striapchie. As Vladimir Spasovich proclaimed, ‘we emerged not ex ovo, we did not hatch from the shell, we have no ancestry or tribe’.¹⁴³ In a humorous contemporary sketch, a ‘new’ lawyer bombarded his ‘old’ counterpart with the varieties of specialist knowledge he would be expected to produce on the spot in the courtroom: all the intricacies of criminal and civil law, but also chemistry, physics, physiology, and especially forensic medicine. Cowed by this ¹³⁸ V. P. Shirkov, ‘Ocherk obshchikh osnovanii nashego ugolovnogo protsessa po sravneniiu s inostrannymi zakonodatel’stvami’, in Sudebnye ustavy, 1: 604–5. ¹³⁹ As pointed out in William Pomeranz, ‘The Practice of Law and the Promise of Rule of Law: The Advokatura and the Civil Process in Tsarist Russia’, Kritika, 16 (2015): 251. ¹⁴⁰ G. B. Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei: Zapiski russkogo evreia (Paris, 1933), 205. ¹⁴¹ Jörg Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich 1864–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 487–9. ¹⁴² Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (New York, 1953), 213–14. ¹⁴³ I. V. Gessen, Advokatura, obshchestvo i gosudarstvo 1864–1914, Istoriia russkoi advokatury, 3 vols (Moscow, 1914–16), 1:2.

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demonstration of his own inadequacy, the ‘old’ lawyer wonders whether he might become a notary instead.¹⁴⁴ The legal profession benefited more than anyone from the glasnost’ and publichnost’ of the 1860s. In October 1861, Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland) reported excitedly on the prospect of ‘open and oral legal proceedings’, where ‘Truth will seek its reward and vice will find its punishment in front of the honest common people’; the leading authorities invited to draw up the new statutes included a certain Pobedonostsev.¹⁴⁵ By 1865 anticipation had reached fever pitch. Large crowds were attending public reports delivered in departments of the Senate both in Petersburg and Moscow: here was the closest existing equivalent to what the new courts promised to bring. Sceptics might say that Russia was incapable of producing courtroom eloquence, but this would surely come with experience.¹⁴⁶ Military courts were the first to experiment with the new principle of oral contestation. The very first example in Moscow came on 29 May 1865, a year before the opening of the ‘new’ courts proper; in a striking new departure, a full stenographic report was published. This court martial was held in a former hotel in front of a large audience. Proceedings started with a measured speech by the prosecutor, but there was cut and thrust between the two sides when the prosecutor started to exhibit evidence found in the home of one of the defendants. Proceedings remained distinctly patriarchal, with the judge using the familiar ty to address the defendants and making it clear that their guilt was to be assumed: all three were sentenced to be shot. The case caused a sensation and was covered avidly in the press.¹⁴⁷ Over the summer, further cases whetted the appetite of the reading (and viewing) public. In July 1865, a townsman (meshchanin) named Nikolai Orlen, already accused of arson, was handed over to a military court in the Ukraine for insulting a duty officer. The newspaper report conveyed the poor state of the defendant, who seemed weakened and spiritually defeated by his imprisonment; a short dialogue was reproduced.¹⁴⁸ A more high-profile case took place on 21 August in the Senate building in the Moscow Kremlin. A merchant son, Gerasim Chistov, was put on trial before a large audience of the general public. The seven members of the military commission sat in the middle of the room behind a table covered in red cloth. Stenographers carefully recorded every word: the verbatim report was published in Golos. The crime was thoroughly Dostoevskian: two old women had been murdered in the course of a burglary. However, the editorial in Sankt-Petersburgskie vedomosti noted that the court had failed to observe the principles of the legal reform. The court proceedings had ¹⁴⁴ ¹⁴⁵ ¹⁴⁶ ¹⁴⁷ ¹⁴⁸

Osip Broud, Nash glasnyi sud: Rasskazy iz narodnogo byta (Odessa, 1868), 5–6. SO, no. 41 (8 October 1861): 1215. ‘Peterburgskoe obozrenie’, PL, 28 November 1865, 1. Dzhanshiev, Epokha velikhikh reform, 400–3. ‘Glasnyi sud v Kamenets-Podol’ske’, Mosk ved, 12 August 1865, 2.

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added little to the case, and the prosecution had failed to go much beyond the indictment in the arguments it presented. The conduct of the case had been disorderly: the accused was not separated from the witnesses, or the witnesses from the general public; there was distracting noise and bustle in the courtroom. Worse still, not enough use was made of witnesses, and evidence was treated far too uncritically.¹⁴⁹ Nonetheless, the courts martial retained their fascination because their proceedings were brisk and their stakes (for the defendants) high. At one such occasion in Vladimir at the end of August 1866 the audience was admitted by ticket only, as the venue (the local club) could only take 150 people. Plenty of ladies were present to spectate at a high-profile trial for murder and armed robbery. The cross-examination was given verbatim in the press.¹⁵⁰ The principle of glasnost’ was introduced to the ‘old’ courts in many parts of the empire by a law of 11 October 1865. The very first examples came in St Petersburg with sessions of departments of the Senate (in the presence of Minister of Justice D. N. Zamiatnin). The response was, at least initially, muted. At the first public session of the Eighth Department of the Senate, Prince V. F. Odoevskii explained that the venue was not yet ready to host the general public. For the time being only a limited number of places could be offered to visitors, who had to make their way to the court through its office, as the previous separate entrance was now being redesigned as a room for the jury. Yet, although only about thirty seats were available for the general public, only about half of them were occupied. The lack of interest could be explained by the fact that the cases were relatively trivial and did not pertain to St Petersburg, as well as by the fact that the plaintiffs were not present in court to provide human interest.¹⁵¹ A few days later, a leading Petersburg newspaper expressed concern that judges might use ticketing as a means of controlling attendance. While it was clear that the court venues were not yet equipped to take large audiences, an obligation to book tickets in advance would be sure to depress public interest in the new courts.¹⁵² Nonetheless, there was no shortage of interest when the criminal courts threw open their doors. The end of 1865 brought the first public session of Moscow’s criminal court—a case relating to the forgery of loan certificates. Although the proceedings lasted from ten in the morning to eight in the evening, many members of the audience— including ladies—stayed to the end. Of the twelve defendants, the ringleaders were not dubious characters but ‘people who’d had an education, with a name and position in society’.¹⁵³ The stage was now set for the ‘new’ courts. Their ceremonial opening came on 17 April 1866 in St Petersburg and on 23 April in Moscow; provincial courts ¹⁴⁹ Spb ved, 7 October 1865, 1. ¹⁵⁰ Golos, 7 October 1866, 3. ¹⁵¹ ‘Pervoe publichnoe zasedanie 8-go Departamenta pravitel’stvuiushchego Senata’, Mosk ved, 28 October 1865, 2. More generally on the first non-military open trials, see Dzhanshiev, Epokha velikikh reform, 404–5. ¹⁵² Spb ved, 6 November 1865, 1. ¹⁵³ ‘Nashe zhit’e-byt’e’, PL, 4 January 1866, 2.

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opened in the autumn of the same year. The novelty of the institution was matched by the makeshift premises usually allotted to it. Even in the capital it was hard to find a suitable venue. There were rumours that the building of the Holy Synod or the Engineers’ Castle would be adapted for this purpose, but in the end the choice of the Minister of Justice fell on the building of the old arsenal on Liteinyi Prospekt. The Moscow court was fortunate in taking over the Senate building, but in provincial capitals the available premises were more modest administrative buildings, mostly in poor condition.¹⁵⁴ In its early days, the open courts were both a site of pilgrimage for the true believers in glasnost’ and a place of refined entertainment. As the future stenographer Iul. K-n found, the light and splendidly decorated courtroom in Kharkov was regularly filled with members of ‘the most elegant public, primarily ladies and student youth’. The chairman of the court was E. Ia. Fuks, later to enjoy a distinguished senatorial career, who made an ‘imposing impression’ through his appearance, manners and drawn-out way of speaking; he turned the courtroom into a ‘temple, where he carried out the mysteries of truth, humanity and mercy’. One of the prosecutors was the later renowned A. F. Koni, who even then was remarkable for his polished speeches and erudition. The Russian Bar had emerged suddenly, from nothing, and its best representatives immediately took up residence on ‘a pedestal from which they did not fall for the next forty years’.¹⁵⁵ The cachet of the new profession was further enhanced by the fact that its members’ words could be carried to the length and breadth of Russia through published transcripts. Even the official paper of record, the Court Herald (Sudebnyi vestnik) put out by the Ministry of Justice, made engrossing reading, as it carried transcripts from courts at all levels from all over Russia. No more than a tiny proportion of the public would ever be able to attend trials; the new courts would only have their full social benefit if proceedings could be published without hindrance. Russian courts, as of 1867, did not always have places reserved for journalists—only for stenographers, who performed a valuable function in taking down proceedings but did not have the opportunity to provide physical description of defendants or commentary on the delivery of the speeches and the impression they made on the public. However, all periodicals had the right to publish stenographic reports in their legal section. (Military courts, however, were able to limit the number of publications that could print such material.)¹⁵⁶

¹⁵⁴ Dzhanshiev, Epokha velikikh reform, 414, 417, 430, 439. ¹⁵⁵ Iul. K-n, ‘Na razvalinakh glasnogo suda’, 224–5, 230. It might be easy to disregard this memoir as born of nostalgia and unfulfilled hopes for the reform era, but a similarly positive view of Fuks and Koni is found in F. Aptekman, ‘Zapiski semidesiatnika’, Sovremennyi mir, no. 4 (1913): 59. Later a participant in student radicalism, Aptekman was a student at the Kharkov medical faculty at the end of the 1860s. ¹⁵⁶ ‘Politicheskaia khronika’, OZ, vol. 174 (September 1867): 41–2.

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Yet the legal status of stenographic reports still had to be demonstrated in practice. It received an early test in February 1867, when the newspaper Golos responded publicly to a demand by a functionary in the office of the Moscow Governor-General to publish a rebuttal of an allegation of malpractice that had been made in a trial transcript from the previous year. The newspaper argued that the trial had taken place publicly in the Moscow civil court; consequently, everything that took place there was in the public domain, and any periodical had the right to publish it as the official record without bearing responsibility for anything that was said in the courtroom. The place for this official to seek redress was in the courts.¹⁵⁷ The new courts not only created a caste of celebrity lawyers but also cast a new light on Russian society as a whole. Especially in the provinces, even the more mundane peace courts could seize the attention of the local public.¹⁵⁸ With their constant supply of unspectacular but engaging cases, they also provided a staple for journalists in the capital. After the St Petersburg peace assembly (mirovoi s”ezd) opened on 30 May 1866, it served up not high drama but a series of minor squabbles and workplace conflicts (for example between German artisan bosses and Russian workers). Attendance by the general public was low, but the courtroom was small and could only accommodate 10–15 people beyond the usual crowd of plaintiffs, respondents and witnesses. Early evidence was that audience behaviour left much to be desired: some members of the public got up early and left during proceedings, which was a great nuisance.¹⁵⁹ As a later report observed, the peasant courts had opened up ‘everyday life with all its upsets, woes and sorrows’. Here readers found cases of theft, physical abuse, non-payment of debts, domestic squabbles. More significantly, from the autumn of 1866 newspapers were giving cross-examinations from the peasant courts verbatim. Never before had the voice of the common people been rendered so faithfully—even if it was not always at its best in cases such as these.¹⁶⁰ In July 1867 a Petersburg journalist complained that the peace court made for an unedifying spectacle: ‘you inevitably see there such sorry pictures of our everyday life that you leave the court room feeling oppressed and in a terrible mood, thus damaging your health, which no Petersburger can claim to enjoy in superabundance.’¹⁶¹ Be that as it may, in the second half of the 1860s the burgeoning urban press carried reports from the peasant courts, often with (purportedly) verbatim dialogue. In one of the earliest such cases, a certain Gorbunov defended himself against the charge of striking a woman named Matrena Vasil’eva. He argued that she had insulted him in his absence, using ‘indecent words’ and alleging that he had fallen out with his wife

¹⁵⁷ ¹⁵⁸ ¹⁵⁹ ¹⁶⁰

Golos, 17 February 1867, 1. See the account of Tver province in Lind, ‘Vospominaniia’, 69–73. ‘Nashe zhit’e-byt’e’, PL, 12 June 1866, 1–2. ‘Nashe zhit’e-byt’e’, PL, 4 September 1866, 1. ¹⁶¹ ‘Nashe zhit’e-byt’e’, PG, 21 July 1867, 1.

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and taken up with his shopkeeper; she repeated all this when he confronted her on the street. This version was denied by Vasil’eva, who claimed not to recall the conversation with Gorbunov that had preceded his slap.¹⁶² The ‘boulevard’ paper Peterburgskii listok ‘published listings of trials as it did of theaters’, and supplemented the stenographic transcripts to be found in the more sober Golos with first-hand accounts by its own correspondents.¹⁶³ Although verbatim court reports were becoming routine, newspapers were highly selective in what parts of proceedings they published. They tended to prefer emotive speeches by defence lawyers or (even better) by defendants. They also laced their reports with descriptions of appearance and gesture that were usually designed to elicit sympathy for defendants. In one case from the Moscow criminal court a young prince was accused of icon theft and chose to represent himself. The icons had disappeared from the cells of the noble house of detention, where the defendant Meshcherskii had been held after insulting a policeman. Meshcherskii’s elaborate speech was given in full, and his somewhat implausible claim that he had put the icons out of harm’s way rather than stealing them was enough to secure a not guilty verdict.¹⁶⁴ A few weeks later a peasant woman accused of murdering her husband made a similarly good impression on a jury; the cross-examination of largely peasant witnesses was mainly given verbatim. The jury was not swayed even by a strong speech from the prosecution. At the end of the trial, after a not guilty verdict was duly returned, audience members crowded around the defendant and some even gave her money.¹⁶⁵ By 1867 it could no longer be said, as it was on the eve of the reforms, that Russians were ‘not ready’ for the new courts. Perhaps, in fact, they had gone too far the other way—by going in for extravagant gesticulation and speaking at excessive length.¹⁶⁶ The Petersburg press bemoaned the poor quality of personnel in what was still a very new profession: ‘some of our defence lawyers are quite incapable of explaining themselves with due cogency, others try to impress with high-flown phrases they’ve learned, while still others read out their speeches exactly as deacons read the psalter’. Stenographic reports were a merciless record of the deficiencies of lawyers’ speeches, which only rarely stuck to the case at hand. The explanation: ‘we Russians have simply not got used to speaking, and especially speaking in public without succumbing to the desire to cut a fine figure.’¹⁶⁷ ¹⁶² ‘Nashe zhit’e-byt’e’, PL, 4 September 1866, 1. ¹⁶³ Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a MassCirculation Press (Princeton, 1991), 60. ¹⁶⁴ ‘Delo v moskovksom okruzhnom sude po obvineniiu kniazia Mitrofana Meshcherskogo v krazhe’, Golos, 24 January 1867, 3. ¹⁶⁵ ‘Sudebnaia khronika’, Golos, 15 February 1867, 2–3; ‘Sudebnaia khronika’, Golos, 16 February 1867, 3. ¹⁶⁶ D. Novonikol’skii, ‘My ne sozreli’, PG, 21 January 1867, 3. ¹⁶⁷ PG, 6 January 1868, 1. A member of the legal profession mounted a spirited defence a few days later: ‘If the audience were dissatisfied with the presentation of the case, then it would probably not just

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Conclusion The prowess of the leading forensic orators had evidently not done much to revise Russian self-stereotyping as a nation of unconfident performers. In December 1868, the holding of a dinner to mark the opening of a new room in a Petersburg restaurant served as a pretext for a sketch-writer’s reflections on the inadequacy of Russians as public speakers. Russians were still incapable of amusing conversation, like the French, or formal speeches, like the English. The author blamed the fact that older people in Russia were unwilling to hold forth, knowing that their speeches might be misinterpreted or even mocked. ‘At the present time our orators demonstrate their eloquence only when it is impossible to do without a flood of words’—mainly on occasions like ceremonial openings of new railway lines. ‘There was a time’, the author recalled, no doubt alluding to the early days of the zemstvo and municipal self-government, ‘when we acquired quite a few homegrown Demosthenes and Ciceros’, but these orators got carried away and had now had a ‘seal of silence’ placed on their lips. Now the only place to hear eloquence was the law court, but that was a very particular kind of public speaking, and not all cases were amenable to engaging rhetoric. General meetings of companies were another occasion for public speaking, but there was no reason for participants to address themselves to the public rather than addressing their own narrow financial concerns. Hence the importance of dinners for gauging the state of the spoken word in Russia.¹⁶⁸ But if Russians were diffident public speakers, that was in large measure because social and political conditions were not favourable for this activity. The reform era had promised much for a newly constituted ‘public’, but in reality glasnost’ had always been contested territory. By the middle of the 1860s, the government was reverting to old habits, seeing glasnost’ as ‘little more than a partial removal of the cloak of secrecy which had shrouded the punishment of corrupt officials in Nicholaevan Russia’, while it still expected the public to adhere to the strict standards of political propriety.¹⁶⁹ In 1862, Alexander II had decided firmly against any form of national assembly.¹⁷⁰ Supplementary censorship rules introduced in December 1866 gave the authorities additional powers to initiate prosecution, while a decree of 22 July 1866 had given governors the power to shut down any meeting or association that they considered ‘a threat to state order or

yawn but leave without waiting for the end of the hearing.’ A.S., ‘Zaiavlenie publiki’, PG, 18 January 1868, 3–4. ¹⁶⁸ ‘Nashe zhit’e-byt’e’, PG, 8 December 1868, 1. ¹⁶⁹ Bruce W. Lincoln, ‘The Problem of Glasnost’ in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russian Politics’, European History Quarterly, 11 (1981): 185. ¹⁷⁰ Chernukha, Vnutrenniaia politika, 15–45 for the tentative ‘government constitutionalism’ of 1861–2 and its suppression.

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public security and morality’.¹⁷¹ In January 1867, the zemstvo assembly in the capital itself was shut down for violating the government’s norms of political propriety. The spoken word was certainly a slippery thing, but it was not quite unpoliceable. After all, the secret police were close enough in attendance that they could take down verbatim sections of Nekrasov’s speech at Dobroliubov’s funeral that other people present did not even hear, and the Third Section kept itself well informed throughout the 1860s by placing observers in public places such as parks, theatre and taverns.¹⁷² And then there was the possibility that public speech might be taken up and exaggerated by the press, as seems to have been the case with a speech by the Kharkov law professor Dmitrii Kachenovskii, who caused huge offence to the Slavophile Aksakov for apparently attacking the politicization of the Slavic Congress of 1867.¹⁷³ Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that even Russians from the privileged classes thought of speech less as a vehicle of self-empowerment than as a hostage to fortune. As one historian summarizes: Throughout the reform era one senses that the gentry and even “radical” publicists who expressed positions not explicitly condoned by the state did so only after undergoing searching self-examination. Indeed, the need of educated Russians to convince themselves that an action was not disloyal is scarcely less striking in retrospect than the independent act itself.¹⁷⁴

The fact that the minutes of zemstvo assemblies are to be found in the archive of the Ministry of the Interior should remind us that perhaps the main purpose of glasnost’ was to keep the government well informed of what was being said in Russian society.¹⁷⁵ Whether or not the Russians were good at speaking, the institutions where public speaking had most scope to develop—the municipal assemblies, the zemstvos, learned and other societies—had to endure constant interference from the authorities and saw their powers and freedoms circumscribed. Hence the view, articulated even in the honeymoon period of glasnost’ and ever more frequently thereafter, that oratory in Russia remained sterile: whatever feats of eloquence individual speakers might achieve, the fact remained that there were no great matters of public interest to talk about. Russia was not Britain, and speechifying did not suit it.¹⁷⁶ ¹⁷¹ Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto, 1982), 165; Daly, Autocracy under Siege, 19. ¹⁷² Ely, Underground Petersburg, 45. ¹⁷³ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 12 (1867): 101–2. ¹⁷⁴ Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government, 290. ¹⁷⁵ For example ‘Ob otkrytii zemskikh uchrezhdenii v Moskovskoi gubernii’ (1865), RGIA, f. 1284, op. 91, otdelenie III, stol I, d. 16. ¹⁷⁶ An argument perhaps first made by G. Z. Eliseev in ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Sovremennik, no. 2, sec. 2 (1861): 368–70, and reported more forcefully in ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Sovremennik, no. 3, sec. 2 (1864): 111.

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As of 1867, then, Russia’s attenuated adoption of public speech had not yielded the political fruit that liberals and radicals might have hoped for. It had, however, already done much to transform the way Russian society could represent itself. In the transcripts of trials, members of the public could read verbatim testimony from peasants, drunks, foreigners and women—not to mention aristocrats down on their luck. On the Russian stage, too, speech that deviated from the standards of the educated elite was getting far more of a hearing. The zemstvo, for all its limitations, was a remarkable experiment in cross-estate communication. Public speech was bolstered by a new technology of reproduction: stenography. To be sure, new venues emerged in the 1860s and afterwards where speech could make a direct impact on listeners. But the significance of the oral does not depend just on the impact of the spoken word on those who happened to hear it. Often, the ‘spokenness’ of a word makes it legitimate and interesting in print in a way that purely written documents would not be. Early examples included the transcript of the Pogodin–Kostomarov debate, which was published in Sovremennik in 1860 (the first ever use of stenography to record verbatim public speaking), and the funeral orations that, when later circulated in written form, gained force from the occasion at which they were delivered. But the greatest beneficiaries of Russia’s stenographic turn in the 1860s would be the members of the Russian Bar, who in the following decade would exploit to the full the protected status of courtroom speech, saying things in the stenographic transcript that no other Russian subject would have been permitted to utter or publish.

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2 Trials and Tribulations The Long 1870s, 1867–81

After 1867 a general disenchantment with the deliberative institutions of the reform era set in. The radical journal Otechestvennye zapiski led the way in bemoaning Russia’s tepid public sphere. Wherever you went in Moscow in the early 1870s—the zemstvo, the city duma, or the noble assembly—you heard the same voices: V. A. Cherkasskii, the Samarin brothers Iurii and Dmitrii, Mikhail Pogodin.¹ In any meeting of the city duma, you might find one member who was able to string together a decent speech; everyone else resolutely kept silent. Once again, the journal’s correspondent found, Russians were proving themselves incapable of cogent public speaking: they usually said ‘whatever God put into their soul’. More worryingly, public assemblies were laying bare social divisions. A debate on taxation brought tensions into the open, as Iurii Samarin rather pompously accused merchants of being too mean in the defence of their interests. The lure of the rhetorical coup was once again stronger than any desire for sober analysis of the various options.² Another of the journal’s contributors held that the public attended sessions of the duma less out of interest in municipal issues than because of the entertainment value that meetings afforded: some members of the duma had ‘undoubted comic talent’. A lengthy debate on the commercial exploitation of a Moscow park was brought to a belated conclusion by the revelation that the park did not in fact exist. A passionate speech in opposition to a dog tax was interrupted by bursts of laughter from the audience. The Rostov city duma surpassed even Moscow in its love of oratory. Speakers liked to pepper their contributions with Latin quotations and self-consciously followed the model of English parliamentarianism.³ Other parts of a putative public sphere seemed to have withered after their brief flowering in the early reform era. Thesis defences were formulaic and left no room ¹ As a graduate of Moscow University in the 1840s, Cherkasskii had attended the main rhetorical school of his age. In the 1860s and 1870s he was a notable Pan-Slavist and supporter of municipal selfgovernment, serving as mayor of Moscow from 1869 to 1871. For a collection of Cherkasskii’s speeches published shortly after his death, see Kniaz’ Vladimir Aleksandrovich Cherkaskii: Ego stat’i, ego rechi i vospominaniia o nem (Moscow, 1879). ² [N. A. Demert], ‘Nasha obshchestvennaia zhizn’, OZ, vol. 213 (April 1874): 359–60, 364–5. Nikolai Demert, the journal’s main contributor on this subject, had first-hand experience of the zemstvo in Kazan Province. ³ [A. N. Pleshcheev], ‘Sovremennye zametki’, OZ, vol. 217 (November 1874): 275–8. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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for genuine debate. A ‘public’ was admitted but was not expected to make any meaningful contribution to proceedings.⁴ One contributor to the Journal of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment went so far as to call lectures a ‘medieval’ hangover in the modern university: there was no need to convey information orally when textbooks were widely available and lecture texts could even be lithographed.⁵ Even theatre was deemed to have lost its edge. The audience was getting tired of ‘critical’ realism, Ostrovsky’s latest plays were not as successful as his works of the 1850s, and undemanding melodrama and light comedy became the staple fare of Moscow’s Malyi Theatre.⁶

Zemstvo Stagnation The shift from hope to disillusionment was most striking in the case of the zemstvo, which had always borne a heavier weight of expectation than the city dumas. As early as 1867, the press was reporting a loss of public interest compared to the heady early days of 1865. As soon as the zemstvo assemblies started on the nitty-gritty issues of local government, the public’s attention started to wander.⁷ By 1870, there was no doubting the disappointing decline in zemstvo activity and attendance. The first sessions of the provincial zemstvos were attended by up to 81 per cent of deputies, but within five years this figure had almost halved (to 47 per cent); at the district level, the figures had fallen from 93 per cent to 60 per cent. The general public was correspondingly indifferent. At the most recent meeting of the Petersburg provincial zemstvo, where the topics for discussion included the crucial issue of education, the audience never exceeded ten.⁸ The delegates were dwarfed by their grand surroundings in the noble assembly hall.⁹ In the early days zemstvo assemblies had been much concerned with the question of what to do if audience members failed to behave themselves and turned disorderly. Now, however, there was no hope of any audience to speak of. The lack of interest in

⁴ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 2 (1869): 150–5. This is an account of two recent occasions where members of the audience were not content with this passive role and were made to understand that their contributions were not welcome. ⁵ N. Varadinov, ‘Neobkhodimost’ reform v nashem universitetskom prepodavanii’, ZhMNP, ch. 150 (July 1870), otd. III, str. 1–18, and ‘Universitetskie lektsii’, ZhMNP, ch. 187 (September 1876), otd. III, pp. 1–10. Varadinov’s idea was that the downgrading of set-piece lectures should be compensated by closer small-group interaction between professor and students, a notion that received support in A. G. Brikner, ‘O prakticheskikh uprazhneniiakh pri prepodavanii novoi Russkoi istorii v universitetakh’, ZhMNP, ch. 185 (June 1876), otd. III, pp. 17–42. ⁶ N. G. Zograf, Malyi teatr vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 1960), chap. 2. ⁷ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 12 (1867): 96–7. ⁸ SPb ved, 5 May 1870, 1. The extent and the causes of absenteeism—which became even more pronounced in the 1870s—are discussed at length in Boris Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let (St Petersburg, 1909–11), 3: 141–51. ⁹ ‘Nechto o zasedaniiakh peterburgskogo zemstva’, OZ, vol. 182 (January 1869): 142–3.

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the zemstvo made for a telling contrast with the new courts: attending a trial almost felt like going to the ballet.¹⁰ As a commentator concluded at the end of the 1870s: ‘with very few exceptions, our zemstvo assemblies are sleepy and lifeless, and even in Petersburg are attended by not more than ten people.’¹¹ It did not help that, in the provinces, zemstvo assemblies were often uncomfortably accommodated. In December 1872 the correspondent of Otechestvennye zapiski paid a visit to the Novgorod zemstvo, which had the reputation of being exemplary. It was housed in a small, uncomfortable room; long tables were arranged in a square, with the audience forced to stand in the narrow space between the back of the chairs of deputies and the wall. This formed a stark contrast with the Petersburg venue, which could comfortably take a thousand spectators but was usually empty.¹² In some places the public was simply denied access to the zemstvo venue. By the early 1870s zemstvo chairmen were exploiting to the full the powers they had been granted by the law of 13 June 1867. Gone were the days when it seemed the chairman would be no more than ‘first among equals’: he was now proving himself capable of banishing from the hall not only the public but even zemstvo delegates. As for publishing the proceedings, that depended on the whim of an altogether more powerful administrator: the provincial governor.¹³ In his speech at the ceremonial opening of the zemstvo, the governor would typically remind members of their responsibilities to the government that had made their institution possible.¹⁴ In his address at the end of the province’s zemstvo session, the Viatka governor constructed an elegant metaphorical edifice, but the supervisory thrust of his words was only too clear: ‘The zemstvo is a new instrument introduced into our administrative orchestra. Up to now this instrument, in Viatka province, has successfully performed its score. It does not play wrong notes, does not hesitate, does not get ahead of the beat and does not disturb the general course of government.’¹⁵ In any case, censorship and lack of clerical staff meant that duff notes would not be heard outside the assembly room. In a few provincial capitals reports were moderately detailed and departed from formula, but for the most part the public record consisted of skeletal minutes. Small wonder, under these circumstances, that there were no ‘Mirabeaus’ to be found in Russia’s provincial assemblies.¹⁶

¹⁰ [N. A Demert], ‘Temnye i svetlye storony nashego obshchestva’, OZ, vol. 196 (May 1871): 33. ¹¹ ‘Po povodu peterburgskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia’, OZ, vol. 242 (January 1879): 72. ¹² [N. A. Demert], ‘Nashi obshchestvennye dela’, OZ, vol. 206 (January 1873): 119. ¹³ [N. A. Demert], ‘Nashi obshchestvennye dela’, OZ, vol. 192 (September 1870): 85–7. ¹⁴ The genre was subjected to parody in the ditty ‘Rech’ gubernatora pri otkrytii gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia’, OZ, vol. 189 (March 1870): 293–4. ¹⁵ ‘Rech’, kakikh zhelalos’ by pobol’she’, PG, 6 January 1868, 3. ¹⁶ [N. A. Demert], ‘Nashi obshchestvennye dela’, OZ, vol. 198 (October 1871): 339. Similar complaints are presented in ‘Desiatiletie russkogo zemstva, 1864–1875’, OZ, vol. 227 (July 1876): 95–6.

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The press constantly revised expectations of the zemstvo downwards. In 1868, the moderate Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, which in the early days had offered the best coverage, started to lose interest in the subject, while in the early 1870s Katkov’s Moskovskie vedomosti took against the institution.¹⁷ But perhaps the most damaging critiques came from the radical press, and they concerned the failure of the zemstvo to build a meaningful relationship between the two main classes of rural Russia. In 1867, Delo reported that Russian society was poorly prepared for the reform of local government: peasant deputies, however they might try, did not understand much of the zemstvo legislation. During the assemblies they listened carefully to debates but did not take much away with them, especially as speakers found it hard to be direct and concise in their contributions. Foreign words like administratsiia and instruktsiia were a real obstacle to comprehension.¹⁸ Three years on, and not much had changed (at least in published accounts of zemstvo life). The common people were not natural public speakers. As Nikolai Demert put it in Otechestvennye zapiski, ‘Muzhiki don’t ever deliver after-dinner speeches and, when such a sin takes place, it all ends in tears’; he went on to give the example of a peasant deputy attempting a speech at a zemstvo dinner and giving up after the first phrase.¹⁹ In 1875 commentators were still bemoaning the lack of the peasant voice in the zemstvo: in a few places it was possible to hear ‘the unfamiliar but sensible and logical speech of a peasant alongside that of the usual district or province chatterer’, but this was not happening anywhere near often enough.²⁰ One of the more poignant cases of peasant–noble incomprehension came in Chernigov province in 1871 during a time of famine. The noble landowners in the district assemblies tried to play down the hardship of the rural population. But a peasant was present, and after several attempts to get up to speak he was finally given the floor: ‘In his particular language, with a Belorussian colouring, he started hesitantly but then spoke ever more loudly, his voice full of indignation and tears.’ He related a number of horrifying facts about the extent of peasant hunger: one of his fellow villagers had become so desperate that he had eaten his sheepskin hat. But this last detail just made the gentry lobby laugh.²¹ Little wonder, then, that in 1872 one journal reached the conclusion that ‘peasants de facto, if not de jure, almost completely do not take part in the activities of the zemstvo’. Zemstvo assemblies contained at the most a few wealthy peasants; ordinary peasants were vanishingly few, and in any case they were voiceless (besglasnye).²² The point received striking visual expression in Grigorii Miasoedov’s ‘The Zemstvo Is at Lunch’, displayed at ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²²

Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstvo za sorok let, 3: 190–2. ‘Zemskoe delo’, Delo, no. 4 (1867): 81. [N. A. Demert], ‘Nashi obshchestvennye dela’, OZ, vol. 189 (March 1870): 106. [D. L. Mordovtsev], ‘Desiatiletie russkogo zemstva’, OZ, vol. 219 (April 1875): 295–336. V. M. Khizhniakov, Vospominaniia zemskogo deiatelia (Petrograd, 1916), 144. ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 12 (1872): 35.

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the second Itinerant Exhibition in 1872, where the peasants took their refreshment on the street.²³ Ippolit Myshkin, one of the most outspoken defendants at the political trials of the 1870s, observed the forced passivity of peasant deputies at first hand in his capacity as stenographer; these provincial zemstvo sessions did much to set him on the path of radicalization.²⁴ The reality was that local politics often remained in the hands of the large landowners who had always held sway in their districts. Pavel Aleksandrovich Bakunin, scion of the leading noble family in his area, exercised mostly benign domination over a district zemstvo in Tver province. His speeches were cogent and effective, but some zemstvo members, primarily those from the towns, got impatient listening to lectures and considered themselves better qualified in practical matters. While Bakunin was generally mild-mannered, he could be severe when he was interrupted or when members expressed their objections in an improper form.²⁵ The zemstvo, in other words, was not too different from what had preceded it. One commentator recalled the opening of a zemstvo assembly in a large provincial capital. The local public was out in force: ladies, dressed up for the occasion, came equipped with binoculars and lorgnettes, and were expecting something like ‘a show by a visiting professor of black magic’. In the event, the zemstvo was found wanting, and the noble elections proved more entertaining. By the early 1870s things had moved on—not that people had started finding the zemstvo interesting again, but rather that the noble assemblies now seemed firmly anachronistic: ‘People are no longer attracted by their uniforms with goldembroidered collars and ridiculous old hussar’s jackets on bald landowners who have run to fat.’²⁶

Talking to the People: Priests and Populists If the zemstvos were not able to engage the peasants, then who would? The institution with greatest pedigree in this matter was the Orthodox Church. As we have seen, in the reform era it identified the need to revive its connection to the common people, though the methods of revival remained a matter of some dispute. By the start of the 1870s, the lines were drawn between the adherents of ‘practical’ sermons, which would use scripture as a starting point for exploring contemporary moral and social questions, and their opponents, who were wary of

²³ I. N. Shuvalova, Miasoedov (Leningrad, 1971), 45, suggests that this was a new way of depicting the peasantry: by foregrounding them even in their marginality. ²⁴ See Myshkin’s testimony when awaiting trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress in November 1876: B. S. Itenberg (ed.), Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo 70-kh godov XIX veka: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1964), 1: 188, 196. ²⁵ V. N. Lind, ‘Vospominaniia’, RM, no. 6 (1916): 68. ²⁶ [N. A. Demert], ‘Nashi obshchestvennye dela’, OZ, vol. 207 (April 1873): 199–200.

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turning the church into a ‘secular tribune’ and compromising its eternal message.²⁷ A stern defence of the Orthodox sermon against the demands of the contemporary world came from Amvrosii Kliucharev: a distinction had to be maintained between the ‘dreams’ of the individual priest and the authority of the Word of God.²⁸ But the question of content was inseparable from that of form. The catalyst for much Russian discussion of preaching was the perceived threat from other faiths and sects. An increasingly unignorable challenge to Orthodox hegemony came from the Evangelical Lord Radstock, who made a tremendous impression on Petersburg high society when he visited in 1874. Radstock attracted large, predominantly aristocratic audiences to his meetings in private houses and a few public buildings such as the Congregational Church. His emphasis on Bible discussion, facilitated by the new accessibility of Old and New Testaments in the Russian vernacular, corresponded perfectly to his audience’s yearning for a more individual and open-ended form of spiritual engagement. Despite (or perhaps because of) his unpolished delivery and faulty French, he possessed considerable charisma: the intensity and directness of his interaction with the audience impressed even those observers who heartily disapproved of it. Radstock would start by throwing himself to his knees and praying silently or reading the Bible for a few minutes before he addressed his listeners. He always spoke impromptu; some observers found his speech meandering and incoherent, but that was evidently not the universal view.²⁹ The Radstock craze reached its height during the Russo-Turkish War, when the public was more than ever in need of spiritual consolation, and by the late 1870s Radstockism was firmly in the sights of officialdom. Although Radstock was no longer welcome in Russia after 1878, his mantle was taken on by his most committed Russian follower, Vasilii Pashkov. Armed with a considerable fortune, Pashkov took the Evangelical message to a much broader social constituency, reading and discussing the Gospel in Russian rather than French or Old Church Slavonic, holding meetings for audiences of a thousand or more at his mansion on Gagarin embankment, and dispensing Bibles and much other largesse to allcomers. Even more worrying for the authorities, the movement spread far beyond St Petersburg: ‘Pashkovite nests’ were to be found throughout European Russia.³⁰ The Russian Evangelicals were operating in full view of the authorities, with ample (if negative) press coverage, enjoying a freedom from ecclesiastical censorship and

²⁷ Russkoe propovednichestvo: Istoricheskii ego obzor i vzgliad na sovremennoe ego napravlenie (St Petersburg, 1871), 5. ²⁸ A. Kliucharev, Slovo o sovremennoi propovedi proiznesennoe 4-go aprelia v moskovskom Uspenskom sobore (Moscow, 1872). ²⁹ Edmund Heier, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, 1860–1900 (The Hague, 1970), chap. 2; G. I. Terletskii, ‘Sekta Pashkovtsev’, PO (March 1890): 507–8. ³⁰ Heier, Religious Schism, chap. 4.

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ritual that even the most enlightened Orthodox churchmen were denied.³¹ This situation could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. In 1878, the Pashkovites were prohibited from holding public meetings, and in 1880 Chief Procurator Pobedonostsev launched a full offensive against the movement, which led first to Pashkov’s temporary expulsion and then to his full banishment from Russia.³² These coercive measures were accompanied by a rhetorical counterblast. Ioann Polisadov, one of the better-known preachers of the day, made a fierce riposte to Pashkov in a sermon on the day of the transfer of the relics of John Chrysostom. The example of the ‘golden-mouthed’ Church Father led him to reflections on the need to honour great preachers—and to distinguish genuine preaching from the kind practised by the ‘false pretender’ Pashkov. It was heresy to renounce the rituals and mysteries of the Church; Pashkov’s renowned eloquence was quite simply the work of the devil, who was skilled at transforming himself into angelic form (2 Corinthians, 11: 14).³³ As always, the true measure of Orthodox success in combating its rivals was not the volume of polemic but rather the daily practice of churchmen in the thousands of parishes of rural Russia. The higher education system was reformed to reflect the new emphasis on preaching: the curriculum of the spiritual academies was redrawn in 1867–9 to give homiletics a more prominent role. Village priests in need of inspiration could now consult numerous collections of exemplary speeches and sermons, some of them responding directly to current events such as the cholera of 1830 or the war with Turkey.³⁴ The church journals from the 1860s onwards were full of advice on how to compose and deliver sermons. They also published a great many texts suitable for delivery. The main journal directed at parish priests, the Guide for Village Pastors (Rukovodstvo dlia sel’skikh pastyrei), soon announced that it did not have space to publish all the sermons that were pouring in from all over the country. Bowing to reader demand, it created a separate supplement for sermons in the 1880s. The Penza diocesan publication alone received more than 400 such texts (and published 105) just in the period 1881–3.³⁵ Even more of a spur to action was the regular monitoring by the Holy Synod, which required parishes to send in reports of their activities—both sermons proper and public talks. These were summarized in the annual report of the

³¹ As pointed out in an editorial in the moderate Sankt-Peterburskie vedomosti: SPb ved, 10 February 1880, 1. ³² Heier, Religious Schism, 126, 130, 138. ³³ ‘Pouchenie v den’ pereneseniia moshchei Sv. Ioanna Zlatousta’, in Propovedi protoiereia Ioanna Polisadova, nastoiatelia tserkvi pri gimnazii Imperatorskogo Chelovekoliubivogo Obshchestva. Slova, poucheniia i rechi, skazannye s prazdnika Rozhdestva Khristova do Paskhi (St Petersburg, 1886), 414–21. ³⁴ See M. A. Potorzhinskii, Obraztsy russkoi tserkovnoi propovedi XIX veka (Kiev, 1882). ³⁵ A. N. Rozov, Sviashchennik v dukhovnoi zhizni russkoi derevni (St Petersburg, 2003), 88–9.

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Chief Procurator, which was published in the church press.³⁶ The ecclesiastical authorities lent their support to preaching outside the regular service in the form of the sobesedovanie. Pioneered in the 1860s as part of the Sunday School movement, this kind of informal ‘conversation’ between priests and believers was recognized as ‘good practice’ by the start of the 1870s. In his annual reports for 1866–8 the Chief Procurator gave successful examples of the genre, while in 1870 he recognized the sobesedovanie as an already quite widespread form of preaching. In the words of an early practitioner, the content of these talks comprised the Gospels (both reading and interpretation), Bible stories, the catechism, explanation of the liturgy, and saints’ lives. In glossing the texts they read, priests were freed from the obligation to be word perfect and always to follow a strict logical plan. The goal was to elicit a response from parishioners—to have the common people ask questions and share their uncertainties and opinions.³⁷ The desired approach was demonstrated in the following published dialogue: : Who created the devil? : What have you heard? : Here’s what I’ve heard. When God created the angels, the devil said: am I any worse than God? I’ll create my own spirits who will serve me. He took . . . his flint and started to beat it with steel; sparks flew, and from these sparks a load of evil spirits came out. : This is a silly fairy tale that is against the Word of God . . . I’ve already told you that everything was created by God. Let me just remind you again of what Paul the apostle said.³⁸ The spread of the sobesedovanie was documented in the church press throughout the 1870s. A report from Vladimir diocese in 1880 further attested to its value, especially in those areas where it was necessary to combat Old Believers. Various venues were possible: schools, almshouses, lodges, as well as the church itself. If the priests wanted peasants to make contributions of their own, it was prudent to hold the meetings outside the church building, since peasant speech was often unsuitable for sanctified surroundings. A good time for such meetings was the afternoon on Sundays and holidays, so as to take parishioners away from the ‘harmful’ pursuits in which they might otherwise engage. In places especially prone to the Old Belief priests needed to take care with ritual: to display the

³⁶ Rozov, Sviashchennik, 84–5. ³⁷ V. A. Mavritskii, Voskresnye i prazdnichnye (vnebogosluzhebnye) sobesedovaniia kak osobyi vid tserkovno-narodnoi propovedi (Voronezh, 1880). ³⁸ First published in Rukovodstvo dlia sel’skikh pastyrei, no. 33 (1870); quoted from Drug naroda. Sbornik religiozno-nravstvennykh statei dlia sobesedovaniia s narodom (Vladimir, 1886), 162–6. See also the collection of sixteen sobesedovaniia in I. Krasnitskii, Vnebogosluzhebnye sobesedovaniia (Novocherkassk, 1892).

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Gospels and the cross before the start and sing hymns to open and close the meeting. The content would comprise readings from the Gospels, Bible stories, explanation of the symbols of faith, prayers, the Ten Commandments, and Lives of Saints. It was important to challenge peasants about their superstitions, to speak by means of engaging examples as well as mere precepts, and to use simple, conversational language.³⁹ But the Church’s programme of social engagement was a response to the underlying fact that its near monopoly on public communication with the common people was ever more contested. Some of the secular claimants to a popular public operated in full view. In December 1871, a series of popular lectures was launched in central Petersburg (in Solianoi gorodok, the salt warehouse district just east of the Summer Garden). This was greeted as a positive development by the radical journal Delo, whose correspondent listed with relish the mixed but attentive public that assembled in the murky venue: factory workers, shopkeepers, cab drivers, soldiers, servants, and many others had come together to hear a lecture on trichina. Besides science, the lectures addressed a variety of topics on religion, geography, and history. Lecturers made appropriate concessions to their largely uneducated audience by not insisting on rigorous exposition and analysis: their accounts were spiced with digressions, popular tales and sayings, and references to everyday life. Even so, this observer concluded that the lectures as a whole could have done more to engage with the overwhelmingly practical and utilitarian concerns of their listeners; the selection of topics seemed arbitrary.⁴⁰ Given the sensitivities of the authorities, some of those who would speak directly to the people had to operate clandestinely. Ever since the crackdown on the discussion circles of the early glasnost’ era, Russian radicals had been working towards a more viable and effective way of conducting their own deliberations— and, if at all possible, spreading the fruits of those deliberations to the common people. The results of this quest had not been encouraging. The socialist Ishutin Circle was rounded up in 1866 in response to Dmitrii Karakozov’s attempt on the Tsar’s life (for which it was not responsible). The ‘Society of Popular Retribution’ created by Sergei Nechaev in 1869 represented the grotesque apotheosis of the conspiratorial organization: secrecy and the leader’s charisma obscured the absence of meaningful political content and the complete failure to project a voice beyond a conspiratorial echo chamber. When they were given national prominence by their trial in 1870–1, Nechaev’s followers (the Nechaevtsy) served as a powerful negative example, not only to scandalized conservatives but also to

³⁹ ‘Vnebogosluzhebnye sobesedovaniia pastyrei tserkvi s prikhozhanami vo Vladimirskoi eparkhii, po otzyvam samikh sviashchennikov, vedushchikh onye sobesedovaniia’, Vladimirskie eparkhial’nye vedomomsti, no. 9 (1880). ⁴⁰ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 2 (1872), 132–9.

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their populist successors, who sought a more open, egalitarian, and socially engaged way of furthering their cause.⁴¹ A pool of potential successors was to be found in the university milieu. The student radicalism of the 1860s had only partly been suppressed by the counterreform of 1863 in the universities. A textbook 1870s radical biography was that of O. V. Aptekman, who on graduating from the gymnasium in 1869 was eager to cast off his school uniform and enter the wider world. As a medical student at Kharkov University he was deeply impressed by the fast-talking chemistry professor Nikolai Beketov but was also swept along by the general student mobilization of the time. The Franco-Prussian war brought new intensity to student debates; a lecture on the subject by the leading scholar of international law, Dmitrii Kachenovskii, only just returned from abroad, further heightened the mood. Above all, students were now thinking in much more concrete terms than their predecessors about how to engage with the society around them. One of Aptekman’s fellow students managed to recruit some university professors for a successful series of talks for shop-assistants. Student reading and discussion circles mushroomed, and before long Aptekman was invited to a skhodka at which the laboratory assistant Ia. I. Koval’skii introduced about fifty Kharkov students to the activities of the Chaikovskii propaganda circle in St Petersburg. When Aptekman moved to the capital to continue his studies at the Medical-Surgical Academy, he encountered a more rowdy skhodka whose members fiercely debated the best way to spread ideas to the working population.⁴² Any such enterprise faced the considerable obstacle of police harassment. When young radicals had tried to gain a secure base for their activities, for example by renting neighbouring dachas outside St Petersburg for the purposes of ‘self-education’ in summer 1871, they had soon been broken up.⁴³ An even thornier matter was the question of how to spread radical ideas beyond the tiny urban redoubt of a student discussion circle. As the future anarchist Petr Kropotkin recognized in a long memorandum that was circulated among populists in the capital in late 1873, the main task of the moment was to find an effective means of communicating revolutionary ideas to the people: of making inchoate dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs turn into articulate protest. In order to transform a ‘peaceable worker’ into a ‘committed, active people’s agitator’, propagandists needed to adopt ‘personal, “oral” agitation’ rather than ‘literary’. But suitable propaganda personnel was hard to come by. In Kropotkin’s view, finding educated young people of the necessary calibre and commitment was enormously difficult; most students were little inclined to political activism, and ⁴¹ Christopher Ely, Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia (DeKalb, 2016), chap. 3. ⁴² F. Aptekman, ‘Zapiski semidesiatnika’, Sovremennyi mir, no. 4 (1913): 53–97. ⁴³ A. I. Kornilova-Moroz, ‘Perovskaia i osnovanie kruzhka chaikovtsev’, KiS, 22 (1926): 7–30, esp. 23–7.

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even the ‘very best representatives of civilized society’ were likely to have been corrupted by their milieu and did not make ideal ‘popular propagandists’. The best strategy was to seek peasant and worker sympathizers who would carry socialist ideas much deeper into Russian society. A closed discussion circle engaging in risk-free ‘chatter’ was no good; the question was how to spread ideas beyond the intelligentsia.⁴⁴ The transition from intelligentsia ‘chatter’ to something more purposeful was observed by Aleksandr Nizovkin, one of the student propagandists rounded up in 1874, who gave an account of his activities in testimony to the prosecutor during his lengthy detention. Soon after he arrived in St Petersburg in 1870, Nizovkin had attended a gathering of about forty student ‘democrats’, finding it full of lofty commonplaces but short on practical agenda. In early 1874, by contrast, he attended a skhodka attended predominantly by workers: about thirty people were crammed into a two-room apartment. There were no big speeches; instead, the discussion was quite practical, devoted mainly to the question of how workers might develop a stronger sense of solidarity. Above all, the workers dominated the discussion; the handful of intelligentsia attendees took only a modest role.⁴⁵ But the true test of populist propaganda was whether it could penetrate Russia’s vast rural majority. Ippolit Myshkin, one of the most celebrated defendants at the political trials of the 1870s, defined the populists’ goal in relatively modest terms: ‘we do not at all want to transform everything overnight, to turn everything upside down, we just want to be given the opportunity to speak freely with the people, to consult it.’ Myshkin was motivated by a strong sense of social injustice: partly what he had experienced himself as the son of a former serf woman, but especially what he had observed from his front-row seat in Russia’s era of attenuated glasnost’. His previous work as a stenographer had earned him the healthy sum of up to 5,000 rubles annually but had also shown him the unpleasant face of officialdom and social hierarchy: in the zemsto assemblies he saw corruption and neglect of the common good, as well as the silencing and disempowerment of the peasantry, while in the courtroom he observed the harsh imperfections of the Russian judicial system.⁴⁶ Could the populist propagandists breach the enforced silence of the Russian people? Could they induce the peasants to speak freely in their own voice? In order to find out, about 4,000 predominantly young people headed to the villages in 1873–4, only partially concealing their intentions and making themselves sitting ducks for the repression that inevitably followed: a young populist was much more ⁴⁴ P. A. Kropotkin, ‘Dolzhny li my zaniat’sia rassmotreniem ideala budushchego stroia?’, in Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 90–3, 99, 104–5. ⁴⁵ Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 247–51. The thrust of Nizovkin’s testimony to the prosecutor was self-exculpatory, so he was likely to overstate the extent of his scepticism towards the student radical movement, but his account of the methods of agitation is probably reliable. ⁴⁶ Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 181–201, quotation 191.

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visible in the village, where he or she might be inexpertly practising a rural trade, than at the heart of imperial power in St Petersburg.⁴⁷ Yet, while this ‘Going to the People’ movement soon met its demise, it still represented a notable rhetorical experiment. For the first time, members of educated society were thinking in serious and sustained fashion about how to talk to peasants—and how, ultimately, to change peasant minds. Populist propagandists would not seek to sway a peasant community all at once but focus their efforts on individuals who were open to persuasion and might then serve to disseminate ideas further. The best carriers of ideas were ‘outstanding individuals from the common people’, but these needed to emerge through genuine conviction and a meeting of minds with the propagandist. Political mobilization should be contemplated only after a lengthy phase of consciousness-raising.⁴⁸ An important theme of populist thinking was that propaganda should feed on peasants’ actual experience rather than their presumed interests. In July 1873, one of the organizers of a Petersburg propaganda circle wrote to a peasant he had managed to recruit to the cause, advising him how best to spread ideas to his fellow villagers: ‘get them to think about their situation, try to teach them good, tell them what you have read, read to them, teach them to read, chase away their prejudices, above all focus their attention on themselves.’⁴⁹ A guide for propagandists that circulated in 1874 followed a similar line: in the village, populists were first to establish trust with the local people and then work outwards from specific sources of hardship and suffering to the social and political causes of these evils. In due course, it was possible even to cite foreign precedents—for example, the fact that ‘the people on the banks of the Thames and the Seine executed their kings for treason’, and that the workers of Europe and America had formed ‘unions that did not recognize kings or the state or private property’. The propagandist needed to make as vivid as possible his ‘pictures of struggle and suffering, heroic feats and martyrdom’; only this would transmit the ‘tradition of revolution’ to the peasants’ minds.⁵⁰ As Nizovkin noted in his pre-trial testimony, the actual methods could vary according to circumstance, ranging from exposition of the evils of class society to the dissemination of revolutionary songs adapted to popular idioms.⁵¹ How successful was this populist propaganda strategy? The main documentary evidence—pre-trial testimony and police reports—seems to tell a familiar story of the intelligentsia’s inability to win over the common people, or even remotely to ⁴⁷ Ely, Underground Petersburg, chap. 4. ⁴⁸ Testimony of A. I. Komov, October–November 1874, in Itenberg, Revolutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 254–60, quotation 256. ⁴⁹ Letter from N. N. Teplov to M. Nikiforov, 10 July 1873, in Itenberg, Revolutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 261. ⁵⁰ ‘O chem i kak dolzhen govorit’ s narodom revoliutsioner-propagandist’, 15 March 1874, in Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 132–3. ⁵¹ Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 246.

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be understood. As Daniel Field has argued, more nuanced conclusions may be in order: populist defendants had reasons to downplay the effectiveness of their activities, while peasants may have wanted to shield themselves and the propagandists from worse sanctions.⁵² A suitably ambivalent assessment is provided by Aptekman’s account of ‘going to the people’ in 1874. After settling in a Ukrainian village and striking up acquaintance with some of the locals, he and his comrades attempted to convey to their listeners the essence of socialism and the predicament of working people abroad. Aptekman thus experienced the thrill of close interaction with the peasant audience: the narod was transformed from an imagined to a very real addressee. But when that addressee began to speak back, he also gained a bracing sense of the limits of his proselytizing, as the peasants remained convinced that the Tsar was their best protection against the ‘lords’.⁵³ Yet, even if peasants did not listen as they were meant to, the more thoughtful educated observers were now able to give them credit as speakers in their own right. Among them was the long-term British visitor Donald Mackenzie Wallace, who added much ethnographic insight to Haxthausen’s famous theory of the peasant commune as the fundamental structure of Russian society. When he observed the Mir at close quarters, Mackenzie Wallace found it to be a fine example of ‘representative Constitutional government of the extreme democratic type’. The commune’s democratic credentials were most immediately evident during its weekly open-air assemblies, which had little in the way of parliamentary decorum but provided an effective and egalitarian way of achieving consensus. Formal speech-making was not tolerated, and much of the debate seemed chaotic and episodic to the outsider: Two or more peasants may speak at a time, and interrupt each other freely— using plain, unvarnished language, not at all parliamentary—and the discussion may become a confused, unintelligible din; but at the moment when the spectator imagines that the consultation is about to be transformed into a free fight, the tumult spontaneously subsides, or perhaps a general roar of laughter announces that someone has been successfully hit by a strong argumentum ad hominem, or biting personal remark.

The Elder held the authority to steer the discussion, but in general was more reticent than a parliamentary Speaker. He would eventually invite the assembly to reach a decision, which was generally by acclamation but sometimes by vote (though without a formal ballot).⁵⁴

⁵² Daniel Field, ‘Peasants and Propagandists in the Russian Movement to the People of 1874’, JMH, 59 (1987): 415–38. ⁵³ Aptekman, ‘Zapiski semidesiatnika’. ⁵⁴ Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia (new and enlarged edition, London, 1905), 1: 160, 162–4.

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It turned out, then, that the people was far from ‘silent’—an insight that would gain greater currency in the early twentieth century, when constitutionalism became much more than a turn of phrase. Viewed in narrow terms, the movement to the people was a dismal failure. It led to mass arrests, and the young activists evidently did not succeed in mobilizing the rural population.⁵⁵ Nonetheless, this was valuable and formative training in the ways and the limitations of top-down ‘propaganda’ from an enlightened elite to the common people. And the training would soon continue in the courtroom, as the young students learned how to project their message to a broader educated public.

Forensic Oratory and Its Critics For all the strenuous propaganda efforts of the populists, the main reason their activities became known to wider society was their prosecution in open trials. The zemstvo had been hemmed in by restrictions after 1866, but the courts remained as the main bulwark of glasnost’. The courtroom was an anomalous place in late imperial Russia. Although the government’s commitment to free public expression was at best intermittent, the members of the Russian Bar retained through this era the right to hold forth—often at excessive length—on all the main issues affecting Russian society. Before the reform era, Russians had been ‘mute’, and for a long time afterwards they remained typecast as hesitant and clumsy speakers; lawyers were seen as the rhetorical vanguard of the new Russia.⁵⁶ For an observer at the turn of the century, there could be no doubt that ‘Rus had become more eloquent’ as a result of the legal reforms.⁵⁷ In Russia, as everywhere else, forensic oratory had particular characteristics, conditioned by the make-up of the profession (late to form in Russia), the parameters set by the statute book, the relationship between state power and the law, and the cultural and social context in which the lawyers were operating. It was not just the lawyers and their set-piece oratory that determined the rhetorical possibilities of the law but also other actors in the courtroom: defendants, witnesses, and jury members. The courtroom, backed up at least until the late 1870s by a press relatively unconstrained in its reporting of trials, served as a conduit for public speech of many kinds—from the muddled testimony in routine criminal trials to the professions of faith made by revolutionaries. Even in the harsher political climate of the 1880s the principle was upheld that words uttered in court,

⁵⁵ The files of the Senate’s Special Tribunal (Osoboe prisutstvie) leave no doubt as to the dedication with which the authorities pursued cases of sedition: GARF, f. 112. ⁵⁶ B. Glinskii, Russkoe sudebnoe krasnorechie (St Petersburg, 1897), 11–12, 15. ⁵⁷ A. Dobrokhotov, Rutina nashikh ugolovnykh zashchitnikov (Moscow, 1901), 7.

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even if potentially defamatory, were ‘privileged’ and could be repeated and disseminated without sanction.⁵⁸ By the early 1870s, the first cohort of Russian barristers had several years’ courtroom experience, and some of its members were fast acquiring celebrity. Legal orations were reviewed in exhaustive detail that exceeded the attention given even to well-known actors. By the second half of the 1870s readers could expect to find in their daily newspaper not only a full stenographic report of a high-profile case but also minute observation of the courtroom demeanour of the protagonists. Among the most striking examples was the 1876 case of the Moscow Commercial and Credit Bank, which had collapsed the previous year after 7 million rubles had gone missing from its accounts. Newspaper readers were treated to withering accounts of the defendants’ performance. One was mocked for his ‘oratorical urges’; another for his red face and pear-shaped figure, as well as his manner of speaking ‘hastily, as if he has a whole flock of words in his mouth, so that if he doesn’t release them immediately in the right order they will fly away in their own directions’. The central defendant, the German railway entrepreneur Bethel Henry Strousberg, was subject to especially minute observation, both because he was the main target of the outraged public and because as a foreigner he was enigmatically silent; the special correspondent of Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti noted his chilly indifference to the sufferings of the ruined small investors he saw before him in the courtroom. But the lawyers were also not spared journalistic scrutiny. The prosecutor Obninskii struck an unimpressive and ‘gloomy’ figure, and although his opening contribution may have contained a few incisive points, the delivery was deemed unimpressive: the speech was read from a text in a voice so quiet that even his fellow lawyers struggled to make out some phrases.⁵⁹ Most cases, of course, did not provide such rich opportunities for courtroom reportage. The utility of oratory was greatly diminished in non-jury trials (which constituted the vast majority), and it is wise to be sceptical about the overall standard of courtroom eloquence in Russia.⁶⁰ But the nascent Russian Bar provided great scope for ambitious young men precisely because it lacked the weight of tradition and authority found in more established legal traditions. To a significant extent, the first generation of the new Russian lawyers was making its own rules. Russian advocates were just as willing as their peers abroad to use cases as a springboard for discussion of society and its ills, but the absence of established rhetorical patterns gave them more licence than their French counterparts to engage in psychological analysis and storytelling—to cultivate a literary as well

⁵⁸ Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto, 1982), 170–1. ⁵⁹ ‘Delo kommercheskogo i ssudnogo banka v Moskve’, SPb ved, 21 October 1876, 2–3. ⁶⁰ Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei, 205–6, 212–13.

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as a forensic sensibility.⁶¹ Many lawyers aspired to literary status for their speeches; by the turn of the century the greatest mark of esteem was to have a published collection of speeches, preferably in multiple editions. Conversely, several leading lawyers had literary careers independent of the courtroom: D. V. Stasov, A. I. Urusov, A. A. Ol’khin (a poet who ended up in administrative exile for harbouring a populist), V. P. Gaevskii, A. L. Borovikovskii, and above all S. A. Andreevskii, whose handsome appearance and splendid voice amplified his reputation as a ‘speaking author’ in the courtroom.⁶² Yet much of the frisson for newspaper readers of courtroom speeches came from the knowledge that the written texts offered no more than a misty window on what made leading advocates special: their command of gesture, their demeanour, their ability to think on their feet in cross examination—in a word, their quality as performers. By the early twentieth century, alongside published collections of speeches, another genre would flourish: the memoir-profile, often written by admiring colleagues, of the stars of the Russian Bar. In the 1870s, the newspaper reports that provided most readers with their information on courtroom celebrities contained not only trial transcripts but also assessments of the advocates’ performance. Summings-up and cross examinations were reviewed like performances in the theatre. It was hardly coincidental that many prominent lawyers had wide contacts in the theatre and the artistic world.⁶³ The sense that a courtroom speech was more than the sum of its transcribed words led to a fascination with the working practices of the leading forensic orators. Did Plevako, Karabchevskii, and the rest write out their speeches in advance, or did they rely on improvisation and inspiration? What was the secret of their success as rhetoricians? Vladimir Spasovich has a good claim to be considered the outstanding member of the first cohort of Russian advocates. He certainly passed the publication test. A collection of his speeches in 1903 included even an after-dinner speech delivered thirty years earlier at which he had extolled the public mission of the Russian Bar.⁶⁴ His first published collection in 1872 was a striking contribution, both for its uniqueness (at the time, and for some years afterwards, it was the only such volume published by a Russian barrister) and for its intriguing content, which included even a defence speech Spasovich had given at the sensational trial of the Nechaevtsy in summer 1871.⁶⁵ ⁶¹ The comparison with France is made in K. Arsen’ev, ‘Frantsuzskaia advokatura i ee slabye i sil’nye storony’, VE, no. 1 (1888): 282–3. ⁶² N. A. Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii i politicheskie protsessy 1866–1904 gg. (Tula, 2000), 68–9, 73, 80, 89, 90, 93. ⁶³ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 202–3. ⁶⁴ V. D. Spasovich, Zastol’nye rechi v sobraniiakh sosloviia prisiazhnykh poverennykh okruga S.-Peterburgskoi sudebnoi palaty (1873–1901) (St Petersburg, 1903). ⁶⁵ V. Spasovich, Za mnogo let, 1859–1871: Stat’i, otryvki, istoriia, kritika, polemika, sudebnye rechi i proch. (St Petersburg, 1872).

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Born in 1829, Spasovich was older than many of his colleagues and entered the Bar only in his mid-thirties, having already made a scholarly career in law. But no one rode the wave of glasnost’ in the first fifteen years after the legal reform with greater aplomb. Spasovich was renowned for trenchant expressions such as ‘literary diarrhoea’ and ‘intellectual masturbation’. He was no radical, and was distrusted by some of his revolutionary clients because he was prepared to belittle their cause in order to secure more favourable treatment for them. But he also managed to irk the authorities, notably through his performance at the trial of the Nechaevtsy.⁶⁶ For all Spasovich’s renown as a courtroom performer, he was no improviser: he always read his speeches from a text, and did not hide the fact. He wrote his speech immediately after acquainting himself with the material of the case, and then set it aside until the trial.⁶⁷ But his delivery was vibrant, he gestured expansively with his right hand, and he peered engagingly over his glasses when he looked up at the audience—a pose that was immortalized in Il’ia Repin’s famous 1891 portrait.⁶⁸ A decade younger than Spasovich, but still in time to join the reformed legal profession almost at its birth, was the patrician Aleksandr Urusov, whose theatrical style and air of cultivation evidently counted more than forensic argumentation; he was admired by contemporaries for his ‘attractive bass, lovely diction, and aristocratic manners’.⁶⁹ In one high-profile case—his defence of Vera Dmitrieva in 1871 for theft and ‘expulsion of the foetus’, where rival defendants were represented by Spasovich and the new star Fedor Plevako—Urusov’s exquisite manners were evident in his flattery of the jury and the homily he delivered on the significance of the new courts. He based his case on a penetrating if speculative analysis of Dmitrieva’s motivations and psychological state in which the detailed evidence retreated to the background.⁷⁰ Urusov’s renown was heightened by his part in the defence of the Nechaevtsy, for which he was exiled in 1872. He was allowed to return in 1876, but forced to leave the Bar for service as a state prosecutor; in 1881 he was given permission to return to the advokatura.⁷¹

⁶⁶ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 63–7. ⁶⁷ On his work practices, see M. Vinaver, Nedavnee: Vospominaniia i kharakteristiki (Paris, 1926), 15–16. ⁶⁸ Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh’, 160. ⁶⁹ Louise McReynolds, Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca, 2013), 34–6, quotation 36. ⁷⁰ The speech was anthologized in L. A. Bazunov and M. S. Margulies (eds), Vydaiushchiesia russkie sudebnye protsessy: Rechi zashchitnikov (St Petersburg, 1903), 154–88. A full transcript was published at the time: Stenograficheskii otchet. Protsess G-zhi Dmitrievoi, polkovnika Karitskogo, st. sov. Diuzinga, vracha Sapozhkova i g-zhi Kassel’ (Moscow, 1871). According to McReynolds, Urusov’s summation revealed his ‘indifference toward the factual evidence of the case’: Murder Most Russian, 39. ⁷¹ A full-length study of Urusov’s career is A. V. Stepanova, ‘A. I. Urusov – iurist i sudebnyi orator’, candidate’s dissertation (Saratov State University, 2005).

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Among Urusov’s immediate contemporaries was the most colourful and celebrated member of the nineteenth-century Russian Bar. Fedor Plevako was born in 1842, son of a customs official in the Urals and a Kirgiz servant woman. He would come to be extolled as the embodiment of a ‘Russian’ style of eloquence; newspapers dubbed him a ‘Russian natural’ (russkii samorodok) and even ‘the pride of the Russian people’.⁷² When Plevako visited Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaia Poliana, the writer was apparently reminded of the Slavophile A. S. Khomiakov.⁷³ Partly this aura came from Plevako’s faintly Kalmyk appearance (often remarked on by contemporaries), but he also projected it through his courtroom persona: in his speeches he wore patriotism and religiosity on his sleeve, and expressed a saltof-the-earth concern for the ‘little brother’ of the suffering people. Criminals were just another category of ‘unfortunates’. This, then, was Russianness in a distinctly Dostoevskian vein, quite unlike the practical version of the national character advanced by later liberal lawyers such as Maklakov or Gessen.⁷⁴ Plevako offered a blend of the religious prophet, the wild Scythian, and the earthy raznochinets (commoner). He combined membership in a quintessentially liberal profession with instinctive belief in absolute monarchy and an almost mystical belief in the underlying goodness of man.⁷⁵ Plevako entered Moscow University in 1859 and graduated in 1864, just in time to take up the reconstituted profession of the law. He made rapid progress after his first case in 1866, earning good money and making the jump from assistant to full sworn advocate in 1870. His celebrity status seems to have dated from that time. By the end of the nineteenth century he was reputedly a household name to the whole of newspaper-reading Russia, while for visitors to Moscow his performances were ‘as much of an attraction as the Tsar Bell or the Tsar Cannon’.⁷⁶ One of the tests of his mettle came in January 1871 with his defence of Colonel Nikolai Kostrubo-Karitskii, who stood trial alongside Vera Dmitrieva for having incited her to abortion and theft of bond certificates. Here Plevako proved every bit the match of Urusov, delivering a three-hour speech from a mere skeletal outline; such was the market value of his performances that it was worth his while to take his own stenographer with him to the courtroom.⁷⁷ According to his younger colleague Vasilii Maklakov, Plevako was so much in demand that he had his own secretariat.⁷⁸ A perusal of the contemporary press

⁷² V. I. Smoliarchuk, Advokat Fedor Plevako: Ocherk o zhizni i sudebnoi deiatel’nosti advokata F.N. Plevako (Cheliabink, 1989), 5, 84. ⁷³ V. A. Maklakov, Iz vospominanii (New York, 1954), 180–1. ⁷⁴ The Dostoevsky analogy made in A. R. Lednitskii, Iz proshlogo (Moscow, 1917), 28. Generally on Plevako’s ‘Russian’ persona, see Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 76–7. ⁷⁵ Such is the account of B. A. Podgornyi, Plevako (Soobshchenie, sdelannoe 13 marta 1914 goda v Moskovskom iuridicheskom sobranii) (Moscow, 1914). ⁷⁶ L. D. Liakhovetskii, Kharakteristika izvestnykh russkikh sudebnykh oratorov (St Petersburg, 1902), 5. ⁷⁷ Smoliarchuk, Advokat Fedor Plevako, 79, 84. ⁷⁸ Maklakov, Iz vospominanii, 233–4.

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soon reveals that Plevako was far more likely to have his speeches rendered verbatim than any of his colleagues.⁷⁹ Although Plevako was much more hard-working than his manner suggested, his fluency seems to have come to him relatively easily. He would jot down parts of speeches on pieces of paper, which he then stuck together. He sometimes sketched out the text in detail, while on other occasions he would note down only the main points. But he never wrote out a full script. Often he would abandon a draft and start again, but he would never edit a text: ‘Once he had written it, a text for him was something like a word he had spoken which he could not take back.’ Partly for this reason, Plevako was among the first to adopt the typewriter: he was reported as saying that ‘a machine is more convenient because you don’t see the text you’ve written, you don’t find yourself rereading it, you don’t compare it with what you go on to write’. Plevako sometimes typed up his speeches afterwards for newspaper reporters and separate publication in book form. The irony was that this recognized master of courtroom improvisation was known to most contemporaries through printed versions of his words—and these were mainly later reconstructions and approximations rather than anything approaching a verbatim transcript. This partly accounts for the overblown style and rhetorical flourishes we find in his collected speeches.⁸⁰ What struck contemporaries was the extent to which Plevako peppered his speech with metaphors and Biblical quotations and allusions. But a recent academic study has emphasized his linguistic ‘syncretism’, which combined social commentary (publitsistika) with official and scientific terminology (drawn especially from medicine and psychology), literary tropes, and colloquialisms. Plevako also had a formidable rhetorical arsenal: analogies, metonyms, imperatives, questions, appeals to common sense, and sheer pathos. All in all, he was a fine exemplar of the ‘hybridity’ of the courtroom genre, which contained various registers of language and combined reasoned argumentation, references to contemporary social and psychiatric theory, and affect.⁸¹ Plevako was renowned for quoting the Gospels, but, when the occasion demanded it, showed himself fully ⁷⁹ For example the well-known case where Abbess Mitrofaniia sued the descendants of a certain Solodvnikov, who apparently promised before his death to make a contribution of half a million rubles to the monastery. See Mosk ved, 24 January 1873, 5. ⁸⁰ V. A. Maklakov, ‘F.N. Plevako: Lektsiia, prochitannaia v mae 1909 goda v Peterburge v obshchestve liubitelei oratorskogo iskusstva’, in V. A. Maklakov, Rechi: Sudebnye, dumskie i publichnye lektsii (Paris, 1949), 76, 80, 83, 86. On Plevako’s disorderly jottings during trials and his occasional practice of reconstructing speeches afterwards for the benefit of acquaintances and journalists, see the editor’s introduction to his posthumous Rechi, ed. N. K. Murav’ev, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1912), 1:iii. Apparently in 1905 Plevako dictated a list of the speeches he wished to see published. ⁸¹ On the quality of Plevako’s language, see N. V. Pirinova, ‘Kognitivnaia obuslovlennost’ i stilevoe svoeobrazie sudebnykh rechei F. N. Plevako’, candidate’s dissertation (Stavropol State University, 2006). On his rhetorical devices, see E. S. Bulgakova, ‘Iazykovye i rechevye sredstva realizatsii i narusheniia kommunikativnykh kachestv rechi “vyrazitel’nost’ ” i “logichnost’ ” v aspekte rechevogo vozdeistviia (na material zashchititel’nykh rechei F. N. Plevako)’, candidate’s dissertation (Orel State University, 2008).

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conversant with fashionable notions of social degeneration and its effect on the individual psyche.⁸² Even Plevako’s admirers admitted that his grasp of detail could be shaky, and that oratorical affect came at the expense of content. He had a regrettable tendency to flatter judges, his performance fluctuated according to how interested he was in the case, and above all his tongue ran away with him: ‘he always faced the danger of instinctively abusing the gift bestowed on him by nature: he found it too easy to speak for him to speak only as much as was required for the matter in hand.’⁸³ Those who observed Plevako outside his home territory of the courtroom often found that he had succumbed entirely to this danger: his form of eloquence was ill-suited to political life, where he needed to persuade not members of a jury but committee members or fellow parliamentarians. One sceptical observer was Boris Chicherin, who found Plevako slapdash as chairman of a committee in the Moscow city duma in the 1870s.⁸⁴ Anatolii Koni (1844–1927) was the antithesis of Plevako. Scion of a metropolitan literary family, he studied law at St Petersburg University just as the legal profession was being transformed in the reform era. He had scholarly inclinations, writing a much praised dissertation. He specialized in civil, not criminal, law. And he was firmly a creature of the written word: if he spoke as he wrote, this was hardly a coincidence, as he wrote out his speeches in advance. Yet, thanks to his phenomenal memory, he barely referred to his text when delivering it, and he was widely recognized as an effective and compelling speaker: ‘There was not a hint of declamation in his speech. A stream burbled by, catching the attractive colours of the rainbow, while the sound of the stream caressed the ear. The simplest things, even truisms, acquired originality in the form Koni presented them.’⁸⁵ Form and content were perfectly aligned: Koni maintained his focus on the substance of the case, and his speeches had the character of calm, rational ordinary speech.⁸⁶ Koni’s credo of precision and economy in courtroom speech was laid out in his own writings.⁸⁷ Yet, when the circumstances were right, he could catch the imagination even of a radically minded listener, for example in his early courtroom career in Kharkov.⁸⁸ One of Koni’s protégés was S. A. Andreevskii (1847–1918), who firmly believed that courtroom speech should have a written foundation and even an aesthetic ⁸² On Plevako’s celebrated defence in this vein of Praskov’ia Kachka, a young noblewoman accused in 1879 of killing her ex-lover, see McReynolds, Murder Most Russian, 70–2. ⁸³ Maklakov, ‘F. N. Plevako’, 82. A range of criticisms is presented in Liakhovetskii, Kharakteristika, 19, 26–7, 31. ⁸⁴ Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina: Zemstvo i moskovskaia duma (Moscow, 1934), 180. ⁸⁵ Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei, 240–1. ⁸⁶ K. Arsen’ev, ‘Russkoe sudebnoe krasnorechie’, VE, no. 4 (1888): 778, 799. ⁸⁷ His main statement on the subject was ‘Priemy i zadachi prokuratury’ (first published 1911), in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, 4:121–200. ⁸⁸ E. Koval’skaia, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii (K stat’e A. I. Kornilovoi)’, KiS, 34 (1926): 31.

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dimension. Not only was he a well-known poet; he was also convinced of the value of the literary style and sensibility for the defence attorney. In preference to the showmanship some defence lawyers borrowed from the stage, Andreevskii advocated the ‘simple, profound, sincere and truthful methods of our literature’; the ideal defence lawyer was a ‘speaking writer’.⁸⁹ His colleagues attested to the simple elegance of his courtroom style and his fastidious avoidance of emotive effects.⁹⁰ In Andreevskii’s account, attorneys in the reformed legal profession occupied a peculiarly advantageous position at the intersection of the spoken and the written word. The new legal code had given lawyers remarkable freedom of speech, and unlike the newspapers they could appeal to a live audience. But their speeches could also be works of literary art, both in their composition and in their subsequent dissemination. After Andreevskii’s first high-profile defence case, stenographers were constantly in attendance at his speeches, and soon his performances would be widely cited and even appropriated; Andreevskii had become aware of cases of oral ‘plagiarism’ from his published collection of speeches.⁹¹ Unsurprisingly, Andreevskii believed that a written text was essential in the courtroom, claiming that ‘all our renowned defence lawyers wrote their speeches in advance’. This, in his view, was the best protection against long-winded and overblown rhetoric. The surest way to gain the trust of the jury was not to attempt to hypnotize it but to speak clearly and directly; the tactics of the actor had no place in the courtroom. Writing in 1903, however, Andreevskii was not convinced that the profession as a whole shared his preference for the literary over the theatrical: in the early days of the 1860s, the Russian Bar had been dominated by men with a literary and scholarly background, who together with less educated ‘gifted naturals’ (samorodki) had created a fresh mode of discourse, but by the turn of the century the ‘school of self-promotion and empty ham oratory’ had grown strong.⁹² In fact, the legal profession had long had its critics. Russia in the 1870s was beset by the same anxieties as in other cultures about the dubious truth-value of forensic speech. In 1876, Fedor Dostoevsky famously assaulted the moral integrity of Vladimir Spasovich for his defence of the child abuser Kroneberg.⁹³ The writer was but one (albeit prominent) voice in a chorus of unease at the implications of ⁸⁹ S. A. Andreevskii, ‘Ob ugolovnoi zashchite’, in his Dramy iz zhizni (zashchititel’nye rechi), 5th ed., expanded (Petrograd, 1916), 6, 13. ⁹⁰ M. Vinaver, ‘Estet na sluzhbe pravosudiia (S. A. Andreevskii)’, in his Nedavnee: Vospominaniia i kharakteristiki (Paris, 1926), 123–5. ⁹¹ Andreevskii, ‘Ob ugolovnoi zashchite’, 17. ⁹² Andreevskii, ‘Ob ugolovnoi zashchite’, 27, 31–3. Andreevskii also believed that Russian poetry was in decline, having lost its former simplicity and clarity: see ‘Slovo, muzyka, mimika’, in his Literaturnye ocherki, 4th ed., expanded (St Petersburg, 1913). ⁹³ Dostoevsky acquainted himself with the stenographic transcript published in Golos and subjected not only Spasovich’s integrity but also his rhetorical techniques to minute investigation: F. M. Dostoevskii, PSS (Leningrad, 1972–88), 22: 52–73. See also Gary Rosenshield, Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law (Madison, 2005), 56–8.

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Figure 2.1. ‘A Provincial Courtroom’. The defence counsel hushes the judge so as not to wake the jury. Source: Oskolki, no. 2 (1882). Courtesy of Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

open jury trials in a society that perhaps was not ready for them. There was indeed much cause for concern. Courts were overstretched because of Russia’s large distances and because a higher proportion of cases went to jury trial in Russia than was the case elsewhere. Lists of jurors were poorly maintained and the betteroff sections of society evaded service, with the result that juries outside Moscow and St Petersburg consisted largely of peasants, many with a miserable level of education.⁹⁴ The debate on the desirability of jury trials was thus in large part a debate on the possibility of communication between the educated elite and the common people. The stakes of such communication were unusually high in the 1870s, as juries were granted considerable room for discretion. A Senate ruling of 1870 indicated that juries might find defendants not guilty on grounds other than those contained in the Criminal Code, even if they had demonstrably committed the act in question.⁹⁵ Many commentators worried accordingly about the large number of not guilty verdicts delivered by juries.⁹⁶ Jury members were deemed to be too ⁹⁴ Jörg Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich 1864–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), chap. 3. ⁹⁵ Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars, 66. ⁹⁶ These concerns would only intensify in the following two decades: see McReynolds, Murder Most Russian, chap. 3.

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respectful of authority and incapable of keeping to strictly legal criteria. Conversely, lawyers were getting carried away by the presence of an audience and speaking at excessive length.⁹⁷ One prominent case that fed such anxieties was the Miasnikov trial of 1872, where the defendants were accused of forging a will. Admittedly, the prosecution had a hard task: one of the defendants was in a disturbed mental state, a long period of time had elapsed since the alleged crime, and there were no people who had directly suffered in consequence. But rhetoric had come at the expense of careful consideration of the evidence. Koni, speaking for the prosecution, was recognized as a fine performer by the onlooking journalists, but he also had a tendency to pursue unnecessarily intricate lines of argument.⁹⁸ Ironically, in an essay first published forty years later, Koni would himself discuss the most common errors made by lawyers and judges when addressing a jury (speaking at excessive length, misjudging tone and register, failing to offer adequate direction on points of law).⁹⁹ In their defence, members of the Russian legal profession could claim to be doing as much as anyone to overcome the deep social and cultural divides of imperial Russia. Even though the Russian Bar was based in just three cities (St Petersburg, Moscow, and Kharkov), it brought about contact and dialogue between the educated and the marginalized, and between the capitals and the provinces. Lawyers would often take to the road, achieving some of their most striking successes a long way from Moscow and St Petersburg. But even when they stayed at home, the courtroom gave a hearing to semi-educated speech as well as to well-honed legal rhetoric. In the 1870s, the courtroom was the main vehicle of an ethnographic (and stenographic) sensibility. Trial transcripts were still the richest and most accessible source for urban educated Russians on the life and language of the lower classes. One fairly standard case in April 1874 brought to public attention the case of a fifteen-year-old peasant girl named Pelageia Gagarina who was accused of putting cockroach poison into the drink of the lady of the house. The evidence that she had committed this act was clear, but the trial hinged on her motivation. In her testimony she emphasized her ignorance and illiteracy, and claimed she had poisoned her mistress ‘out of foolishness’ (po gluposti). In the process the court learned affecting details about the plight of an orphaned peasant girl in the big city. After giving her testimony, Gagarina spent much of the rest of the hearing in tears; during the defence speech many of the jury members also started crying. Although the judge directed the jury to take

⁹⁷ [V. N. Nikitin], ‘Peterburgskii sud prisiazhnykh (Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia prisiazhnogo zasedatelia)’, OZ, vol. 196 (May 1871): 204–5. ⁹⁸ M.L., ‘Iuridicheskie zametki’, Spb ved, 21 March 1872, 1–2. Delo has a more forthright critique of the rhetorical excesses—and concomitant neglect of the evidence—at the trial: see ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, no. 3 (1872): 151–2. ⁹⁹ A. F. Koni, ‘Prisiazhnye zasedateli’, in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow, 1966–69), 1: 368–71.

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seriously the evidence of her guilt, Gagarina was duly found not guilty. At the end of the trial she was surrounded by members of the jury and the audience, who had a whip-round for her.¹⁰⁰ Along with social justice, politics was increasingly serving to bolster Russian barristers’ sense of purpose and collective self-worth. The heroic self-image of the legal profession began to form in the 1870s with high-profile trials of radicals and revolutionaries, developed further with the causes célèbres of the fin de siècle, and has largely been maintained by posterity. Although some observers, from the authors of the seminal Landmarks (Vekhi) collection in 1909 to a few modern scholars, have found that Russian barristers by the early twentieth century subordinated the law entirely to political considerations, many more have highlighted their efforts to resist the arbitrary power of the tsarist state.¹⁰¹ In 1866, the use of the new courts for overtly political cases had still seemed unproblematic. Dmitrii Karakozov, the first would-be assassin of Alexander II, was tried in the Supreme Criminal Court, along with the ishutintsy, a purported revolutionary organization swept up in the investigation following Karakozov’s shot at the Emperor. Although this trial saw the first such use of a stenographer, the transcript was not published, and the authorities retained a firm grip on proceedings, which took place behind closed doors in the Peter and Paul Fortress.¹⁰² What really transformed the political significance of the courtroom was the trial of the Nechaevtsy in 1871. This would prove to be the second largest trial of the entire period before the 1905 revolution: no fewer than seventy-nine defendants were represented by a total of twenty-three lawyers. The government failed to arrange suitably hostile prosecutors or to keep in check the huge public curiosity about the trial. The case was undoubtedly sensational: it comprised a murky conspiracy that culminated in a murder graphically described in the testimony. But the astonishing and unexpected aspect of the trial was the scope that this sordid killing gave to the defence team. For the first time the defence lawyers—foremost among them Urusov and Spasovich—showed what rhetorical tricks they could play, at times sailing close to the wind. Spasovich succeeded in making a distinction between the shadowy, nefarious Nechaev and his followers, whom he presented as devoted to the cause of popular liberation. Perhaps worst of all was the fact that proceedings were available to newspaper readers in the full stenographic transcript. As Sankt-Petersburgskie vedomosti helpfully informed its readers a few days into the trial, private newspapers had been instructed to check their transcripts against the version published in the official Pravitel’stvennyi ¹⁰⁰ Spb ved, 29 April 1874, 3. ¹⁰¹ For a modern sceptic, see Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz. For the ‘heroic’ account of the Russian Bar, see Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii. ¹⁰² Pokushenie Karakozova: Stenograficheskii otchet po delu D. Karakozova, I. Khudiakova, N. Ishutina i dr., 2 vols (Moscow and Leningrad, 1928–30), 1: xvii (on stenography); Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 229–30.

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vestnik (Government Bulletin), which had accounted for a two-day delay in publication; now, however, a way had been found of expediting the process, and transcripts would henceforth appear on the very next day.¹⁰³ Although eventually the full transcript was replaced by a bare summary of content, the damage had been done: the trial mainly aroused sympathy for the accused, not least in the courtroom itself. Officialdom was appalled by the lenient sentences, while the Third Section nervously registered the boomerang effect of the trial on public opinion.¹⁰⁴ An important precedent had been set: the lawyers had conferred and mounted a coordinated defence that included a sympathetic account of their clients’ political beliefs. After a few quiet years, the pattern would be repeated in a series of highly charged trials in the late 1870s. The government did attempt to fight back against the advokatura. Count Urusov, one of the stars of the Nechaevtsy trial, was suspected of contact with secret societies in 1872 and exiled from Moscow for a while. Plevako was accused by the Third Section of heading a secret Legal Society. In 1874 the creation of further Bar councils was suspended indefinitely. But the ultimate independence of the Bar was repeatedly upheld by the Senate, and repressive measures only confirmed leading lawyers in their sense of high social and moral calling; the legal profession was becoming a natural career choice for the liberal-minded youth of the reform era. The courtroom also offered opportunities for showmanship unmatched by any other profession: the first generation of the Russian Bar included many gifted speakers, and unlike their counterparts in other European countries, they allowed their speeches to be published.¹⁰⁵

The Relaunch of Rhetoric, 1876–81 In the second half of the 1870s, the public apathy and very attenuated glasnost’ of the preceding decade gave way to something altogether more vigorous.¹⁰⁶ Russian educated society went quickly from quiescence to ferment. But the prime agents of instability, at least to begin with, were not the opponents of the tsarist order but the most fervent Russian patriots. The escalating conflict over the Balkans had opened the floodgates for patriotic rhetoric, and the summer of 1876 saw a series of very public demonstrations of enthusiasm for the Serbian cause; the Third

¹⁰³ SPb ved, 9 July 1871, 1. ¹⁰⁴ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 236–45; Ely, Underground Petersburg, 155. A member of the Chaikovskii circle recalled avidly following the trial in the papers (and, predictably, being appalled by Spasovich’s apolitical line of defence, which presented the accused as misguided, gullible youths). A. I. Kornilova-Moroz, ‘Perovskaia i osnovanie kruzhka chaikovtsev’, KiS 22 (1926): 27–8. ¹⁰⁵ Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz, 536–8, 541–3, 545. ¹⁰⁶ On the crucial role of the press in this period, see Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991), chap. 4.

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Section became anxious at the rousing send-offs volunteers for the army in Serbia were receiving, and in August the Moscow authorities even changed the rail timetable to reduce the scope for such gatherings.¹⁰⁷ The main patriotic outlet of the time, Moskovskie vedomosti, passed on to its readers the uplifting rhetoric of churchmen and city elders, presenting this as a token of ‘popular feeling’.¹⁰⁸ As always, it was easier to be outspoken in speech than in writing. In September 1877, Ivan Aksakov, president of the Moscow Slavonic Society, gave a polemical speech in Moscow University on the handling of the Russo-Turkish War. The GovernorGeneral of Moscow immediately imposed a ban on publication of the speech in the Moscow newspapers. He also telegraphed the Minister of the Interior with an account of the meeting, a list of the most prominent attendees, and a summary of the content of Aksakov’s speech; a ‘full and precise’ stenographer’s transcript was despatched to Petersburg by post.¹⁰⁹ Although the authorities could suppress overtly political speech, the mobilization of educated society in 1876–7 did not die down. The habit of high-profile public gatherings persisted, especially in the literary world. Turgenev’s visit to Moscow in 1879 was the occasion of a great jamboree—an event that said less about the writer than about the literary world’s eagerness to make some public demonstration of its existence. Observers of varying political persuasions found the event short of meaningful content. The moderate conservative Boris Chicherin had no time for the ceremonial phrase-mongering of Plevako and Nikolai Bugaev.¹¹⁰ Even more disparaging was the account published soon afterwards in Otechestvennye zapiski. Although Turgenev had been a regular visitor for many years, this time it was decided, by a kind of herd instinct, to make a fuss of him. The speeches were ‘either purely rhetorical—an assemblage of pretty phrases and metaphors without any content—or had a content that did not explain why this celebration was taking place at all’. Perhaps the reason was that educated society had nothing else to occupy it after the Turkish war.¹¹¹ Yet the Turgenev celebration paved the way for perhaps the most impressive set-piece event of the age: the Pushkin celebration in central Moscow, held in June 1880. It was held under the auspices of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature (OLRS), which by now had ‘become a specialist in organizing literary commemorations, in the form of dinners and public meetings at which speeches were read’. The Moscow governor-general Prince V. A. Dolgorukii took a non-interventionist approach, while the city duma subsidized the event to the amount of 15,000 ¹⁰⁷ Ely, Underground Petersburg, 145–8. ¹⁰⁸ For example editorial in Mosk ved, 16 July 1876, 3. It is striking how often the word ‘feeling’ and its derivatives (notably prochuvstvannyi, or ‘deeply felt’) occur in accounts of ceremonial speeches at this time. ¹⁰⁹ RGIA, f. 1282, op. 1, d. 881, ll. 2–4. ¹¹⁰ Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina: Moskva sorokovykh godov (Moscow, 1929), 143. ¹¹¹ [G. Z. Eliseev], ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, OZ, no. 4 (April 1879): 220–1.

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roubles. Even more importantly, the celebration was the occasion for an unprecedented media frenzy: ‘a battery of correspondents was ready to march on Moscow, and to relay in detail, by telegraph, rail, and post, a front-line description of the holiday.’ While representatives of twenty-two newspapers and journals were officially listed as delegates, this was ‘only a very small part of the press corps that attended’.¹¹² The representatives of the media kept a broad public up to date with the main events: the attempt to exclude Katkov from the celebration, the tumultuous reception of Turgenev’s reading of Pushkin, and the ecstatically received speech by Dostoevsky. Parts of the proceedings lent themselves beautifully to theatricalized rendition on the printed page: above all, Aksakov’s declaration of a reconciliation between Slavophile and Westernizer camps, and the handshake he proffered to Turgenev.¹¹³ The pan-Slav firebrand Konstantin Leont’ev felt well enough informed to deliver verdicts on the speakers in a newspaper article the following month, though he admitted some time later that he had not been present himself and had composed his piece on the basis of newspaper reports.¹¹⁴ Here was another example of the symbiosis between spoken and written word: the fact that these speeches had been delivered in public made them particularly compelling for their first newspaper readers, even if Dostoevsky’s oration in particular did not look quite so convincing in the cold light of day.¹¹⁵ As one listener reflected many years later, a large part of the impression made by Dostoevsky’s speech was due to the ‘sheer physical effect of his strange voice, which at moments of agitation was capable of rising to a hysterical pitch that assaulted the nerves’, thus ‘infecting’ the audience with the speaker’s own emotional state. This was not artistry but an oratorical style that made up for its roughness in its ‘overwhelming’ effect on listeners. The fact that Dostoevsky was reading from a text did nothing to counteract the impression of passionate improvisation.¹¹⁶ By the late 1870s, Dostoevsky was once again, as in the early 1860s, a ‘speaking writer’. Even if most of his speaking went on at invitation-only aristocratic gatherings, he was well prepared for his high-profile performance at the Pushkin celebration. He was also far from apolitical: his Pushkin speech might be regarded as the manifesto of a conservative ‘party’ (including Pobedonostsev and Suvorin) to which the writer had become affiliated in the 1870s.¹¹⁷ ¹¹² Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989), 54, 65, 72–3. ¹¹³ As recalled forty years after the fact by Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, ‘Dostoevskii na pushkinskikh prazdnestvakh 1880 goda’ (1921), in Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, Zhizn’ cheloveka, neudobnogo dlia sebia i dlia mnogikh (Moscow, 2004), 101. ¹¹⁴ K. N. Leont’ev, ‘G. Katkov i ego vragi na prazdnike Pushkina’, (first published in Varshavskii dnevnik, 15 July 1880), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvenadtsati tomakh, vol. 7/2 (St Petersburg, 2006), 207 (for acknowledgement in 1885 of his absence from the celebration). ¹¹⁵ See Levitt on the critics’ ‘second thoughts’, Russian Literary Politics, 138–40. ¹¹⁶ Amfiteatrov, ‘Dostoevskii na pushkinskikh prazdnestvakh’, 105, 110. ¹¹⁷ Grossman, ‘Dostoevskii i pravitel’stvennye krugi 1870-kh godov’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 15 (1931): 83–123, esp. 117.

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Yet the patriots and the conservatives were not having things their own way in the re-energized public sphere of the late 1870s. Despite all its measures to trim glasnost’, the government was losing the rhetorical battle against its selfdeclared opponents. Admittedly, the post-Nechaev crackdown had almost eliminated opportunities for ‘propaganda’ of socialist ideas. The relatively gentle Chaikovskii discussion circle had soon been crushed. The radical students of 1873–4 had not survived long in the village. Back in the city, energetic provincials continued to move to the capitals to study in institutions that were hotbeds of radicalism. But they were necessarily cautious when it came to the public expression of their ideas. After a modest attempt to turn a student funeral into a demonstration, the radicals finally attempted to make a bold public statement near the heart of Russian imperial power: on 6 December 1876, a group of protesters gathered in front of the Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt, just a stone’s throw from the Winter Palace and a major thoroughfare, to protest the plight of political prisoners and the peasantry. Their most powerful symbolic gesture was the unfurling of a ‘Land and Freedom’ banner. But the speech by Georgii Plekhanov that explained their cause was rushed and hard for listeners to take in, as the orator, like everyone else, was expecting the police to arrive any moment. Sure enough, the demonstration was quickly broken up, and most of the participants were arrested.¹¹⁸ The protesters gained far more attention later the same month when they went on trial in the St Petersburg circuit court, which was full to bursting for the duration. The defence team went on the attack; their speeches were heavily censored in the official record, but secret police reports make clear just how uncompromising they were, and what a favourable impression they made on the courtroom audience (even if this had no effect on the sentences).¹¹⁹ The defendants themselves were less eloquent; one of them would later recall with embarrassment his own gaucheness, reaching the judgement that ‘we conducted the trial poorly’.¹²⁰ But the radicals were learning fast how to turn trials into political theatre, largely because they were being given so much practice in the arts of courtroom eloquence. They next took the stage in February–March 1877 at a trial of several dozen people accused of membership in a revolutionary organization. This ‘Trial of the 50’ was open to the public and saw the first political speeches from the bench by the accused. There were compelling and complementary performances

¹¹⁸ M. M. Chernavskii, ‘Demonstratsiia 6 dekabria 1876 g. Po vospominaniiam uchastnika’, KiS, 28–29 (1926): 7–20. ¹¹⁹ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 247–50. ¹²⁰ Chernavskii, ‘Demonstratsiia 6 dekabria 1876 g.’, 19. But Chernavskii did make an exception for A. N. Bibergal’, who was the most assertive of the defendants, and perhaps for that reason left a more positive assessment of the demonstration itself: Bibergal’, ‘Vospominaniia o demonstratsii na Kazanskoi ploshchadi’, KiS, 28–29 (1926): 21–9.

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from Sof ’ia Bardina, who struck a reasonable but firm tone, expressing defiance only at the end, and the more combative Petr Alekseev, who attacked the government for the bitter disappointments of the emancipation settlement and continued speaking despite fierce attempts by the chairman to stop him.¹²¹ Alekseev’s performance was found so impressive that he was congratulated by the lawyers.¹²² These speeches were no improvisations: they were written out in advance, after at least some consultation with co-defendants, and intended for readers more than for listeners; they were smuggled out and soon published in the émigré journal Vpered.¹²³ Even this trial was dwarfed by the Trial of the 193, resulting from the round-up of socialist propagandists in the ‘Going to the People’ movement of the mid-1870s, which ran from October 1877 to January 1878. Not only were the defendants numerous, they were more active than at any previous trial, and their lawyers’ rhetoric was fiercer. The speech by Ippolit Myshkin quickly gained legendary status: claiming to be a member of an enormous ‘social-revolutionary party’, which he defined broadly as ‘the whole mass of people with the same beliefs as us’, Myshkin kept going despite strong interruptions from the bench and, as he was being expelled from the courtroom, declared the senators were worse than prostitutes.¹²⁴ The defendants were acutely aware of the role of the trial in providing publicity for their cause. Two of them, Mitrofan Muravskii and Aleksandr Lukashevich, circulated a document to their co-defendants to emphasize the propaganda opportunity afforded by their prosecution: through what they uttered in court they should strive to achieve the greatest possible influence on the ‘best part of society’. A political trial was a ‘living example of civic activism’ for an ‘honourably thinking young person’. The main addressees of the speeches delivered in the courtroom were not those present in the courtroom but the readers of the published transcript, which would have force not only for its content but also because ‘readers would know that everything they read had been spoken by us at the trial’. With that in mind, Muravskii and Lukashevich invited their fellow defendants to contribute a written version of what they planned to say at the trial to a ‘collection’ for later publication. This would supplement and correct any official transcript, which was bound to contain omissions and distortions. Those who had given political speeches from the dock could just put their names to the text; those who had remained silent

¹²¹ V. Burtsev, Za sto let (1800–1896): Sbornik po istorii politicheskikh i obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii (London, 1897), 124–9. ¹²² Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 253. ¹²³ See the editorial notes in Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 429. In the case of Zdanovich, it is not clear that the defendant was given the chance to deliver the full speech—but that hardly mattered for the dissemination of the revolutionary message. ¹²⁴ Burtsev, Za sto let, 130–3.

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could provide the text of the speeches they might have wished they had delivered, which would be published anonymously.¹²⁵ These plans to make propaganda out of the trial did not remain a secret to the Third Section, which confiscated part of Muravskii’s correspondence with his fellow prisoners. The authorities did something to blunt the propaganda value of the trial by denying public access to the court, much to Muravskii’s frustration.¹²⁶ Yet the speeches of Alekseev, Bardina, and Myshkin evidently reached a significant part of their target audience: one observer at Kharkov University claimed not to know a single student who had not read the fiery closing speech by Ippolit Myshkin, and the same had been true of the speeches by Bardina and Alekseev at the Trial of the 50.¹²⁷ Although transcripts of the Trial of the 193 were not published, the trial was firmly in the public eye, and the Emperor was kept closely informed in his quarters on the Bulgarian front of the Russo-Turkish War.¹²⁸ The newspapers, following the model of Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik, published brief summaries of each day’s events, and the defendants were given almost no column space for exposition of their socialist programme. But the defence lawyers managed to assert themselves all the same. The published account of the trial’s opening session recorded that Spasovich launched immediately into a protest against the closed nature of proceedings: he wanted the public to be admitted freely, the trial to be moved to a larger room, and the right to invite a stenographer at his own expense.¹²⁹ Even if Spasovich and his colleagues were denied the oxygen of stenographic publicity during the trial, they made their mark. Emblematic was P. A. Aleksandrov, a priest’s son who had risen fast in the procuracy before quitting in protest and moving over to the Bar in 1876; he would soon become known for his electrifying courtroom presence and his tendency to identify strongly with the defendant (to the extent of using the pronoun ‘we’). Eschewing the literary polish of Spasovich or Andreevskii, Aleksandrov relied on mysterious jottings on odd scraps of paper or even the cuffs of his starched shirts; he would pace his room deep in thought when preparing for a speech.¹³⁰ A more refined, but also effective, approach was adopted by the unpolitical Nikolai Karabchevskii, who represented three women defendants including Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia (later known as the

¹²⁵ Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 367–9, quotations 367–8. ¹²⁶ Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 1: 370–1 (letter by Muravskii to his mother on the conduct of the trial, 4 November 1877), 392–3 (Third Section report, 30 November 1877). ¹²⁷ ‘Iz zapiski D. T. Butsynskogo o revoliutsionnom dvizhenii na iuge Rossii vo vtoroi polovine 70-kh godov’ (5 April 1880), in Itenberg, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 2: 125–36, here 128 and 130. ¹²⁸ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 256–65. ¹²⁹ ‘Sudebnaia khronika: Delo o prestupnoi propagande’, Golos, 21 October 1877, 3. The chairman of the court replied that the trial was public and that the defence had the right to engage a stenographer, but that the venue could not be changed. ¹³⁰ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 71; N. P. Karabchevskii, Okolo pravosudiia: Stat’i, soobshcheniia i sudebnye ocherki (St Petersburg, 1902), 105.

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‘grandmother of the Russian Revolution’).¹³¹ The proceedings constituted a resounding rhetorical defeat for the government. As one high official noted a little later, the authorities had put up an ill-prepared and raw prosecutor, who had ‘delivered a flowery speech with fine phrases, but had not studied the case in any detail’.¹³² Dismay in government circles turned to horror with the acquittal of Vera Zasulich in 1878, which raised the politicization of legal process in Russia to a new level. Compressed into a single day and witnessed by several high-ranking personages (Aleksandr Gorchakov, Dmitrii Miliutin, Dmitrii Sol’skii), the trial of Zasulich—who had attempted to kill Fedor Trepov, the governor of St Petersburg—had nothing less than shock value for the government elite and for society as a whole. Again the prosecutor had been feeble: ‘he did not deliver but simply read out a weak speech that he’d prepared in advance, then had not a word to say in response to the truly brilliant defence performance.’¹³³ But most of all the trial underlined the growing partisanship of the legal profession and the inadequacies of the jury trial. The defence lawyer, the same Aleksandrov who was so well known to the authorities for his performance at the Trial of the 193, managed to secure a favourable jury, and his eloquent speech attracted Europewide attention. Even more infuriating, from the government perspective, was the unwillingness of the chairman of the court, Koni, to steer proceedings more firmly. In particular, he deemed admissible evidence on the brutality of Trepov, which had provided Zasulich with her motive, thus turning the trial into a judgment on the governor rather than his assailant. For Senator D. A. Obolenskii, Koni’s pointed impartiality, in the face of the emotive defence case, was practically an invitation to acquittal.¹³⁴ The Zasulich case was the prelude to an avalanche of political trials, as revolutionaries hunted the Tsar and were in turn hunted down by the authorities. The period 1878–82 saw no fewer than 120 political trials, most of them in military courts; between August 1878 and the end of 1880, a total of twenty-two revolutionaries were executed.¹³⁵ After the Zasulich trial the publication of transcripts of political trials was prohibited, but in a sense the damage had already been done: the educated public was already abuzz. It is easy to see how even a modest summary of a defendant’s final word might have aroused public interest ¹³¹ N. Karabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli (Berlin, 1921), 1: 28–9. ¹³² Sol’skii’s words, reported in Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa (1880–1883) (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927), 48. ¹³³ Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa, 49. ¹³⁴ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 269–73; Zapiski kniazia Dmitriia Aleksandrovicha Obolenskogo (St Petersburg, 2005), 431. Koni’s own account (first drafted in 1878, revised in 1904 and first published only in 1933) describes his increasingly fraught relationship with the government in 1877–8, recalling in particular the assumption of Count Palen, the Minister of Justice, that Koni was in a position to guarantee a guilty verdict. A. F. Koni, ‘Vospominaniia o dele Very Zasulich’, in A. F. Koni, Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 85. ¹³⁵ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 274–5.

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and pity. Arsenii Bogoslavskii, on trial before a Kiev military court for membership in a secret society, distribution of illegal literature, and preparation of terrorist acts, was reported as declaring that the ‘good of the people’ was his object and that he had no interest in advocating violence, believing instead that the inevitable ‘social revolution’ would be precipitated by economic crisis; his speech was peppered with ‘texts from scripture speaking of love for one’s neighbor, meekness, humility, and so on’. He was, nevertheless, sentenced to be hanged.¹³⁶ Another symptom of the mobilization of educated society was the renewed stirring of zemstvo activism. Relations between central and local government had already been coming under strain. In the period 1875–9, the government rejected almost 60 per cent of zemstvo petitions and almost 80 per cent of petitions relating to the organization of local government, a higher proportion than at any other time in the first two decades of the zemstvo. From 1877 onwards, a few zemstvo assemblies became to assert themselves, as matters of grave public concern such as the war against the Turks and the revolutionary movement allowed them scope to raise matters of broader political import.¹³⁷ The zemstvos had not been as quiescent in the 1870s as the newspapers liked to allege: issues such as taxation (in the early 1870s) and education policy had galvanized them. But the catalyst for a new wave of mobilization was the wave of terrorist acts starting in 1878. Zemstvos responded with professions of their loyalty to the throne, but a few, such as the Kharkov and Chernigov assemblies, added to these requests for greater powers over local affairs.¹³⁸ The most outspoken zemstvo man was Ivan Petrunkevich in Chernigov, who drew the government’s attention to a precedent recently set in the Balkans with the establishment of a constitution in Bulgaria: why should the Russians not have the same as the Bulgarians had just been granted? Arguments such as this only confirmed the government’s worst suspicions: from now on, any hints of a zemstvo union were to be suppressed. The most that would be permitted was the holding of regional congresses to respond to emergencies such as a diphtheria outbreak in Kharkov in 1880 or an infestation of crop-damaging beetles in Odessa in early 1881.¹³⁹ Interwoven with government apprehensions about the undue political ambitions of the zemstvo were concerns about its administrative effectiveness. Senatorial inspections of four provinces in 1880–1 revealed a dismayingly high rate of absenteeism in zemstvo assemblies and suggested that peasants in particular were proving ill equipped to deliver self-government, whether in their own volost assemblies or in their capacity as zemstvo delegates. The bugbear was anarchic village assemblies, where proceedings ¹³⁶ ‘Sudebnaia khronika’, SPb ved, 6 March 1880, 3. ¹³⁷ Thomas S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local Self-Government, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1989), 70, 75. ¹³⁸ Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, 3: 226–7, 230–1, 233–7. ¹³⁹ Thomas Earl Porter, The Zemstvo and the Emergence of Civil Society in Late Imperial Russia, 1864–1917 (San Francisco, 1991), 29–30.

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were disorderly and often drunken, and where elected volost officials were incapable of establishing order.¹⁴⁰ Yet misgivings of this kind, and restrictions on reporting of zemstvo affairs in 1878–9, did not prevent the start of something approaching a ‘party’ struggle between reactionaries and progressives in some zemstvos. The zemstvos had once more moved to the centre of public life, even if the politicization that took place remained modest and incipient. This was the context for Minister of the Interior Mikhail Loris-Melikov’s decision in January 1881 to summon a commission of zemstvo representatives.¹⁴¹ What Loris-Melikov offered was a relaunch of glasnost’ after its curtailment in the 1870s. His proposal to summon ‘loyal’ experts to advise ministers on legislation affecting ‘local needs’ was reminiscent of the Editing Commission of the late 1850s. In January 1881, he put forward a proposal for elected representatives from zemstvos and municipal dumas to take part in a ‘general commission’ to review draft legislation on local affairs.¹⁴² Political talk seemed about to move from the adversarial courtroom to the more courteous environment of a deliberative (if also merely consultative) commission.

¹⁴⁰ Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis, 84–5, 94. ¹⁴¹ Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, 3: 240–1, 250, 257, 263. ¹⁴² Francis William Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855–1914 (Princeton, 1990), 56–7.

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3 Small Deeds and Muffled Voices The Age of Counter-Reform, 1881–95

The early 1880s found the tsarist authorities in some consternation over the extent of unbridled public expression. The ferment at the time of the Russo-Turkish War had shown that ‘public opinion’, even of an eminently patriotic and nonrevolutionary nature, could get dangerously out of hand. Much worse was the way that recent trials of terrorists, revolutionaries, and socialist propagandists had laid bare the regime’s rhetorical incompetence. Most galling of all was the fact that the reading public was being kept well informed of the government’s failures despite measures to trim glasnost’. A law of 19 May 1871 had increased the state’s room for manoeuvre by allowing the government to deal with state crimes ‘administratively’, in other words without such cases ever going to trial, while a law passed soon after the Zasulich case in 1878 ensured that cases of attacks on government officials would no longer be tried by jury.¹ But reports (at least partly stenographic) of many of the major trials of the 1870s had appeared in the press, and a few of them had come out as separate book editions.² At the trial of those responsible for the assassination of Alexander II, the guilty verdicts were pre-ordained. But proceedings were still by no means choreographed. The performance of the prosecutor, Nikolai Murav’ev, was far better than that of his predecessors in the 1870s: as well as rhetorical flourishes he offered a quite compelling account of the defendants’ moral and psychological descent into violence. One representative of high officialdom felt that his speech had been too long, running from 10 am to 5 pm with only two breaks. It could have been half as long and would only have benefited. A more fundamental drawback of proceedings was that the trial gave the accused a platform. The chairman of the court, E. Ia. Fuks, made some attempts to prevent the defendants expounding on their party’s programme, but did not muzzle them altogether, allowing the charismatic Andrei Zheliabov in particular to expound his views at length.³ As Murav’ev noted in his epic speech, Zheliabov was a ‘type of agitator, not averse to ¹ Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905 (DeKalb, 1998), 21–3. ² N. A. Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii i politicheskie protsessy 1866–1904 gg. (Tula, 2000), 16. ³ Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa (1880–1883) (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927), 55. Some court observers felt that Fuks had been too mild and impartial, and Dmitrii Nabokov, the Minister of Justice, was summoned to defend his conduct of the trial. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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Figure 3.1. The trial of the assassins of Alexander II as depicted in a contemporary illustrated magazine. Source: Niva, no. 20 (1881). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:March_1st_Alexander_II_ assassination_trial_-Niva.jpg

theatrical effects, wanting to drape himself to the last moment in his conspiratorial toga’; not even the prosecutor could deny that he possessed ‘intelligence, spirit and adroitness’.⁴ The Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin was struck by how well the accused had accounted for themselves: they had all spoken ‘decently and very fluently’, while Zheliabov had been ‘especially talkative and self-assured’.⁵ Although the transcript published in Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik and other newspapers was heavily censored, the fact that it appeared at all was remarkable; even the bowdlerized text made an electric impression on some readers. In the summer of 1890, the future Menshevik luminary Iulii Tsederbaum (Martov) came across a second-hand copy and was overwhelmed: ‘The reading of this transcript turned my inner world upside down, finishing off what had been started by the history of the French Revolution.’ Together with old newspapers carrying reports on the political trials of the 1870s, it set him on the path to revolutionary activism.⁶ It is easy to see why: some of the more emotive or politically charged passages (such as Sof ’ia Perovskaia’s final statement) were heavily censored, but what remained still ⁴ V. V. Razbegaev (ed.), Sud nad tsareubiitsami: Delo 1-go marta 1881 goda (St Petersburg, 2014), 199. ⁵ D. A. Miliutin, Dnevnik. 1879–1881, ed. L. G. Zakharova (Moscow, 2010), 300. ⁶ Iu. O. Martov, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata (Moscow, 2004), 44, 51.

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offered a powerful account of the six defendants and their wildly different trajectories in life, as well as a significant part of their political credo. The impact on contemporaries must have been all the greater because of the previous shortage of reliable information about revolutionary terrorism available to the reading public. This general ignorance had been exacerbated by the especially strict controls on publication in force for the previous two years: in January 1879 the publication of independent transcripts of political trials was forbidden, and in October the publication of full transcripts was discontinued altogether. It was only after the Trial of the 16 in 1880, where the defendants included those accused of organizing recent attempts on the Tsar’s life, that people realized there was even such an entity as The People’s Will, rather than a vague ‘revolutionary party’ stretching back to the first assassination attempt in 1866. In March and April 1881 the reading public made up for lost time. Its appetite for information is suggested by the fact that the copies of Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik that carried the trial transcripts were going for fifty kopecks (almost ten times the normal price).⁷

The Rhetorical Counter-Reform This was the last such opportunity the reading public would be afforded for some time. In the period 1882–1904, transcripts of political trials were prohibited (even if the most famous of them circulated illegally).⁸ When the authorities finally tracked down the main surviving figure in The People’s Will, Vera Figner, they were not going to repeat their earlier mistakes. The Trial of the 14 in September 1884 was held in closed session with a small and selected audience; according to the London Times, only nine tickets were made available.⁹ In the sensitive period after the assassination of Alexander II, even an apparently inoffensive Moscow professor could get into trouble for not watching his words. On 16 May 1883, at a coronation dinner he hosted as the mayor of Moscow, Boris Chicherin delivered a speech to his assembled counterparts from other parts of Russia. Here he called for the ‘unification of zemstvo people’ (edinenie zemskikh liudei) and made a stirring appeal to solidarity: ‘A few days will pass, and we shall all disperse to the various corners of our spacious fatherland; but if we take away with us a sense of our shared connection and the importance of common activity, our meeting will not disappear without trace.’¹⁰ His words were taken very badly by the authorities,

⁷ Iuliia Safronova, Russkoe obshchestvo v zerkale revoliutsionnogo terrora. 1879–1881 gody (Moscow, 2014), 52–4, 95, 98, 129–30. ⁸ Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 16. ⁹ Lynne Ann Harnett, The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, 2014), 136. ¹⁰ This is the version Chicherin gives in his memoirs: B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina: Zemstvo i moskovskaia duma (Moscow, 1934), 236.

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being interpreted as a call for a constitution. Although Chicherin insisted this was not what he had meant, the press—both foreign and domestic—soon picked up the story. In due course Chicherin was informed by the Moscow Governor that the Emperor expected him to resign. The story of how Chicherin’s speech came to the attention of the government is instructive. An anodyne report on the dinner was published in the next day’s Moskovskie vedomosti, but that same day the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a circular forbidding further press reporting of the event. Chicherin’s speech had been scribbled down in pencil by an official observer, whose notes were swiftly written up in such a way as to raise the hackles of the minister. The text was then lithographed and circulated to prominent conservatives who had no love either of municipal self-government or of Chicherin personally; even more provocatively, it was leaked to foreign correspondents. Soon enough, Mikhail Katkov took up the cudgels against Chicherin in his Moskovskie vedomosti. Supporters of the mayor were adamant that the text published abroad, and circulating within officialdom, was a slanderous falsification.¹¹ The Chicherin affair was a largely superfluous reminder that public speech was a risk as much as an opportunity in imperial Russia. The point was reiterated by a number of retrograde measures that followed the assassination of Alexander II. In May 1881, a directive by the Main Administration of the Press had made publication of even the resolutions of public gatherings such as city dumas and zemstvos subject to approval by the governor. Otechestvennye zapiski, the most hard-hitting chronicler of zemstvo life in the 1870s, was soon forced to close.¹² In August 1881, an ‘Ordinance on Measures for the Preservation of the State Order and Public Tranquility’ extended police powers to detain suspects and gave governors the power to shut down even private gatherings.¹³ In 1884, new university statutes brought an end to professorial autonomy. No wonder that, when stenography was introduced in the Simbirsk zemstvo assembly at the end of 1886, there was a two-day discussion of what exactly this meant for the institution’s working practices. Was the stenographer a clerical assistant to the secretary, or was he producing a ‘document’ with significance independent of the ordinary minutes (zhurnal)? Evidently, several of the delegates were worried that their speeches would not come across well on the page, or (more likely) that they might be offering hostages to fortune. Some reassurance was offered on both scores: they would have the right to make stylistic corrections to the draft transcript, and the

¹¹ See the anonymous pamphlet Rech’ B. N. Chicherina, Moskovskogo Gorodskogo Golovy, 16-go maia 1883 g. Epizod iz istorii koronatsii v Moskve (Berlin, 1883). ¹² Boris Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let (Moscow, 1909–11), 3: 132, 343. ¹³ Daly, Autocracy under Siege, 33–4. Daly notes that this was more a prolongation of emergency legislation than a radical expansion of state power. Nonetheless, this ‘temporary’ measure remained in force for many years.

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provincial governor would be sent only the minutes, not the full stenographic version.¹⁴ Open discussion was on the retreat, whether in the zemstvo, in the courts or even among the ruling elite. The flagging strength of glasnost’ had been symbolized by the declining health and morale of Alexander II, whose public statements by the late 1870s were but a feeble echo of his rousing speeches on the eve of emancipation.¹⁵ The new ruler and his main adviser, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, soon took a principled stand against the rhetorical excesses of the previous reign. Ironically, some observers assumed Pobedonostsev to be a liberal for his role in the 1864 legal reform, but this could hardly have been further from the truth. Not only was he unremittingly hostile to parliaments on the Western model, he also had no time for Slavophile notions of a consultative Assembly of the Land. He was a bureaucratic centralizer par excellence.¹⁶ The rivalry between Pobedonostsev and the reform-minded Loris-Melikov and Dmitrii Miliutin had been palpable even in the 1870s; in March 1874, for example, Miliutin committed to his diary his exasperation at Pobedonostsev’s ‘seminarian’s eloquence’ in a discussion of marriage rights for sectarians.¹⁷ But matters came to a head a week after the assassination of Alexander II in the discussion of Loris-Melikov’s proposal to allow representatives of broader society a role in discussing legislation. This was an inauspicious moment to contemplate reform. Nevertheless, several of the leading ministers stuck to their view that the proposed measures—whose main component was the creation of an appointed consultative body that would be more genuinely representative of Russian society than the mandarin State Council—were advisable and indeed essential. Halfway through the meeting, however, a powerful dissenting voice was heard. Pobedonostsev, the most eloquent and unbending representative of statist conservatism, launched into an attack on the concept of reform (and, effectively, an indictment of the entire reign of Alexander II). Using a term that he repeated with the force of an incantation, he insisted that the reforms of the 1860s and 1870s had merely brought Russia ‘talking-shops’ (govoril’ni). The last thing the country now needed was more of the same. The talk had to end; it was time to act.¹⁸

¹⁴ Stenograficheskii otchet zasedanii Simbirskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia sessii 1886 goda (Simbirsk, 1887). ¹⁵ N. A. Naidenov, Vospominaniia o vidennom, slyshannom i ispytannom (Moscow, 2007), 256–7 (examples from 23 April 1877, 20 November 1878, 20 November 1879); D. Nikiforov, Moskva v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra II (Moscow, 1904), 171–2, 185. On Alexander’s fearful and withdrawn behaviour from 1879 onwards (in the face of a terrorist campaign), see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton, 2000), 148–9. ¹⁶ Kizvetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoleteii, 86–7. ¹⁷ D. A. Miliutin, Dnevnik. 1873–1875 (Moscow, 2008), 105. ¹⁸ The fullest and most reliable account of this meeting is in Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa, 31–46.

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Pobedonostsev’s sharp distinction between talk and action would soon be confirmed. His more liberal-minded colleagues came away from the meeting convinced that they had won the argument and that the reform would go through. They were shocked to hear, some weeks later, that the Emperor had issued an intransigent manifesto (authored, in fact, by Pobedonostsev) that had firmly put a stop to significant reform projects for the foreseeable future. The cut and thrust of political debate, it seemed, meant nothing given the realities of court politics. Whoever had the Emperor’s ear was bound to win.¹⁹ In retrospect, the defeat of Loris-Melikov’s proposal looks thoroughly overdetermined, given the new Emperor’s personality and proclivities. As a young man, Alexander had been notably less gracious than his alluring father, never feeling at ease at receptions and ceremonies. Only recently, in early 1880, he had given short shrift to Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich’s idea for a consultative body of the estates.²⁰ It was little surprise that Pobedonostsev, Alexander’s former tutor, became the dominant spirit of the age. After March 1881, Pobedonostsev was constantly on his guard against public infringements on state prerogatives, whether in the sanctum of the State Council or elsewhere. Early in 1882, he complained to State Secretary E. A. Peretts that affairs discussed in the State Council were leaking to the press: in his view, the supporting bureaucracy was ‘overflowing with journalists. You can’t say a straightforward honest word in the State Council without it immediately being made known to everyone. The State Council is the Emperor’s council, not an open [glasnoe] institution’.²¹ Loris-Melikov’s successor N. P. Ignat’ev was similarly routed by his government colleagues, not to mention the Emperor himself, when he proposed the creation of a consultative body. Probably acting on the suggestion of the prominent Slavophile Ivan Aksakov, Ignat’ev argued for a Land Assembly summoned to coincide with the coronation of the new Tsar: this would be a powerful gesture and help to bring sovereign and people closer. He saw the measure as a return to Muscovite tradition, confident that it would result in an authentically Russian alternative to Western constitutionalism; there would be no infringement of monarchical prerogatives. Preparations were made to announce the convocation of such an assembly on 6 May 1882, exactly two hundred years after the last such instance. Russian embassies abroad were carefully instructed how to present the measure: under no circumstances should the Land Assembly be referred to as an assemblée nationale or even a Reichstag. All this effort came to nothing. Ignat’ev

¹⁹ On the Loris–Melikov proposals and their fate in the spring of 1881, see Francis W. Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914 (Princeton, 1990), 53–62, and Thomas S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local Self-Government, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1989), 103–14. ²⁰ Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 170, 191. ²¹ Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa, 114–15. Peretts did his best to rebut the charge, suggesting that leaks were much more likely to be explained by members of the Council gossiping at the English Club.

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seems always to have been over-optimistic in judging the degree of support his proposal enjoyed from the Emperor. When Pobedonostsev got to hear of the idea on 4 May and fulminated to Alexander that an Assembly of the Land would be equivalent to sanctioning revolution, his arguments appear to have fallen on fertile soil. Ignat’ev’s position was further weakened when the proposal was leaked to the press: the influential Katkov weighed in against it in a lead article of 12 May. Much as he might deny that he intended the creation of a permanent assembly, opinion in high officialdom was against him, and he did not help matters by arguing his case poorly at the State Council.²²

The Stirrings of Rhetoric: Educated Society in the 1880s By the early 1880s it was not just the government that was preoccupied with the failures and limitations of public speech in the post-reform era. The educated public also had misgivings about trial by jury; even for liberals, the Zasulich case set a worrying precedent. Traces of anxiety about failed communication can be detected even in fiction: it was around this time that the unreliable listener joined the unreliable narrator as a protagonist in Russian literature.²³ Radicals also had reason to despair of the spoken word, which had not brought them notable success in the ‘Going to the People’ movement of the mid-1870s. Not only had speech proved disturbingly policeable—hundreds of populists were rounded up by the authorities for their activities—the propagandists had clearly failed to get their message across to the village audience. The communicative cleavages in Russian society remained profound. In the legal profession, as in other areas of intelligentsia life, the 1880s were widely perceived as a period of demoralization. Opportunities for political engagement dried up after the post-1881 crackdown, the publication of stenographic transcripts was discontinued, and lawyers had to fall back on unexciting civil cases. Attendance at general Bar assemblies was patchy, and there was little turnover in the membership of Bar councils. A number of disciplinary cases— including a lawyer who had published pornographic articles and arranged gambling on the premises of the Petersburg Bar association—undermined the reputation of the profession. Perhaps most dispiriting of all was the fact that sworn advocates faced much greater competition for the available work due to the overproduction of law graduates; the legal profession was becoming a

²² David MacKenzie, Count N. P. Ignat’ev: The Father of Lies? (New York, 2002), chap. 16; E. M. Feoktistov et al., Za kulisami politiki (Moscow, 2001), 132–6; Pearson, Russian Officialdom, 114–15. ²³ Gabriella Safran, ‘The Troubled Frame Narrative: Bad Listening in Late Imperial Russia’, RR, 72 (2013): 556–72.

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proletariat.²⁴ There was no shortage of commentators ready to bemoan the vulgarization of the profession. One survey of courtroom practice found that lawyers were too prone to rhetorical tricks, overwhelming juries either with Biblical quotations or with legal niceties. They resorted to ineffective gestures such as ‘nervously scratching the back of the neck as if they have just been bitten’ or ‘demonstratively sticking out the stomach’. Mannerisms were redolent either of the sacristan or of the market trader. On top of all this, Jews were prominent in the profession, which for some observers raised serious questions about its ethics.²⁵ As the lawyer and prominent liberal Konstantin Arsen’ev noted in 1888, Russia was still struggling to overcome a rhetorical time lag of centuries: ‘Ever since the closing of the Pskov veche in the sixteenth century, ever since the final triumph of the written word in legal proceedings, there has been nowhere for the Russian to practise public speaking.’ Only elite churchmen had the opportunities or the confidence to demonstrate rhetorical facility; although universities since the 1830s had provided opportunities for public speaking, it was rarely heard beyond the walls of the lecture theatre.²⁶ Conversely, the Russian press commented with fascination on the oratorical prowess of American politicians and on the extent to which Americans in general were socialized to be effective public speakers: in school debating competitions, clubs, even ‘eloquence classes’.²⁷ Anton Chekhov used the travails of public speaking as material for the short stories that first made his name in the 1880s. Unsuccessful communication was a regular theme in these minute comedies of human failure, vanity, and misunderstanding. In ‘The Correspondent’ (1882), for example, a local journalist is invited to a merchant party, where he gets drunk and delivers, in painfully ‘fine’ language, a verbose and self-pitying after-dinner speech. He then causes accidental offence to his hosts when he writes up the occasion. In the altogether farcical ‘The Orator’ (1886), a purportedly fine speaker is called along to a funeral on the promise of free food and drink but delivers a eulogy to the wrong person—who happens to be alive and also present.²⁸ The satirical journal Budil’nik, where the young Chekhov published in the early 1880s, gave choice examples of mixed metaphors and unfortunate expressions uttered in the courtroom or the city duma.²⁹ In particular milieux, however, the art of persuasive speech was flourishing— perhaps nowhere more so than in high official circles. Committee life, in Russia as elsewhere, had a rhetorical dimension. Even in the highest political body of the ²⁴ Jörg Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich 1864–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 547–50. ²⁵ Vlad. Ptitsyn, Drevnie advokaty i nashi prisiazhnye tsitserony (St Petersburg, 1894), quotation 28. ²⁶ K. Arsen’ev, ‘Russkoe sudebnoe krasnorechie’, VE, no. 4 (1888): 768. ²⁷ P. Sacerdotum, ‘Za okeanom: Ianki senatory i oratory’, Spb ved, no. 34 (3 February 1885): 1. ²⁸ A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow, 1974–83), 2: 179–85, 5: 431–5. ²⁹ ‘Tsvety krasnorechiia’, Budil’nik, no. 10 (1885): 117.

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Empire, the State Council, there had been faint glimmerings of glasnost’ on the eve of the assassination. In January 1881, some newspapers were suggesting that meetings of the State Council should be made public, and the reformist Grand Prince Konstantin apparently expressed sympathy with this view in a private conversation. His interlocutor (Peretts), however, was ready with the objections: the high authority of this body would not survive public scrutiny, given the modest content of most discussions. Most members of the Council were unconfident public speakers, so glasnost’ would reduce the number of participants in debate to the half-dozen usual suspects. The chances were, moreover, that mediocrities would be the main people to hold forth—and what was to be gained from their ‘chatter’?³⁰ Not everyone, however, was tongue-tied. On taking up his position in the State Council in January 1883, Peretts’s successor A. A. Polovtsov was struck by the performative dimension of proceedings, in particular the contrasting styles of the various speakers. The Comptroller General Dmitrii Sol’skii was ‘what in the ancient world was called a ritor, he can talk about anything you like and will always say something clever and, in general terms, appealing, but not always to the point’. Minister of State Properties Ostrovskii spoke with ‘lawyerly eloquence, thinking only how to achieve what he wants and play a dirty trick on his opponent’. But the most effective speaker, in Polovtsov’s view, was Pobedonostsev himself: the Chief Procurator spoke ‘smoothly, naturally; in his speech there is nothing pompous; the exposition is a little didactic, but very appealing’.³¹ The irony was that Pobedonostsev, the uncompromising foe of ‘talking-shops’, was himself a skilled exponent of the spoken word.³² Even Russia’s leading public intellectuals would have struggled to match him (had they been allowed the attempt). Early in the reign of Alexander III the new Minister of the Interior, Ignat’ev, started a rumour that the novelist Turgenev and the newspaper editor Katkov would be added to the membership of the State Council. But one well-placed observer commented that Katkov would not have performed well in this role: his oral expositions tended to be long and involved, and he had a tendency to embark on the next train of thought before having reached his first destination. As an editor he had incomparably greater influence on public affairs.³³ When controversial matters came up, discussion in the State Council could be just as heated as in the difficult days of March and April 1881. The debate in

³⁰ Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa, 19–20. ³¹ A. A. Polovtsov, Dnevnik Gosudarstvennogo sekretaria (Moscow, 2005), 1:87. ³² A. Iu. Polunov, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev: Vekhi politicheskoi biografii (Moscow, 2010), 95–6. ³³ E. M. Feoktistov, ‘Za kulisami politiki i literatury’, in Feoktistov, Za kulisami politiki, 83. Feoktistov was a writer-turned-official who had taken the well-trodden path from youthful Westernizing liberalism to mature conservatism.

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December 1888 on the reform of local administration saw an exceptionally stormy exchange of views. This was the swansong of the already very ill Dmitrii Tolstoi, who advocated the introduction of strong executive authority in the provinces, in the form of Land Captains, to remedy the defects of zemstvo self-administration. As one scholar puts it, ‘members interrupted each other so frequently that at times the State Council resembled the chaotic peasant assemblies that they unanimously condemned’. Tolstoi’s own defence of the policy was unconvincing, and it only went through after the Emperor threw his authority behind it after the meeting.³⁴ Rhetorical contests in the government elite remained, of course, strictly behind closed doors. But there were other places in Russian society of the 1880s where speech did rather more to address a ‘public’. After 1881, despite the restrictions on publication and public assembly, a good deal of meaningful and at least semipublic talk was going on in educated society—nowhere more so than in the universities, where lectures were even more part of the pedagogical fabric than books. For the budding historian Aleksandr Kizevetter, who arrived in Moscow from distant Orenburg in 1884, the big draw was Vasilii Kliuchevskii, whose twoyear course on Russian history did not disappoint. Kizevetter was impressed not only by the intellectual content but also by the style of delivery, which was vivid and full of artistry.³⁵ Other lecturers made an impression too. The theologian Father N. A. Sergievskii had a theatrical flourish in the lecture theatre and a fondness for striking phrases such as the following: ‘If we put the locomotive of faith on the tracks of philosophy, our first station will be God.’³⁶ Conversely, Kizevetter was not much interested in student politics, finding it to be disorganized and haphazard in the topics it took up. The general student assembly (skhodka) was a ‘chaotic veche where there was no elected representation, no advance discussion, no accepted rules for the conduct of meetings and the reaching of decisions’.³⁷ Beyond the university lecture hall, Kizevetter found the city rather quiet and old-fashioned. Following the 1881 assassination, the state had successfully liquidated populist activity, while propaganda among factory workers had not yet started. There were very few public lectures at this time, and public meetings (mitingi) were out of the question. The 1884 university statutes had put firm limits

³⁴ Pearson, Russian Officialdom, 198–202. ³⁵ A. A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii: Vospominaniia 1881–1914 (Moscow, 1997), 21, 46–7. Kizvetter was by no means the only listener of the time to be struck by Kliuchevskii’s artistic delivery and his one-liners. See also V. A. Nelidov, Teatral’naia Moskva: Sorok let moskovskikh teatrov (Moscow, 2002), 27–9; P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia 1859–1917 (New York, 1955), 1: 92 (the latter testimony all the more valuable because his relations with Kliuchevskii later became very strained); V. A. Maklakov, Iz vospominanii (New York, 1954), 189–90. ³⁶ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 38. Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, a student at Moscow University from 1881 to 1885, recalls the very same phrase in his own portrait of the colourful Father Sergievskii: A. V. Amfiteatrov, Zhizn’ cheloveka, neudobnogo dlia sebia i dlia mnogikh (Moscow, 2004), 114–15. ³⁷ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 40.

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on professorial speech, and the legal scholar Sergei Muromtsev had been dismissed even before that for sins that included calling Russia a ‘decaying organism’ at a meeting with a Bulgarian delegation in 1883 and being party to ‘outrageous’ toasts delivered at Turgenev’s funeral the same year.³⁸ Only occasionally did the progressive educated public have opportunities to find its voice. The celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the zemstvo in 1889 occasioned a number of strong speeches by veterans of the institution. Another opportunity to express mildly adventurous sentiments came at banquets on special occasions such as anniversaries. After-dinner speakers might try to smuggle in hints of an ‘oppositional spirit’ (oppozitsionnyi dushok), for which they would be amply rewarded by applause from the audience. At the university’s annual Tatiana Day celebration (12 January), young and old spread out over the city only to congregate for dinner at the Great Moscow Inn; here Plevako and Kliuchevskii could be seen and heard at the same table.³⁹ Tatiana Day may have had more to do with drunken revelry than with orderly deliberation, but Kizevetter did receive an education in constitutional ideas at meetings of the Moscow Juridical Society. Its chairman was Muromtsev, who two decades later would show his mettle in the Duma: A perfect knowledge of parliamentary rules and customs, majestic selfpossession, the strict propriety of his every word and gesture, and a stately earnestness born of deep respect for the very idea of popular representation— all this gave the impression that Muromtsev had spent his entire life within the walls of a parliament.⁴⁰

Even if Russia had no parliament, ceremonial speechifying continued unabated in the 1880s, and may even have increased. In 1885, the same Muromtsev passed ironic comment on the number of occasions that gave people an excuse for holding forth. The death of the actor Ivan Samarin was followed by a large funeral procession that set off from his dacha outside Moscow. When it reached the edge of the city centre, the cortege was stopped in its tracks by ‘some “celebrated” magician of the word’, who decided to hold forth on the spot (only then to repeat the trick at the actor’s grave). As Muromtsev noted sarcastically, ‘ “events” are constantly producing demand for “eloquence” ’. The public celebration, complete with speeches, of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the career of a senior

³⁸ Details from a dossier helpfully prepared for V. G. Glazov, the Minister of Education in 1904–5, on cases where professors had been fired for political indiscretions. See RGIA, f. 922, op. 1, d. 217, ll. 3–3ob. For more on the circumstances of Muromtsev’s removal, see D. V. Aronov, Pervyi spiker. Opyt nauchnoi biografii Sergeia Andreevicha Muromtseva (Moscow, 2006), 73–6. ³⁹ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 25, 30, 32, 121, 221–3. ⁴⁰ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 31.

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police official was the first time an anniversary of a member of the police service had been marked with such fanfare.⁴¹

Talk and Class: Local Politics and the Spoken Word Muromtsev compensated for his truncated university career by taking an active role in municipal politics, though that too had its frustrations. In 1886 he bemoaned the ‘colossal’ growth in oratory in the Moscow duma, which made for an unfortunate contrast with the modest achievements of that body. Listening, moreover, was much less in evidence than talking. Deputies exerted themselves ‘only at minutes when they felt the need to make a general noise, to stir up the air with indistinct but loud exclamations. Such moments arrive frequently in our duma—whenever the majority feels the need to “break off ” a speaker it dislikes’. Often they ‘did not exchange their thoughts or argue but simply bicker’.⁴² Similar disparagement of dumas and zemstvo assemblies could be found in the main Petersburg paper in the mid-1880s. As an editorial in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti opined, ‘our little domestic parliaments’ were showing themselves unfit for even the modest roles allotted to them. Too often, ‘words substituted for action’, and deputies were too busy ‘playing at parliament’.⁴³ Thus, the notion of the ‘talking shop’ was well established in Russian educated discourse of the 1880s—not just that of the arch-conservative Pobednostsev but also that of the liberal Muromtsev and the moderate Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti. There was, however, an ambiguity in the stereotype: was the problem with deliberative institutions per se, or was it to do with the performance of those institutions in Russia? On closer inspection, the disparaging accounts of the municipal dumas seem to have been a response not only to the rhetorical inadequacies of those bodies but also to their class composition. The dumas were elected on a tiny franchise (typically 1–2 per cent of the urban population), and in the 1880s the voting method—the casting of balls for and against each individual candidate—already struck contemporaries as cumbersome and anachronistic.⁴⁴ Such procedures could only work when elections were restricted to a tiny oligarchy. Yet, at least in Moscow and Petersburg, the dumas were substantial bodies (180 and 250 members respectively) including an impressive selection of the city’s great and good. Moreover, the character of the oligarchy had changed significantly as a result of the 1870 municipal statute, which replaced social estate with property as the suffrage criterion. This gave members of the ⁴¹ Sergei Muromtsev, Stat’i i rechi (Moscow, 1910), 117–19. ⁴² Muromtsev, Stat’i i rechi, 121–2. ⁴³ Spb ved, 17 January 1885, 1. ⁴⁴ A. L. Gurko, Nashi vybory voobshche i moskovskie gorodskie v osobennosti (Moscow, 1889), 21–4. On the ‘stupefying effect’ of this voting method, see also P. Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov, Vybory glasnykh v moskovskuiu gorodskuiu dumu na predstoiashchee chetyrekhletie (Moscow, 1877), 5.

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merchant class more opportunities to gain representation. The merchants were also more motivated to get involved, since, at least until the reversal of much of the 1870 statute in 1892, the dumas had considerable powers to set policy and allocate tax revenues (even if the funds at their disposal were far smaller than in other European capitals).⁴⁵ Although the 1870 statute made no provision for electoral meetings to discuss the candidates, in Moscow such discussions took place in professional groups, extended gatherings of acquaintances, and corporate bodies such as the noble assembly. It was much easier for people in the smaller and most privileged first curia to find each other and to make themselves informed about the candidates. Largely because of low turnout in the more numerous second and third curiae, the level of participation at Moscow’s first municipal election under the new legislation was tiny: a mere 580 voters, or 3 per cent. But the number of electors in the third curia was constantly growing, as property spread to the non-noble sections of society, and so did the level of voting activity. In Moscow the breakthrough year for the less privileged orders was 1876, when the merchants organized themselves as an electoral force and came to dominate the duma. In the 1880s they were joined by a significant number of townspeople (meshchane), artisans, and peasants, who in the 1881 session provided twelve of the sixty-two councillors who spoke at meetings. The social balance was only reversed when new restrictions on the third curia were brought in for the 1889 elections. The average educational level of councillors was falling. Worse still, from the point of view of the old elite, was the fact that representatives of the lower strata were not holding their tongues: they were vigilant about public finances and would often make extended interjections. If non-nobles had been tongue-tied and reluctant to speak in the early days of the duma, by the second half of the 1870s they had overcome their inhibitions. In 1877, merchants and honoured citizens accounted for almost two-thirds of speeches at the twenty-two meetings of the duma, nobles and civil servants for just under a third. By 1881, moreover, the long silent peasants, workers, and meshchane had found their voice: they delivered just over a quarter of the speeches in that year. The gentry and intelligentsia chuntered accordingly at their perceived marginalization by the commercial estate.⁴⁶ As one Moscow memoirist noted, the post-1877 representatives of the lower orders were not as deferential as in the past: they displayed ‘sharp tactics and even pretensions to oratory’.⁴⁷ They were also disciplined in attending meetings, which often gave them the deciding voice. As a result meetings were distinctly noisier in the 1880s than in the 1870s, and matters sometimes went as far as personal abuse. Ironically, the 1870s legislation—which

⁴⁵ See Robert W. Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia’s Urban Crisis, 1906–1914 (New York, 1987), chap. 2 for a general treatment of these matters. ⁴⁶ Vorontsov-Vel’iaminov, Vybory glasnykh, 5. ⁴⁷ N. A. Naidenov, Vospominaniia o vidennom, slyshannom i ispytannom (Moscow, 2007), 149.

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had done away with the estate qualification for voting—had produced a duma divided more sharply than ever along estate lines.⁴⁸ The Petersburg duma saw a similar divide emerge in the 1870s between the commercial and industrial contingent and the noble and bureaucratic element, though here the forces were more evenly balanced: at the election of 1873, the merchants were the single largest group with 115 delegates out of 252, while four years later the nobles and bureaucrats took a majority.⁴⁹ A journalist’s account of the Petersburg city duma in 1879 described an assembly divided along fairly clear social and occupational lines. The various ‘parties’ were even visible in the seating arrangements: the intelligentsia sat at the front, then came the ‘vocal’ and ‘nonvocal’ inn-keepers (traktirshchiki), then the traders, then the meshchane; to the right along the wall were the contractors (podriadchiki), to the left were sundry deputies including members of the city credit society. These various groupings differed greatly in their esprit de corps: the intelligentsia was characterized by constant discord, while the meshchane voted as a bloc under the patriarchal rule of a certain Fedot Andreevich Andreev, who managed them like a conductor waving his baton. Individual deputies could be divided into those who spoke too much (the glasnye), those who spoke occasionally (the poluglasnye), and those who never spoke (the soglasnye, who were ready to go along with anything). This observer at least clearly felt that some of the deputies had no business speaking at all. Nikolai Egorovich Akhanov, a merchant and member of the inn-keeper grouping, looked as if ‘a peasant who has spent his whole life in the village had been dressed up in a tail-coat’; only once did Akhanov break his silence, saying little of interest in a half-hour speech but at least proving that his mouth was ‘designed not only for taking in food’. At the other extreme was the high-ranking civil servant Morits Il’ich Mikhel’son, who held forth on almost every issue. He spoke ‘before the meeting, during the meeting, after the meeting—passionately, all the while grimacing, dancing around on the spot, jigging up and down, holding his arms aloft’.⁵⁰ The situation outside the capitals seems to have been broadly similar. In the 1870s and 1880s there were several rounds of elections under the new legislation, and they were quite keenly fought. The merchantry was itself internally divided: in Lipetsk, for example, the ‘old’ families found their hegemony challenged by a ‘new’ generation. Nonetheless, a widely expressed concern, in the provinces as in Moscow, was that the merchantry was taking over the municipal dumas. In the black earth region of central Russia, merchants generally had somewhere between ⁴⁸ I. F. Pisar’kova, Gorodskie reformy v Rosssii i Moskovskaia duma (Moscow, 2010), 122–77; figures cited in this paragraph, ibid., 135, 170. ⁴⁹ B. B. Dubentsov and V. A. Nardova, Peterburgskaia gorodskaia duma, 1846–1918 (St Petersburg, 2005), 52. ⁵⁰ Portrety glasnykh S.-Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy sessii 1877–1880 godov (St Petersburg, 1880), 10, 12, 14–16, 90.

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half and two-thirds of the seats in the dumas of district towns.⁵¹ The contemporary press had much to say about the merchants exploiting their preponderance to pursue their own selfish interests.⁵² In the 1890s, a further source of anxiety was the rise of a financial haute bourgeoisie held to be lording it over gentry and tongue-tied ‘old’ merchants alike.⁵³

The Theatrical Turn For all its travails in the 1880s, the spoken word was becoming a distinct preoccupation of Russia society even beyond the arenas of the municipal assembly and the university lecture hall. As ever, Chekhov was in the vanguard. In November 1888, he acted on a request from a teacher from the Theatre Institute and asked his brother Aleksandr to help him dig up some examples of the art of oratory. He suggested looking up press cuttings from the archive of Novoe vremia on the death and funeral of Victor Hugo. In the event, his brother was directed to a recent Russian publication entitled European Orators.⁵⁴ A few years later, in January 1893, Chekhov wrote an article for Novoe vremia to celebrate the introduction in Moscow University of classes in declamation. In his view, this was a welcome sign that Russians might start to overcome their inadequacy as public speakers. ‘We have many lawyers, prosecutors, professors and preachers, who ought for their professions to have an oratorical bent, we have many institutions which people call “talking-shops” . . . but we completely lack people who know how to express their thoughts clearly, economically and simply.’ There were only ‘five or six’ true orators in the two capitals, while the provinces had none at all to speak of. This was all the more regrettable given that ‘in all eras the richness of the language has gone hand in hand with the art of oratory’. The article met a rebuttal the next day in Peterburgskaia gazeta: eloquence was not the highest manifestation of culture, and in any case true orators were born, not made: the efforts of Moscow University would have little effect. The effect of an oration also depended on whether the speaker had anything worth saying: form could not be divorced from content.⁵⁵

⁵¹ A. K. Semenov, Vsesoslovnoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie v uezdnykh gorodakh Orlovskoi, Riazanskoi i Tambovskoi gubernii v poslednei treti XIX—nachale XX veka (Lipetsk, 2004), 24, 26, 29–32, 44–5. On merchant domination, see also A. M. Bludov, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii na rubezhe XIX—XX vv. (Tambov, 2006), 42. ⁵² E. Krymskii, Plody gorodskogo i zemskogo samoupravleniia (Chtenie ot skuki) (Zvenigorod, 1886), e.g. 12. ⁵³ See the disenchanted depiction of a Siberian town duma in D. N. Mamin-Sibiriak’s 1895 novel Khleb: Mamin-Sibiriak, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow, 1953–55), 7: 572–3. ⁵⁴ Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Pis’ma, 3: 75, 352. The author of the work in question was Aleksei Shmakov, among other things assistant to Fedor Plevako. ⁵⁵ Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 16: 266–7, 521–2.

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Still, Chekhov had identified a significant trend. Declamation was becoming more prominent in the gimnaziia curriculum in the last third of the nineteenth century. Collections of literary texts intended for reading aloud became a distinct publishing genre in the 1870s. Systematic textbooks on the subject of declamation started appearing in the 1880s. Readers were taken through all the skills necessary for effective public speaking: from breathing, voice modulation, and gesture through to the ‘tones’ suitable for epic, lyric, dramatic, and comic works.⁵⁶ Russian authors were keenly aware of Western European know-how in this area and eager to deploy it. A translation of Alexander Bain’s English Composition and Rhetoric, a widely used school textbook in England, presented readers with all the basic figures of speech and contained an extensive section on ‘oratorical speech or persuasion’.⁵⁷ Even more influential was Ernest Legouvé, whose works on declamation served as an inspiration for Dmitrii Koroviakov’s The Art of Expressive Reading (1892). As Russia’s first professional reader independent of the theatre, and professor of declamation at the newly formed drama school of the Russian Literary-Theatrical Society, Koroviakov had unusually great opportunities to put his recommendations into practice.⁵⁸ Theatre itself gained greater prominence in the 1880s. Part of its appeal lay in the fact that it had little competition in this otherwise subdued age. But for the Russian theatre the 1880s were a decade not of stagnation but of a significant, and long delayed, reform: the removal of the theatre monopoly in 1882, which weakened the privileged status of the five imperial theatres in Moscow and St Petersburg and quickly led to the development of a more diverse entertainment culture, in the provinces as well as in the capitals. Factory and temperance theatres brought stage entertainment to a significant proportion of the working-class population, while the sprawling middle class was served by a number of private establishments.⁵⁹ All this was accompanied by the growth of theatre criticism and the specialist theatre press, which helped to formulate and to communicate the special qualities of stage performance. Admittedly, the quality of new plays left something to be desired, and censorship continued to take a heavy toll (a third of the almost 4,000 Russian plays submitted for approval in the 1880s were forbidden for performance). But the shortage of alternative outlets for public expression, along with the new-found diversity of theatre life, gave actors a new kind of prominence: they were now not only entertainers or celebrities but also, potentially, embodiments of civic or ethical ideals. This meant eschewing stylization and

⁵⁶ M. Brodovskii, Iskusstvo ustnogo izlozheniia (chtenie vslukh, deklamatsiia, oratorskaia rech’ i proch.) (St Petersburg, 1887). ⁵⁷ Ben, Stilistika i teoriia ustnoi i pis’mennoi rechi (Moscow, 1886). ⁵⁸ On Koroviakov and the growing culture of declamation in late nineteenth-century Russia, see Peter Brang, Zvuchashchee slovo: Zametki po teorii i istorii deklamatsionnogo iskusstva v Rossii (Moscow, 2010), 108, 113, 116–17, 197–9. ⁵⁹ E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley, 2002).

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typecasting and cultivating a more intense psychological realism; it was symptomatic that the Directorate of the Imperial Theatres attempted to prohibit the presenting of flowers and gifts to actors with the curtain up and to prevent actors taking bows in the middle of an act.⁶⁰ Contemporaries tended to agree that this aesthetic-ethical programme was best realized in Moscow’s Malyi Theatre, the most dynamic of the imperial theatres, where the repertoire combined contemporary realistic plays with the classics. Either way, the style of performance was gripping: This was not the pompous and overblown declamatory cries of heroes put up on stilts. The actors on stage established a spiritual connection to the audience, and the viewer began to feel that he too could become the hero if the circumstances of his life were to come together in a certain way.⁶¹

It was around this time that A. P. Lenskii, one of the Malyi’s leading actors, started to become a pedagogue and a theorist. He was responsible for perhaps the first sustained attempt to argue for the independent value of acting: the actor was a creative force in his or her own right, not a mere illustrator of a literary work whose performance should be judged by its degree of fidelity to the original or by the ability to learn lines. The actor and the playwright were ‘two actors who complemented each other’.⁶² The new-found dignity of the actor’s calling was perhaps most powerfully embodied by Lenskii’s regular partner in Malyi productions, Mariia Ermolova, who spoke in an intense contralto, eschewed the declamatory style, and burned with an integrity at times bordering on exaltation; her signature role was Joan of Arc.⁶³ If theatre at its best was becoming more like an intensified version of ‘life’, then the reverse might also be true. An impressive example of stage presence in municipal politics was N. A. Alekseev, the larger-than-life mayor of Moscow in the second half of the 1880s. As one eye-witness observed: ‘Everyone listened to him in rapture: his powerful figure, fine and expressive appearance, talent as a speaker—the words pouring out impromptu from the depths of his soul were remarkable both for their ideas and their elegance.’ This ‘Russian folk hero’ was also unrivalled for his ability to impose order even on an unruly meeting.⁶⁴ But

⁶⁰ E. G. Kholodov (ed.), Istoriia russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1982), 59, 149. ⁶¹ Kizvetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 131. A general history of the Malyi supports this assessment: the repertoire was interesting, and the theatre assumed a prominent place in public life in the 1880s. See N. G. Zograf, Malyi teatr vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 1960), chap. 3. ⁶² A. P. Lenskii, ‘Zametki aktera’ (first published 1893), in A. P. Lenskii, Stat’i. Pis’ma. Zapiski (Moscow, 2002), quotation 91. ⁶³ For much memoir testimony of the impression Ermolova made, see S. N. Durylin (ed.), Mariia Nikolaevna Ermolova: Pis’ma: Iz literaturnogo naslediia: Vospominaniia sovremennikov (Moscow, 1955). ⁶⁴ N. A. Varentsov, Slyshannoe. Vidennoe. Peredumannoe. Perezhitoe (Moscow, 1999), 353–4.

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Russia’s main celebrity orators were still, as in the 1870s, to be found in the courtroom. Moscow’s Fedor Plevako was approaching the zenith of his fame, and his renown never owed much to his command of points of law. His younger colleague Vasilii Maklakov left a vivid account of Plevako’s ‘fireworks’: ‘here you had quotations from the Gospels, references to the courts, statues and precedents in the West, and an appeal to the monument to Alexander II standing in front of the court building.’⁶⁵ Another contemporary observer drew a telling parallel between Plevako and Shaliapin: the advocate, like the singer, was characterized by the all-consuming intensity (bezzavetnost’) of his performance.⁶⁶ According to a memorial speech which Maklakov gave shortly after Plevako’s death in 1909, his older colleague had done more than anyone else to establish legal oratory in the popular imagination; his persona had become ‘legendary’, giving rise to an unprecedented amount of gossip and myth. Plevako’s fluency as a speaker was astonishing for the time: in this period this kind of facility with language was less common than in the vastly more ‘chatty and gossipy’ early twentieth century.⁶⁷ A legal celebrity in a different, less showmanlike vein was the Petersburg-based Nikolai Karabchevskii (b. 1851), almost a decade younger than Plevako, who arrived in the profession a few years after it had begun to mature, becoming an assistant sworn attorney in 1874. Like Plevako, he originated a long way from St Petersburg: he grew up in Nikolaev (Kherson province) in a military family of Turkish origins that had served the Russian Empire since the time of Catherine the Great. His father, a colonel and a widower, married the daughter of a wealthy local landowner; her fortune ensured a comfortable existence even after he died (in Nikolai’s infancy). After completing the gymnasium, Nikolai was sent to the College of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg in the late 1860s.⁶⁸ Mainly a criminalist, Karabchevskii brought a literary education and sensibility to the courtroom. But there he was every inch the performer. Karabchevskii did not write his speeches out, but what he sometimes lost in polish he gained in speed of response; he was especially renowned as a cross-examiner.⁶⁹ He once shared his working methods with none other than Lev Tolstoy. Having presented Tolstoy with an edition of his selected speeches on a visit to Yasnaia Poliana, he explained that it contained only those speeches that had been preserved by stenographers.

⁶⁵ V. A. Maklakov, Rechi: Sudebnye, dumskie i publichnye lektsii (Paris, 1949), 13–14. ⁶⁶ Nelidov, Teatral’naia Moskva, 35. ⁶⁷ Maklakov, Rechi, 72, 74. ⁶⁸ Biographical details from N. Karabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli (Berlin, 1921), 1:5 and an incomplete biography by an unknown author (probably, as the phrase goes, ‘a source close to Karabchevskii’) in the lawyer’s personal archive: GARF, f. 827, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 1–10. ⁶⁹ On Karabchevskii and cross-examination, see O. O. Gruzenberg, Yesterday: Memoirs of a Russian-Jewish Lawyer, ed. Don C. Rawson (Berkeley, 1981), 43, and GARF, f. 827, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 19–20. The absence of written text is confirmed in the foreword to an edition of his speeches, which had to rely on stenographic court records and newspaper publications: N. P. Karabchevskii, Rechi 1882–1902, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1902).

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Tolstoy was surprised that Karabchevskii did not write out his speeches. The lawyer replied that he was temperamentally incapable of repeating a text word for word, but also that a good lawyer had to remain flexible and alert: ‘the court investigation sometimes turns everything on its head.’ Tolstoy agreed: ‘In a group of intimates it can be useful to read, but with [other] people you need to talk.’⁷⁰ But this gift for the spontaneous did not override traditional concerns about the promiscuousness of legal rhetoric: Tolstoy was reportedly shocked by Karabchevskii’s admission that he sometimes defended people he believed to be guilty.⁷¹ Karabchevskii was also a writer of fiction, and he provided a much more extended reflection on the possibilities—and perils—of the spoken word in a novella he published in 1893. Its protagonist, Arskov, is a successful businessman and well-known figure in Petersburg society. But he is also in the grip of a classic case of fin-de-siècle melancholia (or, to put it anachronistically, of burnout). He has decided to sell his furniture, move out to the country, and abandon the life he has known. Before he does so, he has one final obligation: to attend a dinner that is being held in his honour. The occasion turns into a long series of speeches that offers an entertaining sample of the oratorical styles of the time. The first person to seize the floor is a young man who leaps up but then seems to lose his nerve: ‘it was painful to see how the arteries throbbed in his temples, how drops of sweat formed on his upper lip . . . He then started speaking at such an insane speed and so incoherently that it was barely possible to understand him.’ Only the overall thrust was clear: this was a ‘vigorous protest against all our careerists and hypocrites’. Shortly afterwards, the young man has to be taken out in hysterics. After this display of youthful impetuousness comes its polar opposite: a speech by a self-regarding and affected professor who has a prepared speech in his pocket and thinks only of getting the chance to deliver it, but pretends to be unwilling when asked. When he starts with a subject from mythology very remote from the subject at hand, the audience noticeably fails to respond. In frustration and pique, the professor then changes his tone from arch to shrill with the aim of ‘completely conquering the audience’. He pulls out all the rhetorical stops: ‘Poetic images, figures of speech, metaphors came hard upon each other, forming strange, almost crystalline patterns whose edges and undulations reflected all the colours of the rainbow.’ The performance ends with a rousing toast to the intelligentsia and its role as the engine of progress. Greeted by stormy applause, the speech achieves a remarkable effect in galvanizing the audience, although not the hero Arskov, who by the end of the novel has shot himself. He declines to give a speech of his own, and the main speaking he does in the novel is over the telephone to a former lover.

⁷⁰ GARF, f. 827, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 45–6. ⁷¹ Maklakov, Iz vospominanii, 176. Vasilii Maklakov was a regular visitor to Yasnaia Poliana at this time.

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As he reflects, ‘sometimes even the most difficult emotional moments were experienced in this tense, unnatural pose with the receiver by his ear’.⁷²

The Church The institution that set itself up as the best antidote to such evils of modernity was the Orthodox Church. By the 1880s, however, it was fast reaching the conclusion that it could only do so effectively by itself embracing aspects of modernity. Although a good deal had been said about the need to promote homiletics in the 1860s and 1870s, it was in the 1880s, in the age of counter-reform, that the revival of the Church’s pastoral mission began in earnest. For the ecclesiastical elite, the 1880s were a decade not of inertia and constraint but of innovation and open prospects. Much of the credit must go to the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, bête noire of all liberals. It turned out that Pobedonostsev’s instincts were not merely repressive: he was determined not just to close down any potential ‘talking-shops’ but also to promote a positive vision of what should stand in for a liberal public sphere. In his view, the Church needed to respond to the challenges of the modern world by strengthening its hold over Russian society. In practical terms, this meant building many new churches, setting up parish schools, expanding popular religious publishing, and increasing the numbers of both parish and monastic clergy.⁷³ In this context, familiar criticisms of the priesthood’s inadequacy in preaching gained a new urgency. It was embarrassing when the press pointed out that the bishop of Mozhaisk had repeated word for word a speech delivered by the bishop of Kaluga the previous year.⁷⁴ In 1884 preaching was made a more prominent part of the seminary curriculum. The word ‘pastor’ became increasingly standard as a description of the priest’s role; V. F. Pevnitskii’s course on the subject became a core text in seminaries in the 1890s.⁷⁵ The cause of authentic, ‘living’ speech was taken up in earnest by Amvrosii (Kliucharev), bishop of Kharkov. Amvrosii (b. 1820) had himself begun to deliver unscripted sermons as a parish priest in Moscow in the 1850s. On the urging of an acquaintance, Fedor Vasi’levich Samarin, and after conquering his nerves, he took to speaking without a text almost every Sunday and holiday; he began to draw a large audience, some from the distant outskirts of Moscow. In the 1860s Amvrosii became well known to the educated public for his trenchant sermons against the

⁷² N. Karabchevskii, Gospodin Arskov: Povest’ (St Petersburg, 1893), quotations 224, 227, 239. ⁷³ Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 239–41. ⁷⁴ Muromtsev, Stat’i i rechi, 120. ⁷⁵ Jennifer Hedda, His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2008), 61, 64, 68.

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various malaises of liberal secular society. He combined this with a commitment to effective communication with the common people, in 1860 setting up a new journal, Dushepoleznoe chtenie, to that end. He became a monk in 1877 and was put in charge of the Bogoiavlenskii (Epiphany) monastery in Moscow. Here he continued to deliver sermons every Sunday—and these were extemporized sermons, which apparently were well received by the common people. Nor did he stay within the monastery walls: he spoke in private homes and at public gatherings around Moscow, notably delivering a series of lectures on theology in the hall of the Moscow duma. His sermons were published, which only added to his fame and to the number of people who flocked to the monastery to hear him. As vicar bishop of the Moscow diocese, he occupied a position of great prominence, and was effectively the deputy of Metropolitan Innokentii. Petersburg made attempts to rein Amvrosii in, by telling him that it was inappropriate for a man in his position to give lectures to a secular audience. But he maintained a high public profile after the assassination of Alexander II. In 1882 he was transferred to Kharkov, where he started up ‘conversations’ outside church between priests and believers. He did not believe in making too many concessions to popular taste and recommended that priests improvise only if they were ready. But he was opposed to the kind of high-flown rhetoric that only obscured the meaning of scripture to ordinary listeners.⁷⁶ In the mid-1880s Amvrosii published a trenchant critique of the state of Russian preaching. Priests were still not trained to speak spontaneously, and practical guides on delivering sermons were sorely lacking; young priests were still referred back to the ancients. On the rare occasions when a priest did try to speak without a text, he was treated with suspicion. According to the rules, sermons were still subject to censorship, so any priest with ambitions to improvise needed the protection of his bishop. Amvrosii cast a sideways glance at the oratorical talent on display in various secular professions—above all the law. Surely, he mused, it was possible to ‘steal’ some such people for the Church. He also noted a welcome tendency for schools to teach their pupils to retell lessons in their own words rather than engaging merely in rote learning. Maybe this would help to develop public speaking abilities for the Church.⁷⁷ In his next article on the subject Amvrosii went even further, arguing for the primacy of the spoken word over the written; it was only human mortality that made it necessary to fix the spoken words by means of writing. There was no question in his mind that spontaneous speech was preferable to reading from a text, both in the effect it achieved over listeners and in the experience of the speaker: ‘while he is delivering

⁷⁶ Biographical details from T. I. Butkevich, Vysokopreosviashchennyi Amvrosii arkhiepiskop Khar’kovskii: Biograficheskii ocherk (Kharkov, 1902). ⁷⁷ Amvrosii, ‘Zhivoe slovo’, Vera i razum, kn. 2 (March 1884): 493–503.

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his speech, the improviser faces difficulties that make him live life in a fuller and more elevated sense and leave him with a feeling of triumph at the end.’⁷⁸ Priests were now gaining more opportunities to put these recommendations into practice. A leading church periodical reported in 1883 on the efforts in recent years to increase the amount of preaching; the ‘conversation’ (sobesedovanie) format had recently been launched in Odessa, Chernigov, Caucasus, and Smolensk dioceses. Priests were also taking part in public readings for the common people—just in the past year these had taken place in Vladimir, Smolensk, Tver, Samara, Viazniki, Shuia, Chernigov, and Kaluga.⁷⁹ In 1885, the diocesan council in thinly spread Arkhangelsk province, where church attendance was low, instructed priests to hold public readings of the New Testament and other religious texts during the church fasts.⁸⁰ At the other end of European Russia, in Astrakhan, public readings were held in the diocesan library by bishop Evgenii and the city’s clergy from the end of 1883. The library could take 500 people seated, but attendance was always higher, with standing room only.⁸¹ Student priests, too, were given greater opportunities to try out their preaching skills in public.⁸² In Moscow, sobesedovaniia were held by the Society for the Lovers of Spiritual Enlightenment; they also took place under the auspices of individual churches and monasteries. At one such event in February 1889, Bishop Alexander of Mozhaisk, vicar of Moscow, apparently held a large audience rapt when he preached on Lent.⁸³ By the end of the decade, the sobesedovanie had the status of official Church policy. A Holy Synod ruling of 12 June 1890 cited evidence that such talks were necessary to put across the basic truths of Christianity of which many ordinary people were still ignorant. It was specified that talks should avoid abstraction and explain in simple terms ‘those truths that an Orthodox Christian accepts in his heart and expresses with his lips’. Talks could be held before the liturgy, but it was in any event essential to have them after vespers. Such events could be held either in church or in some building nearby, and listeners were allowed to sit (unlike a normal service).⁸⁴ Towards the end of the 1880s there was some discussion of lay preaching as a supplement to the proselytizing efforts of priests. In Kiev, professors from the city’s ecclesiastical academy delivered sermons at the evening services; by all accounts these were a great success. But this raised a tricky point of doctrine:

⁷⁸ Amvrosii, ‘Zhivoe slovo’, Vera i razum, kn. 2 (April 1884): 553–67, quotation, 566. ⁷⁹ ‘Otechestvennaia tserkov’ v minuvshem godu’, TsV, no. 1 (1883), unofficial part: 2–3. ⁸⁰ TsV, no. 28 (1885): 452. ⁸¹ TsV, no. 32 (1885): 512. The journal in the mid-1880s was full of short reports on sobesedovaniia from most parts of the Empire. See also no. 43 (1885): 720. ⁸² ‘Iz praktiki studentov propovednikov’, TsV, no. 50 (1895): 1636. ⁸³ Moskovskie vnebogosluzhebnye sobesedovaniia i vsenarodnoe penie (Moscow, 1889). ⁸⁴ ‘O katikhizicheskikh poucheniiakh pastyrei k prikhozhanam’, in Spravochnaia kniga. Rasporiazhaniia i raz”iasneniia po voprosam tserkovnoi praktiki. Besplatnoe prilozhenie k ezhenedel’nomu dukhovnomu zhurnalu ‘Pastyrskii Sobesednik’ za 1897 g. (Moscow, 1897), 286–8.

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how could professors be incorporated into a church service, given that lay preaching was forbidden by the Church Council? There were grey areas, however. Consistory statutes allowed recent seminary graduates who were as yet without a position to speak at services; here the issue was evidently one of competence, not of title.⁸⁵ Kiev, with its unusual openness to borrowings from Western Christianity, was in the vanguard of lay preaching in the Russian Empire. Elsewhere, this form of proselytizing was still in its infancy in the 1880s, even if the form of the sobesedovanie would seem to have been made for lay preaching.⁸⁶ The quantitative indicators in the era of Pobedonostsev’s counter-reform were quite impressive. The number of churches had increased along with the quantity of sermons and sobesedovaniia. But there was every reason to suspect that the quality of the clergy had declined as its quantity had increased and that most members of the clergy were not up to the task of effective preaching outside the framework of the liturgy. By the account of one priest, himself an exponent of sobesedovaniia since the early 1860s, priests were often uneducated and did not feel confident to go out preaching.⁸⁷ If anything, the disincentives to engage in spontaneous preaching grew stronger in the 1880s, as the Church authorities imposed close control over sermons.⁸⁸ According to a Holy Synod ruling of October 1894, permission for ‘people’s readings’ was to be given on a case-bycase basis. The Ministry of Education was to grant permission for such events in small (uezd) towns and settlements with the prior agreement of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Chief Procurator; the ‘moral and political reliability’ of the speakers at such events had to be guaranteed. A circular two years earlier had specified that services were to take place at the appointed time, and priests were to maintain at all times not only outward ‘decency’ but heartfelt ‘rapture’ (blagogovenie) accompanied by all the correct ritual gestures. Services should go ahead even if there were no worshippers present.⁸⁹ Pobedonostsev’s disciplinarian tenure as Chief Procurator may have failed to raise the poor standards of the Russian Orthodox Church at the level of the rural parish. But his drive to raise the status and authority of the Church increased the independence and sense of purpose of the academies, the Church’s elite training institutions. Under their strong-willed and charismatic rectors, the academies

⁸⁵ N. Barsov, ‘O propovedi mirian’, TsV, no. 46 (1888): 849–50. ⁸⁶ N. Barsov, ‘O propovedi mirian’, TsV, no. 47 (1888): 869–70. ⁸⁷ Dmitrii Nikitin, ‘Neskol’ko slov o vnebogosluzhebnykh dukhovnykh sobesedovaniiakh pri sel’skikh tserkvakh’, TsV, no. 44 (1885): 730–1. On inadequacy of priests, see also Vasilii Afonskii, ‘Otchego otnosheniia dukhovenstva k prikhozhanam nosiat ofitsial’nyi kharakter?’, TsV, no. 39 (1885): 636–7. The church press would continue for years to remark on the need to reduce the amount of rote learning in seminaries in the interests of improving priests’ diction and delivery. See Lektor, ‘Ob “uchenii chteniiu po russki” v dukhovno-uchebnykh zavedeniiakh’, TsV, no. 4 (1893): 54–6. ⁸⁸ A. Iu. Polunov, Pod vlast’iu ober-prokurora: Gosudarstvo i tserkov’ v epokhu Aleksandra III (Moscow, 1996), 80. ⁸⁹ Spravochnaia kniga, 97–8, 279–80.

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trained up a monastic vanguard that would provide some of the most compelling rhetoricians of the fin de siècle. In the early 1880s, a new cohort of activist priests emerged in the St Petersburg ecclesiastical academy. One of the pioneers was Antonii Khrapovitskii, who as a mere student set up a preaching circle that delivered weekly sermons in the academy chapel. When Antonii (Vadkovskii) became rector, the emphasis on the Church’s social mission only increased. This was the environment in which impressionable students such as Grigorii Petrov and Georgii Gapon were trained in the 1890s.⁹⁰ Antonii (Khrapovitskii) was a similarly powerful influence when he took over at the Moscow Academy in 1891. He cultivated a close relationship with his students, though some of them suspected this was merely to steer them towards taking monastic vows. He was also unusually strong-willed and outspoken, setting little store even by such impeccable authorities as Filaret of Moscow. Despite its remote location—at the St Sergius monastery, fifty miles north-east of Moscow— the Academy provided a vigorous and varied intellectual environment. The historian Kliuchevskii came up once a week from Moscow, delivering lectures that may have been franker in their political judgements than those he gave at Moscow University. And the young theologians regularly travelled in the opposite direction: the students were avid theatre-goers and also liked to attend university debates and thesis defences. This was a fine education for the future Evlogii (Georgievskii), who would later be a bishop in one of the most politicized parts of the Russian Empire and one of the most prominent rhetoricians of the State Duma.⁹¹

The Zemstvo and the Rediscovery of Politics The paradox of Russia’s 1880s was that, despite severe government restrictions, serious political speech was in the consciousness of educated Russians as never before. The only problem was that none of it was happening in Russia. Parliamentary ‘talking-shops’ were springing up all around the continent, including countries that Russia liked to treat with condescension. This was a major constitutional moment in European history. In the early 1870s France and Germany had established new political systems in which public political speech played a leading role. The Reichstag had fewer powers than its British or French counterparts, but it gave a loud voice to non-government actors—including, in due course, the largest socialist party in the world. The parliament of unified Italy saw the accession to power of the Left in 1876 and a three-fold broadening of the

⁹⁰ Hedda, His Kingdom Come, 47–9. ⁹¹ Evlogii (Georgievskii), Put’ moei zhizni: Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1994), 34–48.

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suffrage in 1881.⁹² The French Chambre des députés had some claim to be the most eventful of Europe’s parliaments, as governments were made and broken with bewildering rapidity. The young historian Nikolai Kareev had a formative experience in Paris in 1877, as he was caught up in the political crisis precipitated by President MacMahon. He witnessed the elections that brought the Republicans a crushing victory and even attended a socialist banquet; on this visit or another, he also visited the French parliament.⁹³ Fedor Rodichev, the fieriest orator of Russian liberalism, cut his teeth on the speeches of Favre, Simon, and Gambetta.⁹⁴ Even staid old England’s parliamentarianism had become more vibrant with the advent of High Victorian oratory, the challenge of Irish obstructionists, and the growth of a daily press that disseminated speeches verbatim. This was a very different world from that of 1816–17 (when the future Nicholas I had visited Westminster) or 1861 (when Tolstoy had heard Palmerston). At those earlier moments parliamentary culture could safely be quarantined as evidence of English exceptionalism. By the late 1870s, it was Russia that was the exception. Still more perplexing, from the Russian perspective, was the fact that parliamentary life had spread to a part of the continent where it had no business existing. Serbia had acquired a surprisingly liberal constitution in 1869, and by 1874 its skupština had made itself a significant participant in the three-way relationship between prince, political elites, and populace. After the Compromise of 1867, Austria and Hungary each had a stable two-chamber system, and even Russia’s other adjacent empire, the Ottoman, had a brief parliamentary moment in 1877–8.⁹⁵ Perhaps most aggravating of all was the case of Bulgaria, effectively a Russian protectorate after the Russo-Turkish War, which adopted a remarkably democratic constitution in 1879—to the great dismay of Alexander of Battenberg, the Russia-friendly monarch parachuted in to head the new state.⁹⁶ A Russian newspaper-reader in 1890 (to take one year at random) could pore over reports on the British parliamentary debate on the Irish land bill, the rejection by the French Palais of a bill restricting press freedom, the Czech and Hungarian sejms, and political cut and thrust in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Portugal; an extensive summary of Wilhelm Liebknecht’s speech in the Reichstag against militarism; even an account of the draft Brazilian constitution.⁹⁷ Quite a few members of the Russian reading public must have felt the same way as a character from Aleksei Pisemskii’s 1877 novel The Bourgeois (Meshchane): the ⁹² Christopher Duggan, ‘Politics in the Era of Depretis and Crispi, 1870–96’, in John A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 161–3. ⁹³ N. I. Kareev, Prozhitoe i perezhitoe (Leningrad, 1990), 146–7. ⁹⁴ Kermit E. McKenzie, ‘The Political Faith of Fedor Rodichev’, in Charles E. Timberlake (ed.), Essays on Russian Liberalism (Columbia, 1972), 42–61, here 52. ⁹⁵ Robert Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period: A Study of the Midhat Constitution and Parliament (Baltimore, 1963). ⁹⁶ C. E. Black, The Establishment of Constitutional Government in Bulgaria (Princeton, 1943). ⁹⁷ Examples from Russkie vedomosti, April-May 1890.

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parliamentary orators of Western Europe might be ‘awful rascals’ but they did at least know how to speak—that was why their performances came across so well in transcripts.⁹⁸ Even Western European monarchs made the Russian news for their rhetorical performances: the speeches of Wilhelm II were taken up by the Russian press, even if they often caused dismay to his domestic audiences.⁹⁹ This made for a striking contrast with the secrecy of the Russian court and the general absence of open political expression, which meant that Russian speeches were subject to overinterpretation by the foreign press. A case in point was the embarrassingly belligerent speech given by General Skobelev to Serbian students in Paris in 1882.¹⁰⁰ As one liberal commentator observed: If speech enjoyed more respect and scope, if after-dinner speeches, formal responses to delegations and so-called discours de circonstance of all kinds were as routine an occurrence as for our Western neighbours, then the speeches of the brave general would have been greeted like any other public expression of thought.

As it was, they were taken as an ‘echo of the intentions and views of the Russian government’.¹⁰¹ Against the backdrop of Western, Central, and even South-Eastern Europe, Russia was a constitutional desert. Boris Chicherin had broached the subject very gently in his 1866 treatise On Popular Representation, where he had made clear his admiration for the parliamentary model but also shown that it did not always work well in practice: ‘Although at the present time all of Western Europe has secured for itself the principle of constitutional monarchy, there is almost no country, with the exception of England, where the representative system [poriadok] has had time to establish itself on firm foundations.’¹⁰² In an extended historical survey, Chicherin made clear the obstacles to Russia joining in the parliamentary experiment: in the land of the tsars, political change always came from the top rather than emerging from below. Russia was simply not politically mature enough for a constitution. Even at the turn of the century, the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia, the Bible of the liberal public, noted that the development ⁹⁸ A. F. Pisemskii, Meshchane, in A. F. Pisemskii, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1959), 7: 114. ⁹⁹ On Wilhelm’s energetic career as a speaker, which did much to make him a media monarch, see Michael A. Obst, ‘Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche’: Kaiser Wilhelm II. als politischer Redner (Padeborn, 2010). ¹⁰⁰ On the same visit Skobelev also encountered Gambetta, the leading rhetorician of the early Third Republic, to whom he declared his support for the idea of convoking a zemskii sobor ahead of the coronation of Alexander III. MacKenzie, Count N. P. Ignat’ev, 646. ¹⁰¹ K. K. Arsen’ev, ‘Rechi generala Skobeleva’, in his Za chetvert’ veka (1871–1894) (Petrograd, 1915), 111. This article was originally published in Vestnik Evropy in 1882. ¹⁰² B. N. Chicherin, O narodnom predstavitel’stve (Moscow, 1899), xiii. This quotation is from the foreword to the first edition of 1866.

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of persuasive public speech was ‘closely connected to the development of democratic institutions’; its modern lineage went back to seventeenth-century England.¹⁰³ By implication, its roots in Russia were shallow indeed. Even Chicherin’s very qualified liberal treatment of the constitutional question met a cool response: it came out at a bad moment, just after the first attempt to assassinate the Tsar.¹⁰⁴ As we have seen, the early 1880s, following the successful assassination attempt by The People’s Will, were no better a time: Chicherin lost his job for hinting at the desirability of a form of zemstvo congress. In the published transcript of the trial of the murderers of Alexander II, newspaper readers were allowed to acquaint themselves with many aspects of the revolutionary movement, but Zheliabov’s call for the ‘convocation of representatives of the whole Russian people’ was vigilantly excised by the censors.¹⁰⁵ Yet by this time the question of political reform, and of the possibility of some consultative body, was on many people’s minds—even that of the moderate Petr Chaikovskii. In a letter of 1881 to his main confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, Chaikovskii wrote of contemporary Russia as a ‘volcano’. Wise government was needed as never before, and it was unlikely to come from the decent but limited and poorly educated new Tsar. What was needed was a new consultative body— a zemskii sobor—that would tell the Tsar the ‘truth’. Katkov was quite wrong, in Chaikovskii’s view, to dismiss all such bodies as ‘talking-shops’: a zemskii sobor would be quite different from a Western parliament, concerning itself not with governmental procedure and executive power but rather with giving the government the ‘trust of the people’ and providing it with the best possible information in order to govern.¹⁰⁶ As the sorry case of Ignat’ev shows, such ideas, even when they came from a government minister, did not stand much chance in the Russia of Alexander III. Yet there was one institution in Russia to which liberals could cling as a gateway to ‘democracy’—and which the government treated with apprehension as a Trojan horse of the dreaded constitutionalism: the zemstvo, which after 1881 as before was the litmus test of proto-parliamentary political discourse. It was all too easy to take a dismal view of the progress made since the golden age of the mid1860s. Laws of June 1867 had imposed restrictions both on speech within the assembly (to be policed by the chairman) and on the written record (which was subject to censorship by the governor, and to restrictions on distribution). The zemstvos were suffering closer police supervision since the ‘Going to the People’ affair of the mid-1870s, and members were often afraid to state their opinions openly. The arbitrary power of the governor was never too far from

¹⁰³ ¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁶

Entry ‘Politicheskoe krasnorechie’, B&E, 24: 313 (1898). G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford, 1992), 296–7. Razbegaev (ed.), Sud nad tsareubiitsami, 246. Chaikovskii i Nadezhda Filaretovna fon-Mekk: Perepiska, 3 vols (Moscow, 2004), 2: 1301–2.

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their minds.¹⁰⁷ The stirrings of zemstvo activism at the time of the Turkish war had soon been suppressed. Yet, if the general outlook seemed bleak, zemstvo assemblies made a more vibrant impression on the ground. Sergei Muromtsev reported at the turn of 1880 that zemstvo sessions in many provinces that winter had been lively and wellattended. Admittedly, not much had changed in the Moscow assembly, where the old gentry landowner lobby continued to prevail. When members’ interests were directly affected, they could speak very sensibly, but there was still a tendency to fuss about protocol and a timid reluctance to get to the heart of issues. Even so, Muromtsev hypothesized that Moscow society had more energy for public affairs, since it did not dissipate its energies in ‘bureaucratic tittle-tattle’: the ‘salon intelligentsia’ did not find enough of an outlet in administrative service, so was more willing to get involved in civic issues. For all its faults, moreover, the zemstvo compared favourably with the noble assembly, which Muromtsev observed in Moscow a couple of weeks later. Muromtsev had no patience with the solemnity of proceedings, the elaborate ceremony, the excessively courteous forms of address, and the obsession with points of honour. At least in the provinces the noble assemblies still had a valuable social and entertainment function; in Moscow not even that was required.¹⁰⁸ While there was no doubt that relations between governor and zemstvo could be antagonistic, they did not have to be. Governors had every interest in working with the local gentry, not against them; and they depended on the provincial and district marshals of the nobility for just about all their governmental tasks. As Richard Robbins notes, the governors were ‘persuaders-in-chief ’ as well as frontline of the executive.¹⁰⁹ And as Catherine Evtuhov shows, even in the life of a single province (Nizhnii Novgorod) the relationship between governor and local society could vary enormously depending on the personality of the former.¹¹⁰ If governor and gentry were more often than not on the same side, the same could not be said of either party’s relationship with the post-emancipation peasantry. Historians have generally concluded that the Russian subaltern was barely able to speak in the zemstvo. In her study of Nizhnii Novgorod, for example, Evtuhov notes that ‘the peasant role tended to be passive’.¹¹¹ Yet the sheer presence of peasants in a mixed-estate deliberative body was a remarkable innovation of the reform era. The young Ivan Petrunkevich was favourably struck by the peasant delegates when he made his first visit (as a spectator) to the ¹⁰⁷ For a contemporary view, see V. Iu. Skalon, Zemskie voprosy: Ocherki i obozreniia (Moscow, 1882). Posterity has not seen matters too differently. ¹⁰⁸ Muromtsev, Stat’i i rechi, 3: 1–2, 19. ¹⁰⁹ Richard G. Robbins, Jr, The Tsar’s Viceroys: Russian Provincial Governors in the Last Years of the Empire (Ithaca, 1987), chap. 7. ¹¹⁰ Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh, 2011), 138–40. ¹¹¹ Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province, 147.

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Chernigov zemstvo assembly in 1865.¹¹² Perhaps more worth of note is the simple fact that peasants made up a good 40 per cent in the district zemstvo assemblies. From her provincial case study, moreover, Evtuhov takes a notably more upbeat view of the zemstvo than earlier historians (or contemporary journalists in the capitals) have tended to do: ‘by about 1870’, she claims, ‘the zemstvos had succeeded in winning the trust of the population’.¹¹³ To judge by one of the few detailed studies we have, peasants were not passive and marginalized in the zemstvo: in general these were the most articulate representatives of their estate. A study of the minutes of one district assembly in Voronezh province found that almost half of the 216 peasants deputies elected between 1870 and 1913 were recorded as making at least one contribution. Twothirds spoke on subjects related to their home district. But 13 per cent made wider-ranging contributions to debate. To be sure, nobles had ways of keeping peasants in their place, and the peasants themselves adopted self-deprecation as a rhetorical strategy, apologizing in ritual fashion for their lack of education. But there is no question that they could assert themselves, and that in general their level of activity rose in the 1880s.¹¹⁴ What really expanded the ambitions of the zemstvo, however, was a social crisis that became a political catalyst. The famine of 1891–2 brought a striking change in the dynamic between government and educated society. The state was so helpless in the face of this disaster that Minister of the Interior Durnovo turned to the zemstvos for assistance.¹¹⁵ The Nizhnii Novgorod governor Baranov created a ‘famine parliament’—a committee including a wide range of people involved in formulating policy on the famine (officials from the regional and ministerial bureaucracies, marshals of the nobility, activists, physicians, and, not least, the zemstvo board). Zemstvo statisticians engaged in vigorous debate with representatives of the local gentry who claimed that the extent of the famine had been exaggerated. Eventually, the zemstvo men won the argument, and the governor swung over to their side.¹¹⁶ Another notable aspect of the famine crisis was the role of the press: correspondents from Novoe vremia were also included in Baranov’s ‘parliament’. In its coverage of the stricken Volga region, this newspaper contrasted the strong lead provided by the Nizhnii Novgorod administration with that of Kazan, which had failed to provide any initiative; an emergency zemstvo assembly had mainly revealed the incapacity of the zemstvo to gain an ¹¹² Charles E. Timberlake, ‘Ivan Il’ich Petrunkevich: Russian Liberalism in Microcosm’, in Timberlake, Essays on Russian Liberalism, 18–41, here 20. ¹¹³ Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province, 148. ¹¹⁴ Franziska Schedewie, Selbstverwaltung und sozialer Wandel in der russischen Provinz: Bauern und Zemstvo in Voronez, 1864–1914 (Heidelberg, 2006), 296–7, 306–7. ¹¹⁵ Thomas Earl Porter, The Zemstvo and the Emergence of Civil Society in Late Imperial Russia 1864–1917 (San Francisco, 1991), 38. ¹¹⁶ Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province, 160–1 (summarizing the account of Vladimir Korolenko).

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accurate picture of what was happening in the province. The story from Samara was worse still, as the governor A. D. Sverbeev seemed overwhelmed and despairing, while the zemstvo had been much too late in its response.¹¹⁷ Among those who seized the new opportunity for more engagé public speaking was the student activist and future Kadet Vasilii Maklakov. Maklakov helped to organize a huge student meeting to discuss whether the proceeds from a benefit concert should be turned over to famine victims. In this unfamiliar setting—big meetings were generally out of the question in Russia—Maklakov gave ‘the first big political speech in my life’, his resolve strengthened by having read the speeches of Mirabeau. Maklakov even secured the initial agreement of Fedor Plevako—at that time ‘Russia’s premier orator’—to deliver a speech at the concert, though in the event the famous advocate was not able to attend.¹¹⁸ Viktor Chernov, a slightly younger student contemporary, observed Maklakov’s ‘smooth, expressive, elegant’ oratory at first hand at a meeting on student associations.¹¹⁹ But Chernov’s account of Maklakov also exposed a fault line in Russian educated opinion that would in time widen to a fissure: between liberals, who ultimately were interested in addressing a middle-class audience, and radicals, who sought to mobilize a wider social constituency. For all his polish, Maklakov did not possess an inspiring quality: ‘he was more explaining and justifying himself than propagandizing his ideas.’ At this moment, in the mid-1890s, there was still much common ground between those who would later be classified as liberals and radicals; Chernov recalled thinking, for example, that the future Kadet leader Miliukov could be ‘one of us’. But it was symptomatic of the incipient mobilization of the times that Chernov, who advocated more outspoken political engagement, would in due course take Maklakov’s place at the head of the Moscow student association.¹²⁰ Yet any significant radicalization still faced the usual obstacles. When the Tver zemstvo, by now the most outspoken body in Russia, seized on the spirit of mobilization by issuing an address to the new Emperor, Nicholas responded on 17 January 1895 with his own most famous (or notorious) piece of oratory: in a speech on the ‘idle dreams’ of the zemstvo men, he strove to close off this line of argument once and for all. In his memoirs, Pavel Miliukov could not resist a jibe at the Emperor’s rhetorical deficiencies: these momentous words were ‘shrieked out in a falsetto, from a crib sheet’.¹²¹ The detailed and loyal contemporary account in Novoe vremia stated, by contrast, that the Emperor had spoken ‘in a loud voice’—a reminder that assessments of oratorical performance are rarely separable from ¹¹⁷ S. Sharapov, ‘S Volgi’, NV, 28 September 1891, 1 and 7 October 1891, 1. ¹¹⁸ Maklakov, Iz vospominanii, 146–7. ¹¹⁹ V. M. Chernov, Pered burei (Moscow, 1993), 56–7. ¹²⁰ Chernov, Pered burei, 57, 67–8; Allan K. Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903 (Chicago, 1967), 12. ¹²¹ Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 163.

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one’s attitude to the content of the oration.¹²² It was clear, however, that the empire’s traditional elites were taken aback. Delivered in front of well-wishers at what was effectively a ‘belated wedding reception’, the speech struck even court aristocrats as petulant and inappropriate.¹²³ This inability to strike the right tone would become an increasing liability for the imperial regime in the more expressive political culture of the turn of the century.

¹²² ‘Rech’ Gosudaria’, NV, 18 January 1895, 1. ¹²³ Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 343; ‘Dnevnik V. N. Lamzdorfa’, KA, 46 (1931): 26.

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4 The Rise of Political Speech, 1895–1905 With his dismissal of the ‘idle dreams’ of zemstvo liberals, the Emperor was successful, for the time being, in suppressing even the slightest hint of constitutionalism in public discussion. Yet public speech, often only ostensibly unpolitical, was spreading to new venues and helping the Russian version of civil society— obshchestvennost’, a word that was itself greatly increasing in currency towards the end of the century—to gain momentum.¹ The newspapers, the main conduit for obshchestvennost’, played their part. With the launch of Aleksei Suvorin’s Novoe vremia and Ivan Sytin’s Russkoe slovo, reporting of even anodyne public events became more colourful in the mid-1890s. Novoe vremia might be conservative in its politics, but in content it was positively jaunty compared to the liberal mainstays Russkie vedomosti and Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, and it managed to give even accounts of debates in the city duma a character not far short of racy.² But the new atmosphere of the 1890s was a matter of substance as well as form. Many educated Russians received their schooling in public speaking at one of the numerous societies that formed in the last third of the nineteenth century; this, in the words of Catherine Evtuhov, was an ‘Age of Congresses’, and the network of learned, professional, and zemstvo bodies was dense enough by the 1890s as to amount to a ‘crypto-parliamentary’ system.³ In the reform era of the early 1860s, responsibility for approving the statutes of new societies had been transferred from the Tsar himself to the relevant ministries. While this measure left plenty of scope for bureaucratic obstruction, it also opened the floodgates: Russia had a mere 100 societies in 1862 but more than 6,000 by the start of the twentieth century. In 1897, the Ministry of Internal Affairs desperately tried to rein in their activities by imposing a more restrictive policy on membership and expanding police powers to intervene.⁴ But by now learned and professional congresses were ¹ On the rise of obshchestvennost’, see A. S. Tumanova, Obshchestvennye organizatsii i russkaia publika v nachale XX veka (Moscow, 2008), 23. ² Perhaps the most striking example was the report on a debate of February 1899 on mismanagement of the construction of the Troitskii (Trinity) Bridge in central St Petersburg: V. L., ‘Zasedanie dumy’, NV, 19 February 1899, 3. ³ Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh, 2011), 13–14. The ‘age of congresses’ tag was also used at the time, even if ironically: as Novoe vremia noted, even even such loosely structured professions as stage artistes were ‘assembling themselves’. Fingal, ‘Pushkinskii s”ezd’, NV, 2 January 1899, 2. ⁴ A. S. Tumanova, Samoderzhavie i obshchestvennye organizatsii v Rossii. 1905–1917 gody (Tambov, 2002), 71, 74–6. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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serving as an effective meeting place for the civically minded intelligentsia, members of the professions, and zemstvo representatives from around Russia. In 1894, in one of the more outspoken such gatherings, zemstvo statisticians from many different provinces came to Moscow for the Ninth Congress of Naturalists and Physicians. Dinners were held for the delegates in various private houses, where speeches seethed with criticism of an ‘old order which did not correspond to the new demands of life’.⁵ As this rather circumspect formulation suggests, criticism of the government, even when expressed in private venues, still tended to stay within the limits of political decorum. Nonetheless, in the mid-1890s, the mood of educated society was palpably more combative than it had been a mere five years earlier. The universities were turning fractious. Students heckled their professors when they detected signs of political passivity or accommodation with the government: such was the fate that befell no less a figure than Kliuchevskii when he delivered an admiring speech on the foreign policy of Alexander III. Any more or less public speech was booed or approved for the position it took in the polemic between Marxists and populists—however remote its topic may have seemed to be.⁶ At the same time, the authorities were not relaxing their vigilance. The outspoken history professor Nikolai Kareev ran into trouble when a lecture he gave at the Moscow Historical Society was thrown open to the public by the chairman. As soon as he finished his talk, policemen’s whistles were heard alongside stormy applause.⁷ Politically minded speech was not confined to the capital cities. The 1890s saw a ‘lecture epidemic’ as professors went out into the provinces, some of them enjoying great success with the local public.⁸ In Nizhnii Novgorod in 1894, Pavel Miliukov gave a course of six lectures on ‘social movements in Russia’; these were held in the spacious assembly room of the local gentry, and the risky subject did not put off a significant portion of the local educated public— including even the vice-governor, the brother of the composer Chaikovskii.⁹ In Tambov, the exiled Viktor Chernov heard a series of lectures by the populist philosopher V. V. Lesevich, a ‘true God-given orator’, whose generally dull and nasal voice was transformed at the podium. His first lecture, on Robinson Crusoe, contained clear hints at Russian affairs and received an ovation that amounted to ‘Tambov’s first masked political demonstration’.¹⁰ Examples such as these did not ⁵ A. A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii: Vospominaniia 1881–1914 (Moscow, 1997), 141. ⁶ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 144–5, 158. ⁷ N. I. Kareev, Prozhitoe i perezhitoe (Leningrad, 1990), 195–6. The government dossier on Kareev contained a long list of indiscretions dating back to 1893; the most provocative seems to have been a speech he gave in February 1894 that called for the restoration of a student society that had been banned following the plot to assassinate the tsar in 1887. See RGIA, f. 1604 (I. D. Delianov), op. 1, d. 179 and f. 922 (V. G. Glazov), op. 1, d. 217, 5ob–6ob. ⁸ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 214. ⁹ P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia (1859–1917) (New York, 1955), 158–9. ¹⁰ V. M. Chernov, Pered burei (Moscow, 1993), 92.

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mean, however, that the authorities were indifferent to the content of purportedly academic speech. According to Kizevetter, who spoke from some experience, lectures on scholarly topics were regarded as nothing less than ‘exploding bombs’, and the local inspector would demand to see the text in advance.¹¹ Signs of mobilization were harder to perceive in the existing institutions of selfgovernment. The municipal dumas had never been hotbeds of radicalism, and were made still more docile by revisions to legislation in 1892. The urban electorate was slashed by a factor of three or four, while the educated classes (nobles, bureaucrats, and members of the free professions) gained representation at the expense of the urban lower orders, the meshchane. In the 1890s the dumas were kept on a tight leash, being required to present the agendas of meetings in advance to the provincial governor. They also showed few signs of political vigour, continuing with the old-school practices of an urban oligarchy. Members smoked and drank tea during meetings as if they were sitting in their club. Voting still took place by the labour-intensive practice of casting balls, which meant that in Kazan in 1897 the electoral meeting lasted fourteen hours.¹² In the Moscow duma at the turn of the century, for which the electorate was a mere 8,000 out of the city’s population of well over one million, many of the members were parochial in their concerns, the ‘old’ merchantry retained a healthy presence, and seniority ruled when deciding who got to speak; tedious ‘local Mirabeaus’ were allowed to hold forth at excessive length if they were deemed ‘authorities’. But prolix speakers were indulged rather than listened to, and the duma as a whole had a preference for plain speaking—so the baroque rhetoric of Fedor Plevako did not go down well, whereas a down-to-earth merchant could command an appreciative audience. Alongside the ‘inert’ majority, the duma also contained some outstanding politicians in the making—above all Muromtsev, who held the attention of all contingents due to his imposing manner and relentless logic. A decade before the opening of the State Duma, he was already bringing to Russian political life ‘the refined ways of the English parliament’.¹³ But true political activism in the Moscow duma would have to wait until the constitutional season of autumn 1904. As usual, it was the zemstvo rather than the city duma where signs of political assertiveness were to be found. The foremost zemstvo orator was still Ivan Petrunkevich, author of the Chernigov zemstvo’s address to the Tsar in 1877. After several years in exile in the 1880s, he had resumed his zemstvo career in Tver province. As a public speaker he made a considerable impression even on so discerning a listener as Kizevetter: this was a

¹¹ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 212, 215. ¹² Lutz Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung: Die Wolgastädte Kazan’ und Saratov (1870–1914) (Cologne, 2004), 285–8, 314–15, 320. ¹³ N. I. Astrov, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 2000), 34, 39–41, 45–6.

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magnificent example of political eloquence. In every word you could hear the speaker’s nervous energy increasing. But at the same time the listener was captivated by the brilliant and sharp, I would even say iron, logic with which he parried all possible objections to the basic position he was defending.¹⁴

In January 1899, Petrunkevich gave an energetic speech to the Tver zemstvo assembly in defence of the principle of glasnost’. For thirty-three years, he reminded his listeners, the Tver zemstvo had been held in open session, but now the regional governor was demanding that the editing commission be closed to outsiders. Glasnost’ had been introduced, Petrunkevich argued, not just to indulge the vanity of orators: it was designed to help institutions work better. He encountered some objections to this line of argument: even in liberal countries like England and France, equivalent committees did not hold their meetings in open session, and Tver was the only provincial zemstvo to have kept the meetings open up to now. But the like-minded S. V. de-Roberti backed Petrunkevich up: the analogy with Western Europe was false, as those countries had plenty of other arenas for public debate. The clinching argument rested on speakers’ responsibility for their words: ‘If I am convinced of something, then I can say so freely in front of everyone and anywhere. Don’t say things you can’t say in front of everyone!’¹⁵

Popular Address: Agitatsiia and Its Alternatives In the 1880s and 1890s, the authorities spent a good deal of time and resources policing communication within the educated society of obshchestvennost’. They were concerned about the potential for mobilization in liberal strongholds such as the universities and the zemstvos, and vigilant in repressing any efforts to build communities of opinion broader than a particular institution or region. Effective communication between that educated public and ‘the people’ was even more dangerous and distasteful to the government. On the other side of the political divide, Russian socialists had been struggling since the early 1860s to find an effective way of spreading the emancipatory (and even revolutionary) word from the ideological core of the populist movement to the wider population. The stateof-the-art term was agitatsiia, a concept borrowed from the international lexicon of politics, first adopted in Russian around 1860, whose usage peaked briefly in the late 1870s before again climbing steeply from the late 1890s onwards.¹⁶

¹⁴ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 172 (writing of 1896). ¹⁵ Stenograficheskii otchet ocherednogo Tverskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia, sessii 1898 goda, zasedanii 8, 9, 11–16, 18–23 ianvaria 1899 g. (Tver, 1899), 3–12. ¹⁶ This according to a graph of usage generated on the site of the ‘National Corpus of the Russian Language’, http://ruscorpora.ru (accessed 22 February 2017).

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After the populist lurch to terror in the late 1870s, the authorities ostensibly had much less to fear from the softer forms of socialist persuasion. The post-1881 crackdown brought mass arrests, and the revolutionaries’ greatest triumph quickly turned into a resounding defeat. For the next two decades, any attempt to spread the word of populism, Marxism or any other variant of socialism would struggle to gain a hearing. Socialist propagandists ran into a contradiction inherent in their whole enterprise: propaganda in tiny conspiratorial groups failed to win them the wide support they needed, but any attempt to range more widely made them immediately visible to the security forces. Nonetheless, the underground populist movement continued its attempts to cultivate a worker and peasant audience in the 1880s, believing that spreading enlightenment to at least pockets of working people would raise their political consciousness and bring into being a popular socialist vanguard. For the populists, as for the intelligentsia as a whole, the 1880s went down in the memoir legacy as a decade of ‘small deeds’.¹⁷ The Russian-Jewish journalist ShloymeZanvl Rappoport (better known under his later pseudonym of S. An-sky) spent the second half of the 1880s conducting public readings among peasants and miners in the Donets Basin. He made little effort to direct proceedings, believing in the importance not only of spreading knowledge to the illiterate, but also of listening to what they said in response.¹⁸ This was the difficult balance that all propagandists had to strike. The stakes of socialist agitation were raised irrevocably in the 1890s, by the famine of 1891–2, the rapid growth of the industrial population in the crucial major cities, and the consequent increase in working-class collective action. A large strike of textile workers in summer 1896 showed that industrial action could be sustained across multiple factories and that agitation might be able to knit together a true proletarian consciousness.¹⁹ At the same time, Russian socialists were contending with serious ideological differences within their ranks—above all, a split between Marxists and populists that hinged on these groups’ differing assessments of Russia’s path of economic development. More significant in practical terms was a concurrent debate on the requisite methods of political activity among the working class. Until the early 1890s, this had largely been conducted in small ‘circles’ (kruzhki), whose goal was to educate a modest number of ‘conscious’ workers who could then form the vanguard of their class. The instrument of enlightenment was ‘propaganda’ in the form of printed material—sometimes books of a formidable level of abstraction. By the early 1890s a younger generation of Marxists was advocating a more direct and punchy ¹⁷ Allan K. Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903 (Chicago, 1967), 2. ¹⁸ Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 43–4. ¹⁹ Gerald D. Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution (Stanford, 1989), 53–65.

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style of propaganda, partly because of their sense that the Social Democratic movement needed to reach out to a wider worker constituency, but also because of their disappointment with the results of the existing kruzhki. Bookish propaganda had brought into being not self-sacrificing fighters for the cause but rather worker intelligenty who used education as a route to upward mobility and were unwilling to court personal risk. The danger was that these men would become as passive and ‘superfluous’ as any Turgenev hero. Russian radicals had still not solved a fundamental problem of revolutionary speech: how to empower workers rhetorically without causing them to lose their authenticity? The thus far unachievable goal had been formulated by the grandfather of the Russian revolutionary movement, Alexander Herzen, when he encountered the Paris worker Barthélemy, protagonist of the June Days of France’s 1848 revolution, in London in 1852. Barthélemy, by then a fellow exile, had somehow managed to ‘preserve the naturalness of his language amidst the showy rhetoricians, the Gascons of revolutionary phrase-making’.²⁰ An alternative strategy was introduced to the St Petersburg Social Democratic scene in autumn 1894. Given the police concentration in the major Russian cities, it is no wonder that it originated at the western margins of the empire. Propagandists in Vilna—foremost among them Iulii Martov—had introduced a new concept of ‘agitation’: they advocated communicating ideas in more straightforward language to a wider worker audience. Agitators needed to ‘rub up against the masses, listen carefully, hit the right spot, catch the heartbeat of the crowd’, using everyday economic concerns as a gateway to political matters.²¹ In the Pale of Settlement, that also meant agitating in Yiddish rather than Russian. Despite significant opposition from the local worker intelligentsia—which accused Martov of trying to keep workers in their place by dumbing down propaganda—the new model was adopted not only in the western borderlands but also in Petersburg, Moscow, and various other cities in southern and south-western Russia to which agitators from the Pale fanned out from 1895 onwards. Martov’s tactic was undoubtedly risky, and the more conspiratorial older generation of Social Democrats was never entirely comfortable with it. A Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class formed in autumn 1895 and set to work ‘agitating’ among the industrial workers of St Petersburg. But it soon felt the attention of the security police.²² Although the strike movement of 1896–7 seemed to confirm the value of this approach, the first cohort of agitators was soon swept up in a wave of arrests—only to be replaced by younger, less polished comrades who threw themselves into agitation and neglected the ideological ²⁰ A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tritsati tomakh (Moscow, 1954–66), 11: 78–9. ²¹ Quotation from the crucial booklet on the subject, Ob agitatsii (Geneva, 1896), 17. By the time this was published, hectographed copies had been circulating for months within Russia (ibid., 2). ²² Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905 (DeKalb, 1998), 101.

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content of propaganda. Agitators in Moscow, after all, were known to cite the Gospels in the meetings they held in woods outside the city.²³ As Laura Engelstein puts it bluntly: ‘No mass workers’ movement existed in Moscow in 1900.’²⁴ Nonetheless, the efforts of socialist agitators to speak to the economic concerns of their worker audience were bearing some fruit. Strikes broke out with renewed force in 1900–1, and the industrial workforce showed a new willingness to voice explicitly political protest.²⁵ May Day 1901 precipitated a wave of demonstrations and strikes among St Petersburg metalworkers, suggesting that an influential minority had been politicized by discussion circles organized by the revolutionary underground, though the high level of literacy and skilled work in this industry, as well as the close relations between different workshops, also played their part.²⁶ In response to the worker activism of the time, local Social Democratic committees threw themselves into demonstrations and political agitation.²⁷ At least some of them made every effort to speak to their audience in a language that would be understood. In the early 1900s, for example, the young Iosif Jugashvili (Stalin) was recalled as being direct and salty in his language as he fomented Marxism among the oil workers of Batumi and elsewhere in the South Caucasus. He presented himself as cut from the same proletarian cloth as his listeners, with neither the education nor the time for ‘delicate manners and high-flown aristocratic eloquence’. Not for the last time in his political career, he would claim to be delivering ‘plain, crude truths’.²⁸ The authorities responded to this upsurge of political activity with heavy repression, nowhere more so than in the ‘Batumi massacre’ of March 1902. The socialist agitators went underground or abroad, if they were not arrested, and the connection between the Social Democratic party and the workers weakened. The strikes of 1903 occurred ‘not because of Social Democratic leadership, but in spite of it’.²⁹ By autumn 1904, the Social Democratic organization even in the proletarian stronghold of St Petersburg was recognized as being in a weak state.³⁰ But the evidence of worker mobilization, whether or not it was inspired by the Russian

²³ My account of the shift to agitation draws on Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution, chap. 2. On Martov’s agitational activities and programme, see Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge, 1967), 21–31 and Martov’s own account in his Zapiski sotsial-demokrata (Moscow, 2004), 149–94. ²⁴ Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford, 1982), 55. ²⁵ On this ‘momentous transformation in the psychology of the working masses since 1895’, see Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution, 59. ²⁶ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 87–98, esp. 97–8. ²⁷ Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution, 216. ²⁸ R. Arsenidze, ‘Iz vospominanii o Staline’, Novyi zhurnal, 72 (1963): 221. (Arsenidze observed Stalin in action in 1904–5.) On Stalin’s career as an agitator in the South Caucasus, see Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (London, 2014), 51–2, 76–8. ²⁹ Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution, 251. ³⁰ S. I. Somov, ‘Iz istorii sotsialdemokraticheskogo dvizheniia v Peterburge v 1905 godu’, Byloe, no. 4 (1907): 22–3.

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Social Democratic Workers’ Party, was real enough at the turn of the century for the authorities to attempt to co-opt rather than suppress it, largely at the initiative of the man with a good claim to be the empire’s most sophisticated policeman, Sergei Zubatov. Zubatov understood from the inside the potential of propaganda among the industrial working class. As a gymnasium student in the early 1880s, he had become ‘a disciple of Pisarev’ and shown himself to be a talented propagandist; he then managed a bookshop with connections to The People’s Will. In the mid-1880s he began collaborating with the Okhrana, and his considerable knowhow was put at the service of the monarchist cause. By the late 1890s, in light of the spread of the revolutionary movement to a wider constituency in the factories, he was convinced that the police needed to adopt more ingenious methods: to recognize, and even in some cases support, specific worker grievances while at the same time cultivating loyalty to the Emperor. In a report of 1898 that was passed on to Grand Duke Sergei, Zubatov reflected on the worrying fact that the Social Democrats were now preying on the economic resentments of the working class, taking advantage of the growth of popular education and reading rooms and the consequent emergence of a worker intelligentsia. In order to undermine the socialist movement, the Moscow authorities approved, even co-sponsored, the creation of new labour societies in 1900–1. With the participation of sympathetic members of the intelligentsia, a programme of lectures introduced the worker audience to topics such as the history of the mutual-help movement; before long these gatherings had to be moved to a larger venue at the Historical Museum, and even that soon proved too small. The results of the first year or more of the policesponsored labour movement seemed very encouraging for Zubatov: meetings were closely supervised and kept to a conservative agenda, while Zubatov’s men had total control of the Workers’ Council that set the agenda. On 19 February 1902, the forty-first anniversary of the emancipation, Zubatov achieved his greatest coup with a mass demonstration inside the Kremlin to demonstrate worker loyalty to the throne and the Church. Yet, while this event was greeted with rapture by sections of the conservative press, the authorities in St Petersburg were more guarded, suspecting that Zubatov was doing too much to promote the working-class agenda.³¹ At the same time, the intelligentsia was starting to distance itself from Zubatov’s experiment, as suspicions hardened about the extent of Okhrana involvement. When the burgeoning labour movement brought worker mobilization against the textile magnate Guzhon, a pillar of the Moscow industrialist community, Zubatov’s position became even weaker, and he was discreetly transferred to St Petersburg in August 1902—ostensibly a promotion, but most probably a means of forestalling further conflict in Moscow. In the

³¹ They were probably not wrong: the liberal press tended to see the event as a sign of political mobilization that, by implication, was broader than the Zubatov agenda. See Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton, 2000), 372.

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capital, Zubatov promptly started setting up labour societies along the same lines as in Moscow. But here he met the obstruction of Sergei Witte and a more charged political atmosphere: meetings were disrupted by political agitators, who heckled the speakers and put off the intelligentsia from participating. Zubatov’s fortunes were waning rapidly, and he was duly removed in 1903.³² Nonetheless, between 1891 and 1903 the conditions for popular political discourse had been transformed. The competition for the people’s ear had been joined by socialists and paternalists alike. The gentle apolitical fare of the previous generation of ‘readings to the people’ was displaced by a set of more urgent set of tasks—above all, the search for a social order that would reconcile or transcend the discontents of urban modernity.³³ But the most active participants in the quest were not the socialists, depleted in numbers and subject to severe repression, but the clergy: in Moscow, priests delivered 772 readings and talks in 1899 and 1900 alone.³⁴ With the pace of events in early twentieth-century Russia, it was less desirable than ever for the Church to remain aloof from the contemporary world: as the main contemporary chronicle of Church life observed in 1904, ‘it is not fitting for priests to remain silent about matters absolutely everyone is discussing, especially when many are waiting for their authoritative pronouncements’.³⁵ Priests needed to embrace their pastoral mission and to share good practice at regional meetings.³⁶ In the capital at least, Orthodox clergy could boast some notable achievements in combining proselytizing with social engagement. By the early twentieth century, progressive churchmen had to their two credit the two ‘largest and most successful public organizations’ in the city: the Society for the Dissemination of Moral-Religious Enlightenment (ORRP) and the Alexander Nevsky Temperance Society. The ORRP, founded in 1880, was part of the response to the success of Radstock and Pashkov in the 1870s. The founders of the society decided to adopt a similar format of talks and readings separate from church services. By permitting laypeople to lead meetings, the society also made possible a productive collaboration between clergy and representatives of other estates.³⁷

³² Jeremiah Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 1976), 49–51, 63, 88–90, 105–6, 115–16, 128–30, 134–5, 172–4, 180. ³³ For an example of gentler fare, see Kh. D. Alchevskaia et al., Chto chitat’ narodu? Kriticheskii ukazatel’ knig dlia narodnogo i detskogo chteniia (St Petersburg, 1888). ³⁴ Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov, 136. ³⁵ ‘Mneniia i otzyvy’, TsV, no. 9 (1904): 262–3. On the need to take account of the audience, see M. B., ‘O tserkovnom propovednichestve’, TsV, no. 16 (1904): 493–5. ³⁶ ‘Sovremennyi pastyr’ i dukh vremeni’, TsV, no. 23 (1903): 705–8; ‘Okruzhnye sobraniia dukhovenstva’, TsV, no. 24 (1903): 737–41. For an excellent survey of the Church’s debate on preaching in the late imperial era, see S. M. Dixon, ‘Church, State and Society in Late Imperial Russia: The Diocese of St Petersburg, 1880–1914’, PhD dissertation (SSEES, University of London, 1993), 364–81. ³⁷ Jennifer Hedda, His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2008), chap. 5, quotation 87.

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Yet, in this era as before, churchmen were frank in their internal reports about the failings of Orthodox practice. For one thing, there were far too few churches. According to the Chief Procurator’s report for 1905, there was on average only one house of worship for every 2,500 believers; the only diocese to average under 1,000 inhabitants for each church was the thinly populated Arkhangelsk; in Perm the average was more than 4,000, while in Kherson, the Don region, St Petersburg, Stavropol, Tomsk, and Viatka it was not much lower. Perhaps these figures were not too bad compared to Western Europe. Church attendance, moreover, was not as obligatory as in Catholicism; it was permissible for parishioners to absent themselves at harvest time or in the depths of winter or simply because of the long distance to the nearest church. More of a concern was the Church’s failure to concentrate resources where they were most needed: in high-density urban, newly industrialized districts.³⁸ The greatest problem identified by Orthodox bishops was the failure of services to make their mark on members of the congregation. Services were long; they were held in the impenetrably archaic Old Church Slavonic; prayers and songs were performed at high speed, leaving listeners no chance to absorb the meaning of words. Priests still did not preach often enough, and when they did they were relentlessly scholastic. The main occasion for sermons was to accompany the liturgy on Sundays and holidays, but even then priests did not feel obliged. Priests were also unable to respond to pressing social issues and current events. Homiletic training in seminaries remained too theoretical. Sermons were usually read out from books and repeated verbatim for years on end. Censorship (whether preliminary or retrospective) remained a powerful disincentive to more spontaneous preaching.³⁹ Censors’ reports, for their part, remarked on some of the same problems. Sermons remained over-general and did not provide examples from contemporary society. They took little account of local particularities: in Ufa diocese, for example, no reference was made to either Islam or paganism. Language remained for the most part archaic and heavily Slavonicized.⁴⁰ In light of all this, it was perhaps not surprising that the greatest successes in adapting religion to modernity were achieved by charismatic preachers with only a tangential relationship to the Orthodox hierarchy. This was in large part a response to the new quality of social engagement required of priests in Russia’s fast-growing cities; it was also a delayed and unintended consequence of the

³⁸ P. E. Immekus, Die Russisch-Orthodoxe Landpfarrei zu Beginn des XX. Jahrhunderts nach den Gutachten der Diözesanbischöfe (Würzburg, 1978), 16–18; on underprovision of churches in St Petersburg, see Hedda, His Kingdom Come, 24. ³⁹ Immekus, Die Russisch-Orthodoxe Landpfarrei, 43–5, 56–7. On the impenetrability of Old Church Slavonic to congregations, see the editorial ‘Kogda luchshe ob”iasniat’ evangelie’, TsV, no. 10 (1904): 290–1. On the restricting effects of censorship, see Aleksandr Liubimov, ‘Propoved’ i tsenzura’, TsV, no. 14 (1904): 427–9. ⁴⁰ ‘Letopis’ tserkovnoi i obshchestvennoi zhizni’, TsV, no. 8 (1903): 248–9.

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creation of the monastic vanguard, some of whose members were setting a new course for the Church rather than zealously defending its existing practices. The earliest of these mavericks was John of Kronstadt. John was a product of the reform era, with its renewed commitment to the priest’s pastoral mission. But no churchman of his generation took this mission more seriously than he. Turning away from the rigid ritual of the Orthodox Church, he poured emotional energy into the liturgy. The Eucharist as performed by John became a highly charged symbolic act. Contrary to Orthodox practice he often turned to the congregation rather than the altar. Even more shocking, he regularly departed from the text. By the 1880s, John was a national celebrity and in heavy demand; he retained his capacity to stir his audiences to religious frenzy until the end of his life in 1908. His charisma and heterodox practices, however, made him an awkward and often unwelcome figure for the Church hierarchs.⁴¹ Another celebrity preacher, but of a very different emotional and intellectual cast, was Grigorii Petrov. Petrov was typical of the post-1881 generation of clergymen. Born in 1867 outside the clerical estate, he entered the Petersburg academy in 1887 just after the arrival of Antonii Vadkovskii as rector. Heavily involved in the ORRP, he set about demonstrating to his listeners, whether lay or clerical, the importance of Christianity in the modern world, placing particular emphasis on individual Gospel reading. Always treated with suspicion by the Church hierarchy, his relationship with the Church soured completely after 1905, when his thought became altogether more political.⁴² In his autobiographical novel Zateinik (The Entrepreneur), Petrov made clear what he thought of the mainstream Church’s approach to preaching. Homiletics, in his view, was no more than ‘everything dreamt up by medieval scholastic rhetoric’, while those who taught the subject were not much better: ‘in two seminaries I know of it was taught by stammerers.’⁴³ Petrov’s appeal extended beyond the common people to the secular intelligentsia; unsurprisingly, the rigorous Evlogii found him given to ‘posing’ and ‘external effects’ but lacking in ‘inner religiosity’.⁴⁴ Petrov did not feel himself bound by Church authorities, and his listeners would wait in vain for references to heaven, hell, and salvation. He was a fluent speaker but lacked Father John’s fireworks. He appealed as much to listeners’ curiosity as to their emotions.⁴⁵ Petrov was apparently required to submit all his sermons for prior authorization—which, given the ⁴¹ See Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park, 2000). ⁴² Hedda, His Kingdom Come, chap. 6. ⁴³ G. S. Petrov, Zateinik (St Petersburg, 1904), 135–6. For a summary of the novel, see Hedda, His Kingdom Come, 114–16. ⁴⁴ Evlogii (Georgievskii), Put’ moei zhizni: Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1994), 166. ⁴⁵ I. V. Preobrazhenskii, Novyi i traditsionnyi dukhovnye oratory O.o. Grigorii Petrov i Ioann Sergeev (Kronshtadtskii) (Kriticheskii etiud), 5th ed. (St Petersburg, 1903), which is distinctly hostile to Petrov.

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number of impromptu sermons he gave, could be as much as fifty sheets per week. He was finally unfrocked in January 1908.⁴⁶ Mikhail (Semenov) was another monk who threw himself into communicating with the secular public at some cost to his relationship with the ecclesiastical authorities. Transferred to the St Petersburg theological academy in 1902, Mikhail brought a more socially engaged quality to the curriculum but also engaged in vigorous debate with Decadent intellectuals at the ‘religious-philosophical assemblies’, addressing the vexed question of sex and marriage. He also spoke effectively to a non-elite public in popular lectures at Solianoi Gorodok, where he drew on knowledge of contemporary literature and science and cultivated an open and non-hierarchical relationship to his listeners.⁴⁷ The clearest demonstration of the social and indeed political reach of charismatic religious speech was the career of Georgii Gapon (see Figure 4.1), a social activist priest and a protégé of Zubatov who went much further than the police chief ever intended. After graduating from the seminary, Gapon (b. 1870) gained a reputation as a preacher in his home province of Poltava. After his wife died he left for St Petersburg and entered the ecclesiastical academy. He soon felt constrained by this institution, however, and dropped out to pursue his charitable vocation, serving in a small church near the docks on Vasilevsky Island. Although his sermons had made him a celebrity, he was treated with suspicion and hostility by the Church. All this made him receptive to an approach from Zubatov that he received in autumn 1902. With Zubatov’s encouragement he set up a tea room for workers, with meetings and book discussions several times a week, and an independent assembly which held its first public meeting in April 1904; its membership increased steadily in the spring and summer of that year and rapidly in the autumn. In January 1905, as the leader of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ procession, Gapon exemplified like no other figure the potential for symbiosis between religion and politics.⁴⁸ Although Gapon’s movement would never have gained such momentum without Zubatov’s support, and although he was later murdered on suspicion of being a tsarist agent, he was no police stooge: he had ably sought patronage at several moments in his career, but only to further his own cause, which was never limited to mere self-advancement. Gapon did not believe merely in pacification of the workers. Instead, he was committed to a form of mobilization. But just how far that mobilization would go, and how political a form it would take, remained unclear, almost certainly to Gapon himself. Meetings of leading progressives at Gapon’s apartment in November 1904 exposed disagreements about how exactly

⁴⁶ Dixon, ‘Church, State and Society’, 436–7. ⁴⁷ Simon Dixon, ‘Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov) and Russian Christian Socialism’, HJ, 51 (2008): 697–9. ⁴⁸ Hedda, His Kingdom Come, chap. 7.

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Figure 4.1. Gapon with St Petersburg governor Ivan Fullon at the opening of a section of his worker assembly, 1904. Source: E. Shelaeva and L. Protsai, Rus’ Pravoslavnaia (St Petersburg, 1993). https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gapon_and_Fullon.jpg

workers should express themselves politically, and whether to make a public demonstration immediately or to hold back. Gapon himself seems to have taken a middle-of-the-road position in this debate. But in December an escalating dispute over the dismissal of a Putilov worker pushed him, and the Assembly as a whole, towards a more resolute position. With the start of a strike among Petersburg workers on 3–4 January, Gapon took on a heightened role as a channel for the grievances and aspirations of the working class. He spoke to dozens of different gatherings, and his words seem to have had the force of revelation for many listeners. Throughout his career, observers had commented on his handsome appearance, his warm and sympathetic eyes, and his attractive voice. When a Bolshevik agitator had to stand in for Gapon, he found himself replicating all Gapon’s gestures and intonations, and even spoke with his southern accent.⁴⁹ Now these qualities achieved maximum political effect, as they were complemented ⁴⁹ I. N. Ksenofontov, Georgii Gapon: Vymysel i pravda (Moscow, 1996), 99.

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by frenetic activity and a disciplined ‘agitational’ effort that put the Social Democrats to shame. Workers streamed into the building of Gapon’s Assembly from morning to night, and Gapon and his associates read out to them the petition they were preparing to present to the Tsar; the main assembly room could hold 700, and it was repeatedly full to bursting. The text was generally approved by acclamation, but the workers also made various amendments and additions, thus turning the document into a piece of oral collective authorship.⁵⁰ In the months before the crisis of January 1905, the Petersburg Social Democrats had badly underestimated Gapon, assuming that it would be easy enough to discredit him in worker eyes by branding him an agent of Zubatov. But their own attempts to use economic grievances as a platform for political mobilization were clearly falling flat in autumn 1904. As one of their number freely admitted, the Putilov strike came as a complete surprise. But their reaction was swift: they threw themselves into a campaign of agitation from 4 January onwards and soon learned to stop denouncing Gapon and embrace the emotionally heightened and politically unfocused mood of Assembly gatherings. It was at this time that the Social Democratic milieu produced its first orators with a genuine popular touch, notably an agitator with the look and demeanour of a wandering pilgrim, thin and poorly dressed in a sheepskin coat and high peasant boots, who very successfully addressed his audience of peasants-turned-workers at gates and street corners. Speaking in a quiet, hesitant voice but with emotional intensity and a folksy turn of phrase, he perfectly embodied the ‘heightened, mystical theatricality’ of the moment. The fact that Social Democrat agitators were ‘going native’ in this way certainly weakened the ideological core of their message, and it meant that most workers in the early days of 1905 found it hard to tell Gaponites and Marxists apart. But this was a valuable schooling in demotic rhetoric, and the influence flowed in the other direction as well: the Social Democrats, to some extent masquerading as Christian socialists, almost certainly helped to sharpen the resolve of the workers as their fateful demonstration came closer.⁵¹ The result, by the morning of the ill-fated 9 January 1905, was an unprecedented mood of ecstatic religious–political mobilization. Even if most of the demonstrators did not seriously expect the police to shoot at them, they had espoused a rhetoric of ‘freedom or death’ that would soon be put to the test.⁵² Like nothing else in Russian life hitherto, the Gapon phenomenon had seemed to

⁵⁰ On the snowballing oratory of early January, and Gapon’s own escalating rhetoric, see L. Gurevich, ‘Narodnoe dvizhenie v Peterburge 9–go ianvaria 1905 g.’, Byloe, no. 1 (1906): 195–223, esp. 201–4. The main general study of Gapon’s activities is Walter Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905 (Princeton, 1976). ⁵¹ See the thoughtful Social Democratic account in Somov, ‘Iz istorii sotsialdemokraticheskogo dvizheniia’, 25–8, 30–7. ⁵² Ksenofontov, Georgii Gapon, 99–100; Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 156–67.

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demonstrate the colossal power of charismatic speech and the fluid boundaries between religious, social activist, and political speech. For some contemporaries, this was both inspiring and appalling. Rappoport (now An-sky) was impressed by Gapon’s remarkable ability to communicate, but also found in him something demonic; the power of charismatic speech was profoundly troubling to intellectuals accustomed to putting themselves in the driving seat.⁵³ Gapon did not conform to educated norms of rhetorical effect: he ‘spoke too rapidly, stammered nervously, and often could not find the right word’.⁵⁴ But such ostensible deficiencies were instead taken as tokens of Gapon’s sincerity and authenticity, and the impression he made was heightened by the swarthy good looks that contemporaries often remarked on.⁵⁵ The Gapon phenomenon might be regarded as a manifestation of the cult of ‘sincerity’ and individuality that characterized life in fin-de-siècle Russia. John of Kronstadt was another uneven speaker, who when conducting the liturgy veered between a barely audible mumble and sudden emphasis bordering on a shout.⁵⁶ At times this could be taken to melodramatic excess; this was, after all, the era of Shaliapin and of Kerensky, who developed a taste for declamation and amateur theatricals during his school days in Tashkent before finding broader applications for it in 1905 and beyond.⁵⁷ But Gapon, before he was himself swept along by the spirit of ecstatic martyrdom in early January, was genuinely interested in speaking to workers on equal terms, holding late-night discussion sessions in his apartment; in his instant memoir of events, he drew a sharp distinction between his own social engagement and the more cult-like treatment of John of Kronstadt, who in Gapon’s view surrounded himself more with middle-class ladies than with the truly downtrodden.⁵⁸ The quest for authenticity and the popular voice was also taken up on the stage. The productions of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko at the turn of the century downplayed the conventionally well-trained actor’s voice and departed from broad characterization by social type, searching instead for the ‘individual’ voice, which might be hoarse, hesitant, and mumbling rather than distinct and well-projected.⁵⁹ This project received its most concentrated expression in Gorky’s doss-house philosophical drama The Lower Depths, which created a sensation at its premiere at the Moscow Arts Theatre in December 1902. The author himself

⁵³ Safran, Wandering Soul, 117, 119. ⁵⁴ Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 126. ⁵⁵ Ksenofontov, Georgii Gapon, 16, 41. ⁵⁶ As reported by Evlogii, Put’ moei zhizni, 203. ⁵⁷ On the ethos of authenticity as excess, see Anna Fishzon, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (New York, 2013). On Kerensky’s love of theatricals even in his school days in Tashkent, see Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (London, 1987), 11. ⁵⁸ George Gapon, The Story of My Life (New York, 1906), 114–15. ⁵⁹ Oksana Bulgakova, Golos kak kul’turnyi fenomen (Moscow, 2015), 120.

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had taken part in rehearsals, helping the actors to ‘hear’ the central figure of Luka by reading that character’s speeches with his ‘Volga lilt’. Such was the impact of the play that the imperial Aleksandrinsky Theatre also took it up, the director and designer visiting the city’s homeless shelters as preparation (though in the event the production was blocked by Plehve, the Minister of the Interior).⁶⁰ The resonance of Gorky’s work can be seen in a contemporary short story whose narrator fails to find work and has to join the begging community in Nizhnii Novgorod. There he encounters a man nicknamed ‘the orator’, who delivers a rousing speech protesting injustice in a Christian socialist vein; the narrator finds work the next day, while the speech-maker succumbs to drink.⁶¹

The Courtroom as Political Theatre Although the government had since the late 1870s placed severe constraints on the reporting of trials, the main historians of the subject rightly stress the remarkable fact that the courtroom retained the core principles of the legal reform despite its proclivity to provoke the authorities.⁶² The underlying independence of the Russian Bar remained in place, and the government’s efforts in the post-1881 era to restrict the dissemination of courtroom speech were not always successful. A notable instance was the third trial in the case of the Votiaks spuriously accused of ritual murder, which took place in May–June 1896. The venue was a grimy zemstvo assembly room in the small town of Mamadysh in Kazan province, but the remote and unprepossessing location did not dissuade many journalists from making their way there. The hostile atmosphere in the courtroom, and the fact that the prosecution witnesses were well prepared for their role after two previous trials, did not prevent the St Petersburg celebrity lawyer Karabchevskii winning the day.⁶³ Karabchevskii’s main partner was the writer Vladimir Korolenko, who had become involved in the case at the first retrial in 1895, where he had teamed up with two associates to take down an ‘almost stenographic’ account of proceedings.⁶⁴ Glasnost’ was beginning to reassert itself. ⁶⁰ S. Danilov, ‘K stsenicheskoi istorii rannikh p’es M. Gor’kogo’, in A. Ia. Al’tshuller (ed.), Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i teatr (Moscow, 1956), 50–60. ⁶¹ A. Paren’kov-Eliseev, ‘Orator’, in A. Paren’kov-Eliseev, Monakh Fedotych. Orator. Rasskazy (Samarkand, 1906), 26–36. ⁶² See Jörg Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich 1864–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1996) and Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (New York, 1953); this despite the fact that they differ somewhat in their assessments of the performance of the legal profession. ⁶³ See the account in Karabchevskii’s archive, GARF, f. 827, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 33–4. For a modern historian’s account, see Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2001), 215–17. ⁶⁴ V. G. Korolenko, ‘Multanskoe zhertvoprinoshenie’, in his Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow, 1953–6), 9: 342.

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A new generation of lawyers rode the wave of social mobilization in the 1890s, taking political activism even further than their predecessors. Lawyers were prominent in the political movements and parties that began to form in the wake of the famine of 1891–2. They became more socially engaged, opening new consultancies to provide legal advice to the disadvantaged and the illiterate. In June 1904, emergency laws were suspended, political cases fell back under the jurisdiction of civil courts, and new Bar councils opened in Kazan, Odessa, Kiev, Novocherkassk, Saratov, Omsk, Irkutsk, and Tashkent. The likes of Spasovich, Plevako, and Gerard now looked and sounded distinctly old-fashioned, as a more engagé cohort took to the stage of the courtroom. The youngsters had a penchant for the bold gesture: by the early 1900s, an almost routine defence tactic was to present unreasonable demands to the court and storm out when they were refused. Politically committed barristers had plenty to occupy them, as the early years of the century saw another peak in political trials—almost 200 of them between 1901 and 1904, many involving working-class defendants.⁶⁵ At least some of these defendants were ready to give voice to a political programme: Nikolai Murav’ev, one of a handful of leading ‘political’ lawyers in the 1900s, recalled that one of his charges, a worker named Petr Zalomov who was on trial for his part in a May Day demonstration in Sormovo (near Nizhnii Novgorod), delivered a speech that quickly became as widely known as the famous courtroom declarations of Alekseev and Bardina in the 1870s.⁶⁶ Beyond the courtroom, in their own assemblies, lawyers played a full part in the political ferment of autumn 1904. The St Petersburg Bar council held a fiery meeting on 21 November, while the Moscow and St Petersburg Bars held a joint meeting on 30 November; civil rights were high up the agenda. After Bloody Sunday came further radicalization and the creation of a highly politicized lawyers’ union.⁶⁷ Lawyers at the turn of the century had grasped the propaganda value of trials. When the government expected public opinion to be in its favour, as in the case of the Socialist Revolutionary assassins Kaliaev and Gershuni, it might permit open trials—thus giving its opponents a platform. But information leaked out even from trials that were closed to the public. At mass trials, typically arising from strikes and protests, crowds of workers might gather outside the doors of the courtroom and obtain information from relatives and witnesses. But the main conduits for information were the lawyers themselves, who cultivated very close relationships with defendants and provided a focus for oppositional and revolutionary discussion. Their arrival for political trials in provincial centres was an ⁶⁵ N. A. Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii i politicheskie protsessy 1866–1904 gg. (Tula, 2000), 332. ⁶⁶ T. A. Ugrimova and A. G. Volkov (eds), ‘Stoi v zavete svoem’: Nikolai Konstantinovich Murav’ev. Advokat i obshchestvennyi deiatel’ (Moscow, 2004), 20–1. For a general account of the trial, see Troitskii, Advokatura v Rossii, 340–2. ⁶⁷ For a fine account of the politicization of the Bar from the early 1890s onwards, see Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz, 564–614.

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‘event’ often marked by banquets and receptions that themselves provided an excellent propaganda opportunity.⁶⁸ The first large-scale trial of the new century took place in Saratov in 1902. The defence of participants in a street demonstration brought together some of the future luminaries of the politicized Russian Bar. But it failed to make much impression on the local public, having resonance mainly for Saratov’s radical intelligentsia. The following year saw a more rousing occasion: the defence of participants in a worker demonstration in Rostov that had led to clashes with police. Here the stakes were higher: the case was tried before a military court, which meant that the death penalty could be applied. The authorities took precautions to avoid unrest, transferring the case to sleepy Taganrog and taking special security measures. The central figure in the trial was a young merchant’s son named Brailovskii, who had evidently ‘electrified’ the crowd with his stirring oratory; according to his lawyer, he was ‘born for the role of popular tribune’. But his palpable charisma left him open to a dubious charge of incitement that carried the death penalty. This time it was not possible to seal the courtroom from its surroundings: by some mysterious ‘wireless telegraph’ accounts of the trial spread through the city and beyond. Before long, news of the case resulted in fresh demonstrations.⁶⁹ The early 1900s were a time of rhetorical flux. Some trials saw curiously hybrid defence teams, where old-style lawyers joined forces with the more politicized younger generation. The results were probably satisfactory to neither party. The case of workers accused of unrest at the Baranov textile factory brought together the radically minded Mikhail Mandel’shtam and the old lion Fedor Plevako. Plevako delivered a speech with his usual flourishes, but failed to give the case the political edge that was desired by Mandel’shtam, relying instead on appeals to general humanity. Admittedly, the defendants themselves were not very politically inclined: their actions had arisen from a local hiring dispute and were apparently not the result of agitation or organization from outside, and their concerns, as expressed in their final statements, remained very personal. Mandel’shtam did his best to raise their consciousness in his interviews with them, but the trial failed to rise to the level of a cause célèbre.⁷⁰ Nikolai Karabchevskii was a lawyer of the older generation who had distinguished himself in a number of politically resonant cases. As part of the defence team in the Trial of the 193, he had earned the personal gratitude of Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, the future ‘grandmother of the Russian Revolution’. He had garnered plaudits for his defence of the Votiaks in the Multan case. But he

⁶⁸ M. L. Mandel’shtam, 1905 god v politicheskikh protsessakh: Zapiski zashchitnika (Moscow, 1931), 43–7. ⁶⁹ Mandel’shtam, 1905 god, chaps. 4–5, quotations 81, 93. ⁷⁰ Mandel’shtam, 1905 god, 101–4.

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remained at heart thoroughly unpolitical. His limitations as a tribune were laid bare in his defence of Ariadna Tyrkova, who in 1903 was tried behind closed doors for smuggling in copies of Petr Struve’s journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) from Finland. While Mandel’shtam put up a steely legal defence of Tyrkova’s co-defendant—carrying the journal across the border did not constitute dissemination, and its content was not in any case criminal—Karabchevskii struck Tyrkova as a ‘superficial chatterer’ (legkomyslennyi govorun): he played to the emotions and appealed for mercy as if he were addressing a jury rather than ‘representatives of the estates’ with higher education. Tyrkova was so dismayed that she took to the stand to put the record straight.⁷¹ As the case of Tyrkova showed, if the courtroom was to attain the quality of political theatre, a lot depended on the conduct of the defendants: how keen they were to save their skin, and what kind of aura they were able to project. Mandel’shtam commented of the lawyer’s role that ‘conduct in the courtroom is not a science but an art’, and the same went for defendants.⁷²

Banquet Politics: Oratory and the Mobilization of Educated Society Tensions between government and educated society rapidly escalated after the turn of the century. The first trial of strength came in the universities. In February 1899, students at St Petersburg University were beaten by policemen, and mass skhodki broke out. By March these gatherings were becoming distinctly political, even if they resisted takeover by any single party. For the first time the student movement had gone beyond narrowly corporate interests, and although the unrest subsided the following month, an important pattern had been set.⁷³ The empire’s other universities were also in turmoil in the early 1900s. In Moscow, even the measured Muromtsev delivered a provocative speech (at the university’s Pushkin celebrations in 1899), after which the Juridical Society was closed down.⁷⁴ The studenchestvo was increasingly straining at the leash of the 1884 Statute, and the most immediate bone of contention was students’ right to hold a general assembly, or skhodka. The hard-line Minister of the Interior Dmitrii Sipiagin and Pobednostsev dug in their heels on the issue, and the result was the ‘paternalistic half-measure’ of Temporary Rules that allowed student associations and discussion groups to conduct their business only under professorial supervision. When ⁷¹ Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode (London, 1990), 159–60; Mandel’shtam, 1905 god, 157–60. ⁷² Mandel’shtam, 1905 god, 73. ⁷³ Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley, 1989), 92–3, 108–9, 116. ⁷⁴ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 173–4.

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Moscow University students went ahead all the same with a general skhodka in February 1902, the response was draconian even by tsarist standards: almost 100 participants in the student movement were exiled to Siberia and hundreds more were sentenced to short jail terms.⁷⁵ When Sipiagin was assassinated in 1902, a full-blown police campaign against dissent began under his successor Viacheslav Plehve. The zemstvos were kept on a tight leash (many zemstvo deputies were arrested and searched in 1903), and the authorities were in no mood to compromise in discussions about involving zemstvo representatives in the work of government.⁷⁶ But this did rather little to check the momentum of debate in educated society that was crossing the divide between proto-political and properly political. At the start of the twentieth century, the presence of police witnesses was not doing much to dampen proceedings at Russia’s various public gatherings. The Pirogov congresses, which brought together scientists and zemstvo physicians, were becoming all but unpoliceable. In January 1902, at the Eighth Congress in Moscow, the police observers reported that delegates were expressing ‘opposition to the current political system’; to open proceedings, the Russian national anthem had been replaced by a lullaby, while delegates had hissed at a telegram from the Moscow Governor.⁷⁷ At the turn of 1903, the Third Congress of Activists in Technical and Professional Education witnessed outspoken oratory and a set of wholly political demands; it was soon shut down by the police, but it had pointed to an important shift in oppositional rhetoric from ‘gentlemanly’ argument and persuasion to ‘bold, impatient, and boisterous’ appeals to a broader citizenry.⁷⁸ It was followed seamlessly by the Ninth Pirogov Congress, where more than a thousand people crowded into auditoriums designed for a third of that number; debates constantly spilled over into politics, and the participation of medical students and other locals only added to the rowdy audience reaction.⁷⁹ The pattern of corporate organization leading to political mobilization was repeated in various other professional gatherings. Even village schoolteachers, widely dispersed and traditionally weak in corporate consciousness, began to mobilize. Summer courses and conferences, effectively in abeyance since the late 1870s, revived in the late 1890s, giving teachers the opportunity to develop an esprit de corps and also bringing them into contact with articulate and politically conscious members of educated society; thus was forged an alliance between zemstvo liberals and an increasingly radical ‘third element’. The process culminated in the All-Russian Congress of

⁷⁵ Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State, 154–5, 161–7. ⁷⁶ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 236–8, 245. ⁷⁷ Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 235–6. ⁷⁸ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 102–3. ⁷⁹ Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1904 (Princeton, 1981), 242–3.

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Representatives of Teachers’ Mutual Aid Societies, which opened on 28 December 1902 in the Moscow Gentry Assembly. Most of the debates were made open to the public, so there was ample opportunity for Muscovites to hear a string of speakers denouncing the nefarious effects of government education policy. Unlike many other professional gatherings, moreover, a significant number of the speakers were women. An outspoken report on the legal status of teachers brought an intervention by the attendant supervisor from the Ministry of Education and a vain attempt by the chairman to rein in discussion; the response was a revolutionary declaration from one delegate and a walkout by many others.⁸⁰ The literary intelligentsia could boast an esprit de corps of longer pedigree than most; its political mobilization in the 1900s was less striking and headlong than that of the physicians or the schoolteachers, but the writers too were emboldened in their public gatherings. The occasion of Vladimir Korolenko’s fiftieth birthday in 1903 brought together an audience of 400, including many intellectual luminaries. It also gave a nervous Iosif Gessen his first experience of full-blown oratory—including the exhilarating sensation of applause as ‘refreshing summer rain’ and the inspiring sense, so lacking in the life of a professional writer, of immediate connection to the audience.⁸¹ Tyrkova, another liberal who cut her political teeth in this era, took part in many less elaborate literary dinners. Most speakers remained cautious, mindful of the likely presence of police informers, relying on a sympathetic audience to pick up various political hints. But such occasions offered a schooling in rhetoric that would soon be put to good use in the mobilized conditions of 1905–6. Unusually for a woman in this milieu, Tyrkova overcame her nerves and delivered her first public speech.⁸² The spirit of mobilization also reached Russia’s institutions of local selfgovernment. In 1901, in the relatively vibrant Saratov, it was possible for the first time to speak of a genuine campaign for election to the city duma: programmes displaced clan allegiances, and a new cohort of municipal representatives were able to establish a new civic identity in public discourse. Three years later, when the pace of political life quickened, Saratov would be one of the first cities in the empire to respond: its representatives to the zemstvo congress in Moscow in 1904 were seen off by a cheering crowd at the railway station, and the city was also unusually quick to mobilize constitutionalist sentiment in the banquet campaign. Kazan, where noble and civil service presence in the duma was stronger, was more cautious; but in 1905 this city too saw a sharp deterioration in relations between urban elite and the state authorities.⁸³

⁸⁰ Scott J. Seregny, Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education in 1905 (Bloomington, 1989), chaps 3–4. ⁸¹ I. V. Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh: Zhiznennyi otchet’, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 22 (1937): 168–9. ⁸² Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 59–62. ⁸³ Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung, 350–3, 369–73, 382–4, 394.

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The career of V. A. Obolenskii offers a textbook example of incremental zemstvo radicalization at the turn of the century and shows the extent to which the effects of the zemstvo congress and the banquet campaign spread beyond Moscow and Petersburg. Born in 1869, Obolenskii entered St Petersburg University in 1887 and began his zemstvo career in the 1890s. After a brief and uninspiring experience of the Smolensk zemstvo, he spent the period 1896–1900 as a zemstvo delegate in Pskov. The proceedings failed to excite him. Debates only ever had a handful of participants, and they tended to be dominated by the chairman P. A. Geiden; though Geiden was a fine speaker and possessed a keen intellect and strong principles, he tended to subdue the other delegates, who knew they could expect a sarcastic rebuff if they opposed him. From Pskov Obolenskii moved to Orel in 1900, where he became a member of the Union of Liberation and found some impressive and quite outspoken colleagues. Large landowners and aristocrats could be more forthright in their criticism of the government than men of lesser wealth and status. On occasion debate could be fierce and ranged over matters that went beyond the competence of the zemstvo. At Obolenskii’s first meeting he witnessed a debate on the question of whether to petition for the abolition of classical education in middle schools. This issue, which had been exercising educated Russia for thirty years, provoked two days of ‘entirely parliamentary’ speechmaking with audience participation from the gallery. The liberals were always the most vocal: the reactionaries in the assembly tended to be poor speakers and restricted themselves to voting. Obolenskii then moved to Crimea in 1903, where he found the zemstvo assembly of the Tauride province to be rather patriarchal: it was dominated by four ‘old men’ who controlled the agenda and the rhythm of debates. By this time, however, Obolenskii’s thoughts were turning more and more to Moscow, where a zemstvo union, bringing together representatives of the thirty-four provinces, was taking shape.⁸⁴ By the autumn of 1904, the discussion circles of recent years were developing into political assemblies. Meetings became more frequent and more intense, and the police were increasingly powerless to stop speakers departing from the script. The liberal press was seized by a mood of optimism. Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s first remarks on taking up the post of Minister of Internal Affairs were greeted as a sign of ‘spring’: at long last a member of the government had expressed trust in society. Now it was time for a loosening of censorship, particularly with regard to zemstvo assemblies.⁸⁵ The theme remained prominent through the autumn. In October, a group of zemstvo delegates in Saratov addressed the chair to complain that reports of meetings in the press had been severely cut and distorted. When challenged about this, the three local papers pinned the blame on the censor, who not only excised whole speeches but also liberally inserted his own words.⁸⁶ An editorial in ⁸⁴ V. A. Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki (Paris, 1988), 170, 221–3, 248, 262–3. ⁸⁵ RV, 24 September 1904, 1. ⁸⁶ RV, 14 October 1904, 2.

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Russkie vedomosti railed at this signal demonstration of the ‘pitiful condition of our glasnost’’.⁸⁷ The zemstvo movement had long been the main source of proto-political activity in Russian society; sure enough, it was again in the vanguard of developments in late 1904. Its figurehead, however, was a moderate and a gradualist. One of the many people spurred to action in the increasingly confrontational atmosphere of the 1890s was D. A. Shipov, a member of the Volokolamsk district zemstvo in Moscow province, who had organized informal gatherings of zemstvo representatives in Moscow at the time of Nicholas I’s coronation in 1896. Dismayed at the harassment he had encountered from the authorities, he set up a ‘semi-conspiratorial’ discussion circle, Beseda, which included representatives of more than half of the zemstvo provinces. As a man of moderate persuasion, whose political goals did not extend beyond the establishment of a consultative Land Assembly, he was an effective leader for a broad ‘zemstvo movement’ at the turn of the century. By 1903, however, the radicals had decided to bypass Shipov by creating a more politically engaged Union of Liberation, thus confirming the government’s perennial suspicion that the zemskii sobor would be a Trojan horse for constitutionalism or worse. The radicalization of the zemstvo movement was sealed at the ‘second zemstvo congress’, held in private in Moscow in November 1904, where Shipov chaired the sessions but failed to set the terms of the debate. This was a gathering of some of the most experienced and committed zemstvo leaders in Russia, who spoke with great eloquence while maintaining outward calm and decorum. Yet tension hung in the air, even when the group moved to the Evropeiskaia hotel for dinner: ‘each of the participants sensed that he must not throw words about or say anything unnecessary but at the same time should not leave out anything important in view of the enormous moral responsibility resting on us.’ Newspaper correspondents gathered next door to catch what they could of the dinner, but were not allowed to cover the congress itself. Although Shipov was the recipient of congratulatory toasts, the momentum was seized on the resumption of formal discussions by the intense orators Petrunkevich and Rodichev, who took aim at the Slavophile model of Russian history—and, by extension, at Shipov himself.⁸⁸ According to the memoir of M. V. Golitsyn, another participant in the congress, Shipov ‘also thought of himself as a constitutionalist, but of some kind of ill-defined mystical-Slavophile kind, believing that the ideal of state wisdom would be to summon a land council without any definite limitation of autocratic power’. Golitsyn, a district land captain and zemstvo activist from Tula province, was

⁸⁷ RV, 17 October 1904, 1. ⁸⁸ R. Iu. Budberg, ‘S”ezd zemskikh deiatelei 6–9 noiabria 1904 g. v Peterburge. (Po lichnym vospominaniiam)’, Byloe, no. 3 (1907): 76–7, 79–83; Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge, 1973), 229–31.

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much more taken with the impassioned constitutional speeches of Rodichev, N. N. L’vov, and others.⁸⁹ The zemstvo congress of November 1904 may not have been public, but its results soon became known and served to politicize the proceedings even in the traditionally more conservative city dumas.⁹⁰ In late November, the floodgates opened with a series of reports on the banquets held to mark the fortieth anniversary of the judicial reform in 1864: the talk, as reported in the press, was of ‘the necessity of fundamental reforms of the system [stroi]’.⁹¹ The Union of Liberation had decided early in 1904 to use the well-established ritual of the anniversary banquet as a way of holding de facto political meetings without risk of suppression by the government. After the start of the war with Japan interrupted plans to use the anniversary of the peasant emancipation (19 February) for this purpose, the main focus of activities became the anniversary of the 1864 judicial reform on 20 November 1904. From November to the eve of Bloody Sunday, it seems at least thirty-eight banquets were held in twenty-six different cities (not just the capitals of the zemstvo provinces, but also the Baltic and Western provinces and the Caucasus). Three banquets even took place in district capitals—notably in Balashov (Saratov province), where 340 people attended a gathering chaired by the head of the local zemstvo board.⁹² There were also more than forty meetings of other kinds—many under the auspices of professional societies and public associations.⁹³ In November and December, there was much excitement in the provincial capitals as news spread of the banquet campaign. Although restrictions on press reporting had generally been severe, for about a week after 24 November there was ‘a flood of reporting on the campaigning in various cities’.⁹⁴ The newspaper audience could read of unusually bold speeches from which the censor had merely excised the word ‘constitution’.⁹⁵ Kizevetter attended a large banquet in Moscow on 20 November, finding it chaotic and lacking in ‘discipline’. But such occasions emboldened their attendees, which accounts for the wave of zemstvo and duma resolutions issued over the following weeks. On 30 November even the merchantdominated Moscow duma called for popular representation (Kizevetter was again in attendance). Assemblies, committees, and associations across Russia were engaging in the civic ritual of conducting debate and passing resolutions in a liberal and ‘democratic’ vein.⁹⁶ In a sign of things to come, worker and Social ⁸⁹ M. V. Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia (1873–1917) (Moscow, 2007), 321–2. ⁹⁰ On the situation in Moscow, see Astrov, Vospominaniia, 73–4. ⁹¹ ‘Prazdnovanie 40-letiia Sudebnykh Ustavov (Ot nashikh korrespondentov)’, RV, 26 November 1904, 3. ⁹² Kirsten Bönker, Jenseits der Metropolen: Öffentlichkeit und Lokalpolitik im Gouvernement Saratov (1890–1914) (Cologne, 2000), 314. ⁹³ Terence Emmons, ‘Russia’s Banquet Campaign’, California Slavic Studies, 10 (1977): 45–86 (for a full list of these events, see 84–6). ⁹⁴ Emmons, ‘Russia’s Banquet Campaign’, 49, n. 10. ⁹⁵ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 266. ⁹⁶ Kizvetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 259–60.

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Democratic orators were muscling in on these liberal conclaves, above all in the unusually proletarian St Petersburg. At a literary banquet on 14 December, for example, several dozen workers and their Social Democrat minders pushed the assembled writers towards a more radical position on suffrage—an intervention that was not welcomed by all the attendees. On 18 December, an even larger group of workers presented themselves at a physicians’ banquet, and their fierce speechmaking led to the collapse of the event.⁹⁷ Even the traditionally more conservative constituencies were turning outspoken. The elections to the Moscow duma at the end of 1904 were conducted in a completely different spirit from their predecessors. For the first time voters were allowed to have preliminary meetings to decide on a list of candidates. This was hailed in the press as ‘the first step to recognizing the legality of electoral campaigning [agitatsiia]’. Previously any information on the candidates had been available only at private meetings, which meant that many voters were woefully ill-informed.⁹⁸ After a period of relative quiescence in 1902–3, the university milieu was once again entering a state of ferment. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war had exposed divisions between ‘patriots’ and oppositionists, while Moscow students were outraged when some of their peers were assaulted by soldiers at Yaroslavl station in mid-October. In early December a general skhodka voted to strike until the new year. Significantly, the student protesters now received unambiguous support from their professors.⁹⁹ The escalating rhetoric of skhodki in the capitals in October and November was dutifully recorded by police informants, whose presence was evidently not doing much to cool passions.¹⁰⁰ In St Petersburg, a group of professors met in late 1904 and early 1905 to hammer out the text of a political declaration. They intended to hold an enormous banquet on Tatiana Day, the anniversary of the founding of Moscow University, to make the declaration public and gather signatures. Then, however, Bloody Sunday intervened, and the perennial trouble-maker in the professoriate, Kareev, found himself in the Peter and Paul Fortress instead of delivering the main speech at the banquet.¹⁰¹ But the universities, as well as providing some striking signs of mobilization at the turn of 1904, also showed the constraints on political speech, which were a matter not just of tsarist policing but also of the divisions and ambiguities within potential political communities. Academia was perhaps the least politically engaged of the professions, and professors had to be chivvied into the

⁹⁷ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 134–6; also Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii (Berlin, 1923), 1: 16; as Somov (‘Iz istorii sotsialdemokraticheskogo dvizheniia’, 30) notes, the Social Democrats, overwhelmingly of intelligentsia background, were at this stage much more comfortable piggybacking on the Liberation Movement than generating their own movement among the Petersburg proletariat. ⁹⁸ RV, 23 December 1904, 2. ⁹⁹ Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State, 182, 191, 193. ¹⁰⁰ See the extensive dossiers on St Petersburg and Moscow respectively in GARF, f. 102, op. 232 (Osobyi otdel, 1904), 3ch, 10, t. 1 and t. 2. ¹⁰¹ Kareev, Prozhitoe i perezhitoe, 225–6.

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Liberation Movement.¹⁰² As for the students, the form of their protests was often more impressive than the content: on closer inspection, the concerns of the studenchestvo remained more corporate than broadly political. A student of socialist persuasion who entered St Petersburg University in autumn 1904 found that any student movement was waning, and that the level of party-political sentiment in the student body was modest in the extreme. An attempt by Social Democrats to instigate a student demonstration at the end of November ended in demoralizing failure, while a similar attempt at a joint worker–student demonstration in Moscow a week later did not fare any better.¹⁰³ On the eve of an event that transformed the conditions of political discourse, it was unclear how truly open speech, both within and between social groups, would sound.

Politics as Cacophony: 1905 By the start of 1905, the mood was turning radical even in the remote provinces. In hitherto sleepy Simferopol, the opening of the zemstvo assembly in January 1905 drew heightened attention: ‘Contrary to custom, all the space for the public was taken, many people were standing in the corridors, milling around, craning their necks in the doorways.’ Although the Governor tried to keep proceedings calm and formal, events were soon to spiral out of control. Soon afterwards, a meeting of the local Agricultural Society, hastily revived to serve as a political platform, was used as an opportunity to make speeches in favour of a constitution. Although the local notables did not attend, rumours of the approaching political event spread around town, and the building of the city duma filled to bursting with people who had never before crossed its threshold—‘traders, contractors, workers, that is, motley and diverse Simferopol democracy, craving to hear for the first time free public speech.’ An ostensibly routine meeting was quickly turning into a political rally. When his turn came, V. A. Obolenskii had to conquer his nerves: getting on to the table, I saw before me this crowd of excited people with red and sweaty faces, sensed expectant glances directed at me from all sides, and my head started spinning slightly from this unfamiliar situation. I have absolutely no talent as an orator, I do not even possess the basic fluency of speech that you need to perform in public. But in this unfamiliar environment I felt as if intoxicated, and my tongue loosened.

Before long he uttered the previously taboo word ‘constitution’, and then the meeting was presented with news of Bloody Sunday.¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰² Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State, chap. 5. ¹⁰³ Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 1: 9, 13, 16–17. ¹⁰⁴ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 268–74.

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In the weeks following the massacre in St Petersburg, just about any public event could be taken over for political purposes, and debate was increasingly projected beyond the assembly room, as various institutions challenged the principle of preliminary censorship. A fortnight after Bloody Sunday, in an exceptionally well-attended sitting of the St Petersburg city duma, forty-three deputies raised the question of censorship; in the noble assembly, also packed out, the same issue was raised, and when the chairman, P. N. Trubetskoi, insisted that he would abide by current censorship regulations, he provoked a walkout by almost all representatives of the press.¹⁰⁵ Political gatherings were taking place even in small towns in Saratov province; in the provincial capital, characterized by unusually close cooperation between white-collar and working-class constituencies, some of these events were organized by the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, who called openly for strike action and even armed uprising. The police maintained a visible presence but were overstretched, often choosing to observe rather than to intervene. In mid-March came a further provocation that triggered a strong response. A public lecture on cholera in the Saratov city theatre was hijacked when an unknown speaker in the gallery delivered a speech comparing the government itself to a cholera epidemic; the editor of a local socialist newspaper then weighed in to call for armed struggle. By the time proceedings ended, Cossacks were waiting outside, and forty-one arrests were made later that evening. Inconveniently for the authorities, revisions to the criminal code in 1903 had made it much harder to prosecute people for criminal speech, as witnesses other than the police were now required. For this reason, governor Stolypin demanded prophylactic closure of meetings that threatened to turn illegal.¹⁰⁶ The response to the revolutionary movement was most sweeping in the capital. Petersburg students took over the central hall of the university, delivering a torrent of revolutionary speeches, voting almost unanimously for a strike, and even ripping a portrait of the Tsar.¹⁰⁷ The government’s announcement at the end of January of an elected commission to consider worker grievances did little to assuage those grievances but provided an excellent opportunity for Social Democrat agitators, who flooded into the electoral meetings; never before had socialist orators worked in such propitious conditions, and before such a receptive audience.¹⁰⁸ Here again, however, the question of party affiliation remained moot: the agitation campaign gave voice to a number of new proletarian orators, but they were likely to be Gaponites if they had any background in organized politics, and they came over to the Social Democrats only gradually and partially. ¹⁰⁵ ‘Zasedanie dumy’, RS, 26 January 1905, 4, and ‘Gubernskoe dvorianskoe sobranie’, RS, 27 January 1905, 3. ¹⁰⁶ Bönker, Jenseits der Metropolen, 297–8, 312–14. On the particular social roots of mobilization in Saratov, see Jonathan Sanders, ‘Lessons from the Periphery: Saratov, January 1905’, SR, 46 (1987): 229–44. ¹⁰⁷ Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 1: 30–1. ¹⁰⁸ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, chap. 5.

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In the wake of the January events, worker discussion circles and meetings were taking place on a scale that the Social Democratic underground had never remotely had to cope with in the past, and the party activists had to reorientate themselves from bookish ‘propaganda’ to more direct and engaging ‘agitation’, setting aside any qualms they may have had about the proletarian tail wagging the Social Democratic dog.¹⁰⁹ The traditional resources of Russia’s political culture were not sufficient to restore order. The problems began with the Emperor’s palpable lack of charisma. Fedor Golovin, the future chairman of the second State Duma, had seen Nicholas perform on a number of occasions over the previous decade and always found him unimpressive. At his coronation, the new Emperor had been ‘a poor provincial actor in the role of emperor that did not suit him’. When opening a monument to Alexander II in 1898, Nicholas’s speech had been polished and fluent without making any real impression on the audience. At a ceremonial Easter meeting with the Moscow nobility some time later, the Emperor had once again seemed distant and unengaging. The audience he granted to a delegation from the joint zemstvo and city congress of June 1905 continued the same pattern: Nicholas made a stilted and evasive response to a cordial and wholehearted speech from S. N. Trubetskoi.¹¹⁰ If Nicholas was awkward in his dealings with constitutionalists from the educated elite, efforts to cut out the intelligentsia and the zemstvo liberals and stage ritual enactments of the bond between tsar and people were also difficult in the wake of Bloody Sunday. On 19 January, at Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas lectured a group of hand-picked factory workers in a stern paternalist vein that was wholly incongruous a mere ten days after the massacre.¹¹¹ Nor could Nicholas count on the main conduit of autocratic discourse to the people: the Orthodox Church. As the example of Gapon had painfully demonstrated, ‘traditional’ forms of communication could be put to unexpected ends. And if priests were not becoming charismatic popular preachers, they were fretting about the inability of the Church to withstand the competition from revolutionaries and sectarians by putting its message across effectively. In 1905, the perennial theme of the inadequacy of Russian sermons gained a new edge. As it searched for a way out of its rhetorical impasse, the regime scrambled to agree on a version of consultative assembly that would offer a sop to deliberative politics without conceding any real power; the zemskii sobor was now the height of ¹⁰⁹ Somov, ‘Iz istorii sotsialdemokraticheskogo dvizheniia’, Byloe, no. 4 (1907): 46–9 and no. 5 (1907): 152–7. ¹¹⁰ ‘Zapiski F. A. Golovina’, KA, 19 (1926): 113–16. ¹¹¹ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 202; Andrew M. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, 1990), 163–4. The government minister Vladimir Kokovtsov took a similarly dim view of this occasion, which seems largely to have been the doing of the newly installed Governor of St Petersburg, D. F. Trepov: V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo: Vospominaniia: 1903–1919 gg. (Moscow, 1992), 1: 64–6.

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its ambitions. As early as 22 January, the well-connected conservative A. A. Kireev reported in his diary that ‘the idea of an Assembly of the Land is taking more definite form’. His main cause for the following months was to lobby for a maximally Slavophile version of such an assembly: a body with a purely consultative role, with places reserved for the peasantry but with no vote for ‘those elements that do not represent the true Russia’.¹¹² Kireev was dismayed even by the restricted-suffrage Bulygin proposal of August 1905; he was downright horrified by the October Manifesto. For Kireev and his conservative coalition of courtiers and marshals of the nobility, the government was rushing headlong into a constitutional revolution. But from other perspectives the regime’s speed of deliberation in 1905 seemed glacial. Between January and October, Russian political culture was continually breaking new ground. Political talk was now conducted across regional divides, thus breaking the government’s taboo on coordinated action by obshchestvennost’. The zemstvo congresses of 1905 steadily got more radical. That of April 1905 was already a more organized affair than its predecessor in November 1904.¹¹³ In Moscow in July, the joint city–zemstvo congress went so far as to discuss a draft constitution that created a sensation when it was published in Russkie vedomosti; this occasion also saw the start of active party formation.¹¹⁴ Although municipal elites had been consistently less radical than their zemstvo counterparts, they were now marching in step. In June 1905 representatives of the municipal dumas came together for their first official congress: a total of 126 representatives from 86 towns and cities. The delegates delivered vigorous speeches fully in tune with the revolutionary moment and issued a censorious resolution to the government. A stenographic transcript was printed, but in only a few copies, and the type was confiscated and later destroyed. The zemstvo radicals’ political demands might ordinarily have caused the duma men difficulty, but the oratory of the summer of 1905 was winning over the doubters: ‘The speeches were so convincing, the tone of the speakers had such certainty, true democrats were so impatient with any compromise, that the doubts and anxieties lost their edge, some kind of inner door slammed shut, and everything became clear, indisputable and certain.’¹¹⁵ In 1905, the zemstvo activists were giving full voice to ideas that had been in the air for years but had not previously found open expression. The persuasive powers of Kokoshkin, Petrunkevich, Rodichev, Geiden, and others were deployed to full effect. Rhetorical styles varied from the verbal ‘stiletto’ wielded by the witty, analytical Geiden to the ‘flame and passion’ of Rodichev, who sent sparks flying ¹¹² A. A. Kireev, Dnevnik. 1905–1910 (Moscow, 2010), 25, 32. ¹¹³ According to Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 274–5. Miliukov listened to the April proceedings through a half-open door. ¹¹⁴ Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia, 334; Astrov, Vospominaniia, 110. ¹¹⁵ Astrov, Vospominaniia, 100–3.

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with his fluent improvised speeches.¹¹⁶ But the zemstvo politics also gave a hearing to many people other than the usual suspects. They included representatives from the margins of the empire. One zemstvo gathering in the late summer was much taken with a speech by a lawyer from Vilna by the name of Vrublevskii: He spoke with a Polish accent, in a soft musical voice which he sometimes lowered to such an extent that the slightest murmur would have drowned him out. We sat there entranced, and not a word of his speech was lost. He spoke expressively, with much imagery, in a way that would have seemed excessive for a Russian orator, but the Polish accent gave this elaborate manner [vychurnost’] an artistic character.¹¹⁷

In parallel, the politicization of the legal profession continued apace. A cardinal illustration was the very same Rodichev. He had studied law at St Petersburg University in the 1870s but had only acquired a legal practice in his mid-forties after a lengthy zemstvo career: he entered the legal profession primarily as a way of conducting politics by other means, and would soon abandon it for a fulltime political career. In 1904–5, the interface of law and politics would prove enormously productive (to the dismay of less political lawyers such as Karabchevskii).¹¹⁸ The same conclusion was drawn by the much younger Aleksandr Kerensky, whose somewhat theatrical idealism found a perfect outlet in the court setting. Kerensky’s first application to join the Bar in autumn 1904 was turned down, but this did not prevent him throwing himself into legal aid for the working classes. A period of arrest in 1905–6 helped him to earn his radical stripes, and in November 1906 he got his big break when he defended a group of Estonian peasants on trial for their part in revolutionary disorders.¹¹⁹ But Kerensky was a new arrival in an already battle-hardened socialist contingent in the legal profession. Lawyers such as Pavel Maliantovich, Nikolai Sokolov, and Mikhail Mandel’shtam were already well versed in the propaganda arts of the courtroom and ready to help their clients gain maximum political value from high-profile cases such as the trial of Ivan Kaliaev in April 1905 for assassinating Grand Duke Sergei, or the defence of the workers led by Nikolai Bauman.¹²⁰ ¹¹⁶ Astrov, Vospominaniia, 103–6. ¹¹⁷ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 284. ¹¹⁸ For Karabchevskii’s dismissive assessment of Rodichev, Kerensky, et al., see his Chto glaza moi videli (Berlin, 1921), 18. ¹¹⁹ Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 24–5, 33–4, 39–40. ¹²⁰ Mandel’shtam, 1905 god, chaps 12, 15. Kaliaev was of course sentenced to death, but not before giving a full account of his motives (in the vein of the assassins of Alexander II at their trial in 1881). In the case of Bauman, the defence team eventually secured a postponement, and Bauman was released after eighteen months in prison (only then to be murdered shortly afterwards in the course of a demonstration in October 1905). But the large team of defence lawyers were already primed to make a strong and coordinated defence along political lines, and not to make any concessions in the interests of securing a lighter sentence.

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With political rhetoric shifting rapidly to the left, the luminaries of Russian liberalism were having to work much harder to make themselves heard. One of the leading figures in the Union of Liberation, Pavel Miliukov, returned from abroad in April 1905 and soon resumed his career as a lecturer—but in a far more politically charged environment than any he remembered from the 1890s. He spoke in an aristocratic mansion to the full gamut of Moscow educated society, in a smoke-filled room in a worker district, and in the opulent Morozov palace on Zubovskii boulevard. He was even sketched by Leonid Pasternak in the pose of the orator. He also travelled widely, receiving in the process an education in political rhetoric and learning to make himself comprehensible and engaging to even uninformed listeners. In Kharkov, for example, he faced a ‘real battle’ to win over his listeners: this was not the decorous, educated audience he was used to. In the face of pressures like these, the Union of Liberation, bastion of the liberal intelligentsia, was moving rapidly leftwards: in August it resolved to transform itself from a secret society to an open political party.¹²¹ In September came a further joint zemstvo–city congress: as Kizevetter notes, ‘the public flocked to these meetings as if to a parliament’. By now the lines of political debate between the liberals and the socialists were more clearly drawn, and the two sides often found themselves in oratorical combat in September and October. When the Kadets tried to spread their ideas—including arguments against boycotting the Duma—in working-class parts of Moscow, they were relentlessly heckled by the Social Democrats. The scholarly Kizvetter had to overcome his inhibitions and shout out ‘Silence!’ to gain a hearing.¹²² The divide between educated society and workers opened up even as these two groups were having ever more to do with each other. The strike movement abated somewhat in July and August in the face of lockouts and layoffs. But political meetings continued apace in large factories, with socialist agitators playing an ever more prominent role. What really created the conditions for a more radical and articulate worker movement was the restoration of autonomy to institutions of higher education on 27 August. In September and October, universities across the empire opened their doors to political meetings.¹²³ The proletarian takeover of the university was seen most in the capital: before long, St Petersburg University was effectively operating two shifts, with lectures delivered as normal in the first half of the day and political meetings held in the evenings after workers left the factories for the day. Students were denied access to meetings on the grounds that there was no space. This led to an outpouring of oratory, some of it Social Democratic in

¹²¹ Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 276–9, 281–2. ¹²² Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 268, 273–4. ¹²³ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 292–6. On the extent of politicization in universities across the empire, see A. E. Ivanov, ‘Demokraticheskoe studenchestvo v revoliutsii 1905-1907 gg.’, Istoricheskie zapiski, 107 (1982): 171–225, here 186–7.

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inspiration, but much of it spontaneous and untutored.¹²⁴ In Moscow, where the professoriate was less amenable to the politicization of the university, the students played rather more of a role in the revolutionary rhetoric. Student protests resumed immediately after the resumption of classes on 15 September 1905. On 21 September an enormous meeting at the Law Faculty contained a sizeable minority of striking workers, which was the first time in Moscow that social divides had been overcome to this extent.¹²⁵ In the capital, meanwhile, socialist agitators threw themselves into the fray: the Petersburg Bolsheviks set up a ‘collegium of meeting orators’, whose members included such future notables as Nikolai Krylenko (known as ‘Abram’) and ‘Petr’ Aleksinskii, later to be a deputy in the State Duma. These men kept up a relentless speaking schedule, appearing in as many as ten different venues in a single day.¹²⁶ By early October, the strike movement had resumed, and the worker meetings in the university were becoming vast; more than 10,000 people were gathering to receive updates on the strike, and the movement was taking on ‘prodigious rhetorical dimensions’. Along with scale and regularity these meetings acquired a more purposeful character, becoming ‘a kind of general assembly of the strike’. By 15 October, the strike had become truly ‘general’, transcending the divide between proletarian and white-collar constituencies.¹²⁷ The October Manifesto, which finally granted a more than consultative parliament, was greeted ecstatically by moderate liberals such as those in the Moscow zemstvo.¹²⁸ Yet it conspicuously failed to cool the rhetoric in other parts of the emerging Russian polity. Orators from the street were now constantly encroaching on the established deliberative bodies of urban politics. The Moscow duma had been hearing oppositional speeches from deputies since the late summer. In mid-October, it was briefly taken over by the popular revolution. According to Dzhunkovskii, the governor of Moscow region, the meeting on 11 October was hijacked by a worker delegate who ‘behaved very provocatively’; Muromtsev was the only member of the duma to make a firm response. On 12 October, workers burst into the duma to make demands. On 15 October, after an opening speech by Muromtsev, a fellow municipal councillor recalled that ‘some short Jew fired out a whole declaration in very fierce language about the power of the proletariat, about the duma’s usurpation of the rights of the people through its restricted electorate, about the fact that the duma should immediately give up its powers’. The proceedings continued until all the visitors had had their say,

¹²⁴ Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 1: 59–63, 87. ¹²⁵ Engelstein, Moscow, 1905, 71–2. ¹²⁶ See the account of another member of the Collegium, Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 1: 64–9. ¹²⁷ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 325–7. ¹²⁸ A. G. Vazhenin and P. V. Galkin, Moskovskoe zemstvo v nachale XX veka: Iz opyta regional’nogo samoupravleniia (Moscow, 2004); Miliukov, much less moderate, was far more sceptical (Vospominaniia, 328–9).

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with kerosene lamps brought in when the light failed (there was by this time no electricity). The duma deputies calmly rejected the demands, and the representatives of the people dispersed in disgruntlement.¹²⁹ According to Dzhunkovskii, however, the chairman Golitsyn completely lost his composure on this occasion; later in the month he would stand down as mayor. In Dzhunkovskii’s view, the duma members had ‘lost their head’, engaging in unrestrained political debates and neglecting the city’s pressing needs. Beyond the duma, the situation was even worse, as all sense of deference and order had broken down. A delegation to Petr Durnovo regarding the funeral of Bauman even presumed to address the authoritarian Minister of the Interior as ‘comrade’; speeches ‘of the most revolutionary content’ flowed at Bauman’s graveside, attended by a large crowd. The rural parts of Moscow province were less turbulent, but even so some village assemblies, ‘under the influence of agitators’, were issuing calls for land expropriation, and the peasant congress of early November was downright ‘revolutionary’.¹³⁰ Similar incursions took place eight hundred miles away in the Crimea. The local zemstvo assembly was taken over by a crowd of (partially drunk) demobilized soldiers. The saving grace for the few deputies left in the room was the soldiers’ inexperience as orators: ‘Back then the common people still did not know how to give speeches, and a soldier with a ginger moustache soon lost his way after the first few phrases he had prepared in advance.’ The fiery mood soon started to dissipate, and V. A. Obolenskii, presented with the unenviable task of keeping the meeting going, was heard out calmly. Even so, in mid-October the zemstvo assembly in Yalta was invaded by a crowd, while demagogic orators were getting to work in the city park in Simferopol. Only shouts from the back of ‘Beat the Yids’ brought the speeches to an end—a disturbing reminder that demagoguery of the Right was just as potent as that of the Left.¹³¹ But the most striking developments in October and November came in the capital. The worker mobilization of the previous weeks was encouraged rather than checked by the October Manifesto. Apparently spontaneous meetings broke out on 18 October, including on the square in front of Kazan Cathedral, scene of an earlier, swiftly repressed revolutionary demonstration. From 20 October onwards, Petersburg factories were holding their own rallies (mitingi), which were accompanied by much of the pomp and circumstance of their counterparts in educated society: meetings were properly chaired and followed an agenda, speakers ascended rostrums draped in red calico, and factory banners were displayed, some of them lovingly made out of red velvet with gold lettering. The

¹²⁹ Astrov, Vospominaniia, 123–7. ¹³⁰ V. F. Dzhunkovsii, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1997), 1: 71, 73–4, 78, 82, 87–8, 90, 102–5. ¹³¹ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 294–6, 298–300.

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party-political complexion of the unrest remained unclear. A hard core of Socialist Revolutionary agitators made up in quality for what they lacked in quantity: Chernov, Nikolai Avksent’ev, and Il’ia Fondaminskii, with some success, challenged the Social Democrats on their home territory of the large factories.¹³² In St Petersburg, the revolutionaries also attempted to create an institutional vehicle for political speech. At Menshevik instigation, a workers’ strike committee had begun to form on 10 October. The very next day, agitators began spreading the word in the factories, and by 15 October more than 200 representatives had been elected from almost 100 factories. On 17 October the committee acquired the name of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and took on the character of a ‘workers’ parliament’ (a description that was embraced by its chairman).¹³³ From early November it would hold its meetings in the splendid and eminently parliamentary venue of the Free Economic Society. The idea of the Soviet emerged only gradually in the middle of October, and its function and status always remained ambiguous: was it a strike committee or an organ of revolutionary government or an instrument of insurrection? The Bolsheviks, with some justification, argued that the Menshevik pretensions to government were utopian, seeing the Soviet as a more limited instrument of revolutionary struggle.¹³⁴ They would come to see this worker ‘parliament’ as something of a talking-shop in the vein of the ostensibly powerless State Duma that followed it: ‘oratorical rhetoric’ far outran practical achievements.¹³⁵ Clearly, the Soviet never had any chance of establishing himself as a stable body—both because of its own chaotic procedures and because the overall balance of forces was not in its favour. As an exercise in revolutionary rhetoric, however, the Soviet was a great success. The deputies took a while to get used to the quasi-parliamentary proceedings, but after a few days debates were staying on track (even if they often became heated). Representatives of the Soviet seem to have revelled in the political theatre of their newborn institution, which extended beyond its formal meetings to gestures such as a deputation it dispatched to the city duma, where workers’ democracy and city oligarchy came face to face: the worker representatives, hoarse from street oratory and still in their overcoats and galoshes, were heard out by the municipal elite in utter silence.¹³⁶ Although the meetings were officially closed, suitable members of the press were in fact

¹³² Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 1: 166–8, 179–87; on the SRs’ perception of their own success, see Chernov, Pered burei, 250. ¹³³ G. Khrustalev-Nosar’, ‘Istoriia Soveta Rabochikh Deputatov (do 26-go noiabria 1905 g.)’, in Istoriia Soveta Rabochikh Deputatov g. S.-Peterburga (St Petersburg, 1906), 150. Generally on the rise and evolution of the Soviet, see Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921 (New York, 1974), 45–7. ¹³⁴ For the Bolshevik view, see Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 140–1. ¹³⁵ Such is the view presented in S. Chernomordik’s preface to the useful annotated document collection L. Geller and N. Rovenskaia, Peterburgskii i moskovskii sovety rabochikh deputatov 1905 goda (v dokumentakh) (Moscow and Leningrad, 1926), 3. ¹³⁶ B. Radin, Pervyi Sovet Rabochikh Deputatov (St Petersburg, 1906), 34–43.

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admitted.¹³⁷ Crucial to the political salience of the Soviet was its ability to publish and distribute its own newspaper. The highly literate and politicized print workers of the capital used their control of the means of production to defy the censorship, running off more than 30,000 copies of the Soviet’s Izvestiia in newspaper plants that were otherwise on strike.¹³⁸ The five densely printed columns of the paper, replete with typographical errors, gave readers a (sometimes literally) running commentary on the unceasing round of worker meetings: on 3 November, for example, a meeting at the Laferme tobacco factory defied efforts by the police to disperse the gathering and heard Social Democratic speeches, ending with a rousing rendition of revolutionary songs and the raising of an ‘improvised’ red banner.¹³⁹ The Soviet also provided a platform for charismatic leadership that, perhaps for the first time in Russian history, soared above the deep divide between intelligentsia and proletariat. The Chairman of the Soviet was the radical lawyer Georgii Nosar’, who had first emerged as a trusted spokesman of the workers in February and embodied the nonpartisan approach to worker protest.¹⁴⁰ But soon at the centre of events was the Menshevik Lev Trotsky, who for the fifty-two days of the Soviet’s existence threw himself into journalism, meetings and oratory. The characterization of the 1905 Soviet as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for 1917 has now acquired the status of cliché, but it is worth taking it literally: this was a training not only in revolution but in stagecraft. It would continue even after the members of the Soviet were arrested, as Trotsky and others were given a thoroughly gratifying political trial.¹⁴¹ Trotsky, however, would spend the following decade abroad in apparent political irrelevance. A more significant development for the ensuing period of Russian parliamentary politics was the reinvention of Russian conservatism. In the autumn of 1905, the Right attempted to fight back rhetorically. Conservatives had railed throughout the year at the concessions made to constitutionalism. The Rightists now countered by launching a movement of their own: the Union of Russian People was designed to bring the defence of autocracy into the immediate present. Late in December 1905 it sent a delegation to the Emperor. The audience was ostensibly a traditional ritual of loyalty to the sovereign: the members of the delegation queued up to profess their devotion to the throne. But a few details marked this out as a more modern and mobilizatory exercise in political discourse. One was the inclusion in the delegation of a Putilov worker. The other was the ¹³⁷ According to Tyrkova-Williams (Na putiakh k svobode, 220), who arrived just in time to see the Soviet being shut down. ¹³⁸ Charles A. Ruud, ‘The Printing Press as an Agent of Political Change in Early Twentieth-Century Russia’, RR, 40 (1981): 378–95, esp. 386–90. ¹³⁹ Izvestiia Soveta rabochikh deputatov, no. 6, 5 November 1905, 2. ¹⁴⁰ Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 233–8, 242. ¹⁴¹ Trotsky’s relish for the experience of defending himself in court is evident in his instant memoir of events, ‘Sovet i prokuratora’, in Istoriia Soveta Rabochikh Deputatov, 311–23.

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language of some of the speakers. P. F. Bulatsel’ permitted himself an almost hectoring tone with the autocrat: ‘Why do people want to force on us a form of government that is making the Austro-Hungarian monarchy fall apart? Just as daylight is hateful to moles, so Autocracy is hateful to the enemies of Russia.’¹⁴²

Conclusion A more positive, though still qualified assessment of the revolutionary ferment of autumn 1905 came from Tyrkova, who was just returning from emigration. On the journey back, she struck up a lively conversation with the train conductor; inspired by this and other encounters, she found that ‘Russians had become even more communicative’. Soon enough, however, she was struck by how little structure and purpose there was to the torrent of speech.¹⁴³ Another difficulty, largely ignored by commentators caught up in dramatic urban events, was that the village too was finding its voice. The upheaval of 1905 served notice that any resulting ‘democracy’ would have to pay more attention to the political culture of the peasantry. A sanguine British observer, Bernard Pares, witnessed a cantonal meeting in Torzhok in August 1905 and found that peasants had their own version of parliamentary procedure: When the peasant meeting gets to a point where it is breaking up, the speaker of the moment descends from the table on which he stands and, as it might be described, ‘the house goes into committee’; there is a rough and ready and somewhat vigorous discussion, in which many speak at once; at last, perhaps, there emerges some formula which might command general acceptance; the proposer mounts the table and puts it tentatively to the meeting.¹⁴⁴

Pares would later form a high opinion of the sense of responsibility of the peasant delegates to the State Duma. But a more sobering, and possibly more realistic, account of peasant debating culture was left by Vladimir Voitinskii, who in late November took a three-day break from the febrile St Petersburg Soviet to conduct Social Democratic agitation among the peasants in a remote corner of Novgorod province. Like many previous intelligentsia emissaries to the people, Voitinskii was perplexed and discomfited by the lack of obvious audience reaction as he looked out at the ‘bearded faces, bushy eyebrows, and gnarled, wiry hands the colour of brick’ in a murky village schoolroom. When the peasants did finally break their silence, ‘they spoke all at once, and it was impossible to work out ¹⁴² Iu. I. Kir’ianov, Pravye partii. 1905–1917. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1998), 1: 97. ¹⁴³ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 215–16. ¹⁴⁴ Bernard Pares, My Russia Memoirs (London, 1931), 95.

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whether they were all saying the same thing or arguing’; Voitinskii’s own speech was ‘drowned out by the noise that increased by the minute’.¹⁴⁵ ‘Democratic’ speech was liberating but also risked being inconsequential; and when it did have consequences, they might be terrifying more than empowering. The task for the post-1905 era was to find a mode of political speech that would take firm procedural shape and at the same time adequately recognize the aspirations of different groups in the empire to be heard. For the time being, the initiative lay with Russia’s class of politicians-in-waiting: zemtsy, municipal councillors of the post-reform decades, and lawyers. When they got their chance, in the banquet campaign of 1904 and the parliamentary politics that followed the 1905 revolution, these men already had forty years of accumulated experience and know-how in public speaking and political procedure. But they would soon find their prerogatives challenged from both Right and Left.

¹⁴⁵ Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 1: 300–1, 311.

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5 Public Speaking in the Age of the State Duma To judge by the burgeoning self-help literature of the early twentieth century, speech of various degrees of publicness was an inescapable obligation for Russians in many walks of life, as well as a vital element in their self-fashioning. Advice was now abundantly available on how to make a good impression in social gatherings: by observing linguistic propriety, being appropriately deferential to those of higher status, and choosing decorous language with ladies. Specific recommendations were made for how to express condolences, to converse on the street or at the skating-rink, or to conduct conversation by a sick bed.¹ Toasts were a particularly tricky area, given the number and variety of occasions in modern life where they might be required. Audiences now commonly spanned a wide social and occupational spectrum, while opportunities for formal speech ranged from weddings to opening ceremonies of factories; one had to be ready to toast a bride or a chemical engineer depending on circumstances.² Readers in search of guidance could turn to potted histories of eloquence from Demosthenes and Cicero through to eighteenth-century France.³ But there were also newer sources of instruction. The art of declamation was increasingly in vogue, gaining a higher profile in educational institutions.⁴ One teacher of ‘expressive reading’ emphasized the importance of effective speaking for ‘various avenues of public activity’; too often newspapers complained that speeches were not audible. She cited approvingly the French and American school systems, which took speech training much more seriously than Russia, and cited the case of a politician who took lessons from an actor.⁵ In December 1912 came the launch of a whole journal devoted to the spoken word. Besides practical advice on public speaking, readers could find information on the (apparently baritone) voice of Peter the Great.⁶ Other guides abounded in practical advice for public speakers: whether and when to learn the speech by heart, how to combat nerves

¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶

Interesnyi sobesednik, ili iskusstvo byt’ vsegda zanimatel’nym v obshchestve (St Petersburg, 1909). Examples from Proshu slova! Zastol’nye rechi i spichi (St Petersburg, 1911). A typical example is A. G. Timofeev, Ocherki po istorii krasnorechiia (St Petersburg, 1899). I. L. Smolenskii, Posobie k izucheniiu deklamatsii (Odessa, 1907), 4. E. Karich, Iskusstvo chitat’—iskusstvo govorit’ (St Petersburg, 1899), 7–8, 10, 14, 16. P. Pereletskii, ‘Kakoi golos byl u Petra Velikogo’, Golos i rech’, no. 1 (1913): 10.

How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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(by emptying one’s bladder beforehand and perhaps downing a glass of wine), and how to use gesture and facial expression (with diagrams provided).⁷ But the vogue for the spoken word also had a pronounced political dimension. The subject mattered for Russians in the 1900s above all because, with the creation of the State Duma, public speaking had become synonymous with a new civic Russia. After 1905, Russia was noticeably more talkative. As Ariadna Tyrkova noted, ‘the floodgates opened’ with the promulgation of the October Manifesto: ‘at long last it was possible to talk about what you liked and to talk freely, without fear, without looking over your shoulder. Everyone’s heads were spinning, whether they were speaking or listening. People talked and listened their fill.’⁸ Or, as one contemporary handbook of public speaking put the matter: ‘The art of oratory now has special significance for Russia, when the Russian people for the first time is hearing free speech, when the future, in spite of temporary severe obstacles, belongs to free speech.’ From now on, Russians would be speakers as well as listeners: ‘Every citizen—and now all are citizens—should if not be an orator, then at least be capable of expressing their opinion on a question.’ To do so required careful preparation: a speech should be written down in advance, and the orator had to work to avoid regional accents and overcome any speech defects. Gesture was also important: speakers should not distract the audience by pacing up and down, and should also avoid nervous head movements, but gesture and expression could be used to great effect. The main objective, however, was affect: a speech should be ‘fluent, vivid, inspiring’; it should ‘give the impression that listeners are hearing an improvisation, not a speech prepared in advance’. The main criterion of success for a ‘civic orator’ was whether he roused a ‘passively inclined audience’ to action. The ‘crowd’ had to be ‘electrified’.⁹ Studies of rhetoric were now updated for the modern age. The article on Cicero for the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia contrasted the intellectual oratory of the ancient world with the voluntarist ethos of the present day: modern orators were more interested in playing on their listeners’ emotions to achieve their aims.¹⁰ This was an age when grandiose claims could be made for the power of the spoken word. As one study of the ‘psychology of eloquence’ put it, ‘nothing is so important for the practical life of mankind as speech, and in particular eloquence’; this was the ‘crowning aspect of our entire psyche’, ‘a window of the soul and a reflection of a person’s whole spiritual and corporeal world’. Speech was powerful because it gave vent to the subconscious: ‘The conscious mind often does ⁷ These examples from N. Abramov, Dar slova, vol. 4 (St Petersburg, 1905), 28, 31 and vol. 5 (St Petersburg, 1909). Other contemporary examples of the genre include M. N. Abramov, Prakticheskoe rukovodstvo k oratorskomu iskusstvu (Saratov, 1908); M. Azham, Iskusstvo govorit’ publichno (St Petersburg, 1908); and Matiunin, Orator (Orenburg, 1909). ⁸ Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode (London, 1990), 254. ⁹ M. N. Popov, Politicheskoe krasnorechie: Chto nuzhno dlia oratora (St Petersburg, 1906), v, 1, 56, 61–2, 67, 72–3. ¹⁰ F. Zelinskii, ‘Tsitseron’, in B&E, 38: 266–8 (1903).

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not know where things come from in public speaking. Orators often don’t recognize their own speeches when they’re written down.’ For this reason, the speech of the common folk, not burdened by the complexes of the intelligentsia, was often more vivid and expressive. But this author stopped short of embracing the irrational: the best public speaking represented not a takeover by the subconscious but the use of emotive images to serve some intellectual design. Although orators had different methods and temperaments, it was advisable not to write out a text in full but to speak from notes (thus combining rational structure while allowing scope for emotions and invention).¹¹

The Birth of a Parliament The central question, however, was how far Russia’s new parliament would support these bold statements about the power of rhetoric. Would it allow the triumph of rational persuasion, putting legislators in dialogue with society as never before? Would it offer a platform for demagogues? Or would it result in the proverbial ‘talking-shop’ and achieve very little? The first test of the new political speech came in the election campaign of early 1906. Russia’s political parties were in an embryonic state, and they had to find a way of appealing to an electorate deeply divided according to class, occupation, and locality. The moderate conservatives of the Octobrist Party fared best when they addressed their main constituency in the affluent property-owning population. At electoral meetings, this middle-class public accustomed itself to the still novel ‘technique’ of formal political debate under the guidance of a neutral chairman.¹² The Octobrists were less successful in their efforts to reach a broader audience: their network of branches in European Russia was more impressive on paper than in reality, they did rather little campaigning in the provinces, and their core membership tended to be gentry and merchants whose political views were further to the right than those of the central leadership.¹³ As for independent political activity by the peasants, this had little prospect of taking purposeful shape given the lack of networks and channels of communication available to the rural population. Efforts to establish such channels, by holding electoral meetings to allow peasants to acquaint themselves with candidates, were often frustrated by the authorities.¹⁴ As the electoral campaign dawned, journalists had good reason ¹¹ V. Larionov, Psikhologiia krasnorechiia (St Petersburg and Moscow, 1908), 2, 5, 20, 23, 32–4. ¹² See the minutes of one Octobrist meeting in the pre-eminently upper-middle-class enclave of Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk on 2 February 1906: GARF, f. 115, op. 1, d. 48. On the matter of debating ‘technique’ and the role of the chairman, see l. 15. ¹³ Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 207–26. ¹⁴ S. M. Sidel’nikov, Obrazovanie i deiatel’nost’ pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy (Moscow, 1962), 141–2.

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to speculate that the peasants would remain passive and alienated from the political process.¹⁵ The Social Democrats, for their part, were caught in a bind: the old method of propaganda in close-knit worker ‘circles’ did not answer the mass-political needs of the moment, but attempts to create more public-facing ‘clubs’ met a punitive response from the police.¹⁶ The SDs would instead do their best to promote their policy of boycotting the Duma by challenging the ‘bourgeois’ parties at electoral meetings. Foremost in this ‘bourgeois’ camp were the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), undoubtedly the most polished and successful political operators of the 1906 election. They put their posters on display in shop windows and on the sides of buildings. They handed out leaflets, exploiting to the full the new phenomenon in Russia of street campaigning. Above all, they held large electoral meetings—a total of more than fifty in Moscow alone.¹⁷ Compared to their main rivals, the Octobrists and the Rightists, the Kadets were a strikingly modern political entity: this was a disciplined, ‘European’ electoral machine.¹⁸ In addition, the Kadets were much the most effective speakers on the Russian political scene, largely because, as the party of the liberal intelligentsia, they had better oratorical material to work with, but also because they were rigorous in their approach to the matter: they trained 400 agitators at courses in Moscow and St Petersburg in early 1906 and set up ‘agitation bureaus’ in Moscow and St Petersburg that were responsible for arranging speaking tours to the provinces by party grandees. Kadet orators from the professoriate took advantage of the closing of the universities to tour the provinces in the party’s cause; Aleksandr Koliubakin, for example, spoke in eleven different provinces and was well paid out of party coffers. The Kadets even included in their plans propaganda among domestic servants during the dacha season.¹⁹ Evidently, the long years of provincial lecturing had paid off for the professors and lawyers who made up the core of the Kadet candidates. Vasilii Maklakov, later to be a star performer in the Duma, held meetings to spread the liberal message among the population, especially what he described as the ‘grey masses’ of shopkeepers, artisans, and office clerks. Along with other liberal luminaries such as Aleksandr Kizevetter and Fedor Kokoshkin, he kept up an active life as a lecturer in different parts of Russia. He was also put in charge of a ‘school of orators’ by the city committee of the Kadets.²⁰ ¹⁵ ‘Moskovskie vesti. K vyboram v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu’, RS, 3 January 1906, 4. ¹⁶ V. Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii (Berlin, 1923), 2: 20. ¹⁷ ‘Vybory: Moskva nakanune vyborov’, RV, 26 March 1906, 3; O. A. Patrikeeva, Rossiiskaia obshchestvennost’ i vybory v I i II Gosudarstvennye Dumy (1905–1907 gg.) (St Petersburg, 2005), 99. ¹⁸ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 249. On Kadet election campaigning, see also Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties, 156-60, 193–7. ¹⁹ Patrikeeva, Rossiiskaia obshchestvennost’, 96–7 and chap. 2 generally; Dittmar Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt: Russlands Konstitutionell-Demokratische Partei und die Dumawahlen 1906–1912 (Cologne, 1996), 127–8, 131. ²⁰ V. A. Maklakov, Iz vospominanii (New York, 1954): 347–9, 356–7.

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As early as their second congress in January 1906, the Kadets showed they were ready for the new national political assembly. The semicircular hall of the Tenishev Academy was full to bursting with delegates from all over Russia. The attendees came in two main categories: zemstvo representatives, who spoke with authority on rural matters, and members of the urban intellligentsia. The event also featured a high-profile intervention by a woman: Ariadna Tyrkova delivered a forceful speech in favour of women’s suffrage, a cause that the party’s leader Pavel Miliukov had declined to support. As she spoke, Tyrkova first experienced what she later called the ‘voluptuousness’ of politics: ‘for the first time I felt the charge that passes from the audience to the orator, I heard applause, I saw how the expressions on faces were changing as a result of my words, how sparks were blazing in people’s eyes.’²¹ Many other Kadet speakers would experience a similar adrenalin rush over the following weeks of campaigning. In Tyrkova’s words, they started the campaign ‘as if going into battle’. Although the Kadets did not have to worry about the Right, who lacked competent speakers and did not participate in the meetings, their debates with the Octobrists sometimes turned ill-tempered and elicited strong audience reaction. Above all, the Kadets could expect to be vigorously heckled by the socialists, who compensated for their boycott of the elections by doing their best to subvert the campaign of their main rivals. The urban intelligentsia generally listened avidly to speeches by the professors, lawyers, and zemstvo men in the Kadet camp, but the socialists tried to throw the liberals off their stride by interjecting hostile comments and questions. At meetings Miliukov encountered everywhere the same socialist opponent: ‘a broad-shouldered, short man in a worker’s smock’, who never actually climbed the podium but stopped at the steps and, with a ferocious expression and ‘teeth clenched like a good bulldog’, laid into the Kadet speaker in a high tenor voice. This, it turned out, was the future Bolshevik prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko. The Kadets were learning that the effect of their words depended not only on their intellectual content but also on the speaker’s stage presence: like actors, orators on stage were ‘emotionally infectious’, and when ideas and affect worked together, political persuasion was the result.²² In Moscow, electoral meetings were almost daily, and Kadet campaigners had to think quickly on their feet to counter polemics from the Left. Unsurprisingly, the Kadet memoirist Kizevetter found that his party had much the better of these oratorical jousts, which were also a clash of cultures. The sophisticated intellectual speakers put up by the Kadets formed a stark contrast to the raw socialists, who were ‘either completely green youngsters or uncultured professional agitators,

²¹ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 237–42, 254. ²² Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 248–50, 252–4 (the view from St Petersburg); Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 147, 157 (summary of the atmosphere at electoral meetings in the provinces).

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always with a crib sheet clutched in their hands, with learned intonations and always the same set of clichéd phrases’. When uneducated speakers held forth without a text, the results were jarring. One ‘small shopkeeper’ was reported as saying: ‘Whatever you say, professor, I, as a citizen in actual fact, want to be the lord of my whim.’ Despite the attempts to throw them off their stride, the Kadets were more successful than they would ever be subsequently at reaching out to the lower-class audience as well as to their educated core constituency. The legal scholar Fedor Kokoshkin was a highly effective speaker despite not possessing an especially appealing voice and having trouble with sibilants; his wit and clarity of argument had great persuasive power. Vasilii Maklakov was strikingly straightforward and unaffected: when addressing an audience of many hundreds he spoke the same way as in a group of a handful of friends. A more combative, and simply louder, orator was Mikhail Mandel’shtam, who could ‘shout anyone down’. The Kadets also kept up an intense speaking schedule in the provinces, where their adversaries were more likely to be right-wingers and Octobrists; the Social Democrats, citing police sanctions, often stayed away.²³ Even a Social Democratic participant-observer acknowledged that Miliukov and Nabokov had the better of the half-dozen callow agitators that the Bolsheviks were able to put up, though ‘Abram’ Krylenko landed some blows in his encounters with the loose-tongued Fedor Rodichev.²⁴ But the police kept an anxious eye on proceedings, finding that Kadet meetings were being turned into something close to revolutionary assemblies.²⁵ The authorities retained considerable capacity to harass: Kadets quite often had their meetings prohibited or disrupted, or their electoral literature confiscated.²⁶ The extent of political activity in particular regions varied according to the tolerance of the local authorities, which were often more inclined to intervene than be accused of passivity. But the campaign was still strikingly vigorous, faced less harassment and manipulation than would be the case in later elections, and addressed itself to a population (especially its peasant component) nowhere near as apathetic as had been assumed.²⁷ The Kadets were able to act on their strategy of reaching beyond their natural constituency of the urban intelligentsia to appeal to the white-collar, worker, and even peasant population. Under the indirect system of voting to the Duma, the first round of voting (in curiae defined by estate) produced assemblies of electors, who then decided which candidates to send to the Tauride Palace. It was crucial for the Kadets’ hopes of success to cultivate a significant number of lower-class electors, and the socialist boycott of ²³ A. A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii: Vospominaniia 1881–1914 (Moscow, 1997), 284–8. ²⁴ Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 2:30. ²⁵ Sidel’nikov, Obrazovanie i deiatel’nost’ pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, 149–50. ²⁶ On the various measures of ‘administrative interference’, see Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties, 181–93. ²⁷ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 134–5.

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the First Duma made this a realistic prospect. Although resources did not permit significant campaigning in the Russian village, the Kadets made a pitch for the peasant vote by adopting a more left-wing agrarian programme than subsequently.²⁸ As a columnist of the liberal Vestnik Evropy noted in the spring of 1906, peasants suffered especially from the restrictions on campaign meetings in advance of the elections: they did not have the well-established political networks of the landowning and educated classes, and they arrived at the electoral assemblies—whether in the landowners’ or the peasants’ curia—with little knowledge of each other or sense of a common programme. This did not mean, however, that they were politically disengaged: they often made up quickly for lost time at the electoral assemblies and voted for left-leaning candidates. It was here that the Kadets were able to make their pitch, as did Vladimir Kuz’minKaravaev, a prominent local zemstvo figure, at a district assembly in Tver province. Although he did not make rash promises, he addressed the land issue persuasively enough that the peasants, after going into a huddle, overwhelmingly gave him their vote.²⁹ A more sceptical view was taken by the Octobrist S. M. Shidlovskii, who observed campaign meetings and the two rounds of elections in his own largely rural district and found that political behaviour was governed more by emotion and group loyalty than by any party programme: the general mood was turning to the left, and peasants tended to vote for their own kind. A local Kadet candidate played to the gallery by declaring a redistributional land policy far to the left of his party’s actual policy.³⁰ When it came to the second phase of the electoral process, the electoral assemblies, proceedings were more sedate. The law sought to rule out any discussion of political programmes at these gatherings, which generally consisted of the local oligarchy with an admixture of peasants and workers. But the Kadets, for all the limitations of their social base and party infrastructure, were at this moment ‘the best organized political force in the country’. Although they had no significant support base in the peasantry as a whole, their vigorous campaigning was sufficient to win over a crucial portion of the peasant electors, making them the single largest party in the First Duma. They also successfully reached out in the other direction: provincial governors reported with dismay on the party’s success in winning over ‘moderate’ and conservative opinion at its many pre-electoral meetings.³¹

²⁸ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 132, 135–6. On the limitations of Kadet propaganda in a more conservative rural province, see F. A. Seleznev, Vybory i vybor provintsii: partiia kadetov v Nizhegorodskom krae (1905–1917 gg.) (Nizhnii Novgorod, 2001) , e.g. 44–5. ²⁹ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, VE, no. 4 (1906): 763–5. ³⁰ S. I. Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia (Berlin, 1923), 1: 101–5. ³¹ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 165, 178, 180; N. B. Selunskaia, Stanovlenie rossiiskogo parlamentarizma nachala XX veka (Moscow, 1996), 72–4.

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Figure 5.1. The Presidium of the First State Duma, 1906. The white-bearded Muromtsev stands at the centre of the group. Photograph by Karl Bulla reproduced on a contemporary postcard. Courtesy of Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

The Kadets carried their political momentum with them into the new Russian parliament. For a brief moment it seemed that they could transcend the divides of class and education that were laid bare by the composition of the Duma. Deputies of many political hues and social backgrounds were swept along by the political theatre of the new institution. They were seen off by enthusiastic crowds at the stations where they boarded their trains to St Petersburg.³² The opening of the Duma made for an impressive and colourful spectacle, as deputies made their way by foot to the Tauride Palace, some of them dressed in national or regional costume. Perhaps the greatest guarantee of the substance and solemnity of proceedings was the imposing figure of the Duma’s first chairman, Sergei Muromtsev, who had for many years been giving lessons in parliamentarianism to his colleagues at Moscow University, the Moscow duma and the zemstvo. Now he could do so in a genuine parliament, and his students included a more plebeian contingent. After one evening in company with Muromtsev and others, peasant deputies were overheard saying: ‘What speeches, sweeter than honey!’³³

³² Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 187. ³³ Kizvetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 291–2. On the attention Muromtsev paid to matters of procedure in the Moscow duma in the 1880s and 1890s, see D. V. Aronov, Pervyi spiker. Opyt nauchnoi biografii Sergeia Andreevicha Muromtseva (Moscow, 2006), 82–3.

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In the absence of a formally approved set of rules of debate, Muromtsev’s imposing figure was the main guarantor of order in the First Duma. In his every word and gesture he ‘embodied the grand significance of this lofty institution’; his voice was ‘even, deep and imposing’, and he spoke ‘like a sheikh reading lines from the Koran’.³⁴ Muromtsev upheld the dignity of the institution through his every word and gesture. ‘Like a good actor’, he had studied the role of chairman to perfection. As the liberal zemstvo veteran V. A. Obolenskii went on to observe: ‘Nowhere, under no circumstances, did he forget his lofty position. He developed manners and gestures that, according to his artistic intuition, corresponded to his presidential person. It seemed to me that he even ate and slept not like everyone else but “in a chairmanlike fashion”.’³⁵ For the leading Kadet Pavel Miliukov, Muromtsev officiated like a high priest, in a style of ‘passive-hermetic grandeur’. Muromtsev’s eventual successor Fedor Golovin recalled him chairing as if he were performing some kind of ‘religious rite’ and paying meticulous attention even to his dress: his frock-coat needed to be longer and more formal than was the fashion, and he wore tails to the first sitting after his election.³⁶ As quotations such as these suggest, some observers felt Muromtsev’s sense of dignity was coming dangerously close to narcissism or pedantry, but he undoubtedly set a tone of the utmost propriety. Muromtsev’s greatest legacy to the Duma was procedural: the rules of order (Nakaz) he drew up.³⁷ As his fellow lawyer Maksim Vinaver recalls him saying in a conversation as early as April 1905: we’ll have a constitution, but when we have that constitution, and the parliament comes together, people will arrive, and no one will know where to sit down and where to go when they get up. Don’t laugh, please, when I tell you that I am already writing instructions for our future parliament and for that purpose am studying all the foreign rules of order.³⁸

³⁴ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 263–4. ³⁵ V. A. Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki (Paris, 1988), 352. ³⁶ P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia (1859–1917) (New York, 1955), 371; ‘Iz zapisok F. A. Golovina’, KA 58 (1933): 148. ³⁷ Although the rules were discussed at some length and in practice were in operation, they were not formally approved during the brief terms of the First and Second Dumas. See V. A. Maklakov and O. Ia. Pergament, Nakaz Gosudarstvennoi Dumy (po rabotam 2-i Gosudarstvennoi Dumy) (St Petersburg, 1907), 3–6, and the discussion in Oleg Kharkhordin, ‘The Past and Future of Russian Public Language’, in Nikolai Vakhtin and Boris Firsov (eds), Public Debate in Russia: Matters of (Dis)order (Edinburgh, 2016), 292–3. ³⁸ M. Vinaver, Nedavnee (Vospominaniia i kharakteristiki) (Paris, 1926), 51; also ‘Iz zapisok F. A. Golovina’, KA 58 (1933): 147–8. Muromtsev’s main models were French, German, and Austrian. On the extent of the borrowings, see S. V. Bogdanov, ‘Natsional’nyi i zarubezhnyi opyt v formirovanii i funktsionirovanii Gosudarstvennoi Dumy i Gosudarstvennogo Soveta v nachale XX veka’, candidate’s dissertation (Moscow State University, 2003), 119–36.

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Muromtsev had prepared meticulously for the minutiae of parliamentary procedure. The fruits of his efforts were rated highly even by a well-informed British observer. In the view of Bernard Pares, Muromtsev’s Nakaz was ‘so good that in all the subsequent vicissitudes of the Duma, including the changes of majority, it was never seriously altered. Anyone who read it through would have said that, if this was the order of things in Russia, then Russia was already a constitutional state.’³⁹ As a contemporary constitutional commentator observed, ‘popular representation will only be stable, will only establish its authority, when it will be exercised consistently and continuously, even in the small details’.⁴⁰ Certain provisions of the Nakaz were unproblematic (and almost universal in other European parliaments). No deputy (with a few minor exceptions) could speak more than twice on the same question. Permission to speak had to be requested in writing and not before the debate had moved on to the matter in question, and the speaker was to indicate whether he intended to speak for or against the motion. Yet establishing the principle that the chairman was the conduit of debate, and that the ad hominem approach was unacceptable, proved tricky. Even so imposing and dedicated a chairman as Muromtsev was not always successful in maintaining the requisite order. Some deputies were resorting to unparliamentary language, one going so far as to declare that ‘our ministers have just one desire in their hearts—to kill’. Tongues became so loose that Muromtsev had to lecture his colleagues on decorum: The old regime, in which power always flowed downwards, taught us that those in power often felt they had the right to insult their subordinates instead of limiting themselves to a calm and authoritative explanation of why their actions were wrong. Surely we, the representatives of the Russian people, now that we have taken the position of an organ of state power, are not going to mimic the old holders of power?⁴¹

A contemporary observer recalls Muromtsev as being scrupulously impartial and vigilant in interrupting speakers who violated parliamentary norms. When an illdisciplined speaker such as Aleksei Alad’in, the leader of the Trudovik (‘Labour’) group, climbed the podium, Muromtsev ‘raised himself a little and, craning his neck over the chairman’s rostrum, listened carefully to every word so as to stop him in time’.⁴² On a number of occasions Muromtsev also had to act to ensure deputies addressed the assembly in the correct style: to insist that members of the Duma speak from the podium and that they refrain from addressing each other ³⁹ Bernard Pares, My Russian Memoirs (London, 1931), 105. ⁴⁰ A. Pilenko, Russkie parlamentskie pretsedenty (St Petersburg, 1907), 5. ⁴¹ Pilenko, Russkie parlamentskie pretsedenty, 49–50. ⁴² Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 353–4; for more on Muromtsev’s interventions, see N. Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma pervogo sozyva (Penza, 1907), 29.

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directly, and to forbid them from reading from a text (citing Western European practice).⁴³ As in other parliaments, particularly important and controversial were measures to protect the minority. Proposals to accelerate the debate by limiting the number of further speakers could be blocked by the opposition of fifty members; as the Kadet Nikolai Ezerskii noted, this provision was exploited ever more frequently in the First Duma, and it may have been misguided in a new and weakly established parliament that could not afford to spend months on passing each bill. Ezerskii also found that the rules of debate were not always enforced. In practice, many speakers were in fact allowed to read out from texts, and on occasion it was very clear that they had not even written the texts themselves. This latitude was extended mainly to peasant and non-Russian deputies in the misguided assumption that they were not capable of expressing themselves adequately ex tempore.⁴⁴ The prohibition on reading from a text was never universally welcomed, with socialists and non-Russian deputies usually among its opponents. The Nakaz committee of the Second Duma only voted to maintain the status quo by a narrow margin of five to four, and the issue was then debated in plenary session: a proposal to make an exception for peasant deputies was overwhelmingly rejected, and special provision was made only for the reading out of quotations. The Third Duma saw an even livelier debate on the matter. A proposal to follow the practice of the Italian parliament and allow the reading out of speeches that did not exceed fifteen minutes was voted down after meeting vigorous objections from the Right: as P. N. Krupenskii observed, one might as well let people ‘wind up a gramophone on this podium’.⁴⁵ The more conservative upper house, the revamped State Council, also had to accustom itself to parliamentary ways. It opened with much less élan than the Duma. The elderly Count Sol’skii read out an official greeting in a faint voice with his head buried in the text. The signing of the oath took an hour and a half, and the proceedings were quite lifeless.⁴⁶ Before long, however, matters of parliamentary procedure came up for discussion, and the relationship between speech and writing was a prominent theme. In only the third sitting a speech by the scholar A. A. Shakhmatov encountered objections on the grounds that he had been reading out a prepared text, a practice that had not previously been allowed in the State Council. The same issue came up on 27 June 1906, when I. G. Kamenskii, a forestry magnate from Perm, was admonished for reading a speech (he claimed only to be looking at notes). On 4 July 1906, the Kharkov historian D. I. Bagalei ⁴³ Pilenko, Russkie parlamentskie pretsedenty, 83–4. These were articles 110–12 in the version of the Nakaz published by Maklakov and Pergament in 1907. ⁴⁴ Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma, 98. On procedures for closing debate, see also Kharkhordin, ‘The Past and Future’. ⁴⁵ A. F. Savrasov, ‘Nakaz Gosudarstvennoi Dumy (1906–1917 gg.): Istoriia sozdaniia i primeneniia’, candidate’s dissertation (Voronezh State University, 2010), 153–4, 166–7, 250–1. ⁴⁶ Mikh. Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma (St Petersburg, 1907), 6–7.

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sought an amendment to Nakaz on this point (to allow the reading out of specific documents that were necessary for elucidating the matter at hand).⁴⁷ This was not the only part of the draft standing rules to which Bagalei took exception. He disputed the stipulation that speakers should address the chairman of the Council: how, in that case, to ensure that a speaker could be heard by the entire meeting? When his proposed amendment went to a vote, however, it was defeated. The counter-arguments ran as follows: there was nothing to stop members addressing the chamber as long as they did not lose contact with the chair; and the clause was necessary to stop members addressing their speeches to each other and causing debates to slide into chaos.⁴⁸ Bagalei also raised the issue of how to speed debate to conclusion when it had taken up too much time: it was agreed by vote that it would be possible either to reduce the time allotted to individual speakers or to close the list of speakers.⁴⁹ Bagalei was still not finished: he also took issue with the ban on ‘applause and other loud expressions of approval or censure’: ‘in spite of all the restraint that to a greater or lesser extent, but generally to a significant degree, is characteristic of all of us, we can all find ourselves, during some speech or other, some communication or other, that it becomes essential, and completely natural, to express that somehow’. This too was voted down, and the decorous Upper House would avoid violations of order for the entire period of its existence.⁵⁰

From Speech to Written Record: The Duma and the Stenographic Transcript For all Muromtsev’s endeavours, the most consequential procedural question in the State Duma was the relationship between the speech that took place in the chamber and the written trace it left—the transcript that was published in the major newspapers as well as in the official record. Stenography in the Duma gave political rhetoric a remarkable platform. In Britain, members of parliament had taken centuries to convince themselves of the need for published records of parliamentary debate, and as late as 1877 MPs voted narrowly against introducing official parliamentary reports, preferring to rely on the compilation of newspaper

⁴⁷ Gosudarstvennyi Sovet: Stenograficheskie otchety. 1906 god. Sessiia pervaia (St Petersburg, 1906), third sitting (4 May 1906), 12; ninth sitting (27 June 1906), 11; thirteenth sitting (4 July 1906), 8–9. According to the main recent historian of the State Council in the Duma period, during the lifetime of this body the chairman did not in practice enforce the prohibition on reading from a text. V. A. Demin, Verkhniaia palata Rossiiskoi imperii. 1906–1917 (Moscow, 2006), 243. ⁴⁸ Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, thirteenth sitting (4 July 1906), 6–7. Demin (Verkhniaia palata, 242–3) again notes that this stipulation was not always observed in practice. ⁴⁹ Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, thirteenth sitting (4 July 1906), 10–11. ⁵⁰ Gosudarstvennyi sovet, thirteenth sitting (4 July 1906), 12; I. K. Kir’ianov, Rossiiskie parlamentarii nachala XX veka: Novye politiki v novom politicheskom prostranstve (Perm’, 2006), 124–5.

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reports that was Hansard.⁵¹ In Russia, by contrast, stenography was part of the fabric of parliamentary life from the very beginning (see Figure 5.2). Before the creation of the State Duma, Russia had few stenographers with the suitable level of expertise. There were various stenography courses in Moscow in the early 1900s, but they mainly trained shorthand secretaries for the commercial sector (which required a speed of 50–60 words per minute rather than the 90–100 words desirable in a ‘parliamentary’ stenographer). When the Duma was in session, stenographers were needed not only to sit in the chamber but also to work nights taking down decrees and reports by telephone from St Petersburg. All in all, the big newspapers of the post-1905 era employed around twenty stenographers. This work paid well (120–50 rubles per month rather than the 50–70 that shorthand secretaries could expect), though it was demanding.⁵² The new Russian legislature thus brought into being a full-fledged stenographic profession. In March 1906, a competition was announced for stenographers to work at both the State Duma and the State Council (twenty-four people for each). Seventy candidates took part, and forty passed muster (twelve men, twenty-eight women); the minimum required speed was the undemanding eighty words per minute.⁵³ At the second competition in January 1907, 157 candidates presented themselves, and 29 passed. In February 1907, of the original forty, only eighteen passed a further test. By 1910, 90 words per minute was the minimum acceptable speed.⁵⁴ To begin with, women stenographers in the State Duma were appointed as assistants to the men, at a lower salary, but soon their status was made equal; given the shortage of competent male stenographers, the women, with the support of their male colleagues, were able to assert their rights. By the period of the Third Duma, the salary of a Duma stenographer had gone up from 75–100 rubles to 150 rubles. The women were required to dress in simple black attire and have modest hairstyles, and they were not permitted to talk to the deputies in the breaks between sessions.⁵⁵ To begin with, a shift lasted five minutes, but it was soon ⁵¹ Admittedly, Britain was already an outlier by 1877: France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and the United States had their official parliamentary reports. For the comparison, see Samuel Whittaker, Parliamentary Reporting in England, Foreign Countries, and the Colonies (Manchester, 1877). On the unreliability of Hansard, which had no Gallery reporters until 1877–8, see Olive Anderson, ‘Hansard’s Hazards: An Illustration from Recent Interpretations of Married Women’s Property Law and the 1857 Divorce Act’, English Historical Review, 112 (1997): 1202–15. ⁵² S. Iudina, ‘Rabota stenografov v dorevoliutsionnoi Moskve’, VS, no. 3 (1927): 4–6. ⁵³ Earlier in 1906, under the auspices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a group of eighteen people had been sent to receive stenographic training in Finland, which already had experience of parliamentary life. Selunskaia (ed.), Stanovlenie rossiiskogo parlamentarizma, 144–5 (although no source is provided for this information). ⁵⁴ A. M. Iurkovskii, Stenografiia skvoz’ veka (Moscow, 1969), 62–4. ⁵⁵ Whether this rule was always observed is another matter. As Chairman of the Third Duma, for example, Mikhail Rodzianko was known for his over-familiarity with the ‘lady stenographers’. Ia. V. Glinka, Odinnadtsat’ let v Gosudarstvennoi dume. 1906–1917: Dnevnik i vospominaniia (Moscow, 2001), 92–3.

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Figure 5.2. Speech becomes print: an editor dictates the stenographer’s text to a typist. Photograph by Karl Bulla reproduced on a contemporary postcard. Courtesy of Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

found more effective for stenographers to work in shorter bursts of 2–2.5 minutes (and always in pairs). After completing their shift in the chamber, they retreated to an adjoining room to write up their notes (with the assistance of a typist). The text then went to the editorial department, which besides its director had a staff of six, who took turns to sit in on the debates so they could compare what they had heard with the texts the stenographers presented. All speakers were permitted to edit their own speeches, but not to make substantive changes. Stenographers, on the other hand, were required to deliver to the editors the unvarnished text, which sometimes made speakers blame them for the inadequacies of their own delivery.⁵⁶ Duma procedures might be open to criticism in other areas, but the stenographic department was generally acknowledged to work very well. The stenographers and editors were carefully selected, and journalists sometimes received transcripts of debates at the end of the very same day. The Duma secretariat

⁵⁶ S. Beier, ‘Stenograficheskaia rabota v b. Gosudarstvennoi Dume i Gosudarstvennom Sovete’, VS, no. 1/3 (1924): 26–7; S. Beier, ‘O rabote stenografov v gosudarstvennoi dume i gosudarstvennom sovete’, VS, no. 3 (1927): 6–9.

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established by the first incumbent, Dmitrii Shakhovskoi, was a rare example of stability and continuity through the whole Duma period.⁵⁷ In fact, the stenographic department functioned much too well for the liking of many observers in the political establishment. As Nicholas II wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘Everything would be fine, if everything that goes on in the Duma stayed within its walls’.⁵⁸ Nicholas kept a careful eye on the stenographic transcripts, on occasion calling on the chairman of the Second Duma to account for his handling of difficult episodes.⁵⁹ In 1905, the ruling elite had come round only under extreme duress to the notion of a legislative rather than consultative assembly. It remained uneasy and divided even on the eve of the First Duma. As late as February 1906, Sergei Witte was arguing that sessions of the Duma should not be made public, given the lack of sophistication of Russian society: in his view, the spectacle of parliamentary cut and thrust would fundamentally undermine respect for the government. Even the arch-conservative Pobedonostsev reportedly poured scorn on this idea: what, he asked, was the point of ‘starting all this business’ of radical reform if only to conclude that Russians were not to be trusted with the fruits of their new institutions.⁶⁰ Small wonder, then, that the State Council, packed with members of the traditional landowning and bureaucratic elites, took some time to establish the procedures for producing its new written record. In the discussion of the standing rules of the new upper house, the question was posed whether members should have the right to express written disagreement with a decision of the Council, and to have these ‘separate opinions’ (osobye mneniia) published as an appendix to the transcript. The majority voted against this proposal on the ground that it would completely change the character and status of oral debates: members should have the courage to speak up with their objections. Another matter for discussion was whether speakers should receive the draft transcript first (before the chairman) to check through their own speeches. One member spoke against this proposal on the grounds that ‘in this case it will be possible to change words for literary effect, but the whole purpose of stenographic reports is for people to know what was said here, even if it was inadequately expressed’. But the motion passed all the same: it would be too difficult for members to remember what they had said 10–15 days after the fact, and the speaker could provide the best check on the accuracy of the written record; this practice would also serve the desirable end of getting the reports out faster.⁶¹

⁵⁷ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 266. As a parliamentary reporter, Tyrkova-Williams experienced the system first-hand. ⁵⁸ Quoted in V. V. Shul’gin, Gody. Dni. 1920 god (Moscow, 1990), 53. ⁵⁹ ‘Zapiski F. A. Golovina’, KA, 19 (1926): 120, 123. ⁶⁰ V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo. Vospominaniia. 1903–1919 gg. (Moscow, 1992), 1: 125–6. ⁶¹ Gosudarstvennyi sovet, sitting of 6 July, 10–16; sitting of 7 July, 1–2.

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Whatever the reservations of the ruling class, parliamentary stenography was the guarantor of the revived publichnost’ and glasnost’ of the post-1905 era. In his speech to open the Duma, State Secretary E. V. Frish reminded deputies (as if they needed reminding) of how far their words would travel when converted from speech to writing: ‘Every step you take along the new path, every thought uttered in your meetings, will immediately become the property of the whole people, which with the assistance of the press will be following vigilantly your actions and your undertakings’.⁶² In his unfavourable contemporary account of the Second Duma, the historian V. I. Ger’e quoted the rhetorical question posed by one deputy: ‘Gentlemen, we have been sitting here for three months. What have we given the country?’ The simplest answer, in his view, was ‘four thousand columns of the stenographic transcript’, much of it consumed by the Russian reading public in the daily press.⁶³ Irony aside, this enormous body of words was a remarkable break with all previous political practice and an enormous rhetorical resource. The daily newspaper by now had a vast reach: according to one respectable estimate, by 1914 somewhere between a third and a half of the adult population of Russia came in regular contact with the press, and the Duma was often the main story, especially in the first two years of its existence.⁶⁴ Even conservatives made regular reference to the stenographic transcript, often combined with arch self-deprecation.⁶⁵ More pragmatically, speakers on the Right could be just as conscious as their opponents of the value of the transcript for securing their political renown and their authority in the eyes of their constituents: on a visit to his constituency of Kholm in the Western borderlands at Easter 1907, Bishop Evlogii (Georgievskii) saw with gratification the ‘delight’ with which transcripts of his speeches in the Second Duma had been received: ‘the connection between deputy and population proved vigorous.’⁶⁶ The role of print meant that words could now be thrown back at their speakers. Miliukov was irked by Ger’e’s ‘tendentious’ book on the First Duma, which had drawn attention to the concessions the Kadets had made to the Left. His first reaction was: ‘Did we really say those things?’ But after going back to the stenographic transcript, he found that Ger’e’s quotations were correct: ‘I had to admit: yes, we really did say those things.’⁶⁷ Even the chairman might be caught out by the transcript. On one occasion, S. I. Shidlovskii, standing in for Nikolai Khomiakov as chairman of the Third Duma, discovered to his dismay that he had wrongly reprimanded the bruising right-winger Vladimir Purishkevich for unparliamentary

⁶² GD SO 1/1/1. ⁶³ V. Ger’e, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma (Moscow, 1907), 1. ⁶⁴ Manfred Hagen, Die Entfaltung politischer Öffentlichkeit in Russland, 1906–1914 (Wiesbaden, 1982), 130–2, 148. ⁶⁵ The Rightist A. A. Bobrinskii did not tire of the device: for examples from November 1907 and May 1910, see GD SO 3/1/453–4 and 3/3/2245–6. ⁶⁶ Evlogii (Georgievskii), Put’ moei zhizni: Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1994), 171. ⁶⁷ Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 369.

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language: he had misheard an exchange in which Purishkevich had responded to an insult directed at him rather than giving unprovoked offence. Despite murmurs of dissatisfaction, the Duma had already voted to expel Purishkevich for a period, and Shidlovskii could only offer the wronged Rightist an apology (which was accepted).⁶⁸ The stenographic transcript was also taken more seriously by the government than ministers let on. V. I. Gurko, representing the Ministry of Internal Affairs, demanded to see the transcript of his speech on the agrarian question. When he returned the text with his ‘corrections’, not a single phrase remained unchanged, and the amendments were often substantive as well as cosmetic. Shakhovskoi and Muromtsev were unpleasantly surprised, but nonetheless approved the text for publication.⁶⁹ The stenographic transcript is regularly invoked in the memoirs of Vladimir Kokovtsov, perhaps the most loquacious of government representatives in the Duma, usually to confirm the warm reception his speeches received.⁷⁰ Although the stenographic transcripts of the Duma debates were deemed to be in the public domain, the government still attempted to limit their dissemination: newspapers containing reports might be confiscated or censored before they reached their readers in the provinces. But the question of public access to the record of the Duma never went away. In January 1914, in a debate on revisions to the Nakaz, the Trudoviks proposed that the mandatory distribution of Duma transcripts to the empire’s public libraries be written into the Duma’s rules of order. This initiative was motivated partly by the fact that newspapers did not have space to give the full transcripts, and hence presented extracts to suit their political flavour, but above all by evidence that the authorities were minded to restrict the circulation of the Duma’s proceedings; the government newspaper Rossiia had just discontinued publication of the transcripts as a supplement.⁷¹ Another fundamental question for the status of the Duma and its written record was whether deputies could count on parliamentary immunity when delivering their speeches. This remained contested territory throughout the Duma era. The founding constitutional document of the Duma, the Uchrezhdenie, was unhelpfully vague or even self-contradictory on the matter: it guaranteed deputies ‘full freedom of judgment and opinion on matters under the authority of the Duma’ (art. 14) but also stated that they would face sanctions for ‘criminal actions’ committed when carrying out their duties (art. 22). As the Duma-loathing conservative Kireev noted in his diary in February 1907, ‘the matter of immunity is not settled. We have no parliament. Of course, a deputy ⁶⁸ Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 1: 114–15. ⁶⁹ N. I. Astrov, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 2000), 166. ⁷⁰ Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1: 256, 269, 385. ⁷¹ GD SO 4/2/2/257–64; the Kadet Nikolai Nekrasov and the Trudovik Aleksandr Kerensky spoke in favour, but later withdrew the proposal at Maklakov’s suggestion on the grounds that this measure would be better channelled through the Duma’s budgetary committee.

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is not prosecuted for what he says or does in the Duma, but if he acts illegally on the street, he comes under the force of ordinary laws.’⁷² In fact, Russia’s version of parliamentary immunity proved to be even more qualified than that: deputies were allowed to engage in free debate on matters put before them, but could be prosecuted like any other citizens for speech that was offensive or contained incitement to illegal actions. This implied discretionary and highly politicized judgements as to what constituted the proper province of Duma debate. The first attempt to prosecute a Duma member for parliamentary speech came in its first session, when the Chernigov deputy I. P. Shrag was accused of defamation for alleging that the mayor of Nezhin was the main organizer of the Białystok pogrom of June 1906, which had drawn an immediate response from the Duma and led to one of the fiercest debates of its first convocation. The principle of freedom of Duma speech received further tests in the following years, and while the authorities were not clear or consistent in the way they treated cases of alleged slander or incitement, by 1912 it was very clear that the Ministry of Justice or the Senate did not set much store by article 14.⁷³ The Duma twice made unsuccessful attempts to pass a law on parliamentary immunity. Although no criminal prosecution of a deputy was ever brought to a conclusion, cases were investigated right up to the outbreak of World War I, and the authorities had at their disposal a number of ‘administrative’ measures (such as fines) that they could take against misbehaving parliamentarians.⁷⁴

The Duma as Oratorical Arena So much for the parameters of parliamentary debate; what of its actual conduct? First impressions were that procedure was getting in the way of content. The correspondent of Russkie vedomosti had little patience with the preliminaries, bemoaning the unnecessarily detailed discussion of the standing rules at the second sitting on 29 April. A caustic remark by Kuz’min-Karavaev, who was on the centrist edge of the liberal camp, encapsulated the matter: ‘the debates on saving time led only to its fruitless wastage.’ As Kuz’min-Karavaev observed in exasperation during the debate: ‘for 40 minutes now we have been talking about how to speed up the holding of elections. The preceding orators have quite rightly pointed out that our time is infinitely precious. We have an enormous task before us—every minute should be accounted for.’⁷⁵ On 30 April, another Kadet, Nikolai

⁷² A. A. Kireev, Dnevnik. 1905–1910 (Moscow, 2010), 192. ⁷³ P. Pokrovskii, ‘Svoboda slova v russkikh zakonodatel’nykh uchrezhdeniiakh’, RB, no. 11 (1912): 233–57. ⁷⁴ Kir’ianov, Rossiiskie parlamentarii, 97–100. ⁷⁵ GD SO 1/1/15. On the nineteenth-century emergence of an ethos of time-efficiency in the British parliament, see Ryan A. Vieira, Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and the British World (Oxford, 2015).

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Ezerskii from Penza, proposed practical measures for bringing debates to a timely conclusion: ‘When the chamber finds that the question has been sufficiently elaborated, then it can address to the chairman a request to close the list of orators.’⁷⁶ As other deputies pointed out, however, the issue was not as straightforward as that. Speed of resolution had to be balanced against protection of minority interests. But it was already evident that any elasticity in the Nakaz would be used to the full. Even in the earliest sittings, some of the deputies were straining at the procedural leash, using dry discussion of the standing rules as a pretext for raising broader matters. They were soon called to order by the vigilant Muromtsev, but the Duma was full of a ‘spirit of freedom’ and ‘high spirits that could only with difficulty be subjected to discipline’.⁷⁷ The stenographic transcript recorded frequent bursts of applause that occasionally rose to the level of the ‘thunderous’. To a newspaper audience still new to parliamentary realities, it was perhaps shocking that the number of deputies present in the chamber at times dwindled to well under half, or that many of them preferred to spend their time in conversation in the lobby. Far worse was the palpable failure of government and parliament to establish a working relationship. If ministers attended debates, they sat through them in silence.⁷⁸ Admittedly, representatives of the government were practically guaranteed a hostile reception when they did take the podium. The military prosecutor Pavlov was shouted down without saying a single word (he was held responsible for meting out the death penalty on several recent occasions); later on, the attempt by the Minister of Justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, to explain the necessity of the death penalty met a dismissive response from journalists and Duma members alike.⁷⁹ When Minister of the Interior Ivan Goremykin addressed the Duma in mid-May, his arrival on the podium was greeted by ‘the silence of the grave’. Delivering his speech from a text, in a slow monotone, projecting indifference but with trembling hands, the Minister elicited no response from the assembled deputies and then affected to take no interest in the tumult his words unleashed in the chamber.⁸⁰ When Goremykin finished, Nabokov, Rodichev, and others delivered a predictably critical riposte to his statement. In the interval, the hall broke into a handful of ‘improvised meetings’, as deputies carried on heated debates in more informal fashion. Goreymykin’s declaration was the first time that a significant contingent from the capital’s civil service elite and aristocracy attended the Duma. According to the correspondent of Russkie vedomosti, these

⁷⁶ GD SO 1/1/47. ⁷⁷ ‘Iz zaly Gos Dumy (Ot nashego korrespondenta)’, RV, 30 April 1906, 2–3. ⁷⁸ As reported in ‘Iz zaly Gos Dumy (Po telefonu)’, RV, 4 May 1906, 3. ⁷⁹ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 354; ‘Iz zaly Dumy (Po telefonu ot nashego spetsial’nogo korrespondenta)’, RS, 20 June 1906, 2. ⁸⁰ V. A. Maklakov, The First State Duma: Contemporary Reminiscences (Bloomington, 1964), 98; on signs of nerves, Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1: 166.

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visitors could be heard commenting that Russia was not mature enough for genuine parliamentary life, while ‘the ladies examined the people’s representatives through their lorgnettes, exchanging phrases in French’.⁸¹ Goremykin’s very demeanour made clear that the minister was not willing to adapt to parliamentary life. Ariadna Tyrkova, who undoubtedly spoke for most other liberal observers, found that ‘his whole persona embodied the mandarin bureaucracy that was slipping into the past’. He read dourly from a text that had evidently been drawn up for him by his secretaries: ‘he did not, of course, know how to give speeches and he would probably have been offended if anyone had suspected him of pretensions to eloquence.’⁸² The indifference of the old regime to parliamentary shenanigans was on further display in the State Council, whose sessions ran in parallel to those of the Duma. Its proceedings were widely found to be anaemic.⁸³ Debate in the upper house differed from the Duma not only in its more conservative content, but also in its rhetorical strategies. The ‘old’ elite attempted to differentiate themselves from the glib oratory of the lawyers and demagogues in the lower house. In his contribution on 4 May 1906, Prince Kasatkin-Rostovskii presented himself as a ‘modest provincial’ who could hardly compete for eloquence with the outstanding scholar and statesman who had preceded him (the historian A. S. Lappo-Danilevskii). He asked his audience to listen ‘not to how I say, but to what I say’. His thirty years in the countryside (twenty-five of them as marshal of the nobility) had convinced him that the peasant needed proof that the government existed and was in charge; for this reason an amnesty was highly inadvisable.⁸⁴ Many contemporaries were not so quick to draw a distinction between form and content, finding that the debates of the First Duma made compelling listening (and reading). Members of the educated public eagerly followed events in the chamber, and there was plenty of demand for places in the gallery; at least one peasant deputy was caught selling tickets. Russia’s aspiring Trollopes also got to work: satire, sketch-writing, and more extended literary treatments further amplified proceedings.⁸⁵ Even a British observer, no stranger to parliamentary life, was favourably impressed. In the view of Bernard Pares, deputies were rising to the challenge: ‘Whatever the limits of practical ability in the Duma, the standard of oratory seemed to me considerably higher than with us. The Cadets were the best, but there were plenty of other good speakers, including quite a number of the peasants.’⁸⁶ Admittedly, the cast of speakers was limited. Only about 15 per cent of deputies took part in debates, and it was common for half a dozen names—largely the professorial Kadets—to dominate proceedings;

⁸¹ ⁸³ ⁸⁴ ⁸⁵

RV, 14 May 1906, 3. ⁸² Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 296. For example Aleksandr Tsitron, 72 dnia pervogo russkogo parlamenta (St Petersburg, 1906), 30. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, third sitting (4 May 1906), 8. Kir’ianov, Rossiiskie parlamentarii, 69–70, 77–8. ⁸⁶ Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 110.

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the very longest speeches came from Kokoshkin. Content analysis reveals an unsurprising preponderance of the key terms of the liberal agenda: ‘constitution’, ‘law-based state’ (pravovoe gosudarstvo).⁸⁷ The Octobrists overlapped with the Kadets in their social background—they too included a significant number of liberal gentry from the zemstvo movement—and in their rhetorical strategies. Mikhail Stakhovich, their leader, had been renowned as one of the most effective orators in the provincial gentry assemblies and zemstvos before 1905. Count Petr Geiden was less demonstrative and suffered from a bad stammer. But he was the more impressive parliamentarian: his speeches were full of substance, and he deployed ‘murderous humour’ against his opponents.⁸⁸ Even the narodnik observer Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan found Geiden the acceptable, Turgenevian face of the old elite; in the view of the Kadet Tyrkova, he was a quintessential expression of gentry conservatism—a fastidious parliamentarian of the English type.⁸⁹ But the gentlemen of the Kadet and Octobrist parties did not have proceedings all their own way. The Duma was a remarkably diverse group of aspiring parliamentarians. A quarter of the almost 500 deputies were peasants by occupation; only forty-six were landowners or estate managers; seventy-three were functionaries in zemstvo, municipal, or gentry organizations; almost forty were lawyers; but there was also a handful of factory owners, alongside perhaps three handfuls of factory workers, sixteen priests, sixteen doctors, sixteen professors, as well as teachers, journalists, tradesmen, and artisans.⁹⁰ The electoral law had excluded the vast majority of urban workers, but peasants had a much better chance of advancing from the volost level to the regional electoral assemblies; the authorities seem fundamentally to have underestimated peasant susceptibility to left-wing and even constitutionalist ideas.⁹¹ The Kadets were the largest single party, with about 35 per cent of the deputies. They owed a significant part of their electoral success to their appeal to lower-class voters who otherwise would have voted for the (absent) socialist parties; when the Duma began to sit, they had a closer relationship with the Trudovik group and with other unaffiliated peasant deputies than they ever would subsequently. From its very first debates, the Duma showed that it would break new rhetorical ground. The first occasion to stir deputies to feats of oratory was the debate on the ⁸⁷ Selunskaia, Stanovlenie rossiiskogo parlamentarizma, chap. 6. Admittedly, the seven debates subjected to content analysis by Selunskaia’s team were on a variety of civil rights, which was home territory for the Kadets. But such issues were more prominent in the First Duma than subsequently. ⁸⁸ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 378–80; Astrov, Vospominaniia 106. ⁸⁹ V. G. Tan, Muzhiki v Gosudarstvennoi Dume: Ocherki (Moscow, 1907), 25; Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 280–1. ⁹⁰ V. A. Demin, Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossii (1906–1917): Mekhanizm funktionirovaniia (Moscow, 1996), 37–8. Figures on the occupations of Duma deputies vary slightly in different historians’ accounts, but the point about diversity stands. ⁹¹ Some governors recognized this misjudgment in the reports on the election campaign they submitted to the Minister of the Interior: see Selunskaia, Stanovlenie rossiiskogo parlamentarizma, 54–5.

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Figure 5.3. A peasant deputy in his lodgings in St Petersburg. From a contemporary postcard. Courtesy of Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

Duma’s response to the Emperor’s Speech from the Throne. Some observers were already becoming impatient: there were demagogic appeals to the interests of the ‘Russian people’, and the chamber took far too long to agree on the text. The word ‘obstruction’ was already being muttered in the lobby.⁹² Ironically, the text of the Response, though overseen by liberal lawyers and professors, was couched in pompous ceremonial prose. As the liberal Jewish lawyer Maksim Vinaver explained to Tyrkova, this was the only language the Emperor would understand. Yet the preceding debate had served notice that Duma deputies would not be constrained by existing norms of public expression. One of the most noteworthy speeches came from the Trudovik Ivan Zhilkin. A liberal newspaper correspondent was evidently impressed: ‘Zhilkin is not one of those popular orators who win you over by their boldness and self-confidence. He has a large dose of sincere sentimentality. When he stands on the podium, his whole figure, his voice, his gestures seem to say: “Take pity on us poor suffering people!” ’⁹³ The debate concluded on 5 May with a resounding contribution from a more familiar figure, the patrician V. D. Nabokov, who sounded very different when speaking from a parliamentary platform. As he read out a bold new draft demanding civil liberties, equality before the law, and abolition of the death penalty, he elicited an astonished double-take from the eminent court official Baron Frederiks, who could ⁹² Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 12–14. ⁹³ ‘Iz zaly Gos Dumy (Po telefonu)’, RV, 4 May 1906, 3.

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hardly believe that this fellow aristocrat was betraying his heritage in this wanton fashion.⁹⁴ The contrast between Zhilkin and Nabokov, made all the more striking by the fact that they were broadly on the same side, was one of many that the First Duma afforded in its seventy-two days. The Duma deputies were a motley cast of characters and backgrounds. The small group of churchmen made for an exotic sight in this parliamentary setting. In the debate on the death penalty, the priest Afanas’ev made a profound impression on listeners for his ‘cassock, cross and the simple Gospel words that he spoke’.⁹⁵ The peasant deputies were rather muted to begin with: they were exemplary in their propriety—contrary to some people’s expectations, they did not blow their noses into their boots or say anything to make ladies blush—but for the most part silent and rather enigmatic.⁹⁶ The occasional peasant deputy made an impression—Grabovetskii from Kiev was ‘the favourite of the lobby public’ for his ‘Ukrainian humour and the colourful and apt way he expresses himself ’—as did the Trudovik leaders.⁹⁷ But peasant participation in debate really picked up in the debate on the land question, which started with a fierce duel between the Kadet economist Mikhail Gertsenshtein and the government spokesman Vladimir Gurko, but then got mired in what one impatient observer called a long series of ‘tongue-tied’ speeches by peasant deputies. One of the few to make an impact was the Tambov deputy Ivan Losev, who cut an unimpressive figure and did not possess an arresting voice, but nonetheless seized the attention of the chamber by starting with the story of Samson.⁹⁸ A far more sympathetic observer, Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan, presented the Duma as an epochal clash of cultures, with the peasants making a full-blooded contribution to the encounter with their former betters. The peasants made an impression despite their lack of conventional eloquence or of physical presence compared to strapping government officials such as St Petersburg GovernorGeneral Dmitrii Trepov or Petr Stolypin. Losev sounded like the peasant he was, and his faltering speech drew mocking laughter to begin with, but he soon seized attention for his authentic aura of suffering borne and transcended. The Trudovik Zhilkin could not compete with the Kadet orators for fluency: his voice was low, his pauses were uneven, and his hand movements were awkward. But his directness and sincerity offered more than adequate compensation. The demotic contribution to parliamentary life was encapsulated by the clenched fist, which

⁹⁴ I. V. Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh: Zhiznennyi otchet’, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 22 (1937): 154–5. On Nabokov’s qualities as a parliamentarian, see also Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 354; Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 70; Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 270–1. ⁹⁵ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 355. ⁹⁶ ‘Krest’iane v Dume’, RV, 26 May 1906, 1. ⁹⁷ Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 57. ⁹⁸ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 357–8; also Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma, 29.

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Figure 5.4. The ‘lobby’ of the State Duma. Photograph by Karl Bulla reproduced on contemporary postcard. Courtesy of Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

soon enough became a universal Duma gesture.⁹⁹ Ezerskii also found the peasants to be far from tongue-tied, and in fact less prone to nerves than members of the educated classes due to their experience of speaking at the village assembly (skhod); they also managed to be far more concise in their interventions than their intelligentsia colleagues.¹⁰⁰ The peasant contribution was by no means restricted to the debating chamber. Tyrkova, present both as journalist and as member of the Kadet Central Committee, found that the Duma deputies ‘lived as in an open forum’. What went under the name of the ‘lobby’ (kuluary, literally ‘corridors’, a word that better conveys the fluid and improvised character of this space) was actually the imposing Potemkin ballroom, where journalists and members of the public debated the issues of the day (see Figure 5.4). In this setting the suffrage was considerably wider than in the country at large: women’s voices were heard as often as men’s. The order maintained by Muromtsev in the Duma session did not obtain here, as members of delegations from all over Russia, individual visitors, and journalists held forth alongside deputies.¹⁰¹ It was precisely outside the chamber that the peasant contribution was most vocal: in these spontaneous mitingi the peasants did almost all the talking, with Losev in particular becoming more outspoken (and more articulate) by the day.¹⁰² Ezerskii, similarly, found that ⁹⁹ Tan, Muzhiki, 7–8, 12, 15, 25–6, 37. ¹⁰⁰ Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma, 99. ¹⁰¹ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 287–8. ¹⁰² Tan, Muzhiki, 31, 36.

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the debate in the chamber on the land question was far less interesting than the ‘much more lively conversation’ that was taking place in the lobby at the same time, which involved peasant petitioners and members of the general public as well as deputies.¹⁰³ The peasant and worker deputies also made an impact in worker meetings around the city. One regular speaker was the worker Mikhail’chenko, who endlessly recycled his favourite anecdote about the grotesque luxury he had witnessed in the Winter Palace at the Tsar’s ceremonial reception of the Duma deputies.¹⁰⁴ But even within the debating chamber, peasant deputies were showing that they had grasped the rules of the political game. Like others, they might speak more to the stenographers than to their fellow deputies, concerned above all to make their point to the wider newspaper-reading public. If we believe the anecdotal evidence, they were not wrong to believe that they could reach even the popular audience in this way: as one journalist recalled hearing from a cab driver, ‘Everything is well said [in the Duma], we enjoy reading it all’.¹⁰⁵ In a further clue to the true addressees of Duma speeches, readers of the transcript could find the first examples of false self-deprecation. Ershov, a Kazan deputy who represented the worker constituency, started by stating that he did not possess ‘the eloquence that people sometimes use to secure everyone’s sympathies’. The Ukrainian peasant deputy Arkadii Grabovetskii prefaced his remarks by saying that ‘I don’t really speak Russian and ask for the forgiveness of the chamber’, only then to claim authority to interpret peasant sentiment regarding the Duma’s response to the opening address from the throne.¹⁰⁶ Ezerskii put down the excessive length of Duma speeches partly to inexperience: deputies had not yet learned the subtler arts of parliamentary persuasion, being concerned to set out their positions in setpiece speeches that had been written in advance. But this ostensibly cumbersome practice also suited their immediate objectives better than any other: this was the first (and, as far as they knew, quite possibly the only) opportunity for them to put forward their views in public, and in a space that was protected from censorship. There was more than a suspicion that the real business of parliamentary politics was being transferred from the main debating chamber to the committee rooms; the Trudovik proposal to make public the meetings of the agrarian committee was rejected on the ground that this would just create another venue for speechifying.¹⁰⁷ The most organized vehicle for the expression of peasant and working-class sentiment was the Trudovik group, which enjoyed significant political clout as it determined the balance of power: although the Kadets had a stronger presence in the First Duma than ever subsequently, they made up only a third of the chamber

¹⁰³ Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma, 33. ¹⁰⁴ Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 2: 70–2. ¹⁰⁵ Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 42–3, 56–7. ¹⁰⁶ GD SO 1/1/26, 71. ¹⁰⁷ Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma, 86, 100.

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Figure 5.5. Alad’in, Zhilkin, and Anikin at the time of the First Duma. Source: Russian National Library. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aladin_Zhilkin_Anikin.jpg

and relied on support from other quarters.¹⁰⁸ The Trudoviks were incoherent as a political entity, lacking the discipline and the esprit de corps of the Kadets. But the energies of their leaders were directed elsewhere: to the performative aspect of the Duma.¹⁰⁹ Here they were undoubtedly successful: their speeches drew considerable attention, even from those who loathed them. Stepan Anikin was a village teacher of peasant origin who made a habit of beating his fists on the lectern as he delivered speeches that hostile observers considered ‘demagogic’; even the sympathetic Bogoraz-Tan admitted that Anikin’s performances were uneven, and he sometimes lost his thread, but noted that many considered him the best Trudovik orator for his expressive style and ‘true knowledge of the life of the people’.¹¹⁰ The provincial journalist Zhilkin was less extravagant in manner, but won listeners over with his straightforwardness and sincerity; even the exacting Tyrkova found him full of integrity and no demagogue.¹¹¹

¹⁰⁸ For the Kadet leader’s account of the relationship between the two parties, see Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 363–8. ¹⁰⁹ This, more or less, is the conclusion of Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma. ¹¹⁰ Tan, Muzhiki, 63. ¹¹¹ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 380–2; Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 273.

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In a category of his own was Aleksei Alad’in, the most striking and divisive orator of the First Duma. Alad’in could claim to be of peasant stock, though more recently he had been in emigration for a decade. He gave his first Duma speech as early as its second sitting, on 29 April 1906, and struck sympathetic listeners for the directness and simplicity of his address.¹¹² Yet Alad’in was jarring, even odious, to many of his colleagues for his rambunctious style, which they found evocative more of a public meeting (miting) than of a parliamentary debate. There was a strong suspicion that the rough edges in his performance were carefully calculated in advance: ‘When the chairman of the Duma stops Alad’in for “unparliamentary expressions”, and that happens quite often, it is hard to avoid the impression that the “unparliamentary expression” is launched with the carefully calculated intention to be stopped and show resourcefulness.’¹¹³ His ostensible colleagues on the Left, the Social Democrats, detested Alad’in for what they saw as empty rhetoric that failed to conceal his basic willingness to swim with the Kadet tide.¹¹⁴ Zemstvo liberals such as Obolenskii loathed him for his ‘vulgarity’ and ‘insolence’. According to this view, Alad’in was a ‘typical chancer making a career of revolution’; although a talented orator, he grated on educated listeners for his ‘posing and empty rhetoric’. Tyrkova regarded him as an effective speaker for public rallies; he undeniably possessed electricity. He did not come across as a serious politician, being too much the actor and too concerned with creating an impression in the moment. But his impact on the ‘crowd’, and on his peasant colleagues in the Duma, was considerable.¹¹⁵ In an interview with the sympathetic listener Bogoraz-Tan, Alad’in stated his belief that there existed two fundamental types of orator: the lawyer and the tribune. The First Duma was dominated by the former, but Alad’in evidently took it as his mission to challenge the hegemony of the lawyers.¹¹⁶ For all Alad’in’s prowess, it was the Kadets who did most to set the rhetorical tone of the First Duma. Yet even the Kadets were a varied group. Their most prominent member was the professorial Muromtsev, who stood at the head of the whole institution, maintained a ‘tone of Olympian calm’, and demonstrated an admirable capacity for economical expression. He was a quintessential expression of the academic and legal professions that were so prominent in the Kadet party. Another prominent element was the old guard from the liberal zemstvo movement that for decades had been preparing the ground for the Duma. Though by now advanced in age, Ivan Petrunkevich remained an assured, energetic, and ¹¹² O. Volyntsev, Rech’ A. F. Alad’ina v pervom russkom parlamente (St Petersburg, 1906). ¹¹³ Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 71. ¹¹⁴ M. Balabanov and F. Dan, Rabochie deputaty v pervoi gosudarstvennoi dume (St Petersburg, 1907), 66–7; Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 2: 72. ¹¹⁵ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 380–2; Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 268–9. For another negative assessment, which acknowledges the force of Alad’in’s speech but notes its lack of lasting effect, see Tsitron, 72 dnia, 117. ¹¹⁶ Tan, Muzhiki, 53.

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straightforward speaker. Even a sympathetic observer found him ‘a little oldfashioned’ in his adherence to classical models of eloquence: he constructed his arguments in detailed and elegant fashion, avoiding the ‘shrill pathos’ heard from other speakers and never showing discourtesy to his opponents.¹¹⁷ Fedor Rodichev was ten years younger but a product of a similar zemstvo milieu. In temperament, however, he was the archetypal fiery orator who was in his element when plunging into an impromptu speech; when the mood took him he was capable of a ‘whole cascade of powerful phrases, creating the impression of hammer blows’. At times, however, his nervous energy was taken to excess, and it was ‘exhausting’ to have to hear him speak too often; he also lacked the practicality and persistence to turn words into political results.¹¹⁸ Bogoraz-Tan, presenting the popular viewpoint, found him also to be old-fashioned: Rodichev’s fulminations were directed at the educated and like-minded audience, and he needed to do more to reach out to peasants.¹¹⁹ Temperamentally different again was the formidable Nabokov, who combined Russian aristocratic poise with the robustness of an English parliamentarian: to the ears of one observer, he was a ‘model of parliamentary eloquence’ for his combination of elegant form and steely content.¹²⁰ Although a constitutionalist to his core, he made remarkably little effort to conceal his wealth and pedigree: each time he arrived in the Duma, he looked as if he had just come from the tailor, and for the Trudoviks his ties became a symbol of Kadet privilege and hauteur.¹²¹ Other notable speakers in the liberal camp stood out depite not conforming to conventions of oratorical bravura. D. I. Shakhovskoi’s weak voice was compensated by the absorbing content of his speeches.¹²² In the view of Vinaver, Kokoshkin, along with Petrunkevich, was the most significant contributor to the debates of the First Duma. Although Kokoshkin’s manner was unshowy, he was a compelling orator who almost always improvised at the podium.¹²³ Foppishly turned out, he sported a Wilhelmine moustache. Although he suffered from a speech defect and had difficulty pronouncing almost all the consonants, he won listeners over by logical argument and by his evident sincerity and conviction.¹²⁴ The legal scholar Lev Petrazhitskii had always had great renown as a lecturer

¹¹⁷ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 359–60. For an even more qualified assessment, see Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 279. ¹¹⁸ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 362; Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 276–7. ¹¹⁹ Tan, Muzhiki, 15. ¹²⁰ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 354; similar is Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 70. ¹²¹ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 271. ¹²² Mogilianskii, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 68–70. ¹²³ Vinaver, Nedavnee, 137, 144, 146. ¹²⁴ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 367. Note that Vinaver apparently could not stand Nabokov: ibid., 362–3.

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despite not being the most fluent speaker, and he carried this success with him into the Duma. For Tyrkova, his Polish accent connoted sophistication.¹²⁵

Rhetoric Rebooted: The Second Duma For an audience new to parliamentary life, how deputies spoke was at times every bit as fascinating as what they said. This did not do much for their reputation in conservative circles, which regarded the Duma as a showcase for Trudovik stuttering and Kadet grandstanding. By the time the First Duma was closed, the stereotype of the Russian parliament as a self-indulgent and ineffectual talking-shop was well established in the right-wing press. On 24 May 1906, the conservative diarist A. A. Kireev paid a visit to the Duma and was predictably unimpressed, putting the word ‘orators’ in contemptuous inverted commas. Later the same day he attended a meeting of the Noble Assembly, and even there he found proceedings lamentably lacking in ‘discipline’; only with difficulty did the chairman Bobrinskii restore order.¹²⁶ As the vastly more sympathetic Obolenskii later noted, more in sorrow than in reproach, the First Duma had left as its legacy ‘tempestuous debates, fine speeches and . . . not a single trace in Russian legislation’. The verdict of the rightists—that the Russian parliament was a mere ‘assembly of idle chatterers’—had a regrettable plausibility, even if the fault lay with the government more than with the parliamentarians.¹²⁷ Early in 1907, as the election campaign for the Second Duma got under way, Novoe vremia ran a series of satirical feuilletons under the pen-name Count Alexis Zhasminov. Its author presented biting accounts of the electoral meetings of the Social Democrats, the Kadets and even the Octobrists. All this talk was no more than a ‘fairground show of mediocre liberal or ignorant and insolent Red oratory’.¹²⁸ Even Ezerskii, strongly sympathetic to the Duma and optimistic about its capacity for further development into an effective lawmaking body, found that the first Russian parliament had been characterized by ‘excessive lyricism and pathos’; interpellations designed to give vent to criticism of the government came at the expense of gainful legislative activity.¹²⁹ Further confirmation of the impotence of fine Kadet oratory came at the (public) trial of the signatories of the Vyborg Manifesto, which had called for a campaign of civil disobedience in response to the closing of the First Duma: the eloquence of the defendants did not prevent a guilty verdict.¹³⁰ Yet it was not too difficult to find a different interpretation. A socialist booklet for the working man claimed that, although its formal powers were limited, the ¹²⁵ ¹²⁶ ¹²⁸ ¹²⁹ ¹³⁰

Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh’, 155; Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 284. Kireev, Dnevnik, 146. ¹²⁷ Obolenskii, Moia zhizn’, moi sovremenniki, 342. Graf Aleksis Zhasminov, ‘Moia sobstvennaia Duma’, Novoe vremia, 19 January 1907, 4. Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma, 96, 99. Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 334.

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Duma had done more for the working population and the poor in its two months of activity than the English parliament had managed in the preceding ten years. The Duma had ‘talked’, but not ‘chattered’. A properly considered speech was a more effective ‘action’ than a bomb that hit its target. The dissemination of Duma speeches had done more to consolidate a set of ‘popular hopes, popular complaints, popular protests’ than any previous political phenomenon.¹³¹ This was not a lone opinion. The constant stream of peasant petitions to the Duma suggested that proceedings in the Tauride Palace were meaningful to a large portion of the population, even if they were often construed in ways that parliamentarians would have considered eccentric or myopic.¹³² The socialist parties had also become convinced of the value of the Duma as a political platform: they abandoned their boycott and made a more concerted effort to counter the Kadets in the election campaign, even scouring the stenographic transcripts of the First Duma for material they might use against their liberal opponents. Krylenko continued to taunt Rodichev, while his colleagues were somewhat better prepared for their clashes with the imposing Miliukov than they had been a few months earlier. But the goal of the Social Democrat campaign was not only to undermine the Kadets—some senior figures worried that the party’s ‘collegium of orators’ had been ‘Kadetified’ as a result of its close-quarters engagement with the liberals in the election campaign to the First Duma—but also to address the working-class audience in a voice it would understand. The shrill, sarcastic oratory of Grigorii Aleksinskii (later to be elected to the Second Duma as a representative of St Petersburg) was irksome in small gatherings of comrades, but it went down a storm at factory meetings. In the capital, the Social Democrats even recruited workers as agitators to good effect.¹³³ The electoral impact of the Social Democrats was still limited by their weak presence in rural Russia and the underrepresentation of the working-class electorate. They also had serious competition on the Left from the Socialist Revolutionaries, who did surprisingly well even in the Social Democrats’ home territory of large factories in St Petersburg. What was beyond doubt was that the Kadets had lost a great deal of their political momentum. In the middle-class liberal stronghold of Moscow, the elections to the Second Duma took place without the same excitement as the first campaign the previous year. In Kizevetter’s words, ‘there was no true electoral struggle’, as the Kadets found themselves debating at meetings with parties who were not putting candidates forward for the Duma.¹³⁴ The party continued to make great efforts to present a viable message: Kizevetter co-authored a handbook on electoral campaigning with ¹³¹ Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Znachenie Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Tronnaia Rech’. Adres. Otvet Soveta Ministrov. Itogi (St Petersburg, 1906), 6–7. ¹³² Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 194, 199. ¹³³ Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 2: 98, 121, 135–7, 140–1, 143. ¹³⁴ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 305.

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Maklakov, which set out the necessary rejoinders to a long list of possible criticisms of the liberal project from both left and right.¹³⁵ Yet, especially beyond the cities, the Kadets had to confront the uncomfortable truth that they had little chance of establishing common ground with the peasant and working-class voter. Their weak base in rural Russia was more obviously a liability now that the Left had entered the fray. When the Kadets tried to use village school teachers to communicate their programme to the peasants, they found this professional group was more inclined to the socialists, while the other plausible conduit, the clergy, would in due course take an important role as agitators for the Right.¹³⁶ Even where speakers were available for service in the provinces, they were rarely given adequate opportunities to perform. The restrictions on campaigning were far more severe than before the first Duma election, especially for the Kadets, who in the wake of the Vyborg Manifesto were branded a ‘revolutionary’ party by some provincial governors. Meetings and lectures under party auspices were out of the question, and some events were forbidden merely on suspicion that the speaker was too close to the ‘progressive’ parties.¹³⁷ Open political meetings were few, and voters were unlikely to witness the cut and thrust of political debate; conversely, the Kadets had little incentive to send their best people to attend meetings that might be cancelled at short notice.¹³⁸ Police agents had been present at electoral meetings for the previous round of Duma elections, but they had mostly been quite restrained at events in Moscow. Now they frequently interrupted speakers or even closed meetings in mid-debate. The policemen were for the most part poorly educated: when unsure of whether to intervene they erred on the repressive side, as they were nervous of letting pass anything sensitive.¹³⁹ When it came to the election day, a considerable police presence ensured that no campaigning (agitatsiia) took place in or near the polling stations.¹⁴⁰ The opening of the Second Duma in February 1907 immediately revealed a new atmosphere. This time there were more worker and peasant deputies; some of them even wore red carnations, advertising their adherence to socialism. In total, 216 deputies, or 42 per cent of the membership, were from the lower classes; the Second Duma was the only one of the four that would have the full spectrum of political parties.¹⁴¹ The mood was more sober and concentrated than in 1906. As a reminder of the turbulent end of the First Duma, several outstanding Kadet figures sat in the gallery as onlookers rather than participants: Petrunkevich, Vinaver, Miliukov, and others had been excluded from the Duma for signing the Vyborg ¹³⁵ Konfidentsial’noe rukovodstvo oratorov partii ‘narodnoi svobody’ (St Petersburg, 1907). ¹³⁶ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 229–30. ¹³⁷ Aleksei Smirnov, Kak proshli vybory vo 2 Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu (St Petersburg, 1907), 37–8. ¹³⁸ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 254. ¹³⁹ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 306; Patrikeeva, Rossiiskaia obshchestvennost’, 178–9. ¹⁴⁰ ‘Vybory v Moskve’, RV, 30 January 1907, 2. ¹⁴¹ B. Iu. Ivanov, A. A. Komzolova and I. S. Riakhovskaia (eds), Gosudarstvennaia duma Rossiiskoi imperii: 1906–1917: Entsiklopediia (Moscow, 2008), 109.

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Manifesto.¹⁴² When the Kadet chairman of the Second Duma, Fedor Golovin, requested permission to admit former members of the Duma to the non-public areas of the Tauride Palace, he was flatly refused by Stolypin. This was only one of several measures the government took to restrict access to the parliamentarians: a new metal barrier was put up at the front of the public gallery, and the doors that led from the guest boxes to the debating chamber had been sealed.¹⁴³ The collapse of the ceiling of the Tauride Palace in early March did not do much to dispel a mood of antagonism and foreboding. But the most salient changes concerned the balance of forces within the Duma. The Kadets were now a fifth rather than a third of the Duma membership, and it was not only the size but also the composition of their parliamentary party that had changed. The old guard of the liberal zemtsy and lawyers had been depleted by the prosecutions following the Vyborg Manifesto; in the First Duma, almost a quarter of the deputies had held elected positions in zemstvo or municipal institutions, but now that number was down to a mere forty-six.¹⁴⁴ Now a third of the Kadet deputies were non-Russian, and almost a fifth were peasants.¹⁴⁵ Among the new entrants was the former Marxist and intellectual luminary Petr Struve, whose remarkable erudition was not matched by his oratorical gifts. He preferred to read from a text, and without it ‘gave the impression of helplessness, which he energetically reinforced with sharp modulations of his voice and frenetic and bewildered gestures with both hands, as if we was seeking help’.¹⁴⁶ On one mortifying occasion, he brought with him a sheaf of papers to refer to at the Duma podium, but the documents went flying and he haplessly scrabbled to pick them up and rearrange them.¹⁴⁷ As the epitome of the other-worldly professor, Struve was a strange guest in the Duma. Vastly more capable, and the outstanding Kadet figure in the Second Duma, was Vasilii Maklakov. Bernard Pares found him even more eloquent than Rodichev, another lawyer who had come to prominence through his role at political trials.¹⁴⁸ Temperamentally and rhetorically the two men were very different. Maklakov was physically imposing and serenely self-confident. In demeanour and manner of speaking, he was a strikingly modern parliamentarian. Although an expert debater, he was direct and businesslike, never dwelling on the formal and ceremonial aspects of the legislative endeavour, and having little patience with unfocused interpellations that merely provided a pretext for speechifying.¹⁴⁹ He did not repeat Nabokov’s mistakes and dressed casually by ¹⁴² ‘Gosudarstvennaia Duma’, RV, 21 February 1907, 2–3. ¹⁴³ K. A. Solov’ev, Zakonodatel’naia i ispolnitel’naia vlast’ v Rossii: Mekhanizmy vzaimodeistviia (1906–1914) (Moscow, 2011), 387. ¹⁴⁴ Demin, Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossii, 38. ¹⁴⁵ Ger’e, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 3. ¹⁴⁶ Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh’, 252. ¹⁴⁷ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 355. ¹⁴⁸ Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 134. ¹⁴⁹ As noted in Iu. A. Shestakov, ‘Deiatel’nost’ V. A. Maklakova vo II-III Gosudarstvennykh Dumakh’, candidate’s dissertation (Rostov State Pedagogical University, 2000), 102.

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the standards of the time. He memorized his speeches so effectively that he appeared to be improvising at the podium: he spoke in a ‘simple, natural, conversational manner’. He was impeccably clear, always finding the right balance between the general and the particular. His only weakness, in the view of Tyrkova, was that he was too much the lawyer: too able to present arguments for any side, insufficiently engagé, as if ‘in the depths of his soul he remained a spectator, not a warrior’.¹⁵⁰ Maklakov, then, was a formidable operator, but no firebrand. He stood out all the more in a chamber that had become less structured and more outspoken since the First Duma. The Trudoviks had almost as many deputies as the Kadets, but without Alad’in were ‘a flock without a shepherd’. More importantly, they and the Kadets had more company on the opposition benches: twenty-seven newly arrived socialist deputies made the centre-left a fragmented and unruly entity. The Right, however, was no better. The centrist, moderate conservative Octobrists always risked appearing colourless, and they were now sharply offset by interventions from the far Right, with the near-hysterical Bessarabian deputy Vladimir Purishkevich usually to the fore.¹⁵¹ Even the clergymen deputies were not a stable political element in the chamber: only four of the thirteen members of the clerical estate were on the Right.¹⁵² No wonder that Golovin, newly elected as chairman of the Duma, approached his task with deep trepidation, feeling distaste for the excesses of deputies on both Right and Left. He was constantly on edge as he assessed how vigilant he should be in policing outspoken oppositional oratory, knowing only too well that he would have to account for himself later to the Emperor and Stolypin. In his memoirs, Golovin claimed always to have been an unconfident public speaker. Although he was well versed in the ways of public assemblies after a long zemstvo career, it may be worth taking him at his word: he never possessed the studied authority of Muromtsev, and contemporaries on both Right and Left were unimpressed.¹⁵³ Events soon showed that Golovin was right to be apprehensive. The new head of the government, Petr Stolypin, quickly showed that he was far more willing than his predecessor Goremykin to engage with the Duma—and, if necessary, to do battle with it. By near-universal acknowledgement, his declaration on behalf of the government was highly impressive. The embodiment of imposing aristocratic

¹⁵⁰ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 353–5. Maklakov’s apparently effortless eloquence, widely attested by contemporaries, was in fact hard won: he wrote out and rehearsed his speeches meticulously, even speaking them into a Dictaphone. See Solov’ev, Zakonodatel’naia i ispolnitel’naia vlast’, 391–2. ¹⁵¹ Ger’e, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 3, 7; Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 136–9. ¹⁵² Sergei Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov’ nakanune peremen (konets 1890-kh—1918 gg.) (Moscow, 2002), 355. ¹⁵³ Gessen found him unimposing in manner and ignorant of Duma procedure (‘V dvukh vekakh’, 241). Kireev called Golovin a ‘cretin’ for his mishandling of one episode (Dnevnik, 195). For a summary of contemporary views, see Solov’ev, Zakonodatel’naia i ispolnitel’naia vlast’, 158–9.

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masculinity, he was also a clear and compelling speaker. As Tyrkova observed, ‘The Duma was immediately put on its guard. For the first time a minister had mounted the podium who was a match for the Duma orators in his ability to express his thoughts. Stolypin was a born orator.’¹⁵⁴ But the opposition was not stunned into silence. Iraklii Tsereteli, the most compelling Menshevik orator, launched into a counter-attack, other leftists joined in, and were in turn vigorously heckled from the right. Stolypin once again departed from governmental precedent and ended the sitting with a stirring rejoinder that included one of the most widely quoted phrases of the Duma era: ‘You won’t scare us!’ (‘Ne zapugaete!’).¹⁵⁵ The debate had already served notice of the bitter polarization of the Second Duma. In the words of a professorial Kadet observer, the Left had let rip with ‘biting accusatory speeches’, while the Right had responded with ‘an endless fountain of true Russian eloquence’. The very same right-wingers who had complained of the fruitless ‘chatter’ of the First Duma were now serving as a ‘model of empty and never-ending verbal obstruction’.¹⁵⁶ The problem, from the liberal perspective, was that the Right had no political capital invested in the parliamentary system. Some of its representatives, in fact, openly wanted the Duma to fail—and if they could hasten that outcome by provoking their opponents and slowing down proceedings, then so much the better. Given the intransigent mood in the chamber, matters of procedure loomed larger than ever, and there was still unfinished business from the First Duma. The standing rules had not been debated in their entirety, still less approved by the Senate. Predictably, the most controversial issue was the question of how to speed up the conclusion of a debate while also providing acceptable protection for the minority. As early as the second sitting, Golovin put to the vote (too lightly, in the view of Novoe vremia columnist and constitutional commentator Pilenko) a proposal to restore the practice of the First Duma, according to which the signatures of fifty deputies were sufficient to block the closing of debate. A separate question, debated at length somewhat later, was how many signatures should be required to block measures to close the list of speakers: proposals ranged from 50 to 150, but the eventual decision was 100.¹⁵⁷ A few days later, when debate moved on to the emotive subject of the field courts set up to dispense summary justice in response to the disturbances of 1905–7, it became clear that deputies would fully exploit any latitude they were granted: not only were they failing to maintain party discipline, but they also tended to repeat at great length what had already been said. Only a few speeches ¹⁵⁴ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 346. ¹⁵⁵ For largely congruent accounts of this sitting, see Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1: 216–17; ‘Vospominaniia F. A. Golovina o II Gosudarstvennoi Dume’, IA, no. 4 (1959): 153–4; Evlogii, Put’ moei zhizni, 162–4. ¹⁵⁶ A. Kizevetter, ‘Dumskii turnir 6-go marta’, RV, 9 March 1907, 2. ¹⁵⁷ A. Pilenko, Russkie parlamentskie pretsedenty (St Petersburg, 1908), 136–7, 144.

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stood out from the general run. Dolgopolov, an SR from Nizhnii Novgorod, had no special talent as an orator, but exuded authenticity due to his long years of prison and exile: ‘Pale with nervous excitement, he declared with deep pain that we cannot live like this any longer.’ The Latvian deputy Treiman also made an impression for his impassioned account of the Baltic provinces, where the authorities were taking charge ‘as in an occupied country’ and people were being shot ‘like rabbits’.¹⁵⁸ But it was the land question that was responsible for the longest bouts of oratory in the Second Duma. When it came up for debate on 19 March, there was little sign of party discipline: no fewer than 106 deputies signed up to speak. Sviatopolk-Mirskii from Bessarabia opened proceedings with an elaborate hymn of praise to the smallholder: in his view, the root of the trouble lay in the peasant commune, which left no space for the peasant proprietor. Karavaev for the Trudoviks predictably concentrated on the plight of the peasants, while Tsereteli engaged in a lengthy historical excursus. The peasant deputies were observed engaging in animated and sometimes indignant discussion in the Catherine Hall during the two-hour interval. They also gave voice to their indignation in speeches in the chamber. Semen Nechitailo, a deputy from Kiev province, gave an abrasive speech asserting the right of the peasant to land without recompense and branding those who rejected this claim as ‘people nourished on blood, who have sucked up peasant brains’. In Golovin’s view, Nechitailo had merely lived down to his name (which to a Russian ear sounded like ‘Non-reader’), and the peasant speakers were taking the floor merely to get their names in the papers. But this still represented a shocking irruption of the demotic, and it was small wonder that the generally confident and self-possessed government representative, Prince B. A. Vasil’chikov, was overwhelmed by the occasion.¹⁵⁹ A week later, the SR deputy Kirnosov began his speech with a barely comprehensible pair of popular sayings and then took aim at the oppressors: the gentry that in former times had traded peasants for dogs or gambled them away at cards. This intervention made the chairman despair: ‘There was something overpoweringly crude, hopeless and ignorant in the speeches of orators like this.’¹⁶⁰ (See Figures 5.6 and 5.7.) Now more experienced in the ways of parliamentary politics, and especially keen to be seen to have their say on the land question, peasant deputies were more active in the Second Duma than in the First.¹⁶¹ That did not necessarily make them more memorable. For Bernand Pares, the peasant members were, apart from

¹⁵⁸ ‘Zasedanie 13-go marta’, RV, 14 March 1907, 3. ¹⁵⁹ ‘Zasedanie 19-go marta’, RV, 20 March 1907, 3; ‘Vospominaniia F. A. Golovina’, IA, no. 5 (1959): 129–30. For the text of the Nechitailo speech, see GD SO 2/1/1/779–80. ¹⁶⁰ ‘Vospominaniia F. A. Golovina’, IA, no. 5 (1959): 138; Kirnosov speech, GD SO 2/1/1/1143–4. ¹⁶¹ As a journalist of SR persuasion, An-sky was struck by the new tone the peasants brought to debate: Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 136–7; see also Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 308.

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Figures 5.6 and 5.7. Two rhetorical extremes in the Second Duma: contemporary photographs of the hapless chairman Golovin and the uncompromising peasant deputy Nechitailo. Source: Figure 5.6, 3-i sozyv Gosudarstvennoi dumy: portrety, biografii, avtografy (St Petersburg, 1910). Courtesy of Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland. Figure 5.7, National Library of Russia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Semen_Vas._Nechitaylo.jpeg

the socialists, ‘less interesting and less distinguished than in the First [Duma]’.¹⁶² They also had new competition on the left from the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries. Among the most prominent orators was the Bolshevik Grigorii Aleksinskii, who spoke at such length that some considered him no more than a talented obstructionist.¹⁶³ Yet even Golovin found him to be an arresting communicator, however unpalatable his politics: ‘The whole Duma listened up when this small, hunched and pale man, with his unpleasant, shrill voice, making sudden movements with his long arms, started his speech with his usual words: “citizen deputies”!’¹⁶⁴ The outstanding socialist figure was Tsereteli, who brought youth and rhetorical panache of a new kind to the chamber. Only just meeting the age requirement for election to the Duma (he was a mere twenty-five years old in the spring of 1907), his vigorous rebuttal of Stolypin’s maiden speech made his name. In combination with a major speech he gave on the agrarian issue a week before the dissolution of the Second Duma, his political performance in 1907 established a ¹⁶² Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 139. ¹⁶³ Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh’, 243. ¹⁶⁴ ‘Vospominaniia F. A. Golovina’, IA, no. 4 (1959): 157.

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reputation that would later help to make him one of the outstanding figures in the revolutionary movement of 1917.¹⁶⁵ Tsereteli was a striking figure not just for his youth and socialist rhetoric but also for his Caucasian background. As well as providing the first national platform for the Russian Empire’s socialists, the Second Duma laid bare the multi-ethnic character of the new quasi-constitutional polity. Although Tsereteli spoke stylistically elegant Russian, he was one of a handful of leftist orators who aroused the special ire of the Right for their Caucasian accents. By far the worst offender was the Armenian A. G. Zurabov, who was responsible for the great crisis of the tempestuous Second Duma. In April 1907, Zurabov delivered a speech that loyalist members of the Duma considered had insulted the army. The fact that the insult was delivered in a heavy Armenian accent was more than the Right could bear, and Golovin even worried that the speaker would be beaten up on the spot. Zurabov received a formal censure from the chairman, he was not allowed to continue the speech, and his words were excised from the published record. The decision to censor drew a protest headed by Tsereteli and signed by thirty-one deputies: ‘The attitude taken by the President of the State Duma in the last few sittings, and especially in the past two days, has convinced us that he is systematically abusing his right to intervene in debates and silence speakers.’ But Golovin had come under severe pressure from Stolypin, and had every reason to believe that this incident could provoke the closure of the Duma.¹⁶⁶ The threats to parliamentary propriety from the Right were no less severe. Traditional conservatives were drowned out by extreme nationalist tribunes, whose two main goals—to grab headlines and to undermine the Duma as an institution—were fully compatible. Nikolai Markov (known as Markov II), leading light of the Union of the Russian People (the most potent right-wing organization of the day), was recognized even by his opponents as having some flair, but at the same time was ‘remarkably crude’, less an orator than a ‘town-square phrasemonger’ (ploshchadnyi krasnobai).¹⁶⁷ His comrade Vladimir Purishkevich (see Figure 5.8) spoke at such a speed that the stenographers struggled to keep up with him, and he struck some observers as unhinged.¹⁶⁸ He certainly managed to draw

¹⁶⁵ W. H. Roobol, Tsereteli—A Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography (The Hague, 1976), 45, 49–50, 53–4, 65; also Alfred Levin, The Second Duma: A Study of the SocialDemocratic Party and the Russian Constitutional Experiment (New Haven, 1940), 117, 190–2. ¹⁶⁶ GD SO 2/1/1/2285–7. For the chairman’s account, see ‘Zapiski F. A. Golovina’, KA, 19 (1926): 140–5. For a less favourable government account, which presents Golovin as floundering in his response in the chamber, see A. A. Polivanov, Iz dnevnikov i vospominanii po dolzhnosti voennogo ministra i ego pomoshchnika, 1907–1916 gg. (Moscow, 1924), 24–5. On the outraged response in government circles to Zurabov’s speech, which almost brought the closure of the Duma there and then, as well as the indignation on the Left at the chairman’s actions, see Levin, The Second Duma, 294–305, and Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2001), 191–3. ¹⁶⁷ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 365. ¹⁶⁸ ‘Vospominaniia F. A. Golovina’, IA, no. 5 (1959): 136; Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh’, 243.

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Figure 5.8. Vladimir Purishkevich. Photograph from a contemporary album. Source: 3-i sozyv Gosudarstvennoi dumy: portrety, biografii, avtografy (St Petersburg, 1910). Courtesy of Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

attention to himself. At the end of March, he got himself expelled from the chamber for the day for proposing a standing ovation in memory of recently killed policemen.¹⁶⁹ In mid-April he justified the use of torture in prisons in Riga, arguing that it was legitimate police vengeance for political assassinations in the Baltic province.¹⁷⁰ On 4 May, he and his colleagues on the right took fierce objection to the notion that the ‘autocratic system’ might be weakening. They ‘jumped from their seats, banged their fists on the desks, and the hall was filled with an unimaginable noise that had not previously been heard in the Duma. The chairman’s bell could not be heard. All deputies were on their feet.’¹⁷¹ But the right-hand side of the chamber was populated not only by provocateurs. An altogether cooler, even sardonic representative of the Right was Vasilii Shul’gin: careful in his gestures, clear and measured in his speech, courteous in his manner, with a soft but venomous delivery, who expressed the most illiberal sentiments with a little smile on his marmoreal face.¹⁷² Shul’gin’s contribution to the debate on the land question combined an unflinching defence of private property—though not necessarily for Jewish capitalists—with an excursus on the

¹⁶⁹ ¹⁷⁰ ¹⁷¹ ¹⁷²

‘Zasedanie 29-go marta’, RV, 30 March 1907, 3. ‘Zasedanie 13-go aprelia’, RV, 14 April 1907, 3. ‘Zasedanie 4-go maia’, RV, 5 May 1907, 3. Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh’, 250; Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 365.

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achievements of the Russian landowning nobility. The latter took a literary turn: Shul’gin imagined Aleksandr Pushkin rising from the dead with a defiant message to the Social Democrats: ‘you know, Tsereteli, we were Russian noblemen and were never Georgian Social Democrats or Armenian Dashnakites.’¹⁷³ Shul’gin was no less capable than Purishkevich of enraging the Left and the liberals. It was he who put to the socialists the most provocative question of the Second Duma: did they, apologists for revolutionary terror, perhaps have a bomb in their pocket?¹⁷⁴ Another rhetorical contribution on the right came from the clerical contingent. The Second Duma saw the entry into political life of the most politically adept churchman of the era, Archbishop Evlogii. Although his main contributions to parliamentary life would come in the Third Duma and he was ill at ease in the combative parliamentary arena of early 1907, Evlogii was never out of his depth. He responded artfully to an invitation from the opposition to condemn the government’s use of the death penalty and threw a counter-punch by challenging leftist deputies over their laughter at the news of an assassination.¹⁷⁵ For all its memorable moments, the Second Duma made an unpleasant impression on many contemporaries of various political persuasions. One problem was that the quantity and intensity of oratory did not mean that any meaningful debate was occurring. There was a great deal more speaking than listening. Despite the best efforts of Purishkevich and his colleagues, many speeches were unengaging, long-winded, or barely audible, and were delivered to a suitably modest audience in the chamber—facts that were often remarked on in the press.¹⁷⁶ The intractable agrarian question seemed to bring the nadir of the Second Duma. The eagerness with which deputies signed up to speak contrasted with the dwindling audience they faced in the chamber. Two sessions in early May ended early due to lack of a quorum, and the atmosphere at other times was, in the words of one early historian of the Second Duma, ‘most unparliamentary’: The duma appeared to have lost all interest in the proceedings. The speakers droned monotonously on, but the assembly hall was, for the most part, empty, and those present talked, read, wrote letters, or napped while the corridors were filled with a milling crowd of deputies conversing or debating. Often the orators were scarcely audible above the din of the conversation. Yet any attempt to limit the time at the disposal of the speakers, or to end debates entirely, met with the firm opposition of the combined right and left; the one for provocative reasons,

¹⁷³ GD SO 2/1/1/1133–43. ¹⁷⁴ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 366. ¹⁷⁵ Evlogii, Put’ moei zhizni, 164–5; ‘Vospominaniia F. A. Golovina’, IA, no. 5 (1959): 146. ¹⁷⁶ For example ‘Zasedanie 23-go marta’, RV, 24 March 1907, 3; ‘Zasedanie 27-go marta’, RV, 28 March, 3; ‘Zasedenie 3-go maia’, RV, 4 May 1907, 3.

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to prove the incapacity of the duma for productive work, the other with propagandist aims in mind.¹⁷⁷

Liberal contemporaries were similarly dismayed. Gessen found that the deputies erased their individuality, dissolved, turning into a crowd, and its main weapon was not words but shouts and sometimes even roars. A few chatterboxes even managed to put words to the same ends—Aleksinskii on the left, Purishkevich on the right competed for speed, strewing words that piled up into a formless, senseless heap.

Only in the commmittees did parliamentarians become more restrained in their oratory, as their words were not being transmitted to the country by stenography.¹⁷⁸ For Kizevetter, the Second Duma made a chaotic and unstable impression. Both Left and Right became more extreme and intransigent. Although he retained a belief in the value of parliamentary life, he concluded that active politics was not for him and declined to put himself forward as a candidate for the Third Duma.¹⁷⁹

Stolypin’s Parliament: The Third Duma The mood of the Third Duma was perceptibly different from that of its predecessors. It did not help that it opened on a grey day in November rather than in early spring. The streets close to the Tauride Palace were cordoned off. The press gallery left journalists feeling cut off from the deputies: they could see the Catherine Hall through a window, but they had no access to the lobby, and audibility was poor. They could observe deputies in animated discussion in small groups, but they had no idea what was being said. Most striking of all was the new geography of the chamber: everyone had been shunted leftwards, with the Kadets in the places formerly occupied by the socialists.¹⁸⁰ The political landscape had been transformed by Stolypin’s new electoral law of 3 June 1907, which had reduced the weight of the urban electorate and the national minorities, made it harder for peasants to vote, and significantly overrepresented the landowner curia. This manipulation had been accompanied by severe restrictions on campaigning, harassment of grass-roots party organizations, and sheer electoral abuses. Given the near-impossibility of functioning as a normal political party, the Kadets effectively abandoned their ambitions to secure the popular vote and redirected their efforts at a variety of cultural and ¹⁷⁷ Levin, The Second Duma, 185–6. ¹⁷⁸ Gessen, ‘V dvukh vekakh’, 243, 250. ¹⁷⁹ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 312, 320. ¹⁸⁰ ‘Zasedanie 1-go noiabria’, RV, 2 November 1907, 3.

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educational projects, trying to use proto-political ‘substitute organizations’ such as professional associations to keep their cause alive.¹⁸¹ Liberals and socialists railed against Stolypin’s ‘coup’, while their counterparts on the right rejoiced. Even the intransigent conservative Kireev, who continued to deplore the constitutional ‘disease’, recognized that this Duma was ‘much more decent’ in its conduct than its predecessors; the new chairman, Khomiakov, did not have the most imposing presence, but kept the leftists on a tighter leash.¹⁸² Journalists evidently found less to engage them, and the dullness of Duma proceedings became a trope of parliamentary reporting.¹⁸³ But the Duma, even in its more muted third incarnation, remained an interesting institution, and rather less ineffectual than posterity might lead us to believe. Although the new electoral law was profoundly inequitable, the Duma did now contain all significant political groups, from far left to far right, and made visible the diversity of the empire. For all its flaws, it did more to raise the concerns of ordinary people in public than any other body. It was also starting to feel permanent: perhaps more remarkable than Stolypin’s gerrymandering of June 1907 was the fact that the Prime Minister did not shut down the parliament entirely—and nor would his successor do so at another moment of acute conflict between legislators and government in early 1914.¹⁸⁴ Although the regime-friendly deputies could congratulate themselves on their domination of the chamber, they were also entering unknown territory. One of the curiosities of the First Duma had been that there had been no one to ‘fight for the old order’; the Union of 17 October had ‘dissolved in the Duma like snow in water’, and the deputies on the right were weakly aligned, often mediocre, and very quiet.¹⁸⁵ On the conservative wing of the chamber only Count Geiden had made a real impression. In the Second Duma, left-wing oratory was unleashed with full force; and, although the Right now had its own ferocious orators, the sensible conservatives on whom Stolypin was counting had still not found their voice. As of the opening of the Third Duma, the Right was still weakly structured, and its spokesmen had not quite worked out how to talk in the parliamentary setting. They also had to reckon with opponents on the left who, although now small in number, were determined, cohesive and experienced in the ways of stenographic debate. Thus, despite the preponderance of landowners, the Third Duma was far from staid and conservative in rhetorical terms. Deputies continued to provoke each other, as well as the government. As early as the third sitting, on 8 November, S. I. Kelepovskii (Kherson) and A. A. Bobrinskii (Kiev) used the election of the ¹⁸¹ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, chaps 4–5. ¹⁸² Kireev, Dnevnik, 227, 229. ¹⁸³ For examples at either end of the term of the Third Duma, see ‘Gosudarstvennaia Duma’, Rech’, 9 January 1908, 2; ‘Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Zasedanie 10-go ianvaria’, RV, 11 January 1912, 3. ¹⁸⁴ Hagen, Die Entfaltung politischer Öffentlichkeit, 318, 352, 358. ¹⁸⁵ Ezerskii, Gosudarstvennaia duma, 134.

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presidium to taunt the opposition. As proceedings were drawing to a close, Kelepovskii drew a storm of protests by stating that the Kadets were sitting on the benches formerly occupied by the ‘tsaricides’. According to the liberal press, Chairman Khomiakov could have done much more to keep him in check.¹⁸⁶ A few days later the composition of an Address to the Throne predictably caused more conflict between Left and Right; Khomiakov was now perhaps a little firmer with the right-wingers over their incessant heckling of speakers, though he also regularly reminded the opposition speakers to stick to the point.¹⁸⁷ Thereafter the Right continued to provoke the Left by challenging it to condemn terror.¹⁸⁸ On explosive terrain such as this, the orators of the Right were given more leeway than those of the Left.¹⁸⁹ It was to an already fractious chamber that Stolypin presented his government’s programme on 16 November. As he had shown in the more intimidating Second Duma, Stolypin was one of the few ministers prepared to expose himself to the ordeal of speaking before the Duma and took the trouble to deliver carefully crafted speeches, even if they were written for him.¹⁹⁰ Yet, as observed by the Russkie vedomosti correspondent, even this imposing speaker showed signs of nerves as he addressed a packed hall. Soon he got his voice under control and was rewarded with thunderous applause from the Centre and Right. He met a more sceptical response from Maklakov, who pointed out the government’s evident willingness to override the law, and Stolypin’s reply to the speech by the eminent Kadet laid bare their differing understandings of parliamentary life. Although Stolypin did more than any other minister to bridge the divide between secretive government and garrulous parliament, he too tended to see talk and action as mutually exclusive, not as complementary. As he put it in the debate of 16 November, he had no intention of turning the Duma into an ‘ancient circus, a spectacle for the crowd’ by engaging in polemics. It was incumbent on the

¹⁸⁶ ‘Zasedanie 8-go noiabria’, RV, 9 November 1907, 3. The stenographic transcript suggests that Khomiakov did not entirely remain on the sidelines, making liberal use of his bell when Kelepovskii and Bobrinskii cast their jibes at the opposition during the debate on the election of the presidium: GD SO 3/1/1/89–90 (8 November 1907). ¹⁸⁷ ‘Zasedanie 13-go noiabria’, RV, 14 November 1907, 2. For the example of frequently interrupted speeches by the Trudoviks N. Ia. Liakhnitskii (Stavropol) and K. M. Petrov (Perm), see GD SO 3/1/1/ 163–6. ¹⁸⁸ Kireev was appalled by the failure of the Duma to come out and condemn political murders: Dnevnik, 231–2. ¹⁸⁹ Lutz Häfner, ‘Die Bombe als “Notwendigkeit”: Terrorismus und die Debatten der Staatsduma um die Legitimität politischer Gewalt’, in Walter Sperling (ed.), Jenseits der Zarenmacht: Dimensionen des Politischen im Russischen Reich 1800–1917 (Frankfurt and New York, 2008), 437–8; on the standing rules and their room for interpretation by the chairman (usually to the detriment of the opposition), see also Lutz Häfner, ‘Die “Illusion” des freien Wortes: Sprechen und Handeln der parlamentarischen Linken in der russischen Staatsduma 1906–1914’, in Dittmar Dahlmann and Pascal Trees (eds), Von Duma zu Duma: Hundert Jahre russischer Parlamentarismus (Bonn, 2009), 96–103. ¹⁹⁰ Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 132–3; V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II (Stanford, 1939), 463.

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government ‘to avoid unnecessary words’.¹⁹¹ The very next day, however, in Stolypin’s presence, Rodichev showed the Prime Minister just how much words could matter by uttering his notorious phrase that the hangman’s noose, once known as the ‘Murav’ev collar’, might now be called the ‘Stolypin necktie’. Even some Octobrists joined in the cries of outrage, and Rodichev was expelled from the chamber for fifteen sessions, after which he meekly stated: ‘I take my words back.’¹⁹² But his jibe would have a longer afterlife than any other phrase uttered over the eleven-year existence of the Duma. The other main representative of the government in the Third Duma was Vladimir Kokovtsov, the Minister of Finance (and later Stolypin’s successor as Prime Minister). Kokovtsov struck a very different tone from Stolypin, being less forceful and rhetorically ambitious. But he too expended considerable effort on his dealings with the Duma. Despite much provocation, he had remained calm during his appearances in the Second Duma, and after its closure he could look forward to a more amenable and businesslike parliament.¹⁹³ His opening speech in the budget debate at the end of November maintained his aura of calm competence. As a liberal correspondent complained, he ‘expresses himself very correctly, he speaks smoothly, he stands freely at the podium, but his diction is exceptionally monotonous, he speaks without gestures, without particularly raising his voice, and there is never any spark of feeling in his words.’ The impression of his speech as a ‘lesson learned by heart’ was only strengthened by the fact that he, like other government ministers, was evidently reading from a text.¹⁹⁴ While the criticism may be unfair—journalists rarely find fireworks in budget speeches—it accurately conveys Kokovtsov’s technocratic and even pedantic manner, which was largely maintained even in his prolonged jousts with his main Kadet opponent on financial matters, Andrei Shingarev. Even a Kadet observer found that Kokovtsov had the better of these debates: he simply understood state finances much better than Shingarev, and remained calm and measured throughout, even if he was not the most riveting speaker.¹⁹⁵ In his memoirs, Kokovtsov was predictably dismissive of Shingarev’s attempts to hold him to account. More revealing was the sheer number of times Kokovtsov felt obliged to get to his feet to rebut this point or the other; he manifestly failed to follow the recommendation of S. I. Shidlovskii, a close observer of the Third Duma from his position on the presidium, that a parliamentary speaker should sense the moment to call a vote and not waste time on responding to every minor objection voiced in the ¹⁹¹ ‘Zasedanie 16-go noiabria’, RV, 17 November 1907, 3; for the stenographic transcript of Stolypin’s speech, see GD SO 3/1/1/348–54. ¹⁹² ‘Zasedanie 17-go noiabria’, RV, 18 November 1907, 4, 6. Rodichev’s comment was apparently impromptu: Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 175. ¹⁹³ On Kokovtsov’s performances in the Second Duma, see ‘Vospominaniia F. A. Golovina o II Gosudarstvennoi Dume’, IA, no. 5 (1959): 131. ¹⁹⁴ ‘Zasedanie 27-go noiabria’, RV, 28 November 1907, 3. ¹⁹⁵ Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode, 378–9.

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debate.¹⁹⁶ As Kokovtsov later commented of the Third and Fourth Dumas, ‘it could be said that my 14-hour working day was spent as much on the podium of the Duma as in the office of the Minister of Finances on the Moika’. He prepared carefully and strove to be an effective parliamentary performer: although he wrote out his first statement to the Duma, he barely looked at the text during the speech, just reminding himself of figures as he went on. Even if he could not hope to sway the liberal press in his favour, he was also acutely interested in how the speeches were received in the chamber. As he noted a decade later in his memoirs a propos his first major speech to the Third Duma: ‘I was accompanied from the podium by prolonged and deafening applause—as the stenographic transcript of the sitting states.’ Evidently, government ministers were among the most avid readers of the Duma transcripts. Kokovtsov’s consciousness of the afterlife of words uttered in the Duma was again demonstrated in the reaction after the most memorable phrase he uttered in his parliamentary career. In a debate of 24 April 1908, the Kadets called for a parliamentary commission to investigate the reasons for losses incurred by the state-run railway. As Kokovtsov later recalled, Miliukov stressed the word ‘parliamentary’ on the third syllable (parlaméntskaia) rather than the second (parlámentskaia), a pronunciation which evidently had a neologistic and alien ring, suggesting perhaps that Miliukov’s notion of a parliament was more French than Russian. In his response—that this would be an infringement of government jurisdiction—Kokovtsov inserted a throwaway remark that later caused him some bother: ‘we, thank God, do not yet have a parliament.’ According to the transcript, this remark was immediately met with ‘lengthy applause’ from the Right and ‘whistles and hissing’ from the Left. Although Kokovtsov professed not to regret the remark, as usual referring posterity to the stenographic transcript in his defence, it gave Miliukov the opportunity to end the debate with a predictable and rousing defence of Russia’s parliamentary integrity.¹⁹⁷ Worse still, when the minutes of the debate were read out at the start of the next sitting, Chairman Khomiakov made an awkward intervention to suggest that Kokovtsov’s choice of words was unfortunate. Khomiakov was immediately hauled in by Stolypin to explain himself, and the result of the kerfuffle was an artful apology to the Duma by its chairman the following day.¹⁹⁸ Even government ministers had to watch their words in the Duma: in March 1909, the Minister of War, Rediger, lost his job

¹⁹⁶ Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 1: 184. ¹⁹⁷ GD SO 3/1/2/1995, 2000. ¹⁹⁸ For the minister’s account of his various dealings with the Duma, see Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1: 254–6, 268–74, 307. A few days later, Stolypin and Kokovtsov gave an account of the incident to the Council of Ministers, which listened in silence (though individual members evidently suspected that Kokovtsov’s provocation had been entirely intentional). See Polivanov, Iz dnevnikov i vospominanii, 45–6.

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for an incautious remark he had made on the shortage of suitable commander material in the army.¹⁹⁹ For the most part, however, Kokovtsov recognized the Third Duma as a parliament he could do business with. The preponderance of landowners, nationalists, and churchmen made this an altogether more sympathetic audience for government ministers. This did not, however, make the Third Duma docile. The opposition spoke more often, and for longer, than its share of the deputies warranted. As in many parliaments, only a small proportion of members were regular contributors to debate: in the Third Duma, only 50 of 440 deputies gave speeches, and only 15 of these were reckoned to show any real aptitude.²⁰⁰ The Kadets, Trudoviks, and Social Democrats were the most talkative.²⁰¹ The main Kadet orators—Miliukov, Shingarev, Maklakov—continued to hold the government to account. The zemstvo old-timer Fedor Rodichev kept on in his familiar elegant and impassioned vein. The Kadets could also boast one of the most powerfully emotive orators of the Third Duma in Aleksandr Koliubakin, a zemstvo man from an old noble family who had taken up a position on the far left of the party. Along with the former political exile Vasilii Karaulov, whose speeches sometimes had the aura of religious ecstasy, his Kadet colleague Maksim Vinaver considered him the most inspiring speaker in the Third Duma.²⁰² More surprising than the continued prominence of Miliukov, Maklakov, et al. was the fact that peasant deputies—even those notionally on the right—were establishing themselves as a more independent force, especially on the land question.²⁰³ Although quiet in the first few months, by May 1908 they had found their voice. Even monarchist peasants spoke of illegal repression by village constables and local authorities, while on 29 May Andreichuk, a rightist deputy from Tver province, initiated a debate on an issue of fundamental importance to the peasant contingent: the mismatch between high peasant taxation and low zemstvo representation.²⁰⁴ Some peasants still engaged in the usual ritual of selfdeprecation, but this did not disguise their resolve. On 24 October 1908, Rozhkov (Stavropol province) opened by declaring: ‘It is difficult, gentlemen, for a village muzhik to speak from this podium.’ But, citing the ‘great responsibility placed on me by the people’, he went on to make a critique of the founding decree of the Stolypin agrarian reform.²⁰⁵ An even more intractable problem than peasant preoccupation with the land question was the apparent impossibility of finding a stable and persuasive progovernment voice. The ‘Right’ was a diverse and increasingly fractious group, ¹⁹⁹ Aleksandr Rediger, Istoriia moei zhizni: Vospominaniia voennogo ministra (Moscow, 1999), 277–9. ²⁰⁰ P. Larev, ‘Nasushchnaia potrebnost’’, Golos i rech’, no. 4 (1913): 23–4. ²⁰¹ Statistical analysis in Hagen, Die Entfaltung politischer Öffentlichkeit, 330. ²⁰² Vinaver, Nedavnee, 165–76. ²⁰³ Kizvetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 344. ²⁰⁴ ‘Vnutrenne obozrenie’, VE, no. 7 (1908): 307–10. ²⁰⁵ GD SO 3/2/1/217.

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ranging from gentlemanly conservatives to extreme nationalist demagogues, who held wildly varying rhetorical notions. An early sign of trouble came in the lengthy debate over the terms of the Address to the Throne: the Octobrists did not want to refer to the Tsar as ‘autocrat’, while the Right refused to make any mention of the October Manifesto. Kireev regretted that the ‘somewhat archaic’ draft by Fedor Plevako, famous courtroom lawyer and newly minted Octobrist deputy, had been rejected in favour of a ‘bureaucratic’ compromise version.²⁰⁶ The case of Plevako showed that some conventional notions of eloquence had to be revised in an era of modern, if illiberal, parliamentarianism. Kireev had been an enthusiast for Plevako ever since he had first seen him at work: at an Octobrist meeting in November 1906, he found his speech to be ‘outstanding’ and the work of a ‘philosopher’, not just a politician.²⁰⁷ Plevako’s speech as representative of the committee for composing the Address to the Throne contained a familiar set of nativist appeals: to Russian traditions, to the alien character of ‘constitution’ both as word and concept, and to the importance of peace and harmony underpinned by reverence for the monarchy in place of partisan division.²⁰⁸ This old-style Slavophilism, couched in suitably cloudy rhetoric, was an unpleasant surprise for educated observers expecting great things from the courtroom celebrity. A week later, his further contribution to the debate was deemed superficial and ‘strangely muddy and contradictory’ by the liberal press.²⁰⁹ His fellow lawyer Karabchevskii found Plevako ground down by legislative labours that ill suited his talents.²¹⁰ Plevako had perhaps misjudged his audience, addressing his fellow parliamentarians as if they were jury members rather than partisans and failing to project a message to any clear extra-parliamentary constituency. A more able political operator was Bishop Evlogii, who spoke on more than forty separate occasions just in the first session of the Third Duma (1907–8) as well as sitting on five committees.²¹¹ Later on, he would become still more visible as threw himself into his principal cause: the defence of the Orthodox population in the Western provinces.²¹² Evlogii’s cogent and assured performances showed that ecclesiastical gravitas and modern politics could mix very successfully; he was one of forty-nine churchmen deputies in the Third Duma (three times as many as there had been in the First).²¹³ On the whole, however, the Right was becoming ever more theatrical, not to say histrionic. Although the Third Duma seemed much closer to achieving ²⁰⁶ Kireev, Dnevnik, 229. ²⁰⁷ Kireev, Dnevnik, 178. ²⁰⁸ GD SO 3/1/1/239–43 (13 November 1907). ²⁰⁹ ‘Zasedanie 20 noiabria’, RV, 21 November 1907, 3. ²¹⁰ N. Karabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli (Berlin, 1921), 2: 14. ²¹¹ As recorded in the Lichnyi alfavitnyi ukazatel’ k stenograficheskim otchetam Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Tretii sozyv. Sessiia I. 1907–1908 g.g. (St Petersburg, 1908), 125–6. ²¹² See Evlogii’s own account in Put’ moei zhizni, 175–211; on the Kholm issue more generally, see Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, 1996), 172–92. ²¹³ Demin, Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossii, 39; slightly different figure in Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov’, 360.

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a fruitful working relationship with the government than either of its predecessors, the atmosphere turned angry again in 1910, and this time the socialists were not the main culprits. The provocations of the far Right were becoming ever more outrageous, and the Octobrists in the centre of the chamber were unable to exert a restraining influence. Matters came to a head in March 1910, when a vulgar antiSemitic allegation by Purishkevich led to a furious exchange between the Right and the opposition headed by Miliukov. Khomiakov’s handling of the meeting, which included an ill-tempered exchange between the chairman and Miliukov, led to protests afterwards from both parties; under the pressure of these events, Khomiakov resigned as chairman.²¹⁴ His successor, Aleksandr Guchkov, made a promising start. Although nervous, he was acutely aware of the need to set the right tone and delivered his speech from a text (unbeknownst to his listeners). At least to begin with, he was an effective chairman, intervening to cut speakers short where necessary; he also put some clear distance between the Octobrists and the Right. But by the end of the year he too was failing to keep the unruly deputies under control, especially those on the Right. Parliamentary civility was forever under threat in the Duma.²¹⁵ The Right heckled energetically, striving especially to throw peasant speakers off their stride.²¹⁶ Markov alone was responsible for forty interruptions in the first session of the Third Duma, Purishkevich for an astonishing ninety-nine; the two men were reprimanded by the chairman eight and twenty-five times respectively. For comparison, Shingarev, one of the most active Kadet orators, managed a mere nine interruptions.²¹⁷ One favourite tactic was to claim that speakers were reading from a text. A peasant deputy from Stavropol who used the debate on Finland to raise the issue of the condition of the peasantry, was repeatedly heckled on these grounds on 24 May 1910; so was the leader of the Kadets on 29 October 1911.²¹⁸ But sheer outrageousness remained the main tactic of the Rightists. On 28 May 1910, Purishkevich came out with his most notorious interjection, ‘finis Finlandiae’, after the vote on the Finland bill; ‘voices from the centre’ shouted ‘shame on you, that is indecent’, and Purishkevich was called to order.²¹⁹ As Kireev, a conservative who could be both pragmatic and fastidious, observed in February 1909: ‘The Right in the Duma is tactless to a tragicomic extent.’ It was unseemly and counterproductive for the Right to attack the government and to engage in skirmishes with Chairman Khomiakov, scion of a Slavophile dynasty and himself no liberal.²²⁰ Yet it is evident from the contemporary press that the

²¹⁴ V. F. Dzhunkovskii, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1997), 1: 473–4; Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 347. On the Right’s ‘systematic campaign’ of disruption that claimed Khomiakov as its main casualty, see Ben-Cion Pinchuk, The Octobrists in the Third Duma, 1907–1912 (Seattle, 1974), 86. ²¹⁵ Glinka, Odinnadtsat’ let, 59–60, 62, 73. ²¹⁶ Examples from May 1908 in ‘Vnutrenne obozrenie’, VE, no. 7 (1908): 308, 310. ²¹⁷ See Lichnyi alfavitnyi ukazatel’. ²¹⁸ GD SO 3/3/4/2298–9 and 3/5/1/782 respectively. ²¹⁹ GD SO 3/3/4/2582. ²²⁰ Kireev, Dnevnik, 305.

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self-consciously outrageous minority in the Duma achieved their primary objective of getting noticed. The shenanigans of the Right were reported with a mixture of disapproval and relish in the Octobrist paper Golos Moskvy: Purishkevich was one of the few speakers to be granted extensive stenographic treatment in a newspaper that otherwise increasingly relied on punchy summary of Duma debates.²²¹ Duma speakers (mainly those on the right) themselves made reference to the oratorical excesses. In the debate on the Address to the Throne, Bobrinskii, for example, expounded at self-contradictory meandering length on his fatigue with the ‘fountain of eloquence’ of his fellow deputies.²²² In his memoirs, the Octobrist Shidlovskii despaired of the scope the Duma standing rules afforded for useless verbiage in the plenary sessions and the general Russian neglect of time-saving measures, which in his view accounted for the rapid burnout of Russian statesmen.²²³ The irony was that the Right, which was always eager to denounce the corrupting potential of parliamentary rhetoric, had within its ranks several of the most prolix speakers and the most enthusiastic exponents of the lower arts of political persuasion. In his fierce denunciation of the delusions of democracy, the nationalist V. A. Gringmut devoted some choice paragraphs to the parasitical and self-aggrandizing class of ritores, who in his view might equally well be referred to as ‘lawyers’, ‘sophists’, or ‘charlatans’; such people used democracy as an ideological cover for the ‘glossocracy’ they were bent on achieving.²²⁴ Yet the foremost glossocrats of the Third Duma were not the lawyer, professors and zemstvo men of the centre-left but the extreme nationalists Purishkevich and Markov 2. Their speeches were long-winded even by the standards of late Victorian oratory. Along with his British predecessors, Purishkevich had a weakness for classical quotations. He also loved to muddy the waters of parliamentary deliberation through digressions, analogies and simple ad hominem attacks. In the debate of May 1908 on peasant representation in local self-government, Purishkevich accused Fedor Rodichev, a long-time defender of the peasant cause, of doing what he could to ‘keep the peasants down’ (pridushivat’) in his own province of Tver, promising that he would bring evidence of this to light in print. When Rodichev curtly denied the charge (for which no evidence was subsequently produced), Purishkevich retorted that Rodichev had ‘mumbled a few words’ by way of explanation and had completely failed to justify himself. As the correspondent of Vestnik Evropy noted, Purishkevich was thereby giving an inflection to

²²¹ See for example the extended account of the scandalous sitting that provoked the gentlemanly Khomiakov to resign as chairman: ‘Dumskii den’’, GM, 4 March 1910, 3. On Purishkevich’s parliamentary persona, see Kir’ianov, Rossiiskie parlamentarii, 159–81. ²²² GD SO 3/1/1/453–8 (20 November 1907); note also that Bobrinskii had earlier been in favour of limiting the time of interventions to ten minutes, while the liberal Shingarev had been against. ²²³ Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 1: 112–14, 123–5. ²²⁴ V. A. Gringmut, Istoriia narodovlastiia (Moscow, 1908), 13.

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the stenographic transcript that was not present in the original exchange; as the chairman interjected, Rodichev had not ‘mumbled’ any more than Purishkevich had.²²⁵

From Bolsheviks to Black Hundreds: The Fourth Duma, 1912–14 The manipulation and abuses of the government were even more undisguised in the elections to the Fourth Duma in 1912. The election authorities compiled lists of deputies whose re-election they wished to prevent. Priests were mobilized in the conservative cause to an unprecedented extent. For the first time, governmenthired hecklers were planted in meetings to disrupt oppositional speakers. Dubious registration practices kept undesirables off the voter lists. Harassment was so severe that election campaigning worthy of the name was quite impossible, unless you were a Rightist. Even some Octobrists felt the hostile attention of the authorities. The general population appears to have been appropriately uninterested, and newspapers had far more to say about the Balkan War that broke out in October 1912.²²⁶ Yet these measures did not yield the malleable Duma the government desired. The government’s electoral abuses and broader policies had alienated even political groups that might have been its natural allies. The Octobrists were drifting leftwards. The industrial bourgeoisie were mobilizing as the ‘Progressists’ in the Duma and making common cause with the Kadets, whose fortunes had revived somewhat. The Rightists continued to make a great deal of noise, but they were a fissiparous and isolated group, and even together with the Nationalists they fell well short of a majority.²²⁷ They could not even impose on the rest of the Duma their candidate for chairman, having to resign themselves to the re-election of the Octobrist Mikhail Rodzianko, who had taken over from Guchkov in 1911.²²⁸ The government needed a political centre with which to work, but it had effectively removed the conditions for it to exist. Over the next two years Russia’s political order came increasingly to seem not only fractious but fragile. Rodzianko was described even by a hostile observer as possessing a ‘stentorian voice’ and a ‘commanding presence’.²²⁹ He made a firm statement of constitutional ²²⁵ ‘Vnutrennee obozrenie’, VE, no. 7 (1908): 313–14. ²²⁶ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 378–410; Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 1: 205–7. According to Kokovtsov, the agreed government strategy was to go after the Left but not to insist on the election of rightists at the expense of ‘moderate elements’. In the event, many governors pursued a much more ambitious campaign of repression (Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 2: 69, 90–2). ²²⁷ A. A. Ivanov, Poslednie zashchitniki monarkhii: Fraktsiia pravykh IV Gosudarstvennoi dumy v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–fevral’ 1917) (St Petersburg, 2006), 31–5. ²²⁸ Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt, 420. ²²⁹ A. Badayev, The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma (London, 1932), 39.

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principle in his opening speech, not put off by the fact that the Right and the Nationalists walked out, and built bridges between the Octobrists and the liberal opposition.²³⁰ But signs of trouble ahead came immediately after Kokovtsov’s painstaking declaration as Prime Minister on 5 December 1912. Citing the authority of the transcript, he later claimed that his speech had been received well at the time.²³¹ But the government’s main informer on events behind the scenes in the Tauride Palace reported a more ambivalent response. Kokovtsov’s ‘businesslike’ approach was a strength but also a weakness in that it prevented him building a ‘closer, warmer and more cordial relationship’ with the parties in the centre of the chamber, while deputies on the extremes of Right and Left were impatient or dismissive.²³² In the ensuing debate Kokovtsov was attacked not by his traditional Kadet and socialist opponents but by the Right. On 7 December, Purishkevich launched into a meandering critique, which was followed up by Markov 2 on 8 December. Both men drew attention to the fact that Kokovtsov had read his speech from a text, which exacerbated their impression that the head of the government had taken an insufficiently uncompromising line and failed to set out a firm programme.²³³ Purishkevich’s own speech was anything but carefully crafted. So extravagant were his digressions that he had to be reprimanded by the chairman for quoting lines of Horace.²³⁴ In the Fourth Duma he and Markov would continue their tactics of provocation, doing their best to put off their opponents and undermine the authority of the institution. In one characteristic ad hominem attack in early 1913, Markov told I. T. Evseev, a deputy from St Petersburg province representing the peasant group in the Progressist bloc who had dared to speak in favour of a revision to the discriminatory electoral law of 3 June, that he had no right to make the case for popular suffrage: in Markov’s view, Evseev was a ‘St Petersburg peasant from a line of insurance agents’.²³⁵ What gave such interventions in the Fourth Duma a sharper edge was that the Right had little respect for the head of the government, Kokovtsov, and were consequently less constrained by the possibility of causing the authorities embarrassment. Controversialists in the Duma were greatly assisted by the newspapers, which continued to give top billing to the most arresting debaters and used verbatim reporting more selectively. By the eve of World War I, in some sections of the press, Russia was approaching sound-bite politics.²³⁶ Even the more austere State Council was not exempt. In ²³⁰ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 352; Glinka, Odinnadtsat’ let, 98–9. ²³¹ Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 2: 112. ²³² ‘Doneseniia L. K. Kumanina iz Ministerskogo pavil’ona Gosudarstvennoi dumy, dekabr’ 1911 – fevral’ 1917 goda’, VI, no. 2 (1999): 14–16. ²³³ GD SO 4/1/1/286, 390–1. See also the detailed summary of the debate on Kokovtsov’s declaration in Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma (1912–1914), 35–9. ²³⁴ GD SO 4/1/1/291. ²³⁵ Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma, 57–8. ²³⁶ See for example Golos Moskvy in 1913, which used short interviews with Duma deputies in addition to providing opinionated summaries of plenary debates.

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January 1914, a much anticipated clash between Kokovtsov and Witte, present and past ministers of finance, was described with relish in Russkoe slovo along with a detailed account of the audience reaction. Pace the prohibition on expressions of approval in the upper chamber, parts of Witte’s speech, ‘perhaps the best he has ever delivered in the State Council’, drew cries of ‘That’s right!’, not to mention ‘knowing smiles’ from the assembled mandarins. A ‘somewhat agitated’ Kokovtsov then gave a fifty-minute speech to defend his custodianship of the alcohol monopoly against Witte’s critique; the impression that his speech had been relatively colourless was exacerbated by the fact that the newspaper could not print a stenographic transcript, as corrections had not yet been returned by the speaker (as we know from his memoirs, Kokovtsov took some trouble over the documentary record of his speeches).²³⁷ All the while, the Left was gaining a shriller partisan edge. The most notable new parliamentarian of the Fourth Duma was the politicized lawyer Aleksandr Kerensky, whose elaborate syntax and emotive language marked him out as an orator with ambitions far beyond the debating chamber. He articulated the familiar Trudovik theme of the suffering of the common people, but with a hefty injection of pathos. Here was a new Alad’in, but in a more radicalized political environment and with more time to demonstrate his prowess. Kerensky soon became famous (or notorious) for the quantity and impassioned character of his speech. Usually in a state of nervous agitation as he took to the podium, he would begin his speech in choppy fashion, but soon the oratory gushed forth. One of his first contributions, in the debate on Kokovtsov’s declaration, gave a taste of what was to come: Can words written on paper have any meaning for us now, phrases on paper about the law, when we know that far more important and valuable papers have already been torn up and destroyed, when the Manifesto of 17 October has been torn up, and before we argue about the ground the government will stand on, would it not be better for us, gentlemen, to return from phrases on paper to reality, and, observing what is happening in our country, resolve the question of whether we even have law, whether or not the government stands on the ground of law.²³⁸

Little wonder that Kerensky, at the end of January 1914, would argue for the right of members to give formal speeches lasting more than one hour.²³⁹

²³⁷ ‘Bor’ba s p’ianstvom: Zasedanie Gos Soveta 10-go ianvaria’, RS, 11 January 1914, 3–4. Kokovtsov later wrote that Witte’s attack on him had been ‘hysterical’ (Iz moego proshlogo, 2: 216). ²³⁸ GD SO 4/1/1/421. On Kerensky’s style as a Duma orator, see Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 58–60. ²³⁹ GD SO 4/2/2/218–19.

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The political theatre of the Duma gained another vigorous new actor with the arrival of a separate Bolshevik fraction in autumn 1912 after it split away from the seven Menshevik deputies who made up the rest of the Social Democratic contingent in the Duma. The SDs had already been achieving some striking successes in the Third Duma, notably in the debate over the Lena goldfields massacre that had transfixed the newspaper-reading public in April 1912 and provoked the Minister of the Interior, Makarov, into an ill-judged attempt to justify the shooting.²⁴⁰ In the Fourth Duma, the Bolshevik groupuscule was determined from the outset to use the parliament as a platform for ‘revolutionary agitation’ without taking any part in the ‘so-called “positive” work of legislation’. Its resolve had already been tested in the election campaign, much of which had carried out in covert fashion. Groups of workers were invited on agitational ‘picnic-parties’ in the forest to the south of St Petersburg. When the Bolsheviks came face to face with their rivals for the popular vote at a meeting of the workers’ electoral college in early October, the debate was ‘exceptionally violent’ and uncompromising, all under the unsympathetic chairmanship of the right-wing vice mayor of St Petersburg, Demkin.²⁴¹ In the Fourth Duma the Bolsheviks largely entrusted their set-piece oratory to Roman Malinovskii. After the February Revolution, Malinovskii would be exposed as a police agent, and he had aroused suspicion before then, especially when he suddenly resigned as a Duma deputy and disappeared abroad in May 1914. It is, however, easy to see why Bolshevik hierarchs such as Lenin and Zinov’ev found him such a plausible and necessary participant in their cause. Malinovskii was an authentic worker (if in fact the son of a Polish nobleman exiled after the 1863 uprising). He had proved his mettle as the secretary of the metalworkers’ union, the largest and most robust of the post-1905 independent labour organizations. He had made a big impression in speeches on worker insurance at a series of legal (non-party) congresses in 1908–9. Though difficult and often overbearing in person, he was a charismatic and effective speaker to audiences ranging from metalworkers to revolutionary emigres. Here, in short, was the ‘Russian Bebel’ that Bolshevism so badly needed.²⁴² The Social Democrats, with Malinovskii to the fore, immediately signalled their will to obstruct by refusing to take part in the election of the chairman. They shunned the Kadets but tried to establish closer relations with the Trudoviks. They used the privileged status of parliamentary speech to spread their propaganda: the stenographic reports of debates were not subject to censorship, and so could be printed in Pravda. The Bolshevik deputies also found that interpellation ²⁴⁰ See Michael Melancon, The Lena Goldfields Massacre and the Crisis of the Late Tsarist State (College Station, 2006), chap. 6 on the ‘unexpected consensus’ this generated in Russian society. ²⁴¹ Badayev, The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, 4, 11, 18. ²⁴² Such is the portrait presented in the well-documented study by I. S. Rozental’, Provokator Roman Malinovskii: sud’ba i vremia (Moscow, 1996).

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was a very effective means of agitation—though they needed to ‘borrow’ Kadets to raise the thirty-three signatures required. They enjoyed a flattering degree of attention from their Duma colleagues and the wider audience. Not only could they count on raising a commotion through the hostile interjections they elicited from the Duma majority, but the public galleries were intrigued to listen to their performances. The Bolshevik speakers were, after all, authentic Russian workers, and wore with pride their proletarian roughness; the Mensheviks, by contrast, were headed by the Georgian nobleman Nikolai Chkheidze, whose career included municipal politics in Batum and service as a public health inspector as well as revolutionary politics.²⁴³ As Aleksei Badaev, one of the half-dozen Bolsheviks, recalled, ‘Wives of high officials peered at me through their lorgnettes anxious to see how a locksmith would behave himself and what he would say in the Duma’. It turned out, however, that these manipulators of parliamentary publichnost’ could themselves be manipulated. When Roman Malinovskii read out the declaration of the Bolshevik fraction, he ‘omitted a passage of considerable length criticising the State Duma and demanding the sovereignty of the people’. His fellow Bolsheviks put this down to nerves in the face of a hostile chamber, but in fact the omission was quite deliberate: Malinovskii’s text had been vetted in advance by the chief of police, S. P. Beletskii.²⁴⁴ Before too long, the parliamentary order was becoming precarious. Two weeks after Kokovtsov’s last budget speech in May 1913 came another gross provocation from Markov, who accused the minister of finances of ‘stealing’; the chairman of the Duma would deliver a carefully negotiated apology only at the start of the following session.²⁴⁵ Duma members were also engaging in extra-parliamentary rhetoric that made the authorities thoroughly nervous. A congress of city duma representatives in Kiev in autumn 1913 turned surprisingly outspoken and was brought to an end by the policeman in attendance when Guchkov’s concluding speech was felt to overstep the mark.²⁴⁶ Guchkov had effectively taken one wing of the Octobrists into the opposition; he had even given a speech on Rasputin on 9 March 1912.²⁴⁷ The authorities fought back in the way they knew best. In June 1913 the Minister of the Interior, Nikolai Maklakov (younger brother of Vasilii), proposed a new press law that would have forbidden the ‘tendentious’ reporting of ²⁴³ The contrast between Chkheidze and the Bolshevik G. I. Petrovskii is drawn in Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma, 50–1. ²⁴⁴ Badayev, The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, 40–1, 43–6, 52–3. On the police censorship, see Rozental’, Provokator Roman Malinovskii, 93–4. In the event, Beletskii miscalculated: he assumed that Malinovskii would be cut off by the chairman Rodzianko no more than a third of the way through the declaration, given its provocative content, but in fact Malinovskii was able to deliver almost all of it. ²⁴⁵ Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 2: 137–40. ²⁴⁶ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 353; also M. V. Rodzianko, Krushenie imperii (Moscow, 1992), 87 on Guchkov’s speech at an Octobrist conference in November 1913. ²⁴⁷ Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (Cambridge, 1973), 185, 212.

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Duma speeches. Newspapers were sometimes fined for carrying transcripts of Duma debates—on the grounds that the law permitted the publication only of Duma transcripts in their entirety, without omissions or commentary. In April 1914, in a clear violation of parliamentary privilege, Maklakov tried to indict Chkheidze for advocating a ‘republican regime’ in a speech he had made to the Duma on 11 March. Chkheidze’s Social Democratic colleagues fought back by uttering the word ‘republic’ freely in the chamber, daring the authorities to take further action. It was only in the summer, shortly before the outbreak of war, that the authorities would finally call off the case. On 21 April, the Duma responded to the prosecution of Chkheidze by debating a bill on parliamentary immunity, and the Left insisted that the passing of the budget should be dependent on this. The following day, the Social Democrats and Trudoviks shouted out and drummed on their desks, and only when the obstructionists were expelled was the Prime Minister Goremykin able to speak. On 13 May, there was a further outbreak of unparliamentary behaviour in the chamber after the Octobrist N. P. Shubinskii provoked the Kadets over their sources of funding; four deputies were expelled, and the Left walked out.²⁴⁸

Beyond the Duma The rhetorical turn in Russian political culture extended far beyond the Tauride Palace. This was despite the fact that, even in the wake of 1905, Russia was still a long way from freedom of speech. The authorities cracked down on the socialist parties, driving their agitational activities underground.²⁴⁹ But even moderate public discourse faced significant constraints. As early as November 1905, it was reported that the Council of Ministers was busy revising the law on associations. The new ‘Temporary Rules’ on public assembly, issued in March 1906, ostensibly provided a firmer legal basis for public speech. Meetings and societies ‘not contrary to the law’ could proceed without hindrance. But anything classified as a ‘public’ meeting required prior permission from the authorities and was likely to be attended by a police agent. The police was mandated to prevent or close any event that offended against public ‘morality’, ‘tranquility’, or ‘safety’, which left it ample discretion to determine where the boundaries of the law lay. Participants in public meetings soon found that the powers of the Police Department had increased as a result of the new legislation. Some decentralization had occurred,

²⁴⁸ Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma, 119–20, 122–3, 128–32, 136; Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment, 200, 204. ²⁴⁹ On the weakness of the Bolshevik underground, see Robert B. McKean, St. Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907–February 1917 (New Haven, 1990), chap. 5.

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but that just made the police more vigilant in their localities.²⁵⁰ As early as 3 May 1906, a Kadet deputy was reporting that he had been prevented from holding a public meeting in his home province of Voronezh to tell his constituents about the past two months of activity in the Duma; even a lecture without ensuing debate had been forbidden.²⁵¹ Measures hardened in 1906–7. Thereafter public events were often a battle of wits where speakers would resort to allusion and florid language to smuggle political content past police representatives. Tactics like these did not always work, which meant that a lot of frank talk took place at dinners and ‘tea evenings’ rather than at ‘public’ events. Stolypin even wanted such gatherings to be classified as ‘public’ so as to tighten the grip of the police. Police officials regularly intervened at professional or scholarly meetings. In this edgy political climate even football clubs came under supervision.²⁵² Speakers with any political pedigree could expect close observation. At the funeral of Sergei Muromtsev in 1910, the assembled liberal luminaries were interrupted by an anxious police observer as they gave their graveside speeches. They suffered a similar fate at the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of Russkie vedomosti in 1913, which were cut short by a bumptious young police inspector. On occasion, the authorities could show more discretion: Kizevetter encountered a sympathetic policeman who telephoned him the day before a speech he was due to give on the reforming Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin to ask whether there was anything reprehensible in what he was planning to say. Kizevetter offered him reassurance, the event went off without incident, and the policeman even joined the applause. But he was then demoted for this unseemly show of enthusiasm: evidently he too was being watched.²⁵³ The government’s interventions were at best a partial success. Ostensibly apolitical associations became ever more engaged in the burning questions of the day; they played cat and mouse with the authorities, which retained extensive powers to silence public discussion but were overstretched and not always able to sniff out de facto political speech until it was too late. Despite the attentions of the police, Russia now had numerous voluntary associations that ‘nourished the skills of organization, democratic practice, and self-monitoring’.²⁵⁴ Even if public order was restored after the chaos of 1905–6, local representative institutions retained vivid memories of the political agenda of 1905. They increasingly strayed beyond

²⁵⁰ A. S. Tumanova, Samoderzhavie i obshchestvennye organizatsii v Rossii. 1905–1917 gody (Tambov, 2002), 112–13, 187; Joseph Bradley, ‘Russia’s Parliament of Public Opinion: Association, Assembly, and the Autocracy, 1906–1914’, in Theodore Taranovski (ed.), Reform in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, 1995), 213–15; Wayne Dowler, Russia in 1913 (DeKalb, 2010), 227–8. ²⁵¹ A. Shingarev, ‘Iz Tavricheskogo dvortsa v provintsiiu’, RV, 3 May 1906, 2. ²⁵² Tumanova, Samoderzhavie i obshchestvennye organizatsii, 198–202, 216–17, 221–2, 297–8. ²⁵³ Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 348–9, 354–6. For the example of repeated police intervention at the 1913 Cooperatives’ Congress, see Bradley, ‘Russia’s Parliament of Public Opinion’, 219. For more examples, see Dowler, Russia in 1913, 222. ²⁵⁴ Dowler, Russia in 1913, 140.

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their technocratic remit of local administration and debated matters that the imperial government had always regarded as its prerogative. M. V. Golitsyn was not much impressed with the Epifan municipal duma, where he served briefly in about 1910: meetings brought together ‘15–20 typical provincial merchants and townspeople [meshchane], and also a few civil servants [chinovniki] who owned houses in the town’ for two or three hours of discussion on the needs of ‘our wretched little town’. But the Moscow duma, to which he was elected in late 1912, was a different matter. A pre-election meeting conspicuously failed to resolve the differences between the various parties, and the Right was prominent. The hall where the duma met was gloomy and decorated in a heavy style russe, but it contained a handy berth for the press (behind the podium alongside the secretary) as well as places for the general public at the back of the hall.²⁵⁵ Even the United Nobility, bastion of gentry conservatism, was not immune to the pressures of post1905 glasnost’: after resolving at its first congress in May 1906 that its meetings would not be open to the public, it kept returning to the issue. Eventually, at the Fifth Congress in February 1909, the chairman was given the discretion to let in the press.²⁵⁶ As Wayne Dowler puts it, ‘a bourgeois revolution of sorts was taking place in many Russian cities by 1913’. Meetings in advance of the municipal elections of 1912–13 saw vigorous debate within and across professional groups, and the results of the election brought a defeat for the ‘old conservative guard’ in Russia’s city councils.²⁵⁷ The Moscow duma in this period was acutely split between Right and Left, and it took supreme efforts by the mayor Nikolai Guchkov to rise above the political differences.²⁵⁸ Even elections to small-town dumas were becoming political platforms. As a sign of the more volatile political times, a few places were adopting ballot papers instead of the traditional timeconsuming method of voting by placing balls for or against each candidate.²⁵⁹ In general, the greater the distance from the centres of power—whether imperial or provincial capitals—the more room for manoeuvre local institutions enjoyed; town assemblies at the district (uezd) level had some freedom to cultivate a small-scale version of civil society, and the Russian provinces were certainly not in the ‘deep sleep’ alleged by leftist memoirs.²⁶⁰ The press was doing more than ever to inform society of public speech in various arenas. In early 1914, for example, newspapers offered coverage of a raft of public events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the zemstvo, including a verbatim transcript of an impassioned

²⁵⁵ M. V. Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia (1873–1917) (Moscow, 2007), 411, 438–40, 444–6. ²⁵⁶ Kir’ianov, Rossiiskie parlamentarii, 121–2. ²⁵⁷ Dowler, Russia in 1913, 117. ²⁵⁸ Iu. S. Vorob’eva, Nikolai Guchkov—moskovskii gorodskoi golova: Stranitsy istorii (Moscow, 2004), 45–6. ²⁵⁹ A. M. Bludov, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii na rubezhe XIX–XX vv. (Tambov, 2006), 71–4. ²⁶⁰ Kirsten Bönker, Jenseits der Metropolen: Öffentlichkeit und Lokalpolitik im Gouvernement Saratov (1890–1914) (Cologne, 2010), 446.

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speech by Rodichev; of the testimony in the sensational trial in Kiev of Vasilii Shul’gin for having dismissed the ritual murder charges against Mendel Beilis as ‘nonsense’, as well as Shul’gin’s ‘highly animated’ speech in his own defence; and of a civil war in the Akkerman district zemstvo between the Purishkevich and Krupenskii clans. Even more pointedly, readers were given a list of scheduled speeches by Duma deputies that had not been permitted to take place.²⁶¹ But if political participation was growing, it was by no means guaranteed to be ‘progressive’. At the end of January 1908, the Moscow noble assembly saw heated discussion on the purported moral decline of the young generation, and then debate moved on to the truly controversial matter on the agenda: whether to expel Fedor Kokoshkin from the Moscow nobility for signing the Vyborg Manifesto. This sitting was attended by more than 350 delegates with the general public crammed in to the available space in the galleries. Although Kokoshkin had some impassioned defenders, the vote (by secret ballot) went against him by a resounding majority of 260 to 92.²⁶² The pro-government outcome was no surprise in this traditionally arch-conservative body, even if the process that preceded it was unusually combative. More striking was the rightward drift in the zemstvos, which had accounted for much of the political mobilization that culminated in the events of 1905. In the Duma age, the zemstvo continued to foster vigorous debate, but the political activity now had a different character. If the pre-1905 ‘zemstvo movement’ had been dominated by liberals, who saw a significant portion of their constitutional desires fulfilled by the October Manifesto, local government after 1905 increasingly served as a rallying point for more conservative gentry who saw themselves caught in a pincer movement between state-led economic liberalization and the agrarian reform agenda of the liberals and the peasantry. The change of mood must have been especially palpable to Fedor Golovin, the ill-fated chairman of the Second Duma. The Moscow zemstvo assembly had given Golovin his main political training before his entry into the Duma. In February 1906, for example, Golovin as chairman of the zemstvo board gave a defiant speech accusing the provincial governor of encroaching on the zemstvo’s prerogatives, arguing in particular that it was not the zemstvo’s business to monitor the political views of its employees. The following year Golovin resigned his zemstvo post and threw himself into national politics. By January 1908, with his national career on the wane after the closure of the Second Duma, Golovin was on the back foot, having to defend his record as zemstvo chair against charges of financial incompetence. The division between Left and Right remained—in

²⁶¹ RS, 1 January 1914, 4 (Krupenskii and Purishkevich); 10 January, 6 (prohibited speeches); 12 January, 4 (Rodichev); 21 January, 4 (Shul’gin). The practice of documenting prohibited speeches and public events already had some pedigree: see ‘Chleny Dumy na kanikulakh’, Rech’, 3 January 1908, 5. ²⁶² Dzhunkovskii, Vospominaniia, 1: 276–9.

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January 1909 Golovin and his allies would once again accuse the governor, Dzhunkovskii, of exceeding his powers—but the initiative now lay with the conservatives under the Moscow marshal of the nobility, A. D. Samarin.²⁶³ The same pattern occurred elsewhere in the Russian provinces: Stolypin’s conservative coup in 1907 handed greater powers to local government, and increased the representation of the gentry in it, making the zemstvo the instrument of a ‘gentry fronde’, while the moderate Octobrists lost their purchase.²⁶⁴ The impeccably progressive M. V. Golitsyn observed ‘Black Hundred’ rhetoric from a merchant candidate at an electoral meeting for the Third Duma. Although he himself was re-elected as a member of the zemstvo board, his appointment was not confirmed by the hostile provincial governor. A little later Golitsyn took part in the zemstvo election campaign in Zvenigorod on behalf of his brother, but here the right-wing landowners were too strong.²⁶⁵ The conservative zemtsy also had a national platform that was denied to their pre-1905 forebears. At the first Zemstvo Congress in June 1907, delegates gathered to express their resistance to headlong ‘democratization’. They did so, however, with a greater degree of exposure than they were used to. Confronted with a parliamentary degree of debating procedure and publichnost’ (the stenographers were in attendance), some were clearly discomfited. As one Kursk landowner declared, ‘I should warn you that most of us are provincial people and don’t know how to speak from the podium. If you decide to order me to take to the podium, I shall decline to speak.’²⁶⁶ Despite police harassment, the radical Left was also benefiting from the expanded public sphere of the post-1905 era. Roman Malinovskii and Aleksandra Kollontai, star Bolshevik orators, rose to prominence in the period 1907–9 by addressing worker audiences in legally constituted associations: Malinovskii as a leader of the metalworkers’ union, Kollontai by organizing a women workers’ ‘club’ in St Petersburg. They also took part in a number of ‘legal’ congresses, which, as Kollontai put it, often served as ‘politically innocent flags’ to conceal radical content. Although by autumn 1908 Kollontai was already under police investigation, she took part (illegally) in more than fifty meetings with female workers in preparation for an inaugural All-Russian Women’s Congress and even risked giving a speech at the congress itself.²⁶⁷

²⁶³ Dzhunkovskii, Vospominaniia, 1: 146–7, 269–71, 357–8. ²⁶⁴ Roberta Thompson Manning, ‘The Zemstvo and Politics, 1864–1914’, in Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich, The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge, 1982); quotation on 167; Robert Edelman, Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), 86–8. ²⁶⁵ Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia, 383–4, 401. ²⁶⁶ Stenograficheskie otchety 1-go Vserossiiskogo S”ezda Zemskikh Deiatelei v Moskve. Zasedaniia 1–15 iiunia 1907 g. (Moscow, 1907), 6. ²⁶⁷ Rozental’, Provokator Roman Malinovskii, 29–32; A. M. Kollontai, Iz moei zhizni i raboty (Moscow, 1974), 109–13.

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But much political speech after 1905 was taking place nowhere near a podium and without the benefit of rules of procedure. Before it was so brutally suppressed, the strike at the Lena goldfields testified to the diffusion of a loosely socialist oppositional culture to worker centres as far removed as Siberia: one meeting place near a mine came to be known locally as the ‘Tauride Palace’.²⁶⁸ In their heartland of the south-west, the orators of the Right were mobilizing resentment against Jews and Poles: secular rabble-rousers and charismatic churchmen made common cause, as did Purishkevich and Serafim (Chichagov) at the centenary of Bessarabia’s annexation in 1912.²⁶⁹ In Tsaritsyn, the fiery monk Iliodor was delivering a series of inflammatory sermons to the worshippers who flocked to his newly built cathedral; his targets included capitalists and officials as well as other categories of the godless. The authorities tried without success to rein him in, and in May 1910 an intemperate attack on local politicians provoked a fullblown investigation.²⁷⁰ In the wake of the edict on religious toleration of April 1905, Old Believers were able to be open about their activities, and it turned out that their unhierarchical and participatory rituals had much to recommend them; the Old Believers could also boast compelling orators such as Fedor Mel’nikov, dubbed an ‘all-Russian schismatic missionary’ in one diocesan report even before he was able to go public after 1905.²⁷¹ In this context, the Orthodox Church’s perennial quest to improve its standard of preaching gained yet more urgency. The turbulent events of 1905–6 were soon reflected in the church press. The general themes were familiar—the deadening effects of ecclesiastical censorship of sermons, the pressing need for priests to find their own unscripted approach to their parishioners and counter more effectively the challenge of the sectarians by adopting some of their techniques—but discussion of these matters was now taken to new extremes. The priest was now not only to ‘own’ his sermons and to be ready either to depart from the script or to do without it entirely; he was also expected to take greater account of the urban working-class audience, which might derive its picture of the world from popular lubok literature rather than scripture and find Old Church Slavonic thoroughly impenetrable.²⁷² At least on a rhetorical level, the campaign Amvrosii had

²⁶⁸ Melancon, The Lena Goldfield Massacre, 138. ²⁶⁹ On right-wing oratory in the south-west, see Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905 (Cambridge, 1995), 95–6; on the rise of the Right as a mass political movement in Kiev, the only major city where it gained a preponderance, see Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca, 2013), chap. 6. ²⁷⁰ Dixon, ‘The “Mad Monk” Iliodor in Tsaritsyn’, SEER, 88 (2010): 377–415, here 391–6. ²⁷¹ Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb, 1995); Simon Dixon, ‘Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov) and Russian Christian Socialism’, HJ, 51 (2008): 689–718, here 709 (on Fedor Mel’nikov). ²⁷² See for example the editorials ‘O propovednichestve’ and ‘Nuzhna li tsenzura propovedei’, TsV, nos 30 and 40 (1905): 929–30, 1249–52; D. Bogoliubov, ‘O zhelatel’nom napravlenii tserkovnoi propovedi’, TsV, no. 47 (1905): 1484–7 (on how priests should address the politicized worker audience); A. Likhovitskii, ‘O bogosluzhebnom iazyke russkoi pravoslavnoi Tservki’, TsV, no. 13

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launched for the ‘living word’ in the 1880s had triumphed. In 1913, a journal devoted to the spoken word in all its forms reported that the reading out of written sermons had now ceased, with the exception of official sermons in the cathedral, which had to pass censorship, but even here priests could depart from the text in the act of delivery. By now it was a truth universally acknowledged that priests needed to work to find the right means of expression for the common people, which had ‘grown out of the old forms and was “bored” listening to “clichéd” renditions of the Word of God’.²⁷³ Exemplary in this regard was Ioann (Vostorgov), a leading figure in the Russian nationalist movement who brought the techniques of the missionary to the Russian heartland. His energy and organizational capacities made a deep impression on no less a figure than Bishop Evlogii, who paid a visit to the seminar where Ioann trained priests in the art of preaching. Ioann’s teaching method was bracingly practical and interactive: he would read out a lesson from the Gospels, ask students what theme they would select for a sermon, and then adopt a method of ‘collective creation’ by pooling the students’ ideas.²⁷⁴ In a further concession to modernity, priests were sometimes advised to sway the emotions of their audience by exposing more of their own spiritual makeup.²⁷⁵ The liturgy might be delivered not in the established monotonous drawnout style but with individual emphases and varied intonation: it was possible to be ‘dramatic’ without succumbing to ‘theatricality’ (akterstvo).²⁷⁶ In the post-Gapon era the church journals were prepared to acknowledge that priests might have something to learn from the charismatic orator-preachers who were so much more successful in winning over the popular audience. Existing sermons were held to be dry, appealing to the intellect entirely at the expense of the emotions. Although priests should avoid ‘affectation’, they still had to remember that their main purpose was to act on the hearts of listeners.²⁷⁷

(1906): 391–6 (on the impenetrability of the liturgy to the urban working-class audience and the need to learn from Poles, sectarians, and other competitors); this followed by defence of Old Church Slavonic in N. Pokrovskii, ‘O bogosluzhebnom iazyke russkoi pravoslavnoi Tserkvi’, TsV, no. 15 (1906): 461–4; Pl. Petrov, ‘ “Ocherednoe propovednichestvo” kak vrednyi perezhitok’, TsV, no. 27 (1906): 884–6. ²⁷³ M. A. Lisitsyn, ‘Zhivoe slovo s tserkovnoi kafedry’, Golos i rech’, no. 1 (1913): 25–7; Protoerei I. P. Slobodskoi, ‘Pervoe plavanie’, Golos i rech’, no. 3 (1913): 22–44. ²⁷⁴ Evlogii, Put’ moei zhizni, 185. ²⁷⁵ Note I. Mikhail, ‘Pis’ma o propovedi’, starting in TsV, no. 6 (1905): 171–5, and the critical response by Gr. Prokhorov, ‘Po povodu pis’ma o propovedi’, no. 8: 246–8, which argued that Mikhail went much too far in his advocacy of pathos. ²⁷⁶ Arkhim. Mikhail, ‘O tserkovnom chtenii (Pia desideria)’, TsV, no. 24 (1905): 742–6. ²⁷⁷ N. Dobrokhol’skii, ‘K voprosu o nashei tserkovnoi propovedi’, TsV, no. 39 (1908): 1218–20. This article came with a disclaimer that the editors did not agree with everything the author said, but its publication in Petersburg’s main church journal is nonetheless indicative. Similar on the need to overcome the scholasticism of Russian preaching is A. Govorov, Otchego nashi pastyri-propovedniki s svoimi slushateliami ‘glukhi drug k drugu’ (Kazan, 1906).

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Subjective criteria for successful preaching were now all the rage. As the influential Kiev theologian V. F. Pevnitskii put it, ‘these days a preacher acts as an orator before society or his congregation, and the people listen to him like an ordinary orator’. The corollary was that priests could benefit from detailed instructions on how to use the voice to communicate emotion and how to prevail in the ‘struggle’ that was public speaking. In Pevnitskii’s words, ‘an orator uses words the way another might use a sword or some other weapon’. Through affect the orator needed to spur the audience to action. To do this effectively he could not be a mere instrument of salvation but rather a ‘living witness to the truth called to serve his neighbours’. Erudition and philosophical rigour were far less important than achieving impact on listeners’ way of living. References to contemporary events were fine, but the language of sermons should retain the special qualities that marked it out as something different from secular discourse. Preaching was hard work that required assiduous preparation. It was permissible to use other people’s sermons (by now there were many examples available in print), but true preaching had to be an expression of individual conviction.²⁷⁸ Even in the 1890s it had been possible to draw analogies between preaching and various secular occupations. The priest might be seen as a doctor who provided a diagnosis of society. Through preaching, he was able to reveal the ‘psychophysiological mechanisms of moral actions’; he thus had something in common with a novelist or social commentator (publitsist).²⁷⁹ Antonii (Khrapovitskii) also acknowledged that belles-lettres could serve as a useful guide to the spiritual torments of contemporary man as priests carried out their pastoral mission. If a preacher could speak with true conviction, the way was open for him to achieve great impact on contemporary society.²⁸⁰ But after 1905 the models recommended were less diagnostic and contemplative than performative. Even if priests were still enjoined to avoid the cheaper effects found on the stage, they could create a sense of ‘drama’ in their reading of scripture and their sermons. By the First World War, preaching was being treated as an art of persuasion not too different from the secular rhetoric employed in parliamentary politics, and the aim of a sermon was ‘the subjugation of a person’s will, a change in his character’. Preachers were given advice on gesture, pronunciation, even the judicious use of wit.²⁸¹ In a later guide, priests were told that a preacher was a ‘public figure’ who should know ‘the psychology of contemporary society’. He was not merely a vessel for religious

²⁷⁸ V. F. Pevnitskii, Tserkovnoe krasnorechie i ego osnovnye zakony, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1908), 15, 75. ²⁷⁹ A. Govorov, Osnovnoi printsip terkovnoi propovedi i vytekaiushchie iz nego predmet i zadachi tserkovnogo krasnorechiia (Kazan, 1895). ²⁸⁰ Antonii (Khrapovitskii), O pravoslavnom pastyrstve (Moscow, 1906). ²⁸¹ I. P. Triodin, Printsipy krasnorechiia i propovednichestva (Ekaterinoslav, 1915), quotation 27.

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truths; he also needed to study contemporary literature and periodicals and to be capable of responding fast to what he read.²⁸² But the problem was not only that rhetoric had changed in the wake of 1905; so had the audience. The peasantry, in particular, was not so easily led as nationalist ideologues or clerics might have imagined. As one participant-observer commented, debates in the village assembly (skhod) were far more vigorous in the post-1905 era: ‘Since the elections to the first Duma, “left” and “right” parties have emerged in the assemblies, and any, however trifling, public matter becomes a matter of principle.’ The ‘leftist’ contingent was both more numerous and better organized. Even the spatial arrangements of the assembly reflected the new partisan atmosphere: the more active members sat to the front and the sides, with the leftists on the left and the Black Hundreds on the right. Each side had its principal orators, who spoke in turn. This was a far cry from the old-style assembly, where unstructured shouting would eventually lead to the minority yielding and assenting to a ‘unanimous’ decision. Even so, proceedings in due course descended into shouting all the same: the new procedure of turn-taking was uncomfortable to peasants unaccustomed to public speaking, and the commotion allowed everyone to feel they had had their say. The author, as an experienced chairman, realized he just had to wait for the noise to abate. The volost court was characterized by similar, only partially successful efforts to get speakers to observe the formalities.²⁸³ The quantity of public speaking only increased as more people gathered in cities and the boundaries between speech communities broke down. The 1869 St Petersburg city census revealed that 15 per cent of inhabitants did not have Russian as their native language. Given that a significant proportion of the rest were northern Great Russians with their characteristic ‘o’ pronunciation (okan’e), this meant that non-standard accents were more noticeable in the capital than in Moscow.²⁸⁴ By the turn of the century standard Russian had gained much ground. In churches, sermons were being delivered in modern Russian rather than Church Slavonic, while the courtroom, the marketplace, and the theatre had done much to create and instil linguistic norms.²⁸⁵ But if people were more likely to be able to understand each other, this might only make them more aware of their differences. Southerners who had gained their education in Odessa, Kiev or Odessa were likely to ‘speak bad Russian’; by the start of the First World War courses were on offer to help them cure their regionalisms with a view to embarking on a successful career closer to the ²⁸² L. V. Zubarev, Put’ k improvizatsii (Viatka, 1916), quotation 27. ²⁸³ S. Matveev, ‘V volostnykh starkhinakh’, RB, no. 2 (1912): 76; RB, no. 4 (1912): 120–30; RB, no. 5 (1912): 179–84. ²⁸⁴ V. I. Chernyshev, ‘Kak govoriat v Peterburge’, Golos i rech’, 1913, 1, pp. 11–14. ²⁸⁵ Bernard Comrie, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky, The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995), 1.

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metropolis.²⁸⁶ A contemporary dictionary makes clear the amount of pidgin (zhargon) that was being spoken on the outskirts of the empire.²⁸⁷ For a Russian nationalist, the most egregious purveyors of zhargon were Jews. Traditional Jewish culture had no place for ‘secular spoken-word events’, but after 1905 they played an important role in building national cohesion in the Yiddish-speaking shtetl, while secularized Jews would make the leap from Yiddish to Russian and take a distinguished part in the rhetoric of the revolutionary era.²⁸⁸

From Cacophony to Unity, and Back Again: 1914–17 The outbreak of war came as a relief. Suddenly there was a patriotic rhetoric to which almost all members of the parliament could subscribe. A joint session of the State Council and the Duma on 29 July 1914 seemed to indicate that political rifts had been healed, at least for a while; the chairman of the Duma, Rodzianko, produced ‘eloquent and sonorous oratory’ and the foreign minister, Sazonov, gave an emotional speech. In the view of the French ambassador, ‘the bad days of 1905 seem to have gone from the memory of all’.²⁸⁹ The few in the Duma who remained unreconciled—the Social Democrats—were arrested. Municipal politics, similarly, was infused with a spirit of patriotic collaboration between liberals and the Right. At the Moscow mayoral elections in 1914, the successful candidate was the Progressive Mikhail Chelnokov, a Kadet who had been the secretary of the Second Duma, but who was well regarded even by many on the Right. He produced the necessary patriotic speeches at the city duma meetings that continued regularly; in 1915, as Golitsyn recalled, the general mood was still positive and constructive.²⁹⁰ Yet the government remained deeply suspicious of public initiative, however patriotic the cause. Minister of the Interior Maklakov would have no truck with a zemstvo congress, even in aid of the war effort, and kept a close eye on the Union of Towns and the Union of Zemstvos, the public organizations created to assist the government at this time of crisis. The Okhrana also monitored goings-on in the Tauride Palace, where underemployed Duma deputies continued to gather throughout the autumn.²⁹¹ As relations between government and public soured,

²⁸⁶ P. G. Sharov, Obraztsovoe russkoe proiznoshenie, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1914), 4–5, 7. ²⁸⁷ I. I. Ogienko, Slovar’ nepravil’nykh, trudnykh i somnitel’nykh slov, sinonimov i vyrazhenii v russkoi rechi, 4th ed. (Kiev, 1915). ²⁸⁸ On the ‘people of the Book and the spoken word’, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington, 2009), chap. 5, quotation 146. ²⁸⁹ Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs (London, 1923), 1: 68, 75; Rodzianko, Krushenie imperii, 93, 99, 101. ²⁹⁰ Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia, 514–15, 520. ²⁹¹ Rodzianko, Krushenie imperii, 107; Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917 (London, 1977), 24–5.

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secret horse-trading between the Council of Ministers and the Duma leaders (primarily Kadet) in late 1914 resulted merely in the holding of a largely prescripted Duma session in January 1915.²⁹² The Duma was permitted to meet for a mere three days. Pressure for its recall grew with the downturn in Russian fortunes in the war in 1915. When the Duma finally reconvened in July 1915, it immediately showed itself to be in a vastly more combative mood, and the creation of a ‘Progressive Bloc’ to establish a working relationship between ministers and Duma moderates did not prevent a further prorogation in early September (followed by an indefinite postponement on 23 November). By early 1916, life was much harder on the home front, and even members of the urban elite were losing confidence in the capacity of the government to conduct the war successfully. The Emperor’s visit to the Duma early in 1916 suggested that a more harmonious relationship between sovereign and parliament might be possible, but such hopes were soon defeated.²⁹³ When the Duma reopened in February 1916, the atmosphere was turning as hostile as before the dawn of patriotic unity in July 1914. The appointment of Boris Shtiurmer as Prime Minister, as well as other examples of ‘ministerial leapfrog’, heightened suspicions of the government, while dark rumours of the influence of Rasputin continued to circulate. Yet another prorogation, in June, did little to calm the mood. By the early autumn, not only were parliamentarians pressing for greater scrutiny of the war effort, society as a whole was turning militant.²⁹⁴ The press, as ever, was playing its part. Despite the wartime censorship, the newspapers were far from muted. The government debate on regulations for closing meetings was itself reported in the press, while in September, in a bracing reminder of an earlier revolutionary moment in 1905, the trial of Georgii Khrustalev-Nosar’, first chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet, for fleeing his place of exile was reported in detail: the defendant’s highly agitated speech, the tense mood in the courtroom, and the throng in the lobby afterwards.²⁹⁵ Despite a police roundup of socialists at the start of the war and further repression in 1914–15, the revolutionary parties soon resumed and indeed expanded their activities, both underground and public; by mid-1915, their anti-war agitation was gaining purchase among workers in the capitals.²⁹⁶

²⁹² It still gave time for an impassioned speech from Kerensky calling for worker solidarity in the cause of peace and democracy (GD SO 4/3/44–9); but Miliukov at the head of the Kadets was impeccably patriotic. ²⁹³ Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia, 552, 559. ²⁹⁴ On the government’s difficult wartime relationship with the Duma, see Pearson, Russian Moderates, 27–35, 47–58, 70, 77–8, 96, 104–6. ²⁹⁵ ‘Nadzor za sobraniiami’, RS, 13 September 1916, 3; ‘Delo Khrustaleva-Nosaria’, RS, 17 September 1916, 3. ²⁹⁶ Michael Melancon, The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914–1917 (Columbus, 1990), esp. chap. 3. On the growth of worker protest from autumn 1915 onwards, see also Iu. I. Kir’ianov, Sotsial’no-politicheskii protest rabochikh Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (iiul’ 1914–fevral’ 1917 gg.) (Moscow, 2005).

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When it reopened in November 1916, the Duma rapidly descended into mutiny. Miliukov started the slide with his famous rhetorical question on 1 November: was the government guilty of stupidity or of treason? He himself immodestly referred to this speech as ‘the start of the Russian revolution’, although some would call his intervention merely irresponsible; in a characteristic Kadet blend of circumspection and radicalism, he claimed the implied answer to his question was ‘stupidity’, but everyone else took him to mean ‘treason’.²⁹⁷ In due course, the Kadets tacked back to the centre, insisting on the need to remain within constitutional bounds. When the Duma reconvened in mid-Febrary after its recess, Miliukov declared impotently that ‘our only deeds are our words’; by now it was clear that his ‘Stupidity or Treason’ speech had been ‘more a tactical ploy than a declaration of principle’.²⁹⁸ Back in early November, his words were taken much more literally, and his critique of the government became even more forceful when it was amplified by the perennial defenders of autocracy. The next major figure to make a contribution was the nationalist Shul’gin, on the right of the wartime Progressive Bloc, who later recalled the experience as mounting ‘Golgotha’, referring especially to the sense of being listened to by ‘all of Russia’.²⁹⁹ Admittedly, he may not have been ‘heard’ by quite as many people as he thought: his speech, like Miliukov’s, was banned for publication in the press. According to Miliukov, however, this only added to their renown: ‘There was no ministry or headquarters in the rear or on the front line that did not copy out these speeches, which flew around the country in millions of copies.’³⁰⁰ A more sober estimate would hold that illicit mimeographed copies circulated in the thousands.³⁰¹ Ironically, Purishkevich played his part in disseminating Miliukov’s text, handing out ‘bales’ of copies from the hospital train he oversaw on the front line. The government also failed to take action against Miliukov despite mooting the possibility.³⁰² But the censorship of Duma speeches was in any case peculiarly ineffective. The gaping blank spaces in newspaper reports spoke louder than any words. Even if readers were told only

²⁹⁷ Ivanov, Poslednie zashchitniki, 125–6. ²⁹⁸ Pearson, Russian Moderates, 129, 137. Two other scholarly treatments also find that there was both less and more than met the eye to Mililukov’s famous speech. This was no signal for revolution, but rather an assertion of authority on behalf of the Progressive Bloc and a call to the wartime regime to create a government less devoid of public trust. See Semion Lyandres, ‘Progressive Bloc Politics on the Eve of the Revolution: Revisiting P. N. Miliukov’s “Stupidity or Treason” Speech of November 1, 1916’, Russian History, 31 (2004): 447–64, and Thomas M. Bohn, ‘ “Dummheit oder Verrat”—Gab Miljukov am 1. November 1916 das “Sturmsignal” zur Februarrevolution?’, JfGO, 41 (1993): 361–93. ²⁹⁹ Shul’gin, Gody. Dni. 1920 god, 372–3. ³⁰⁰ Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii, 35. ³⁰¹ Pearson, Russian Moderates, 117; also Bohn ‘ “Dummheit oder Verrat” ’, 389, citing police reports on the wide unofficial circulation of this and other Duma speeches in November 1916. A. G. Shliapnikov commented on the ‘systematic’ censorship in newspapers of oppositional speeches in the Duma, but also noted that other ways were found to disseminate these speeches among the population. Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda. Semnadtsatyi god, 3 vols (Moscow, 1992–94), 1: 280–2. ³⁰² Ivanov, Poslednie zashchitniki, 128, 135.

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that ‘P. N. Miliukov gave an extensive speech criticizing our internal and external policy’, their imagination could surely fill in the rest, especially when reporters informed them that the Duma lobby was ‘buzzing like a beehive that has been given a shake’.³⁰³ The press may have been forced to excise large sections of the Duma debates, but it could still carry an opinion piece arguing that the current censorship of Duma transcripts had no legal basis.³⁰⁴ The most powerful sign of the impending crisis was the fact that Purishkevich joined the attack on the government on 19 November, in the process causing the disintegration of the Rightist bloc. One day earlier, Purishkevich had sought the permission of his fraction to speak in its name; when denied this, he had gone ahead all the same, despite efforts to persuade him to remain in the Rightist camp. The press, long accustomed to giving Purishkevich star billing, carried a remarkably full version of the speech, along with copious description of the audience reaction all the way through to the handshake Vasilii Maklakov offered Purishkevich when he left the podium.³⁰⁵ Purishkevich used his trademark tactic of wild, unproven allegations—telling the Duma and the country at large exactly what they wanted to hear—but deployed this against the government for which he had previously been a leading advocate. Evidently, his indignation had boiled over after witnessing chaos at the front line, and his state of mind could not have been improved by the loss of his Bessarabian estates to the German invasion. Many of his former colleagues considered him a traitor, and on 22 November he and Markov came to blows in the chamber. When Markov took the podium, he completely lost his composure; he was expelled for fifteen sittings, and Rodzianko almost challenged him to a duel.³⁰⁶ It almost goes without saying that the Social Democrats—prominent among them the head of the Menshevik fraction, Chkheidze—added their own fierce criticisms of the government. The latter stages of the Fourth Duma also served as a rhetorical launch pad for the dominant figure of Russia’s revolutionary politics between February and October 1917: Aleksandr Kerensky. Duma speeches had always had multiple addressees, being directed both at deputies in the chamber and at various constituencies in the empire beyond. But by late 1916 the world outside was very close to swallowing up the Tauride Palace: the barriers between the parliament and the street were coming down. It was Kerensky who best realized Aleksei Alad’in’s agenda for the parliamentary orator as popular ‘tribune’, having absorbed and synthesized the rhetorical strategies of both Left and Right. His speeches in the last ³⁰³ ‘Otkrytie Gosudarstvennoi dumy’, RS, 2 November 1916, 2; ‘V Dume’, RS, 12 November 1916, 2. The revolutionary government of the following year seems to have realized that the publication of blank spaces undermined it: Shul’gin’s Kievlianin was forced to suspend publication after it disregarded an instruction not to leave blank spaces for articles forbidden by the military censorship. See ‘O priostanovke “Kievlianina” i areste V. V. Shul’gina’, RV, 1 September 1917, 4. ³⁰⁴ P. N., ‘Immunitet parlamentskikh otchetov’, RS, 9 November 1916, 1. ³⁰⁵ ‘Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Zasedanie 19-go noiabria’, RS, 20 November 1916, 2. ³⁰⁶ Ivanov, Poslednie zashchtniki, 128–40.

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three months already showed him to have become a revolutionary orator, not a parliamentarian.³⁰⁷ In a more than symbolic passing of the torch, even the Rightists, painfully aware of their own divisions and inability to sway the mass public, succumbed to the Kerensky fervour that swept the country after February 1917. Early in March, he gave a short but fevered speech to the now unemployed Duma deputies of the Right, who responded with equally fevered applause.³⁰⁸

Conclusion Aleksei Oznobishin spent much of the early Duma period pursuing agriculture on his estate in Grodno province. He held strong views on what he called the ‘criminal chatter and actions of the First and Second anti-State Duma’. He recalled a conversation with a local peasant who had served as a deputy to the First Duma but clearly had not grasped the content of debates, preoccupied only with how much of his daily allowance would be left over for him to buy land. Yet Oznobishin nonetheless stood for election to the Fourth Duma, claiming that he was persuaded to do so by his peasants. Although he refused to engage in any campaigning, he was safely elected in the landowner curia. He always remained a grudging member of parliament, dismayed by the ‘verbal incontinence’ (slovobludie) that accompanied legislative work and by the obstruction of the Left. The patriotic unity briefly established in 1914 was soon corrupted by the temptations of grandstanding oratory. A small number of lawyers and professors possessed the ‘gift of eloquence’ and monopolized debate; the rest were reluctant to speak, accepting the authority of the smooth-tongued minority. The problem was exemplified by the ‘sick’ Kerensky, who ‘spewed out words as if from a machine gun and drenched the stenographers sitting below in a fountain of his poisonous saliva’. But such rhetorical triumphs in the debating chamber could not be repeated in the country at large. In Oznobishin’s experience, peasants were deeply suspicious of people who spoke too much, and after a few years they were routinely referring to Kerensky as a ‘hysterical woman’ (klikusha).³⁰⁹ Perhaps more significant was the fact that more moderate observers also expressed reservations about the practice of parliamentary life in Russia. The Octobrist Shidlovskii recalled being told by an acquaintance who had visited many of the world’s parliaments but did not speak a word of Russian that nowhere ³⁰⁷ As Boris Kolonitskii notes, these speeches were largely prohibited from publication in the press in late 1916, and indeed Kerensky expected to be arrested for them, but they were swiftly printed after the February Revolution and served as a useful tool for Kerensky to establish his revolutionary credentials. Kolonitskii, ‘Tovarishch Kerenskii’: Antimonarkhicheskaia revoliutsiia i formirovanie kul’ta ‘vozhdia naroda’ mart-iiun’ 1917 goda (Moscow, 2017), 21, 84–5. ³⁰⁸ Ivanov, Poslednie zashchitniki, 154. ³⁰⁹ A. A. Oznobishin, Vospominaniia chlena IV-i Gosudarstvennoi dumy (Paris, 1927), 191–2, 195, 197–9, 206–10.

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did orators speak with such fluency as in Russia—which, for Shidlovskii, was evidence less of Russians’ facility as speakers than of their profligate attitude to time.³¹⁰ The zemstvo activist M. V. Golitsyn, a constitutionalist in his politics, had misgivings after attending a couple of debates in the Second Duma. Although impressed by the grandeur of the venue and by the performances of Rodichev and Maklakov, he found other parts of the proceedings disappointing: in essence I thought that people were talking too much, and long and empty speeches were only holding up the passing of one or other bill; it was as if every member of the Duma wanted to make an impression on his electorate or wanted his speech to get into the newspapers, and this inappropriate vanity led to the Duma becoming that talking-shop that was so successfully attacked by its enemies.³¹¹

Even Vasilii Maklakov, a star speaker for the Kadets, was disenchanted by the time he came to write his memoirs: ‘Was there superior eloquence, revelation of national understanding, profound thinking? Eloquence perhaps, but parliament is not an oratorical tournament and eloquence is generally of little worth, particularly when the judge is a large gathering and the measure is its applause.’³¹² It is, then, easy to succumb to despondency when reviewing the performance of the four convocations of the imperial State Duma. But we should remember that all four of the authors quoted above were writing with the disadvantage of hindsight—specifically, in the knowledge that the Duma had failed to forestall the seizure of power by a regime they abhorred. Whether or not we regard the Duma as a positive factor in Russia’s political development, it had brought about something close to a transformation of Russian political culture. Its legislative fruits and constitutional standing were not as miserable as many contemporaries and subsequent commentators imagined. Especially during the life of the Third Duma, the uncivil and prolix plenary sittings belied the amount of purposeful activity that went on in the committees, whose members rarely spoke for effect; they also obscured the extent of informal and semi-formal interaction between the legislature and the executive.³¹³ Nor should we overlook the impact and significance of those ill-tempered plenary sittings. Precisely because it was so often undermined by the government and the Emperor’s unbending belief in his autocratic prerogatives, the Duma was at least as much a political theatre as a sober lawmaking institution. This was especially true in its first two iterations, when the novelty of parliamentary life was still vivid, party discipline was nonexistent in large sections of the chamber, and the leftist contingent was at its most

³¹⁰ Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 2: 50. ³¹¹ Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia, 376. ³¹² Maklakov, The First State Duma, 97. ³¹³ Such is the main argument of Solov’ev, Zakonodatel’naia i ispolnitel’naia vlast’ v Rossii.

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numerous. But the Tauride Palace remained a stage set even after 1907: the evident weakness of Russia’s constitutional order after Stolypin’s coup of June 1907 only strengthened its performative dimension for the small but vocal contingent of deputies who felt themselves to be speaking for the sections of the population so drastically disenfranchised by the new electoral legislation. Even when the authorities exercised editorial control over oppositional discourse, it still caused them intense discomfort: in his testimony to the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the Provisional Government in July 1917, the chief of police, Beletskii, admitted that he found it hard to stomach the coruscating speeches of his own agent Malinovskii.³¹⁴ The Duma had served as a rhetorical laboratory for politicians of all hues, and their experiments had yielded undeniable results: a great distance had been travelled from the Kadet Duma of 1906 to the fully mobilized Duma of Miliukov, Purishkevich, and Kerensky in 1916. The Duma had served as an effective means of political communication, through the published transcripts and reams of accompanying commentary. It had also provided a conduit and a model for political participation, as the boundaries between parliamentary and extraparliamentary realms dissolved. The principle had now been established that all groups in the empire could have a voice, even if they were shouted down. Thanks to the Duma, socialists, right-wingers, liberals, peasants, and churchmen had tested and refined their notions of how to ‘do’ politics. They would take this knowledge with them into the following revolutionary period of discursive combat.

³¹⁴ B. I. Kaptelov, I. S. Rozental’, and V. V. Shelokhaev (eds), Delo provokatora Malinovskogo (Moscow, 1992), 113–14. In practice, Beletskii was able to amend Malinovskii’s speeches only to a limited extent, given the importance of avoiding suspicion and Malinovskii’s own stubbornness.

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6 Revolutionary Talk, 1917–18 Well before February 1917 it had become clear that communication was one of the greatest weaknesses of the tsarist regime. In 1916, public opinion was swirling with conspiracy theories and scurrilous rumours, while the Emperor’s attempt to place himself at the centre of the narrative by assuming supreme command in 1915 had backfired horribly.¹ Those contending for authority after Nicholas’s abdication were acutely conscious of the rhetorical imperative and eager to get their message across; the dire consequences of failure were only too clear from recent Romanov experience. The problem, as at Russia’s earlier moment of revolutionary cacophony in 1905, was that everyone was talking at once—to audiences that were both volatile and unknowable. This ‘talking’, moreover, was not just metaphorical. Posters, newspapers, rituals, and symbols played an enormous part in the revolutionary culture of 1917, but they often were supplemented by, even depended on, the spoken word. In the revolution, as we have seen so often in the preceding decades of Russian history, spoken and printed word existed in a symbiotic relationship: most often speech provided emotional impact, while print provided reach. But in revolutionary conditions speech might also prove the most effective form of dissemination: distribution networks were collapsing, newspapers might take weeks to arrive, and a large part of the audience remained only weakly literate. As Roger Pethybridge suggested half a century ago in what remains the most insightful study of communications in 1917, ‘[i]n many ways it could be argued that the spoken rather than the written word was more influential as an instrument of propaganda in 1917’. The Russian Revolution was on the one hand dependent on modern, distance-conquering communication technology: Bolshevism could never have spread so fast without the telegraph. Yet, on the other hand, telegrams were the starting point rather than the end of the transfer of information and ideas: the dry content of print needed to be amplified for the benefit of the immediate audience—and that often meant that it had to be vocalized. Newspaper offices coordinated ‘oral agitation, political circles, posters and slogans on a grand scale which went far beyond the limited bounds of the printed words’. Slogans themselves, in Pethybridge’s felicitous phrase, were ‘frozen oratory’, standing ‘halfway between the spoken and the written word, acting as shorthand signs to sum up a ¹ On the Emperor’s wartime public relations offensive and its failure, see Boris Kolonitskii, ‘Tragicheskaia erotika’: Obrazy imperatorskoi sem’i v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 2010). How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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wider concept’.² As two more recent historians note, communication was exceptionally protean in 1917, and words and symbols moved freely from one venue and medium to another. The stakes were high: Flexibility was a cardinal advantage in this symbolic battle: the party whose political language was able to accommodate the greatest number of different idioms and dialects, and yet unite them all in a common understanding which had real significance for people’s daily lives, was likely to attract the most support and dominate the revolutionary discourse.³

Trotsky’s famous agitation train was a prime example of the multi-media character of the Russian Revolution: formed in August 1918, this vehicle completed thirty-six trips and more than 100,000 versts over the course of the civil war; it distributed tens of thousands of copies of Bolshevik newspapers and kept up a vigorous correspondence by radio telegraph; but it also brought the most charismatic voice of the revolution direct to the local audience.⁴ Political parties and movements of various hues understood that propaganda had a much better chance of success if it spoke directly to the concerns of its audience. The best way of making the necessary adjustments—of turning political programmes into the currency of grass-roots communication—was to address people face to face. This was especially true in the village, where revolutionary agitators had the opportunity to re-enact the ‘Going to the People’ movement under conditions vastly more favourable than those of the 1870s: the tsarist police was gone, and the appetite of the rural population for news and interpretation of political developments was enormous. Zemstvos and public committees sent out speakers to spread the word of revolution. Urban socialists sent factory workers to the villages as well as professional agitators.⁵ The task was still not easy: the local intelligentsia members who constituted the core of this mass communication drive were always at risk of speaking over the heads of their audience. Advice literature on how to talk to peasants (by breaking big political questions down into examples they would understand, and by avoiding complex language) was duly produced, but the agitators of 1917 evidently did very little to shift the fundamental peasant assumption that resolutions passed by their own assemblies had the force of law.⁶ Content was likely to be garbled as it was disseminated further: ² Roger Pethybridge, The Spread of the Russian Revolution: Essays on 1917 (London, 1972), 140–1, 148, 151. ³ Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999), 2. ⁴ N. S. Tarkhova, ‘Trotsky’s Train: An Unknown Page in the History of the Civil War’, in T. Brotherstone and P. Dukes (eds), The Trotsky Reappraisal (Edinburgh, 1992), 27–40. ⁵ On Bolshevik efforts to propagandize in this way, see Pethybridge, The Spread of the Russian Revolution, 165–8; on the ineffective lecture campaign of the Provisional Government, see ibid., 146–7. ⁶ Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 131–7, 147.

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rumours spread like lightning at this fast-changing moment where reliable sources of information were at a premium.⁷ As another historian of the revolutionary era puts it: Almost everyone had their own plot line, their own story to share or tell anew. In the half-literate society of revolutionary Russia, most people first received the latest news and political ideology not as an informed reading public but as whispering crowds, passing on bits and pieces of information with their own creative twists and not a little confusion.

This was a daunting situation for party activists, but for those who managed somehow to channel the swirling torrent of talk, the rewards were great; eventually, the Bolsheviks would selectively adopt the rumours of 1917 as ‘the first draft of history’.⁸ The revolutionary moment was almost by definition a time when the would-be shapers of minds did not have things all their own way: ‘the people’, however they might be construed, were not listening as they were supposed to, and were talking back. The new freedoms of speech and assembly were the most visible changes enacted by the February Revolution, and ordinary people were determined to make use of them. An adolescent in Ukraine at the outbreak of revolution, Viktor Kravchenko later recalled February and its aftermath as endless spectacle and commotion: ‘Demonstrations, banners, cheering, flaring angers, occasional shooting—and above it all, enveloping it, almost smothering it all, there was talk, talk, talk. Words pent up for centuries broke through in passionate oratory; foolish and inspired, high-pitched and vengeful oratory.’ The speech had a spontaneous and elemental character: ‘Platforms grew on the main squares. Speakers followed one another in a loud procession. Men and women who had never spoken above a timid whisper now felt the urge to scream, preach, scold and declaim.’ Kravchenko was overwhelmed by the sight of his own father ‘transfigured’ when addressing a crowd.⁹ A contemporary how-to book on the conduct of meetings suggested the extent to which new groups of people were being drawn into a culture of public deliberation. The venues were no longer custom-built as in courtrooms and assembly halls. Sometimes meetings had to be held outdoors, in which case it was worth having speakers stand in front of a building or wooded area so that their voices carried. If the meeting was held indoors, there should be a raised platform and a surface to rest on (ideally a lectern); glasses of water should be ⁷ Pethybridge, The Spread of the Russian Revolution, 170–5. ⁸ Michael G. Smith, ‘Anatomy of a Rumour: Murder Scandal, the Musavat Party and Narratives of the Russian Revolution in Baku, 1917–20’, JCH, 36 (2001): 221–2, 239. ⁹ Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (London, 1947), 20–1.

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placed elsewhere so as to avoid accidents. Representatives of the press should be given good seats near the presidium so as to let them observe the audience. The chairman of the meeting should not abuse his powers by delivering speeches on his own account. Audience members should refrain from leaving the hall during a speech, as this undermined the authority of proceedings, and disapproval of a speech should be expressed with civility. Speakers, especially those little practised in the arts of oratory, should not strive for effect; it was best to keep speeches short and direct, and to remember that even a six-minute speech to an audience of 100 consumed 600 person-minutes. Reading from a text was strongly discouraged, as this was sure to have a deadening effect on listeners. We can safely assume that this book, like most works of advice literature, needs to be read against the grain: it tells us more about the absence of norms of civil and rational deliberation than about their successful acquisition. Nonetheless, it does suggest just how widely the revolutionary era was bestowing the role of orator—so widely that it was almost impossible not to believe in the book’s core message that good orators were made, not born.¹⁰ The underlying theme of advice literature on the subject was that speech was now to be a part of citizenship. Readers were given careful advice on how to prepare for speeches and instructed to be economical and stick to a single point. But there was also the perennial rhetorical matter of ethos and pathos. One author instructed that ‘the orator needs to be surrounded by a kind of aura. He should be decent, courteous, have conviction, and be sincere and certain of himself ’.¹¹ Another hailed the freedom of assembly that was a cardinal achievement of the February Revolution: ‘now all Russian citizens are free to gather wherever and whenever they like on the sole condition that they do not interfere with other people, do not constrain their freedom.’ Speakers should make full use of their freedom, but also take responsibility for it, making sure that they did not ‘violate the equal rights of other people or encroach on their freedom by their actions’.¹² But such well-meaning advice was soon sounding rather oldfashioned. Other works acknowledged that public speaking had now become a far more combative activity: ‘the orator should be aware that during his speech he is effectively engaged in struggle with his listeners.’ He should expect not a respectful and decorous audience but a ‘crowd’, and anyone intimidated by that fact should apply willpower or use the ‘mechanical’ technique of a dousing in cold water, a rub-down with towels, and breathing exercises.¹³ Nor should speakers

¹⁰ N. I. Faleev, Kak organizvovat’ i vesti sobraniia? (Petrograd, 1917), 3–5, 9, 31–2, 34–5, 38. ¹¹ A. Shchegol’kov, Ob oratorskom iskusstve: Chto nuzhno znat’ nachinaiushchemu oratoru dlia umeniia proiznosit’ rechi sudebnye, dukhovnye, politicheskie i salonnye (Petrograd, 1917), quotation on 45. ¹² M. L’vov, Narodnye sobraniia, kak ikh ustraivat’ i vesti (Moscow, 1917), 3, 16. ¹³ A. Iarov, Oratorskoe iskusstvo (Kak sdelat’sia khoroshim oratorom) (Moscow, 1917), 5, 15–16.

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neglect intellectual content: they needed to be ready with a clear thesis and means of rebutting objections.¹⁴ Contrary to the well-established stereotype of the ‘talking-shop’, the oratory of early 1917 was immensely consequential. As one historian writes of provincial Russia, the February Revolution threw up a simple and immediate question: ‘whose story to believe?’ The answer depended on the environment in which the news was received. In large towns with lively local politics such as Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan, the news of the end of the old order was vigorously elaborated in makeshift meetings. In due course, even the Church, traditionally the main conduit of official news to the village, played its part.¹⁵ The nature of the ‘new’ order might remain unclear, but its birth was accompanied by real pathos and a new kind of urban politics where existing elites in the municipal duma and the zemstvo assembly struggled, with wildly varying degrees of success, to steer public discourse. In Smolensk, for example, class very soon emerged as the main idiom of politics, and in March and April workers were able to attend countless meetings as well as attending cultural events and joining clubs and political parties.¹⁶ Able orators could rapidly make a name for themselves. Aleksandr Giunter, a youthful professor of law and Menshevik, became a regional celebrity as he lectured in the southern provinces from Kharkov to the North Caucasus. A large part of the legal profession had already been in revolutionary mode for two decades and made the transition to revolutionary discourse with aplomb.¹⁷ The population of the capital was ostensibly closer to the source of reliable information, but here the competition for the public’s ear was especially intense. At the end of March, Vladimir Voitinskii, a Bolshevik-turned-Menshevik recently returned from Irkutsk, found Petrograd consumed by political rallies—whether of workers in the factories, soldiers in the garrisons, or the ‘bourgeois intelligentsia’ at ‘concert rallies’ in theatres. At first glance, he recalled, all this activity seemed a sheer ‘waste of time’. But in fact these events were important for defining the new political landscape: ‘social forces were taking shape that were required to resolve endlessly complex issues.’ Workers, he found, were generally optimistic but filled with a ‘sense of responsibility’; ‘maximalist’ demands were barely heard. The mood among Petrograd soldiers was darker and more resistant to authority. The political ‘concerts’, by contrast, offered a rather incongruous mix of musical

¹⁴ S. Povarnin, Spor: O teorii i praktike spora (Petrograd, 1918). ¹⁵ Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge, 2007), chap. 2. ¹⁶ Michael C. Hickey, ‘Discourses of Public Identity and Liberalism in the February Revolution: Smolensk, Spring 1917’, RR, 55 (1996): 635–6. ¹⁷ E. Fedorova (ed.), Bezymiannoe pokolenie: Zapiski pravoveda, advokata, byvshego men’shevika Aleksandra Giuntera (Moscow, 2004).

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numbers and speeches, where opera singers and ballerinas rubbed shoulders with revolutionaries and ministers in the Provisional Government.¹⁸

Authority as Rhetoric: The Kerensky Moment, March–May All the while, a momentous battle for power was taking place; here too communication was everything, and the spoken word was one of its main instruments. The would-be party orators of 1917 came from two main camps: there were those who had earned their stripes in the Duma or the politicized courtroom and those who had been in cold storage for much of the preceding period, whether in exile, in emigration, or in forced inactivity at home. Both of these groups had to face an intimidating popular audience, whether in various makeshift venues, on the street, or on the front line. Many of them remembered from Russia’s previous revolution just how difficult a task lay before them. Iulii Martov had narrowly averted a fiasco when he spoke at a mass meeting in St Petersburg in early 1906: the underground intellectual, who suffered from a throat condition, was no orator and had to be saved by an intervention from the presidium.¹⁹ Existing institutions fell by the wayside. The State Duma, the main potential source of institutional continuity, was rapidly sidelined, and would remain in limbo for much of 1917. It was soon physically ejected from the Tauride Palace by the Soviet, while the Provisional Government had usurped its legislative prerogatives.²⁰ Various private meetings of members of the Duma were convened, and there was some talk in July of reviving the tsarist-era legislature. But the State Conference in Moscow in mid-August turned out to be the last event where the Duma had formal representation—and even there, it was only late in the evening of the third day that Mikhail Rodzianko, the Russian parliament’s last president, was allowed to read a declaration on behalf of the Duma, which was promptly cut off because time had run out. (Kerensky as chairman gave him special dispensation to continue, but Rodzianko declined the offer.) Any final illusions were shattered the following month when the Duma was not granted representation at the Democratic Conference.²¹ The Duma might have lost its role, but the Tauride Palace remained at the centre of political events. As Aleksandr Bublikov, a Progressist deputy from Perm in the Fourth Duma and transport commissar in the Provisional Government, ¹⁸ V. S. Voitinskii, 1917-i. God pobed i porazhenii (Benson, VT, 1990), 34–7. A similarly dismissive view of the concert-rallies—from a very different political standpoint—can be found in N. Karabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli (Berlin, 1921), 2: 150–1. ¹⁹ Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge, 1967), 111–12. ²⁰ On the ejection, see S. I. Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia (Berlin, 1923), 2: 55. ²¹ I. K. Kir’ianov, Rossiiskie parlamentarii nachala XX veka: Novye politiki v novom politicheskom prostranstve (Perm’, 2006), 192, 195–7.

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reported in his instant memoir of events, the home of the legislature was immediately flooded with people, and the ensuing rally (miting) would last several days and nights. In Bublikov’s view, even if there was some turnover in the cast of speakers, this was merely confirmation of a familiar vice of the Russian intelligentsia: a proclivity to endless talk at the expense of action. The State Duma was too busy speechifying to seize power.²² The nationalist Vasilii Shul’gin was even less favourably impressed by the ‘unending public meeting’ in the former home of the tsarist parliament and the ‘furious quantity of people from countless institutions, organizations, societies, unions of I know not what, who all wanted to see Rodzianko and in his person greet the State Duma and the new government’. In Shul’gin’s sardonic expression, this was ‘something two-headed, but certainly not an eagle’.²³ But the impression of fruitless chatter was rather misleading. For one thing, some extremely purposeful talk was going on in a private meeting of leading Duma members on 27 February that culminated a few days later in the creation of a new, albeit shaky government. For another, the distinction between talk and deed was not at all clear at this volatile revolutionary moment—a point amply demonstrated by the leading political figure of the first six months of the Russian Revolution, Aleksandr Kerensky. The Trudovik firebrand of the Fourth Duma wasted little time in taking over Rodzianko’s chairman’s functions. He provided a unique channel of communication between street and Tauride Palace, quickly becoming the ‘idol of the crowd’, this at a time when most orators—of Left as well as of Right—were intimidated by the unpredictable ‘masses’.²⁴ As one of his listeners later observed, Kerensky’s ‘special characteristic as an orator had been, from way back, an extreme sensitivity to the mood of his audience. He did not control his listeners, it was rather the listeners who controlled him.’²⁵ Ever since Kerensky had first come to prominence, he had embodied the melodramatic sensibility of the age, where emotional excess was not only tolerated but valued for its own sake; he was the Shaliapin of politics.²⁶ In early 1917 it proved that his ethos of affect worked even better in a full-blooded revolution. At times, it seemed that the authority of the Provisional Government rested purely on Kerensky’s personal charisma.²⁷

²² A. A. Bublikov, Russkaia revoliutsiia (ee nachalo, arest Tsaria, perspektivy): Vpechatleniia i mysli ochevidtsa i uchastnika (New York, 1918), 18–21. ²³ V. V. Shul’gin, Gody. Dni. 1920 god (Moscow, 1990), 461. ²⁴ Bublikov, Russkaia revoliutsiia, 19. ²⁵ Sergei Mstislavskii, Five Days which Transformed Russia (London, 1988), 64, 67. ²⁶ Anna Fishzon, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (New York, 2013), 189–90. ²⁷ Nikolai Sukhanov, the most detailed chronicler of events in the Tauride Palace, is withering in his overall assessment of Kerensky’s role in 1917, but recognizes his superhuman energy, his headlong commitment, and his ability to get through to the crowd in the critical first days of the revolution. His views carry some weight, as he knew Kerensky quite well from 1913 onwards and observed him at close

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At least to begin with, Kerensky was no rabble-rouser but a politician with a unique political role whose public performances were finely judged to achieve the right effect; even a very close observer of his performances found it impossible to say where the balance lay between passionate sincerity and theatrical effect.²⁸ He straddled the divide—rhetorical as well as institutional—between the Duma constitutionalists of the Provisional Government and the assorted socialists, soldiers, and proletarians of the Soviet. His performed with aplomb at the first big set-piece event for soviet oratory, the All-Russian Conference of Worker and Soldier Deputies, which opened on 29 March with a rousing ritual welcome to Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia: the ‘grandmother of the Russian revolution’ was greeted effusively by Kerensky, who was wasting no opportunity to don the revolutionary mantle. But the political theatre soon gave way to quasiparliamentary procedure. The ensuing speeches followed a simplified version of rules borrowed from the Duma: speeches were limited to thirty minutes, no speaker was able to intervene in a particular debate more than twice (the first time for not more than fifteen minutes, the second time for five), the meeting was to stick to the agenda, and matters of order were to be settled by debate between one speaker on each side (with a time limit of three minutes).²⁹ Kerensky’s achievements in the early phase of the revolution would have been impossible without the celebrity that he was afforded by the media. As early as 28 February, an address he gave to young officers at the Mikhailovskii artillery school was given largely in direct speech with insertions to indicate the warm audience reaction. A few days later came a verbatim account of Kerensky’s speech to the Soviet after he took a post in the Provisional Government, with its famous appeal, ‘Comrades, do you trust me?’; the text was punctuated with mentions of the ‘stormy ovations’ and shouts of approval he elicited.³⁰ Press reports in the early days of March gave the impression almost of a roving microphone, as Kerensky’s movements and utterances were exhaustively described—sometimes three verbatim speeches to three different audiences in the course of one report.³¹ Accounts of his speeches spared no pathos, as Kerensky’s highly charged appeals for his

quarters during the revolution. N. N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 3 vols (Moscow, 1991–2), 1: 66–72. ²⁸ Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 1: 165. Boris Kolonitskii, in his exhaustive study of the public representation of Kerensky from March to June 1917, makes a similar point: Kerensky’s theatricality and emotional ‘sincerity’, much commented on by contemporaries, did not preclude tactical astuteness, especially in the period before May. See Kolonitskii, ‘Tovarishch Kerenskii’: Antimonarkhicheskaia revoliutsiia i formirovanie kul’ta ‘vozhdia naroda’, mart-iiun’ 1917 goda (Moscow, 2017). ²⁹ Stenogram in GARF, f. 6977, op. 1, d. 2. Even the skeptical Sukhanov recognized that proceedings were smoother and more orderly than had been the practice hitherto, referring to the conference as a ‘Soviet parliament’ (Zapiski o revoliutsii, 1: 329). ³⁰ ‘Rech’ A. F. Kerenskogo k iunkeram Mikhailovskogo Artileriiskogo uchilishcha’, Izvestiia, 28 February 1917, 1; ‘Rech’ A. F. Kerenskogo v Sovete Rabochikh Deputatov’, Izvestiia, 2–3 March 1917, 1. ³¹ ‘A. F. Kerenskii v Moskve’, Rech’, 8 March 1917, 4.

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audience’s ‘trust’ were given in full. Take for example the account of his speech to the Petrograd Soviet on 26 March: I have heard that there are rumours among you that I am making concessions to the old government and to persons of the tsar’s family. I have heard that people have appeared in our midst who dare to express distrust of me. I warn everyone [Kerensky raises his voice] who says such things that I will not permit anyone not to trust me and in my person to insult Russian democracy. I ask you either to expel me from your midst or to trust me without reserve. [Stormy applause and shouts of bravo].³²

But the most urgent task lay not in the capital but at the front, where patriotic revolutionary uplift was badly needed to bolster the morale of the troops. A number of now unemployed Duma men took to the front line to give talks soon after the February Revolution. The process was closely observed by Fedor Stepun, an academically trained philosopher, artillery officer, and now head of the political section of the armed forces under the Provisional Government. Although the Duma representatives Gronskii and Demidov were far from revolutionary in their appearance or manner, the front-line audience found their account of events in Petrograd engrossing and even inspiring: the soldiers gave speeches that were clumsily expressed but full of ‘an almost sacred exaltation’.³³ The impact of these Duma men may partly be explained by post-revolutionary euphoria. Stepun was later embarrassed to recall his own rousing front-line speeches calling for vigorous prosecution of the war, a cause he knew had to be abandoned in favour of safeguarding the integrity of the revolutionary state (‘revolutionary defencism’). Soon afterwards, Stepun had the opportunity to test the climate of opinion in the capital, when he travelled to Petrograd as part of a delegation from the south-western front. There he witnessed the political phenomenon of Kerensky, who received the army delegations. Kerensky had ‘militarized’ his whole image, growing fast into his role (see Figure 6.1). In his response to the soldiers, he spoke ‘loudly and firmly, breaking up and emphasizing the words in his characteristic fashion’, offering a pathos-filled account of the ‘allpeople’s, peaceful and democratic character of the “great Russian revolution” ’.³⁴ Whatever the inconsistencies of content in his speeches, his image remained intact: the aura of citizen soldier was combined with near-hysterical pathos and a proclivity for fainting fits; like a latter-day saint, Kerensky offered physical

³² ‘A. F. Kerenskii v Sovete rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov’, Rech’, 28 March 1917, 7. ³³ Fedor Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia (London, 1990), 14–17. ³⁴ Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 18–19, 34–5.

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Figure 6.1. Kerensky exhorts a regiment. Source: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Kerensky_exhorting_a_regiment_LCCN2014705153.tif

suffering as a token of spiritual grandeur.³⁵ The British nurse Florence Farmborough was treated to a front-row seat at one of Kerensky’s addresses to the troops in Galicia in May 1917. Arriving by car to a makeshift hillside arena where perhaps 12,000 soldiers had gathered, Kerensky made a huge impression despite his unremarkable appearance and unimposing build: for the twenty minutes he spoke, ‘his eloquence literally hypnotised us’, and a ‘great, mystical Freedom which had come to Russia’ became a rallying cry for battle. After twenty minutes, Kerensky got back in his car and was seen off by a ‘hysterical outburst of patriotic fervour’.³⁶ The newspapers brought the experience of Kerensky in action to the home front, with verbatim reports of his speeches and accounts of the ecstatic reaction they elicited.³⁷ Kerensky also brought off a sweeping military³⁵ The theme of Kerensky’s sickliness and physical exhaustion as a token of his revolutionary purity, heroism, and self-sacrifice is well developed in Kolonitskii, ‘Tovarishch Kerenskii’, 196–209. ³⁶ Florence Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front: A Diary 1914–18 (London, 1974), 268–70. ³⁷ ‘A. F. Kerenskii na fronte’, Rech’, 16 May 1917, 3.

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style arrival and departure in the Petrograd Soviet after he returned from the front; even a few Bolsheviks were reported as applauding him.³⁸ Kerensky was badly needed: on the south-western front, Bolshevik agitation for immediate peace was palpably gaining purchase, and speakers on the government side, such as Stepun, needed a fine sense of crowd psychology to get through to the soldiers.³⁹ Witnesses from the socialist camp had always been more sceptical about the impact of patriotic oratory on the troops. At a conference of the south-western front in early April, more than a thousand delegates were crammed into the city theatre in Minsk to hear speeches from prominent Duma figures such as Rodzianko and Rodichev. While the newspapers dutifully recorded that their speeches received ecstatic applause, the eye-witness Nikolai Sukhanov found that their impact was only fleeting, and the real political action was taking place at the improvised rallies in the surrounding streets and open spaces; at best, this was the last hurrah of the ‘Demosthenes of the plutocracy’.⁴⁰ At the congress of the southwestern front in Kamenets-Podol’sk a month later, the far Left was in a position to make a more direct challenge to government authority. The redoubtable N. V. Krylenko, who had first earned his stripes heckling the Kadets in 1906, delivered a combative speech on the first day of the congress on 7 May, a crucial occasion for mobilizing the troops. But Kerensky, who was riding high at this moment, having just assumed the post of Minister of War, delivered a brilliant and effective riposte the next day. Dressed in the black military-style tunic that was already an unvarying part of his image, and with gestures even more urgent and commanding than usual, he managed to convey a ‘vibrant, all-reconciling faith in Russia, in the revolution, in a just world and even in the possibility of an offensive’. Delivered in a voice that rose at times to the shrill pitch that was another of his trademarks, the speech evidently had a colossal effect on the mood of the congress. There were even rumours that it had brought Krylenko to tears; at any rate, it induced a significant rhetorical concession from the Bolshevik, who in a later speech reiterated his opposition to the offensive but declared he would be first over the top if Kerensky ordered it.⁴¹ It was unclear how lasting a trace such performances left in the morale of the troops: in the view of the commander of the all-important Petrograd military district, Kerensky was overly concerned with oratorical effect and his own burgeoning cult of personality and lacked the common touch with soldiers; he was too speedy and perfunctory at military parades.⁴² But the immediate galvanizing effect of his performances in May was very widely attested. A profile by a journalist who accompanied Kerensky on one ³⁸ ‘V Sovete rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov’, Rech’, 24 May 1917, 4. ³⁹ Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 67–72. ⁴⁰ Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 2: 33. ⁴¹ Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 72–7; V. B. Stankevich, Vospominaniia. 1914–1919 (Moscow, 1994), 67–70. ⁴² P. A. Polovtsov, Dni zatmeniia (Zapiski Glavnokomanduiushchego Voiskami Petrogradskogo Voennogo Okruga generala P. A. Polovtsova v 1917 godu) (Moscow, 1999), 100–1.

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of his tours of the front described the impact of his ‘sharp metallic voice’ and extraordinarily expressive manner, which allowed him to transmit a ‘psychic infection’ to the mass audience even though his language was ostensibly too abstract and peppered with foreign terms to be that of a true demagogue.⁴³

The Soviet On his visit to the capital from the south-western front, Stepun also had the opportunity to acquaint himself at first hand with the most ambitious new political assembly of the revolutionary moment: the Petrograd Soviet, which met in incongruous proximity to the Provisional Government in the very same Tauride Palace. The Soviet filled the parliamentary vacuum, both in its venue and its proceedings, although it soon proved itself, in the words of a modern historian, an unworkable ‘hybrid of both representative and direct democracy’, and its real business shifted to the Executive Committee.⁴⁴ Stepun found the Soviet to be a ‘formless and cumbersome institution’ whose main activity was endless speech-making; the only difference from the Duma was that the talk was even more incessant and even less civil. It was as if there were no partition between the Soviet and the street meetings outside: day and night, hoarse orators shouted and gesticulated from the podium. The leading figures of the socialist parties varied considerably in their stature and oratorical abilities. Tsereteli was an impressive figure, and had even managed to bring some order to the Soviet in his role as chairman. Martov had intelligence and integrity but was not really an orator or a practical politician, while Chernov had some theatrical talent and showed few scruples in his efforts to win over the audience. Most of the Marxists spoke in a thick fog of ideological ‘jargon’ with a relentless edge of embittered hostility towards their opponents. Apart from Tsereteli, only Lenin and Trotsky were figures of any significance.⁴⁵ V. B. Stankevich, an army officer and now Trudovik representative on the Executive Committee, found work in the Soviet to be chaotic and overwhelming, with endless soldier delegations demanding to be heard in the plenary sessions. He observed at close quarters the leading Mensheviks Nikolai Chkheidze and Fedor Dan, as well as the remarkably industrious Iu. M. Steklov, who had the crucial role of editing Izvestiia, the bulletin of

⁴³ P. Arzub’ev, ‘S A. F. Kerenskim po severnomu frontu’, Rech’, 31 May 1917, 2. ⁴⁴ Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (London, 2014), 181. Sukhanov also recognized the chaotic procedures of the Soviet in the early days, when it had no permanent presidium or effective chairman. In due course, procedures became tighter, with only speakers appointed by the various ‘fractions’ given the floor. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 1: 221, 224. ⁴⁵ Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 41, 43, 51–5.

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the Soviet.⁴⁶ But Stankevich also found that Tsereteli surpassed them all: he was ‘full of burning passion, but always even, elegantly restrained and calm’. Although he came late to the Soviet and was hampered by ill health and exhaustion, within three days Tsereteli had established himself as the leading presence in the Soviet.⁴⁷ Tsereteli was one of the few politicians in 1917 capable of drawing sympathy from both Left and Centre, just as his calibre as a speaker and a politician had been acknowledged even by Kadets in the Second Duma.⁴⁸ In March he was able to take up where he had left off in 1907. Finding himself in Irkutsk at the time of the revolution, he threw himself into the cause, chairing the first big political meeting in the town and giving an impressive speech to soldiers who showed signs of being ready to mutiny.⁴⁹ In mid-March he travelled to Petrograd along with other exiled members of the Second Duma, stopping frequently to give speeches along the way. After presenting himself to the Petrograd Soviet on 19 March, his ‘revolutionary defencism’ and commitment to bring Soviet and Provisional Government closer soon won over the Executive Committee. He then achieved a notable success at the All-Russian Conference of Soviets in late March and early April, acting ‘more like the leader of the parliamentary fraction of a coalition partner than the leader of the opposition’.⁵⁰ Tsereteli’s ability to combine consensus-building and revolutionary fervour meant that few contemporaries had an altogether bad word to say about him.⁵¹ His elegant, Georgian-accented Russian, as well as his aura of integrity and conviction, made him an effective figurehead of the Soviet in the first half of the year.⁵² Like Kerensky, he served as a rhetorical bridge, cooling passions on Left and Right alike: at the height of his influence in March and April, he rebutted Bolshevik attacks on the Provisional Government but also defended the Soviet against the charge that it was undermining the war effort.⁵³ There was a distinct resemblance between Stepun’s account of the Petrograd Soviet and earlier negative depictions of the Duma ‘talking-shop’. The parallels ⁴⁶ For a modern attempt to distil ‘minutes’ of the Soviet meetings from a combination of newspaper reports and scribbled notes by the secretary, see P. V. Volobuev (ed.), Petrogradskii sovet rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov v 1917 godu (Leningrad, 1991). ⁴⁷ Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 40–1, 44–5. Sukhanov, who disliked Tsereteli and was on the sharp end of his rhetoric, acknowledged his immediate impact in March 1917. With one speech, Tsereteli transformed the mood of the Soviet and moved it towards a far more ‘defencist’ position (Zapiski o revoliutsii, 1: 309–10). ⁴⁸ Grigorii Aronson, Rossiia v epokhu revoliutsii (New York, 1966), 25–6. ⁴⁹ Voitinskii, 1917-i, 11, 17. ⁵⁰ W. H. Roobol, Tsereteli—A Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography (The Hague, 1976), 83, 86–7, 91–101, 107. ⁵¹ An exception was Sukhanov, who still acknowledged his qualities as an orator (Zapiski o revoliutsii, 1: 329). ⁵² On Tsereteli’s manner as a speaker, see Aronson, Rossiia v epokhu revoliutsii, 26–7. ⁵³ For a sample of Tsereteli’s responses to the Left, see the account of his ‘brilliant’ speech to the congress of soviet delegates on 31 March, in ‘S”ezd delegatov sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov’, Rech’, 1 April 1917, 5. For a sample response to the Right, see his riposte to Vasilii Shul’gin at a ceremonial gathering of former Duma deputies in late April: ‘Torzhestvennoe sobranie chlenov Gos. Dumy vsekh sozyvov’, Rech’, 28 April 1917, 2.

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could be taken even further. Soviets were springing up across the empire and providing a vigorous training in democratic politics for the sections of society that had been disempowered by the Duma’s electoral legislation. In Israel Getzler’s view, these were ‘quasi-parliamentary bodies’, with (for the time) remarkably coherent internal procedures and open and vigorous election campaigns. If party allegiance soon took over from class or curia as the main source of structuring division, that was only to be expected—and was in fact to be welcomed, at least while there remained more parties than one.⁵⁴ Soviets were also spreading in rural Russia, and beginning to coordinate at a national level. In mid-April, representatives of peasant soviets from twenty-seven provinces, most of them SRs by party affiliation, came together for a conference in the Tauride Palace. The first All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies ran for almost the whole of May in the House of the People on Kronverskii Prospekt on the Petrograd Side; 561 delegates were present on the opening day, but at its peak the attendance was more than double that number. Conflict broke out at the very start: a Bolshevik delegate fiercely rejected the policy of continuing the war, and when the SRs threatened to throw him out, he took out his revolver. In general, however, the SR leaders of intelligentsia background managed to set the tone. The articulate and polished Nikolai Avksent’ev opened by calling the congress the first free peasant ‘parliament’, and this word, which would become an object of parody later in the year, was taken up by other delegates. Among them was Viktor Chernov, who managed to introduce some moderation into the debate on the land question.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks in the person of Grigorii Zinov’ev strove energetically to arouse anti-war sentiment. The Kadet paper Rech’ did not dignify his speech to the congress with a full transcript, but summarized his warning of the nefarious intentions of the capitalist powers France and Britain and described the pandemonium it apparently unleashed in the hall: ‘a terrible noise bursts out and lasts several minutes, shouts of “Get out!”, “Shame on you”, drown out occasional applause from a part of the meeting.’⁵⁶ Even under Tsereteli’s able stewardship, the Soviet was struggling to keep popular passions in check or to halt the polarization of political life. Lenin’s return in early April shunted Bolshevism to the left, while tensions grew between the Soviet and the Provisional Government. On 20 April, Miliukov’s diplomatic note to the Allies on the continuation of the war leaked out and provoked mass demonstrations; in vain did Chkheidze deliver a speech from a car telling the protesters to go home. The ensuing meeting of the Soviet was chaotic and heated, ⁵⁴ Israel Getzler, ‘Soviets as Agents of Democratisation’, in Edith Rogovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel, and Baruch Knei-Paz (eds), Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge, 1992), 17–33. ⁵⁵ V. M. Lavrov, ‘Krest'ianskii parlament’ Rossii (Vserossiiskie s”ezdy sovetov krest’ianskikh deputatov v 1917–1918 godakh) (Moscow, 1996), 20, 28–9, 36–8, 44–5. ⁵⁶ ‘Krest’ianskii s”ezd’, Rech’, 12 May 1917, 4.

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and it even seemed that the violence on the streets might be about to move inside to the assembly hall of the Cadet Corps where the Soviet had convened. It was Tsereteli, with a gesture of the hand, and then Matvei Skobelev, with a dictated set of resolutions, who restored order.⁵⁷ But Tsereteli was finding it increasingly difficult to compete rhetorically with the more flamboyant Kerensky and the more intransigent Lenin and Zinov’ev.⁵⁸ In May, the meetings came thick and fast. Alongside accounts of the peasant congress, newspaper readers were kept informed of congresses of tanners and of post and telegraph workers, a conference of the Menshevik Party, even a heated meeting of the Petrograd city duma.⁵⁹ One of the most vigorously conducted and widely reported events was the congress of officers’ deputies, whose debates (reproduced partly verbatim) often became heated as delegates discussed the state of the war effort and its relationship to the domestic political struggle.⁶⁰ With so much public speaking going on, stenographers’ services were in demand as never before. Before the revolution there had been no more than ten major congresses per year in Moscow; in 1917 and afterwards, there could be as many as twenty per month. The political stakes were high: delegates had a great deal to say, often at high speed in poor acoustic conditions, yet it all had to be taken down. The transcribers were evidently working every bit as hard as the speakers: in 1917, Russia had only 100 registered stenographers, and only thirty-seven had the highest qualification necessary for ‘parliamentary’ work.⁶¹

The Bolshevik Rhetorical Surge In April and May, Zinov’ev and his comrades were not always granted a warm reception when they tried to sway peasants and soldiers to their radical anti-war position, but many contemporaries were struck by how effectively the Bolsheviks were able to get their voice heard despite (or perhaps because of) their lack of preponderance in the formal institutions of ‘Dual Power’. From the beginning, despite their still modest numbers, they had thrown themselves into the street oratory that seemed so haphazard to observers like Stepun. Among the most active Bolshevik speakers was Aleksandra Kollontai, a leading figure in the international women’s movement and devoted Leninite, who in the years after ⁵⁷ Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 59–60. ⁵⁸ For Tsereteli’s own alienated assessment of these politicians, see Tsereteli, Krizis vlasti, 64–70, 96–7, 120–1. ⁵⁹ These examples from Rech’, 12 May 1917. ⁶⁰ For example ‘S”ezd ofitserskikh deputatov’, Rech’, 13 May 1917, 5, where the subject of the Soviet’s relationship to the armed forces caused heated debate. On the deep political divisions among officers in the spring of 1917, see Matthew Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford, 2010). ⁶¹ S. Iudina, ‘Rabota stenografov v Sovetskoi Rossii’, VS, no. 1 (1923): 2–7.

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1908 had been as prominent as any Bolshevik émigré as a speaker at worker meetings and congresses around Europe. Soon after her return to Petrograd in March, Kollontai took herself to the building of the city duma for a meeting in support of women’s rights. On finding that the mood there was hopelessly ‘defencist’, she decided not to waste her time further and headed to the Tauride Palace. Here the mass soldiers’ meetings—both inside the building and on the street—were much more to her taste. She forced her way to the platform and soon sensed that her audience was sympathetic to the core Bolshevik message: ‘An end to the imperialist war!’ Even if the ‘defencist’ camp at this stage held firm, Kollontai relished the struggle and the physical challenge, straining her voice to the limit.⁶² She was by no means the only woman of her party to address mass meetings in 1917: the Bolsheviks, alive to the fact that their core proletarian constituency had become far more female over the course of the war, did as much as anyone to challenge pre-revolutionary constraints on women’s access to the public sphere.⁶³ The Bolsheviks’ rhetorical capacity was soon boosted by their returning leader. Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station late in the evening of 3 April was a notable occasion even before he had opened his mouth: local party members had ensured a rousing turnout, and the welcome committee sent by the Soviet was low-key by comparison. Chkheidze’s ‘glum’ speech of greeting was practically ignored by Lenin, whose reply took a different track entirely. Outside the station he was forced by the crowd to make an impromptu speech, which he delivered from the bonnet of his armoured car. The vehicle then made only slow progress to the Kshesinskaia mansion, because Lenin made speeches at ‘practically every streetcrossing’. He rounded this off with an address from the second-floor balcony of the mansion, by which time he was quite hoarse. Later that night he gave a ‘thunder-like’ speech lasting two hours to a party meeting inside the building.⁶⁴ The main reason we know so much about Lenin’s activities that night is the influential account given by Nikolai Sukhanov, an independent socialist who retained cordial relations with the Bolsheviks for much of 1917. Generations of readers have found Sukhanov the most compelling chronicler of events in Petrograd in 1917, partly because of the attention he paid to oratory that otherwise might have proved ephemeral. Tsereteli, for example, commended Sukhanov for his ‘almost stenographic accuracy’, while Trotsky reproduced some of his own speeches—including the famous ‘rubbish bin of history’ jibe—from the record in Sukhanov’s memoir.⁶⁵ Although Sukhanov’s account played its part in the ⁶² A. M. Kollontai, Iz moei zhizni i raboty (Moscow, 1974), 274. ⁶³ On Bolshevik women’s role as agitators in 1917, see Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge, 1997), 125–30. ⁶⁴ Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 2: 6–9, 11; translation from N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: A Personal Record, trans. Joel Carmichael (Princeton, 1955), 274–6, 280. ⁶⁵ Israel Getzler, Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (Houndmills, 2002), 68.

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mythology of 1917, he was himself no myth-maker, and even his account of the night of 3–4 April gives a sense of Lenin’s distinctive qualities as a speaker— qualities rather different from the image later constructed in the various film versions and the innumerable statues in Soviet cities with Lenin in the pose of an orator, arm outstretched. Sukhanov heard only snatches of Lenin’s speech outside the Finland Station, as he was trapped by the crowd in the doorway. It was entirely characteristic of the Bolshevik leader that he made the strongest impression on Sukhanov for the speech he gave to a closed party meeting later that night. Voitinskii, also present at the Finland Station and the Bolshevik HQ on the night of 3–4 April, found in Lenin a sense of absolute conviction mixed with contempt for his opponents; even those party members who disagreed with his position were inspired by him, and his appeal to workers, to whom he was always more solicitous than to his educated interlocutors, was undeniable.⁶⁶ Lenin had always been at his fiercest in intra-party polemics, and his influence in 1917 was exerted far more in committee meetings than through his occasional sallies on to Kshesinskaia’s balcony; from July to October, the months when the Bolsheviks gained decisive momentum in Petrograd, he was in hiding. Unlike his Menshevik counterpart Tsereteli, Lenin rarely gave speeches, preferring to ‘work silently, searching for points of support for his “line” in surrounding events, catching in the storm-filled air slogans that could become thunderbolts of his will’.⁶⁷ But even in his public performances, he was by no means the conventional rabble-rouser or revolutionary firebrand: in Sukhanov’s description, he was not an orator of the consummate, rounded phrase, or of the luminous image, or of absorbing pathos, or of the pointed witticism, but an orator of enormous impact and power, breaking down complicated systems into the simplest and most generally accessible elements, and hammering, hammering, hammering them into the heads of his audience until he took them captive.⁶⁸

Another observer was struck by Lenin’s calm at the podium amid the tumult around him. He gave the impression of ‘conversing’ rather than delivering a political speech; he had no booming voice and could not pronounce the letter ‘r’. His modest appearance only strengthened the effect: he bore no trace of his origins among Simbirsk gentlefolk, but nor did he have the manner of an intellectual or revolutionary. The fact that he showed ‘no outward signs of demagogy’ only heightened the impression of total conviction as he reeled off his April ‘theses’.⁶⁹ His Bolshevik comrades had a similar sense of Lenin’s break with existing norms of revolutionary rhetoric: when he made his first address to ⁶⁶ Voitinskii, 1917-i, 51–7. ⁶⁷ Voitinskii, 1917-i, 70. ⁶⁸ Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 2: 11; translation from Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 280. ⁶⁹ Aronson, Rossiia v epokhu revoliutsii, 50–1.

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the Petrograd Soviet, Kollontai observed that he ‘did not go to the podium but without haste walked up to the very edge of the stage, as if he wanted to be closer to the deputies and meant to talk to them as to a meeting of political émigrés in Geneva or Paris’. He spoke ‘in an even, calm voice, remarkably simply and clearly’ and reacted with complete equanimity to criticism of his position. Here was the very antithesis of ‘revolutionary phrase-mongers’ like Kerensky and Tsereteli.⁷⁰ As the year wore on, even a Menshevik could appreciate Lenin’s unshowy qualities as an orator: his speech was simple, accessible, and logical.⁷¹ It would appear that Lenin’s rhetorical style had remained constant through the years: in early 1906, at a meeting on Bolshevik tactics in a classroom of the Tenishev Academy, his speech similarly lacked fireworks: it had ‘no images, pathos, long periods, striking quotations’. But it delivered core ideas ‘as if banging nails into the listeners’ heads with repeated hammer blows’. Any impression of monotony was dispelled by Lenin’s absolute self-assurance and scornful treatment of his opponents.⁷² Much closer to received notions of revolutionary eloquence was the most prominent Bolshevik orator of 1917, Lev Trotsky, who arrived a month later than Lenin to the same Finland Station to a similarly rousing reception. This time, however, the welcoming committee was composed of like-minded Bolsheviks, and Trotsky was ready with a speech on ‘the necessity of preparing a second revolution—our own’. He then launched himself into the fray—not just in the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet but in an unremitting ‘whirl of mass meetings’ in factories, schools, and theatres, and simply on the street. He practically held court at the Cirque Moderne, a venue in handy proximity to the Bolshevik headquarters on the Petrograd Side, where the electric connection between speaker and listeners was palpable: Above and around me was a press of elbows, chests, and heads. I spoke from out of a warm cavern of human bodies; whenever I stretched out my hands I would touch someone, and a grateful movement in response would give me to understand that I was not to worry about it, not to break off my speech, but to keep on . . . At times it seemed as if I felt, with my lips, the stern inquisitiveness of this crowd that had become merged into a single whole. Then all the arguments and words thought out in advance would break and recede under the imperative pressure of sympathy, and other words, other arguments, utterly unexpected by

⁷⁰ Kollontai, Iz moei zhizni i raboty, 253–5. ⁷¹ E. V. Gutnova, Perezhitoe (Moscow, 2001), 17 (citing an account by her father, who shared a platform with Lenin in summer or autumn of 1917). ⁷² Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii, 2: 22–3. Lunacharsky gives a similar account of the powerful impression Lenin made (simplicity, clarity, and supreme will-power) when he first heard him give a lecture in Paris in his second (post-1907) period of emigration. A. V. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes (London, 1967), 39.

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the orator but needed by these people, would emerge in full array from my subconsciousness.⁷³

This canonical account of revolutionary charisma begs a question: where did Trotsky’s aptitude as an orator come from? After all, the émigré Russian Social Democrats were bookish types; Trotsky, like Lenin, had been thrilled by the reading room of the British Museum when he visited London, and the decade before 1917 had been devoted to newspaper polemics rather than speechifying. Trotsky’s special facility with the spoken word might be explained by his experience of hearing a Lutheran pastor when studying in the preparatory class of the realschule, or by his visits to the theatre and Italian opera as a schoolboy in Odessa, or by his later efforts to educate himself in the arts of rhetoric, or by the speeches he had given to Russian colonies in locations from Belgium to Brooklyn. Some contemporaries, notably Viktor Chernov, sought to explain Trotsky’s power as a public speaker by his Jewishness, although it had a more obvious debt to the devices of classical oratory, and Jews in the revolutionary movement do not seem to have differed significantly from their non-Jewish comrades in their rhetorical style.⁷⁴ Trotsky’s combative style of argument seems to have remained constant since his youth in Nikolaev, where for a time he took the populist side of the big debate that was convulsing Russian socialism at the time and turned his withering sarcasm on his Marxist opponents; he had also studied Schopenhauer’s Eristic Dialectic (subtitled The Art of Being Right) and modelled himself on Ferdinand Lassalle, that most flamboyant of German socialists.⁷⁵ But perhaps the most important factor in Trotsky’s oratorical aplomb in 1917 was that he had taken the lead role in the ‘dress rehearsal’ of 1905. The tumultuous fifty-two days of the St Petersburg Soviet had given him a thorough training in oratory; they had even taught him to protect his voice as carefully as any opera singer, so that in 1917 he was ‘hardly ever out of the ranks’.⁷⁶ Trotsky, of course, was exceptional. His starring role in 1905 was made possible by the fact that he had not then been a Bolshevik; the party as a whole, as Anatolii Luncharsky admitted in a frank collection of memoir vignettes that he published in 1923, had been caught ‘somewhat unprepared’ for the revolutionary turmoil of that year, lacking the requisite ‘political skill’. But Lunacharsky was himself testimony to the Bolsheviks’ ability to learn from their mistakes and to gain from experience. With his intelligentsia demeanour and intellectual pedigree as theoretician of proletarian culture, Lunacharsky was an unlikely tribune; yet in ⁷³ Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (London, 1970), 307. ⁷⁴ Gabriella Safran, ‘Jewish Argument Style among Russian Revolutionaries’, Journal of Jewish Languages, 4 (2016): 44–68, here 63–5. ⁷⁵ G. A. Ziv, Trotskii: Kharakteristika (Po lichnym vospominaniiam) (New York, 1921), 9–11, 14–15, 20. ⁷⁶ Trotsky, My Life, 306.

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1917 he was, along with Trotsky, Zinov’ev, and Kollontai, among the great frontline orators of revolutionary Petrograd. In Lunacharsky’s view, it was the Bolsheviks’ activities at home and abroad in the post-1905 era that had turned them into ‘practical politicians’.⁷⁷ In emigration, Kollontai, Zinov’ev, and the rest had received a schooling in practical rhetoric by addressing all manner of gatherings—from socialist congresses to worker meetings. At home, the Duma era had allowed the Bolsheviks to explore new channels of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary communication within the Russian Empire. Another important factor seems to have been the feedback circuit between émigré and domestic rhetoricians: Lenin sent outlines of speeches to the Bolshevik Duma deputies but was also deeply impressed by their efforts to project a proletarian voice even in conditions of police harassment. This interplay of émigré intellectuals and worker activists meant that, when their moment came in 1917, the Bolsheviks were better able than their rivals to make ideology demotic and to operate successfully both at the congress podium and on the street. Their hallmarks were not just toughness and resolve but also adaptability. After giving his due to Trotsky’s physical presence and soaring oratory, Lunacharsky also emphasized the breadth of his rhetorical repertoire: this quintessential Bolshevik tribune was capable of delivering a ‘magnificent set-piece political speech’ but also of issuing ‘lapidary phrases’ and ‘well-aimed shafts’.⁷⁸ By late May, the Bolsheviks, with Trotsky to the fore, were unquestionably landing some blows in the debates in the Soviet. An issue that brought tensions to a head was a stand-off on Kronstadt, whose radicalized sailors, having lynched their officers in the first days of the revolution, had rejected the authority of the Provisional Government in mid-May. At a heated meeting of the Soviet on the evening of 26 May, Tsereteli attacked the sailors as mutineers, while Trotsky defended them. Although the vote went 580 to 162 in favour of Tsereteli (with 74 abstentions), this was by no means a triumph for the chairman: ‘In a parliamentary vote this result might have been considered brilliant, but the Soviet was not a parliament, it remained politically firm only while it was supported unanimously or almost unanimously by the workers and soldiers of Petrograd.’⁷⁹ The possibility of any socialist consensus receded further with the First Congress of Soviets in June, which was billed as the ‘first parliament of the revolution’.⁸⁰ This was a great crowd of representatives of all political groupings: 1,090 delegates in total, though attendance thinned out over the three-week session. As in the early gatherings of the Petrograd Soviet, there was constant hubbub in the corridors, and speakers and listeners were shrouded in clouds of tobacco smoke. Inside the debating chamber, however, proceedings were quite ⁷⁷ Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 46. ⁷⁸ Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 65. ⁸⁰ Voitinskii, 1917-i, 146–7.

⁷⁹ Voitinskii, 1917-i, 137.

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structured. This was no gathering of representatives of the street: although the social origins of delegates have been established only in a minority of cases, well under half of these were of peasant or working-class background.⁸¹ Proceedings were governed by the now standard rules of order (largely those of the Duma) under the chairmanship of Chkheidze. Socialist party politics was the order of the day: there were endless resolutions and discussions of reports and critiques of the government, but little in the way of practical decisions.⁸² The press was also well represented. The liberal Rech’ carried mainly detailed summary of debates, with some verbatim sections and accounts of audience reaction; in general, the speakers the newspaper found sympathetic were granted the verbatim treatment, so Bolshevik speeches were given in dry summary, while Kerensky’s words were treated with far more respect.⁸³ Whatever the nature of the press coverage, this was the biggest showcase yet for the Bolshevik orators. They had little difficulty drawing attention to themselves, even though they were in a small minority at the congress. Lenin was already a celebrity and seized everyone’s attention in his speech towards the end of the long debate on the soviets’ relationship to the Provisional Government. Stepun’s account of the occasion was largely congruent with Sukhanov’s characterization of Lenin’s unconventional but steely and effective rhetoric. Lenin could not keep still, constantly moving from front to back of the stage and frequently thrusting his right arm up ‘like a semaphore’. His delivery was ‘not musical, jerky, as if he was chopping up his thoughts with an axe’. He evidently had no truck with metaphorical flourishes, but was remarkably successful at breaking up his ideas into schematic patterns, thus making the impression on a worker audience of overwhelming logic and authenticity. But nor did he make the impression of a scholastic Marxist: he evidently had the courage of his convictions, being ready, unlike any other politician, to join with the ‘darkest, most destructive instincts of the popular masses’ and throw himself into full-blooded revolution.⁸⁴ In June, radical socialist rhetoric was gaining ground in all manner of assemblies. The Third All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions saw a clear leftward turn.⁸⁵ More surprisingly, socialist oratory was heard not just in the soviets and trade unions but in the local assemblies inherited from the old regime. An early post-revolutionary account of the municipal dumas decried their tiny franchise in the tsarist period and complained that in many places the resultant oligarchy ⁸¹ A. S. Pokrovskii, Pervyi raboche-soldatskii parlament Rossii: I Vserossiiskii s”ezd Sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov (3–24 iiunia 1917 g.) Opyt rekonstruktsii spiska uchastnikov. Kontury sotsial’nogo portreta (Moscow, 2001), 3–4, 11. ⁸² Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 98–102. For the rules of order, see the transcript of the opening session in GARF, f. 6978, d. 1. ⁸³ ‘Vserossiiskii s”ezd predstavitelei rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov’, Rech’, 6 June 1917, 4. ⁸⁴ Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 102–4. ⁸⁵ Tret’ia vserossiiskaia konferentsiia professional’nykh soiuzov 3–11 iiulia (20–28 iiunia st. st.) 1917 g. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1927).

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remained in place.⁸⁶ By summer 1917 this was no longer the case, at least if we judge by the Moscow duma, where lively elections in June led to a hefty SR majority. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks made their presence felt, acting as a constant obstruction to meetings with their lengthy speeches. In the view of the oldstyle zemstvo constitutionalist Golitsyn, the duma was completely taken over by party politicking among the socialists.⁸⁷ Early July gave the Bolsheviks the opportunity to trump the congress by their command of street politics. The ‘July Days’ provided one of the most famous instances of Bolshevik oratory, when the eloquent Trotsky saved the tongue-tied and terrified Chernov from the mob outside the Tauride Palace.⁸⁸ Less wellknown are the feats of Zinov’ev, who showed his mettle by addressing the crowd and restraining its tempestuous mood.⁸⁹ But Lenin showed again that street politics interested him much less than the underlying balance of forces, and that even he might hesitate when communicating with the revolutionary crowd: he declined to launch an insurrection with the backing of the workers on the Vyborg Side, and in the subsequent crackdown against the Bolsheviks was driven underground. As they held their sixth Congress—the first for a decade—in July–August 1917, the Bolsheviks were once again beleaguered and semi-clandestine as they assembled in the Vyborg district; none of the party’s most celebrated orators were available, and so the keynote speech was given by a certain Joseph Stalin. A modern biographer rates his performance at the congress as ‘masterful’: Stalin laid out Lenin’s radical position with artful ambiguity, presenting what might have been seen as the fiasco of the July Days as ‘a triumph of Bolshevik moderation and sagacity’.⁹⁰

The Crisis of Kerensky This setback for the Bolsheviks did not change the fact that by July their core message had more mobilizatory power than that of the government. They also worked harder and more effectively to put that message across to the crucial constituency of Petrograd workers and soldiers. A new cohort of agitators came along to replace those leading Bolsheviks who were now in prison or in hiding, foremost among them the little-known V. Volodarskii. As Sukhanov noted admiringly of the Bolshevik performance later in the year, they were out ‘among

⁸⁶ L. Shcheglo, Gorodskie Dumy prezhde i teper’ (Petrograd, 1917), 7. ⁸⁷ M. V. Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia (1873–1917) (Moscow, 2007), 575–7. ⁸⁸ Hence Chernov’s (ostensibly philosemitic) later reflections on the Jewishness of Trotsky’s speech style: Safran, ‘Jewish Argument Style’. ⁸⁹ Myron W. Hedlin, ‘Zinoviev’s Revolutionary Tactics in 1917’, SR, 34 (1975): 25–6. ⁹⁰ Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (London, 1973), 149; see also the account in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (London, 2014), 204–5.

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the masses, in the workshops, day after day, constantly’.⁹¹ This required not only energy but also physical courage: in the wake of the July Days, street orators were as likely to face violent confrontation as acclamation.⁹² By July, Kerensky’s aura was fading fast. His emotive persona had palled, and his propensity to shed tears was now seen in some quarters as unseemly.⁹³ Even his admirers were noticing that he was overwrought and becoming the slave of events rather than their master; incapable of organizing his time, he had no free moments whatsoever. Compared to Lenin, Zinov’ev, Trotsky, and Lunacharsky, Kerensky sounded like a Schiller among revolutionaries: romantic exaltation and faith in the human soul could not compensate for the absence of steely purpose. At the State Conference in Moscow in mid-August, an event designed by Kerensky to bolster his authority and held in the beautifully lit and elegant Mariinsky Theatre, he gave a strange speech: ‘His powerful, robust voice started suddenly breaking up, becoming at times a kind of sinister whisper.’⁹⁴ For Bublikov, participant in a famous handshake with Tsereteli at this gathering, Kerensky’s fierce oratory had become entirely empty: this was ‘just rhetoric without any possibility of actual fulfillment. The audience listened and couldn’t help thinking: “he’s putting the wind up us, but we’re not scared” ’.⁹⁵ Golitsyn found the event to be inconsequential, and Kerensky’s speech to be ‘completely hysterical and incoherent’.⁹⁶ According to Shidlovskii, Kerensky had started the conference speaking in a slow and emphatic manner very different from his normal practice; while this came across as artificial, Kerensky’s closing speech was much worse, lacking all composure.⁹⁷ The State Conference was, in short, the beginning of the end of Kerensky’s political career: the moment that ‘speechifying’ seemed to many onlookers to have become an end in itself. Even the Bolsheviks had credited Kerensky with more political savvy: Stalin expected the event to mutate into a ‘long parliament’ that would usurp soviet power. But, as Stephen Kotkin sums up, ‘nothing institutional endured’.⁹⁸ At the ‘Democratic Conference’, held in the Aleksandrinsky Theatre in midSeptember, where the soviets had greater representation and more opportunity to make trouble, Kerensky made his standard martial entrance, flanked by two adjutants, and delivered a familiar appeal for the trust of his audience in his trademark staccato style. Even from a sympathetic account, however, it was clear

⁹¹ Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 3: 46, 214. ⁹² For two examples of street orators (of contrasting political persuasion) losing their lives in such confrontations, see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 176. ⁹³ For example the regimental doctors Florence Farmborough knew on the south-western front: Farmborough, Nurse on the Russian Front, 271. ⁹⁴ Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 93, 138, 162. ⁹⁵ Bublikov, Russkaia revoliutsiia, 36–7. ⁹⁶ Golitsyn, Moi vospominaniia, 579–80. A similar verdict is presented in Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 3: 62. ⁹⁷ Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 2: 138–9. ⁹⁸ Kotkin, Stalin, 207.

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that Kerensky’s electricity was meeting more resistance than earlier in the year; the left-wing hecklers might still have been a minority, but they were vocal.⁹⁹ Four days later, a clash between Trotsky and Tsereteli was given extended stenographic treatment in the press. Even a newspaper hostile to the Bolsheviks acknowledged that it was not clear who had come out on top. Tsereteli received a large ovation, but Trotsky’s rhetorical style came across vividly in the transcript as something quite different from that of his moderate socialist opponents: short sentences, numerous rhetorical questions, plenty of sarcastic wit, and a capacity to feed off the many indignant interruptions that the speech elicited.¹⁰⁰ The indispensable eye-witness Sukhanov observed that Trotsky was well-prepared for this performance, with a well-annotated outline of his speech on the lectern in front of him, and traded his usual pathos and ‘metallic’ delivery for a remarkably calm and straightforward delivery, remaining untroubled as the storm broke around him.¹⁰¹ A similar story can be told of the ‘Pre-Parliament’ (or the Temporary Council of the Russian Republic, to give it its full name), which opened on 7 October in the Mariinsky Palace, the former home of the mandarin State Council. To spare the revolutionary sensibilities of delegates, Repin’s famous painting of the State Council in session was draped in red. The idea was to provide a forum for representatives of all social classes and political groups in advance of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The decision to include the propertied classes in proceedings was a departure from the socialist monopoly in 1917 and immediately drew criticism from the far Left. Although Kerensky was this time on decent form, the Bolsheviks delivered a verdict on proceedings that would be shared by posterity: they turned up only to announce their exit, and Trotsky’s declaration excoriated the class character of the gathering. One again, the Bolshevik head of the Soviet remained almost pointedly calm at the rostrum.¹⁰² By now it was becoming clear that the Bolsheviks had met the challenge of revolutionary communication better than any other party: ‘They alone kept nearly abreast of the quicksilver political mood of the country.’ The party had swiftly abandoned—or suspended—bookish ‘propaganda’ in favour of the more immediate ‘agitation’. The Provisional Government, by contrast, had clearly pitched its message too high.¹⁰³ Bolshevik agitators were making ever deeper inroads in the army. In late August, Farmborough was present at a socialist agitational meeting

⁹⁹ ‘Demokraticheskoe soveshchanie’, RV, 16 September 1917, 3. Sukhanov found Kerensky notably less fiery and energetic in his opening statement than he had been at the State Conference the previous month (Zapiski o revoliutsii, 3: 179). ¹⁰⁰ ‘Demokraticheskoe soveshchanie’, RV, 20 September 1917, 4. ¹⁰¹ Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 3: 188–9. ¹⁰² Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 3: 233, 236–7; Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (London, 1987), 302–3; S. E. Rudneva, Predparlament: oktiabr’ 1917 g.: opyt istoricheskoi rekonstruktsii (Moscow, 2006), 132–4 (on Trotsky’s defiance in the face of protests from his listeners). ¹⁰³ Pethybridge, The Spread of the Russian Revolution, 144–6.

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on the south-western front. Appalled by this ‘outpouring of treachery’, she also recognized its impact on the audience: the same appeal to freedom that had served as a rallying cry for Kerensky in May was now being put to opposite ends.¹⁰⁴ In Petrograd, Trotsky was the orator of the moment. The Left SR Mstislavskii recalled his sense of powerlessness as his party’s warnings against a seizure of power failed to capture the imagination of the crowd; the resounding Bolshevik ‘battle cry’ of insurrection was cutting through the background noise of political debate.¹⁰⁵ On the other side of the political divide, Kollontai recalled a mood of revolutionary ecstasy at a mass meeting at the Cirque Moderne: The whole hall trembled from the long rumble of stormy and passionate applause . . . One after another from the depths of the lower classes, from the very masses, orators – whether in caps or in headscarves – took the floor. These were not skilled orators, but what frenzy they caused in their listeners.¹⁰⁶

The insurrection was, of course, timed to coincide with the Second Congress of Soviets, both pre-empting the deliberations of this ‘worker parliament’ and drawing on its legitimacy. This was a chaotic gathering and anything but parliamentary in its atmosphere and proceedings: in Sukhanov’s words, by comparison with the Second Congress the Petrograd Soviet was ‘the Roman Senate, which an ancient Carthaginian took for an assembly of the gods’. In the first sitting Trotsky switched back to the metallic style in an uncompromising defence of the Bolshevik seizure of power as an ‘uprising’ born of the ‘revolutionary energy of Petersburg workers and soldiers’. His closing round of abuse of his socialist opponents—consigning them to the ‘rubbish bin of history’—was one rhetorical blow too many for Martov, who quit the hall in a state of sheer anger and ‘affect’. Lenin’s arrival at the congress for its second sitting late on the evening of 26 October—his first appearance in public for more than three months—was, given the circumstances, remarkably untheatrical. Scheduled to give a keynote speech on the question of war and peace, he declared this was unnecessary and merely read out a declaration to the peoples of the belligerent states. As for the all-important land question, he merely read out the Bolshevik Decree on Land. In a sign of things to come, no debate on the subject was permitted.¹⁰⁷

After October After the Bolshevik takeover, the Bolsheviks gave free rein to their antiparliamentary instincts. As Getzler observes, the slogan of ‘All Power to the ¹⁰⁴ Farmborough, Nurse on the Russian Front, 309–11. ¹⁰⁵ Mstislavskii, Five Days, 116–17. ¹⁰⁶ Kollontai, Iz moei zhizni i raboty, 307–8. ¹⁰⁷ Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, 3: 334, 337, 354, 356, 358.

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Soviets!’ meant the opposite of what it said, as these institutions were transformed ‘from agents of democratization into regional and local administrative organs of the centralized, one-party Soviet state’. The All-Russian Executive Committee, the closest thing to a ‘Soviet Parliament’, was reduced to an ‘administrative branch’ of the executive Sovnarkom; in June 1918 it became officially, not just de facto, a oneparty body, as the Mensheviks and SRs were excluded.¹⁰⁸ When the Constituent Assembly finally opened, the Bolsheviks showed once again that they were ‘masters at staging crowd scenes’. The venue was thrown open to the throng, as if to confirm the democratic credentials of the new regime. The main non-Bolshevik speaker, Chernov, was practically drowned out by the heckling, but his hour-long speech in any case failed to rise to the occasion: it would have been more suitable for the Duma, being ‘a dead collage of bookish quotes, verse, and pedantically turned phrases’. Bukharin replied with a speech in the style of a rally that was ‘aimed straight at the upper balconies rather than the “dress circle” ’.¹⁰⁹ Chernov, for his part, recalled sadly in his memoirs that ‘anyone who reads the stenographic transcript of this meeting will not have even the remotest notion of what happened in actual fact’.¹¹⁰ The more combative mood was further in evidence in the first full Trade Union congress, which made a striking contrast with the relatively restrained Third Conference the previous June. Held in the Nicholas Cavalry Academy on the Obvodnyi canal, the occasion was chaired by the Bolshevik Minister of Labour Aleksandr Shliapnikov, who immediately had to deal with heckling from what the stenogram identified as the ‘Right’. He gave a defiant third-person response: ‘Shliapnikov will give an answer to anyone at any time, if someone dares to accuse him openly from this podium. I consider it beneath my dignity to respond to anonymous accusations.’ After approval of the now standard rules of order, the Mensheviks launched into protests at the shooting of workers on 5 January. In his appeal for calm, the chairman went well beyond his remit, telling the opposing comrades that innocent victims were inevitable in a civil war. When the discussion moved on to the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the tone got even more heated. After hearing the objections, a Bolshevik speaker insisted that the congress would ‘not let itself be provoked by this kind of hysterical outbursts from a minority of bankrupt politicians’, proposing that further departures from the agenda should not be allowed. With Shliapnikov presiding, the Bolsheviks ¹⁰⁸ Getzler, ‘Soviets as Agents of Democratisation’, 26–8. ¹⁰⁹ Mstislavskii, Five Days, 139, 146–7. For a vicious Bolshevik account of Chernov’s performance at the Constituent Assembly, see F. F. Raskolnikov, Tales of Sub-Lieutenant Ilyin (London, 1982), 6–20. For a negative assessment of Chernov’s performance in 1917 from a very different political perspective, see Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 2: 122–3, 138–9. Chernov does indeed appear to have had trouble striking the right tone in political meetings, having an awkward combination of the abstract and the ingratiating. ¹¹⁰ V. M. Chernov, Pered burei (Moscow, 1993), 354. Chernov’s speech was given verbatim in the press, in RV, 11 January 1918; a detailed summary was given in Novaia zhizn’, 7 January 1918.

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remained firmly in charge of proceedings. They also made sure others got to see the evidence: the full transcript was published later in the year with a foreword from trade union leader Mikhail Tomskii.¹¹¹ Yet this kind of glasnost’ was practised very selectively. The transcript of the acutely controversial Seventh Party Congress, where Trotsky and Lenin fought over the question of a separate peace with Germany, was embargoed for five years.¹¹² At least until the middle of 1918, the non-Bolshevik press still offered reminders of the rhetorical world that was fast disappearing. In December 1917, Sof ’ia Panina was put on trial for withholding from the Bolsheviks 93,000 roubles of funds held by the Ministry of Education, but the case aroused as much sympathy for the defendant as public indignation: it was clear that the Bolsheviks were still a long way from knowing how to organize an effective ‘show trial’.¹¹³ In early January, Vladimir Purishkevich came before the revolutionary tribunal; his ‘last word’ ran for three hours, and extracts—including a pathos-filled appeal to a common ‘love of the motherland’ in the cause of the current ‘holy war’—were reproduced verbatim.¹¹⁴ More threatening to the new regime was a conference of the Left SRs, held in the Corps de Pages in late March, whose delegates voted to withdraw from Sovnarkom over the issue of BrestLitovsk. Proletarian voices of dissent could also be heard: a heated meeting of print-workers in the Cinzelli circus in central Petrograd was rendered quite fully, including the hostile interjections. The proposal for a typographers’ division of the Red Army met indignation from the floor: cries of ‘shame on you’ were heard.¹¹⁵ In 1917, factory meetings had contributed to the spread of Bolshevism; in 1918, they were giving voice to oppositional sentiment, including appeals to the Constituent Assembly.¹¹⁶ Working-class opposition bubbled up in the Petrograd Soviet in August 1918, where chairman Zinov’ev struggled to rein in a selfdeclared Left SR speaker who defended the striking Putilov workers against ¹¹¹ Pervyi Vserossiiskii s”ezd professional’nykh soiuzov. 7–14 ianvaria 1918 g. Polnyi stenograficheskii otchet s predisloviem M. Tomskogo (Moscow, 1918), 3–7. ¹¹² As explained in Sed’moi ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP(b) (Moscow, 1962): the transcript was first published in 1923, then reprinted in 1928 with additions from the secretary’s notes. The 1962 edition carefully compared the 1923 edition with the archival record in the archive of the Institute of MarxismLeninism. ¹¹³ Adele Lindenmeyr, ‘The First Soviet Political Trial: Countess Sof'ia Panina before the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal’, RR, 60 (2001): 505–25. Another striking example of revolutionary justice misfiring came in the trial of Vladimir Dzhunkovskii in May 1919, though by this stage of the civil war it was more the exception than the rule for tsarist high officials to escape severe punishment: Richard G. Robbins, Overtaken by the Night: One Russian’s Journey through Peace, War, Revolution, and Terror (Pittsburgh, 2017), 422–32. ¹¹⁴ ‘Revoliutsionnyi tribunal: Delo Purishkevicha’, Novaia zhizn’, 5 January 1918, 3. ¹¹⁵ ‘Konferentsiia levykh s.-r.’ and ‘Obshchee sobranie pechatnikov’, both in Novaia zhizn’, 26 March 1918, 3. ¹¹⁶ ‘Miting na Obukhovskom zavode’, Novaia zhizn’, 11 May 1918, 3. More broadly on workingclass protest, which peaked in May 1918 and then waned by autumn, see D. O. Churakov, Revoliutsiia, gosudarstvo, rabochii protest: Formy, dinamika i priroda massovykh vystuplenii rabochikh v Sovetskoi Rossii. 1917–1918 gody (Moscow, 2004).

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Bolshevik efforts to bring them into line.¹¹⁷ After she was amnestied by the Bolsheviks in late November 1918 for her part in the Left SR assassination of the German ambassador, Mariia Spiridonova threw herself into anti-Bolshevik agitation at worker meetings, and a Cheka observer testified to the impression she made (though she was arrested again in February 1919).¹¹⁸ As late as May 1920, the Menshevik-dominated union of print-workers held a large rally in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in honour of a delegation of British workers. Bolshevik speakers at the event did not receive a warm reception, while other varieties of socialist were well represented—including even Viktor Chernov, who at the time was wanted by the Cheka and narrowly avoided arrest following his speech.¹¹⁹ In general, however, the space for dissenting voices was shrinking rapidly. Dan admitted that the gathering in the Conservatory in May 1920 was ‘the last such rally in Bolshevik Moscow’.¹²⁰ The print-workers were exceptionally wellinformed and self-assertive compared to the rest of the working class, and had a much larger than average Menshevik presence. But even here the Bolsheviks had gained a firm grip on workplace ‘democracy’ by the end of 1919: unwanted elections results might be cancelled or superseded, dissenters fired or arrested.¹²¹ Newspapers on Bolshevik territory were muzzled by the middle of 1918, when the civil war attained full intensity. The crucial Petrograd Soviet was completely under the sway of the Bolsheviks, who had 90 per cent of the delegates.¹²² A powerful symbol of the intensifying conflict was the figure of the orator. Lenin’s behaviour after the government’s move to Moscow in March 1918 was a far cry from his (partly forced) preference to operate behind closed doors in Petrograd in 1917. He spoke at dozens of mass meetings, an oratorical offensive that was only brought to an end when he was shot and nearly killed after a fiery address at the Mikhelson Machine Factory late in the evening of 30 August.¹²³ Here was incontrovertible evidence that public speaking was real, as well as rhetorical, combat. Even before that, the Bolsheviks could claim a prominent

¹¹⁷ Ia. V. Leont’ev and M. I. Liukhudzaev (eds), Partiia levykh sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov. Dokumenty i materialy. 1917–1925 gg., vol. 2, pt. 2 (Moscow, 2015), 372. ¹¹⁸ V. M. Lavrov, Mariia Spiridonova: terroristka i zhertva terrora. Povestvovanie v dokumentakh (Moscow, 1996), 172–5. ¹¹⁹ Fedor Dan, Dva goda skitanii: Vospominaniia lidera rossiiskogo men’shevizma. 1919–1921 (Moscow, 2006), 17–19. Whether Chernov’s speech had any effect is another matter. Dan was yet another observer who found that Chernov had missed the mark, speaking in terms that were ‘excessively literary and abstract’. ¹²⁰ Dan, Dva goda skitanii, 17. ¹²¹ Diane P. Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, 2005), chap. 2. ¹²² Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton, 1994), 284. ¹²³ Kotkin, Stalin, 284–5.

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orator-martyr in the person of Volodarskii, shot on 20 June 1918.¹²⁴ As Anatolii Lunacharsky, himself a distinguished participant in the agitation drive of 1918, observed some time later, Volodarskii’s oratory did not have exuberant rises and falls or appeals to the emotions. This was ‘metallic’, machine-like oratory of the ‘American’ type. Volodarskii’s resounding voice pounded out the words like a printing press.¹²⁵ The Bolshevik orators of the civil war period, it would seem, had inherited Kerensky’s martial image and metallic edge but purged his rhetoric of its emotional excess. This was oratory for an era of modern warfare.

Conclusion When we survey political talk in Russia’s 1917, it is tempting to borrow the assessment of a historian of China’s revolutionary moment six years earlier: ‘Widely shared political practices like speech making, political debate, and street protest, as well as more routine meetings, reports, voting, and assemblies, fostered a political culture of seemingly endless talk punctuated by talk-driven action.’¹²⁶ The parallel with republican China can take us only so far. Russia’s slide into one-party dictatorship was much swifter; the oratorical imperative soon weakened for Bolshevik leaders after the civil war was won, and especially after leadership was assumed by a Georgian with a modest manner and heavily accented Russian. Yet, while talk would henceforth be subjected to much stricter rules, it continued unabated. In the new soviet and party institutions, bourgeois ‘speechifying’ would become more disciplined ‘report [doklad] giving’. The same historian’s assessment of Chinese communist political culture seems fully applicable to the Soviet case: before long, Soviet Russia would acquire its own distinctive ‘social technology of citizenship built from meetings, assemblies, reports, voting, and oral, written, and symbolic communication pitched to audiences sitting in judgment of what they see and hear’, thereby showing that ‘democratic’ participation did not have to be liberal.¹²⁷ But it is important not to draw too generously on hindsight. As of 1918, very little was clear. There was still a great deal of work to be done to spread the word of Bolshevism and, conversely, to tame alternative models of popular rhetoric. The ¹²⁴ See the hagiographic treatment in P. Arskii and Al. Dmitriev, M. M. Volodarskii (Materialy dlia biografii i kharakteristiki) (Leningrad, 1925), which noted that Volodarskii ‘did not flatter the crowd or succumb to demagogy’ (p. 41). ¹²⁵ A. V. Lunacharskii, ‘V. Volodarskii’, in Feliks Kon (ed.), Pamiati pogibshikh vozhdei (Moscow, 1927), 41–2. The adjective seems to have become a trope of Bolshevik rhetoric at this time: Raskolnikov uses the word to characterize Iakov Sverdlov’s performance at the sole session of the Constituent Assembly, contrasting it with the ‘thin, piercing falsetto’ of an SR interjector. Raskolnikov, Tales of Lieutenant Ilyin, 8. ¹²⁶ David Strand, An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China (Berkeley, 2011), 2. ¹²⁷ Strand, An Unfinished Republic, 4–5.

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task of communication was, as ever, most daunting in the village. The first six months after October saw an enormous increase in peasant participation in local politics, as rural communes turned into soviets, but without any significant oversight by the new regime. The soviets were often sprawling and weakly structured entities whose size exceeded the limits set down in the Constitution; the village commune was still alive and well, and the ‘will of the assembly’ often proved stronger than any attempts by the chairman to steer the discussion.¹²⁸ The Bolsheviks’ rhetoric also had to adapt itself to meet the most pressing need of the moment: to fight the civil war. By now highly experienced agitators, they far outperformed their enemies. The White generals, with the partial exception of Petr Vrangel’, were not inspirational speakers; even when, as in the case of the serf ’s son Anton Denikin, they themselves had impeccably ‘popular’ origins, they were unable to communicate effectively to their peasants in uniform. White propaganda relied on traditional forms of printed text and image, and did much less than the Bolsheviks to combine written and spoken word. The Bolsheviks lacked military experience but never underestimated the importance of the spoken word for keeping their soldiers loyal and motivated: in late March 1918, courses of agitation opened in Moscow under the auspices of the Red Army, and by June about 300 agitators had been trained up and sent to the front line. They found an effective balance between threat and persuasion, shifting from class-based socialist language to quite conventional patriotic-heroic rhetoric.¹²⁹ The revolutionary period had given Bolshevik oratory, already more combative and astringent than its competitors, a pronounced martial cast; the shrill effects and emotional excesses of rivals such as Aleksandr Kerensky and Mariia Spiridonova had provided a useful foil. In his witness testimony to the revolutionary tribunal in February 1919, Nikolai Bukharin described Spiridonova’s speeches as a ‘hysterical cry’ and evidence of her ‘unbalanced’ psychological state. The Bolsheviks’ main political opponent on the Left was thus dismissed as possessing the characteristic female weaknesses, just as Kerensky had increasingly been depicted as womanish in 1917. The hyper-emotional rhetoric of the Left SRs, which received its most concentrated expression in the courtroom when revolutionary terrorists like Spiridonova took the role of martyr-accuser, was to be contrasted with the iron logic, relentlessness, and masculinity of Bolshevism.¹³⁰

¹²⁸ Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921) (Oxford, 1989), 73–6. ¹²⁹ Here I summarize S. E. Zverev, Voennaia ritorika noveishego vremeni: Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii (St Petersburg, 2012). While the Whites in the South were well aware of the importance of propaganda and tried to train up effective agitators, they seem to have been more organized and effective in the medium of print: see Christopher Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts in the South during the Russian Civil War, 1918–19 (The Alekseev-Denikin Period)’, SEER, 70 (1992): 688–707, esp. 704, 707. ¹³⁰ For her part, Spiridonova was—probably with justification—scornful of Bukharin’s ability to hold a crowd and in a letter to her party comrades threw back at him the charge of hysteria. Bukharin’s

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Nonetheless, as in other areas of life, it was unclear to what extent practices forged at a time of life-or-death struggle would be suitable for a period of routinization and institutionalization. Front-line charisma had its uses, but this was also an ideocracy that required the organized diffusion of ‘socialism’ by the Party to the society it ruled. The old debates in Russian social democracy about the requisite methods of agitation had not gone away: to what extent was it permissible for a communist to ‘go native’ in an attempt to convert the heathen? Bolshevik rhetoric in the aftermath of the civil war had strong elements of the martial, the charismatic, and the adversarial. But it also made a claim to scientific truth and relied on methods that were syllogistic and catechismic.¹³¹ It was only through political practice—and no small amount of internal conflict—that the Party would find a new rhetorical synthesis.

lack of emotional restraint would become a theme when he was lynched by his own party a little more than a decade later. Lavrov, Mariia Spiridonova, 180–5. ¹³¹ On the formative Bolshevik culture of propaganda circles, which were at once intensely bookish and oral and performative, see Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 2017), 29–42.

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7 Soviet Talk Following Stephen Kotkin’s introduction of the phrase in his study of Soviet civilization in the making, ‘speaking Bolshevik’ has proved a very influential way of thinking about the entire cultural project of the post-NEP era.¹ Language, as many historians have now shown, was a vital tool of self-fashioning and a means for individuals to perform allegiance to their immediate ‘collective’ as well as the wider Soviet ‘public’. A great deal of such self-fashioning took place in writing: through diaries, questionnaires, applications, letters, newspaper articles. But the phrase ‘speaking Bolshevik’ also deserves to be taken literally: from the moment it consolidated itself in the early 1920s, the Bolshevik state made possible, indeed required, a great deal of public speaking. This was, of course, to be clearly distinguished from decadent parliamentary chatter. The Bolsheviks had no more patience with bourgeois ‘talking shops’ than their tsarist predecessors. Even with his back to the wall defending party ‘democracy’, Trotsky studiously avoided the term ‘parliament’, which would surely have discredited his cause in the eyes of the Party public.² Nonetheless, the Bolshevik party-state always claimed to be ‘democratic’, and this democracy was ostensibly guaranteed by a vast pyramid of deliberative bodies, whose proceedings were often recorded by stenographers and made known at least to a limited party ‘public’, and sometimes published openly. Bolshevik Russia was from the beginning a ‘participatory dictatorship’, where ‘dissent could be punished’, but ‘loyalty needed to be cultivated’. Assent and participation were solicited in regular workplace elections and in incessant meetings that seem to have been close to a running joke in some workplaces in the mid-1920s; party and trade union activists worried about falling attendance and worker ‘apathy’, while the workers themselves did their best to avoid or mitigate the tedium of gatherings where they enjoyed no meaningful agency.³ Back in 1906, Vladimir Voitinskii had written an article for the Social Democratic press pouring scorn on the Kadets for taking time over procedural ¹ Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 198–237. In the vanguard of the response was Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s “Magnetic Mountain” and the State of Soviet Historical Studies’, JfGO, 44 (1996): 456–63. ² Aleksandr Reznik, Trotskii i tovarishchi: levaia oppozitsiia i politicheskaia kul’tura RKP(B), 1923–1924 gody (St Petersburg, 2017), 145. ³ Diane P. Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, 2005), 144, 167–9. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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niceties in the first sitting of the State Duma. His prescient editor, I. Gol’denberg, advised him to hold back: ‘If we were in the majority, we would have to elect a presidium in just the same way, and we’d argue even more about it!’⁴ Sure enough, the practices of Bolshevik democracy could by no means be taken for granted in the wake of the October Revolution. In 1918, Platon Kerzhentsev, the future head of Soviet radio (among many other significant posts), published a how-to book on the conduct of meetings that would go through several further editions in the following years. Kerzhentsev argued that Russia could learn from the flourishing and time-efficient meeting culture in England, which was the fruit of ‘many decades of political life’. Echoing the sentiments of many observers in the Duma era, he noted that ‘Russians are used to putting very little value on their own and other people’s time’. Readers were then given basic procedural recommendations: on time limits for speeches, the function of the secretary as minute-taker, and the need to speak only at the invitation of the chair. There were also nods to the realities of revolutionary politics: storming out of meetings was not advisable, and the chairman should allow some degree of shouting from the floor—though not to the extent that the speaker’s flow was interrupted. Above all, chairmen needed to be quick-thinking, so as to cool passions, and not to allow meetings to get mired in procedure: they would be quite wrong to take their lead from the Nakaz of the State Duma, a document that was ‘too formal and unwieldy for ordinary meetings’.⁵ In Bolshevik Russia public speech also had a powerful ritual function. By inventing the genre of show trial, as one historian puts it, the Bolsheviks ‘pushed both drama and the law backward on their respective evolutionary paths, in the hopes that they would collide with one another and regain a portion of the mythopoetic power they once had as primitive religious and moral institutions’.⁶ In the process, they gave a new twist to that ritual of tsarist public life: the political trial. Their first high-profile trial took place even before the Bolshevik victory had been secured. In May 1920, representatives of Kolchak’s Siberian government were put on trial for their lives in Omsk. The venue was the largest available: a cavernous locomotive workshop. Specially prepared for the occasion, it accommodated an audience of 8,000 on the opening day (though this declined to 3,000 by the end). This was a carefully conceived propaganda move: the proceedings were brought to a much wider audience through the press, as well as being extensively

⁴ V. Voitinskii, Gody pobed i porazhenii (Berlin, 1923), 2: 48. The more combative Lenin liked the article, however, and it ended up published elsewhere. ⁵ V. [P. M.] Kerzhentsev, Kak vesti sobraniia (Viatka, 1918), quotations 4, 7. Similar in its basic recommendations on time-keeping, chairing, and record keeping was V. A. Kil’chevskii, Tekhnika obshchestvennykh organizovannykh sobranii (Yaroslavl, 1919). (This work, based on a course first taught in the Shaniavskii popular university in Moscow just before the war, was directed primarily at members of the cooperative movement.) ⁶ Julie A. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb, 2000), 26.

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photographed and filmed. The case itself had been in preparation for a full two months—an eternity in the midst of civil war. The Siberian party bureau discussed in advance whether the death penalty should be applied to all defendants. Although there were some advocates of collective punishment, the clinching argument was that this was ‘a court, and not pure terror’; the trial would serve as a ‘huge political rally’, and would turn the defendants into political corpses irrespective of whether they were actually shot (in the event, four of them were).⁷ The new regime soon made a habit of such exemplary justice. Bolshevik proprietary rights over Russian socialism were sealed by the show trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries in summer 1922. History had come full circle: the courtroom format that had been so ably converted into political theatre by the Bolsheviks’ populist ancestors was now turned against the revolutionary populists by the Bolsheviks themselves. The Bolshevik leadership hit on the idea of holding a trial for propaganda purposes in 1921 when they were provided with rich testimony on SR conspiracy by Grigorii Semenov, a former SR operative who had been collaborating with the Bolshevik security agency, the Cheka. But for the Bolsheviks, as for their tsarist predecessors, things did not work out entirely as planned. The defendants, hardened by years of persecution, used the trial with some success as a platform for defending their version of revolutionary ethics; they certainly did not keep to any Bolshevik ‘script’. Although the trial was conducted on the Bolsheviks’ terms, and accompanied by a barrage of hostile commentary on the defendants in the press, the government’s uncertainty about the rhetorical outcome was reflected in the decision not to publish the full transcript.⁸ Here, as in other areas, the Bolsheviks would need to be selective in their appropriation of the revolutionary tradition. The political trials of tsarist Russia had provided some of the most inspiring examples of defiant revolutionary oratory in the face of autocratic power. But those orators had been in the role of accused. In Soviet Russia, the prosecutor was the true voice of revolution, and defendants were to operate in the mode of contrite self-analysis rather than impassioned accusation. As Igal Halfin has shown, the practice of demonizing opponents and of institutionalized suspicion even of fellow party members can be dated back to the trial of the agent provocateur Roman Malinovskii in October 1918.⁹ In his testimony to the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the Provisional Government in May 1917, Grigorii Zinov’ev recalled that Malinovskii’s passionate and compelling oratory had made it unthinkable that he might be a police

⁷ V. I. Shishkin (ed.), Protsess nad kolchakovskimi ministrami. Mai 1920 (Moscow, 2003), 6–7, 28–9. ⁸ Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923 (Pittsburgh, 2011), 239–77. Publication of the full transcript from material held in the FSB archive is now under way: see V. K. Vinogradov et al. (eds), Pravoeserovskii politicheskii protsess v Moskve. 8 iiunia—4 avgusta 1922 g. Stenogrammy sudebnykh zasedanii (Moscow, 2011–). ⁹ Igal Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh, 2007), 1–17.

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agent.¹⁰ Here was a lesson in the deceptiveness of rhetoric that the Bolsheviks would take to heart.

Speech as Self-Empowerment and Civic Obligation The Bolsheviks were not only recasting earlier forms of public life. They were also innovating by making public speech something close to a civic obligation. The act of public speech was crucial for bolstering Bolshevik claims about the ‘democratic’ nature of their proletarian dictatorship. Ordinary people would be allowed, even required, to listen to political speech and also to perform it. Even women, often imagined by the Bolsheviks as needing male tutelage, were not permitted to be passive: as early as the civil war, a good number of them were pressed into service as worker ‘delegates’ to local soviets.¹¹ As one how-to author asserted in the mid1920s, ‘anyone who want to be an active member of the new Soviet society must know how to speak in public’; a ‘tongue-tied’ society was yet another ‘accursed legacy of tsarism, when there was no opportunity to speak in front of an audience’.¹² In the early 1920s, public speaking symbolized social and political vigour and renovation; in proletarian lips, the spoken word could ‘reclaim the rightful place of the divine Logos from the previously dominant (bourgeois) bureaucratic, written word’.¹³ The cultural elite naturally took a leading role in articulating and implementing this project. The avant-garde delivered ‘eulogies’ to Lenin’s language, as manifested above all in political oratory that abandoned the high style of traditional rhetoric and embraced colloquialisms and shifts of register.¹⁴ The literary and theatrical world explored and promoted new forms of oral performance for the mass audience of the new Soviet state. Declamation (or ‘artistic reading’) as an independent art form had had its enthusiasts before the war, but it received a boost under the new regime: in August 1919, Vasilii Serezhnikov, who had established private ‘courses of diction and declamation’ in Moscow in 1913, gave a presentation to Lunacharsky, who was sufficiently impressed to take Serezhnikov’s enterprise under the wing of Narkompros as the Institute of the Living Word.¹⁵ The revolution had already given rise to an ‘Institute of the Living

¹⁰ B. I. Kaptelov, I. S. Rozental’, V. V. Shelokhaev (eds), Delo provokatora Malinovskogo (Moscow, 1992), 56. ¹¹ Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1997), 85–7. ¹² A. Adzharov, Oratorskoe iskusstvo: V pomoshch’ molodomu oratoru (Moscow and Leningrad, 1925), 3. ¹³ Michael S. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2003), 12. ¹⁴ Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 42–5. ¹⁵ V. Serezhnikov, 10 let raboty na kul’turu zhivogo slova (Moscow, 1923), 13.

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Word’ in Petrograd the previous year, again with the backing of Lunacharsky, who declared at its opening that ‘a person who remained silent in a time of political crisis was only a half-person’ and hailed a ‘gigantic dawn of speech’ to which the institute was contributing.¹⁶ Advocates of declamation aimed to synthesize existing popular and religious traditions in a new Soviet art, in the process taking it out of the clutches of a ‘cabal of artist-performers’. Declamation would soon have its own notation and put down new roots in Russian society.¹⁷ As Serezhnikov argued, declamation could also respond to the demands of the new age by becoming ‘collective’.¹⁸ Among the most prominent rhetorician-performers was Vladimir Iakhontov, who devised his own mode of declamation and a distinctive kind of stage monologue that offered a collage of material from different sources (often newspapers). A witness to Iakhontov’s impact as a performer in the 1920s was Iraklii Andronikov (b. 1908), later one of the Soviet Union’s most renowned raconteurs, who received a thorough education in the value of the spoken word when growing up in the revolutionary era. Andronikov’s father was a lawyer who acted in many political trials in the wake of 1905; the son inherited the expressive performativity of his father’s native Georgia, while also benefiting from the more experimental methods used in school at that time as well as from his family’s wide contacts in the Leningrad artistic and theatrical world. He later remembered the 1920s as ‘a time of universal enthusiasm for the genre of artistic reading’, whether the prose performances of Iakhontov and Zakushniak or the poetry of Maiakovskii, with its blend of declamation and ‘conversational intonation’: ‘the great revolution that had taken place in a country with little paper and millions of illiterates summoned into being a new form of art already prepared by the heyday of Russian psychological theatre.’¹⁹ In the Proletarian Culture movement, similarly, oratory served as a powerful vehicle and symbol of the self-liberation of the long downtrodden and silenced working class.²⁰ But the immediate task was getting the Bolshevik message through to the population at large, and here the spoken word remained in many cases the best means of transmission. This went even for print culture. In 1921, Pravda had as its running header the following instruction to users: ‘We don’t have many newspapers, there aren’t enough for everyone. Read newspapers aloud, together.’ But material scarcity was not the only reason for relying on the spoken word as a propaganda vehicle. As Russia began to emerge from the civil war, all manner of

¹⁶ Quotations from Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 13. ¹⁷ V. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Iskusstvo deklamatsii (Leningrad, 1925). ¹⁸ V. K. Serezhnikov, Kollektivnaia deklamatsiia: Teoriia i praktika v nauchno-populiarnom izlozhenii (Moscow, 1927). ¹⁹ I. Andronikov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1975), 9. ²⁰ Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 13–14.

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meetings—workplace, party, trade union, electoral—presented opportunities for putting the word of Bolshevism across. In its regular column ‘Worker Life’, Pravda presented summaries of speeches by factory or trade union activists. It also gave quite detailed accounts of audience mood and reaction, indicating how successful speakers had been in engaging their listeners. The truth was that failures were as common as successes. In the early 1920s, Soviet society was universally recognized as having a ‘communication gap’—a version of the eternal disjuncture in Russia between intelligentsia and narod, but made all the more painful and palpable by the pretensions of the new regime to speak in the people’s voice. This situation gave ‘popular’ language greater currency and prestige than ever before or subsequently: even Pravda could run approving articles on ‘people’s oratory’, which possessed ‘its own original manner of speaking, its own approach to the masses, its own imagery, and its own ability to “feel” a crowd of listeners and find a way to their hearts’.²¹ Those aspiring to talk to the people were enjoined to keep their language ‘close to life’ and avoid complex reasoning and abstract language; the spoken word was assumed to be a good model for the written.²² Village propagandists were urged to get to know local conditions and ‘peasant psychology’; to be audible and clear in exposition; to avoid regionalisms and malapropisms; and to use plenty of repetition, illustration, and analogy in preference to exhaustive argumentation.²³ It was a good idea to catch peasants in the small groups of 5–10 in which they themselves assembled to discuss their affairs; the main thing was to be concrete, offering plenty of illustrations, and to use simple language.²⁴ Bolshevik agitators needed to work with the masses, not stand above them, showing the skills of organizer and preacher. There were various ways of achieving this. The community meeting (sobranie) was a means of fusing individuals into a ‘general opinion’ by means of persuasion rather than brute imposition of the majority view. But if it were to achieve this effect, the chair had to be vigilant in keeping discussion on track and reining in excessive oratory. A larger public meeting (miting) was more mobilizational: a means of ‘enlivening, shaking up, lifting the mood, giving a feeling of unity and mass strength’. The venue should be made as comfortable as possible, and visual aids such as magic lanterns, diagrams, and posters were a good idea. Propagandists needed to be even more creative in festive meetings, leaving space for spontaneous contributions from the audience;

²¹ Iak. Okunev, ‘Narodnye oratory’, Pravda, 2 February 1922, 2. ²² Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 58–61. ²³ S. Beksonov, Zhivoe slovo kak metod propagandy i agitatsii (Samara, 1921), 3, 6, 9, 11–12, 17, 31–3. ²⁴ R. Burshtein, O gromkikh chitkakh v derevne (Novosibirsk, 1926). On decorations and illustration, see also V. D. Markov, Zhivye doklady: Rukovodstvo dlia derevenskikh politprosvetchikov i dramaticheskikh kruzhkov (Moscow, 1927).

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here Bolsheviks had something to learn from traditions of popular entertainment and festivity.²⁵ Another means of engaging the popular audience was the Q&A format, which developed in the Red Guards and the Red Army and spread more widely in the 1920s. Such occasions could not be expected to run themselves, however. The outlines of the discussion needed to be carefully planned in advance and the main speakers prepared. If necessary, opening questions could be ‘planted’ in the audience, but the impression of spontaneity needed to be maintained.²⁶ The quintessential mass-participatory format of the early Soviet period was the agitational trial, a format that emerged in the Red Army in 1919–20 as a solution to the evident communication gap between Party and soldiers. Conventional speechifying was failing to get through to peasants and workers in uniform. Agitational trials were a cheap and effective alternative, and spread rapidly ‘as if everyone already knew what they were’. Consciously or unconsciously, their organizers drew on various traditions from tsarist Russia: trials of sinners in Orthodoxy and Judaism, post-1864 jury trials, theatre in the cause of popular education. In the early years, the trials were relatively playful and permitted dialogue between mock defendants and accusers; from the mid-1920s, however, ‘humiliation, intimidation, and the collective guilt of all involved’ became the dominant themes.²⁷ From the beginning, the agitation trial was intertwined with the far less playful format of the show trial, which would prove to have more staying power in Bolshevik culture.²⁸ The fate of the agitation trial makes clear that the embrace of the popular voice always had its limits: whether in the mock-courtroom or the village assembly room, the ‘people’s’ contributions were to be carefully elicited and orchestrated. Cultural and political hierarchies remained firmly in place. Audiences required suitable guidance if they were to respond appropriately to what they heard and saw. Nowhere was this more the case than in the cinema, since so many of the films available were ‘harmful’ due to their prerevolutionary or foreign origins. In the early years of Soviet culture-building (1918–24), lectors or propagandists were often required to provide an accompanying commentary to films; this practice continued in the USSR much longer than in other countries. Soviet lectors were, moreover, expected to monitor audience reaction.²⁹

²⁵ E. Khersonskaia, Publichnye vystupleniia (2nd ed., Moscow, 1923), 15, 17–20, 24–8. Similar on the need to get to know the popular audience is the same author’s Kak besedovat’ so vzroslymi po obshchestvennym voprosam (Moscow, 1924). ²⁶ I. Rebel’skii, Vechera voprosov i otvetov (2nd ed., Moscow, 1925). ²⁷ Elizabeth A. Wood, Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca, 2005), quotations 1, 17. ²⁸ Julie A. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb, 2000), esp. chap. 2. ²⁹ Valeri Pozner, ‘Ot fil'ma k seansu: K voprosu ob ustnosti v sovetskom kino 1920-30-kh godov’, in H. Günther and S. Hänsgen (eds), Sovetskaia vlast’ i media (St Petersburg, 2006), 329–49.

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As the charisma-infused revolutionary era gave way to something more routine, oratory for its own sake came to seem suspicious: Serezhnikov’s institute was closed in 1922. There was growing ambivalence towards untutored popular speech and charismatic political oratory, evident first in the proletarian literature movement and then, towards the middle of the 1920s, in advice literature that had much less to say about the ‘emotional, psychological, and transformational powers of the spoken word’ and rather more about the practical techniques of public speaking.³⁰ Conversely, the audience was now imagined as less mysterious and independent and more malleable. The extensive coverage in Pravda of the elections to the Moscow Soviet in early 1922 featured what are now recognizable as enduring tropes of Soviet political culture. At one factory ‘hundreds of attentive eyes were fixed on the tribune’ as the speaker delivered an account of the international situation, while the meeting was ‘moved’ (zavolnovalos’) to hear of one affecting instance of international solidarity. At an electoral meeting at another factory, the faces of the audience were ‘serious and thoughtful’, eyes ‘devoured’ the orator, and listeners expressed ‘general agitation’ (obshchee vozbuzhdenie) at the appropriate moment. In 1921, the audience was still recorded as talking back (even in Pravda); in 1922, by contrast, it was fast becoming a cast of extras—putty in the hands of an able propagandist.³¹ How-to books accordingly set about teaching the necessary skills. One work dismissed the notion that public speaking could not be taught as a ‘typical throwback [otryzhka, literally ‘belch’] of the idealist world-view’. What followed was a series of eminently practical recommendations on how to get and hold the audience’s attention. Modesty was absolutely out of place in an orator: speakers should do what they could to get themselves noticed even before their turn came to speak, be sure to get themselves introduced in a way that sounded impressive, and use suitably combative methods to quieten a rowdy audience. Preparation was another prominent topic. Speakers needed to avoid taxing their digestion with hot or acidic food, be well rested, and not to overtax their voice in advance. They should map out their speech without learning it by heart, making open use of notes as necessary (and not hiding their notes in their hat, as Nicholas II was spuriously alleged to have done).³² It was now much less clear that the spoken word should serve as the model for the written. One advice book in 1926 made the bold claim that ‘public meetings [mitingi] are dying out. They no longer satisfy the audience. A report [doklad], on the other hand, still serves as agitation but also includes elements of propaganda ³⁰ Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 95–101, quotation 100. ³¹ Examples from ‘Na zavode “Dinamo” (Vybory v Sovet)’, Pravda, 25 January 1922, 2, and Tartakovskii, ‘Molodezh’ pobedila!’, Pravda, 27 January 1922, 3. ³² Adzharov, Oratorskoe iskusstvo, 5, 13–16, 62, 65, 85. Similar is A. V. Mirtov, Umenie govorit’ publichno (2nd ed., expanded, Moscow and Leningrad, 1925), whose main conclusions were ‘in the current era everyone is an orator’ and ‘the art of oratory can be learned’ (p. 86).

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and is becoming deeper’; on the whole, agitation was taking a back seat to the more through and informed propaganda.³³ By the mid-1920s, accordingly, press reports of meetings had become largely standardized, with more emphasis on acclaim and agreement and fewer mentions of debate, let alone unfavourable audience reaction. ‘Stormy applause’, soon to become a great cliché of the Stalin-era stenographic transcript, is distinctly more noticeable in Pravda in 1924 than in 1922. Yet routinization also had its perils. Soviet authors grappled with the same questions of rhetoric and authenticity that had preoccupied their predecessors for many centuries. One advice book explicitly rejected the label of ‘textbook of the art of oratory’, because ‘true revolutionary orators are forged by the revolution itself, in the immediate political struggle’; the party had no need for ‘hothouse orators, nurtured and tutored in special schools’. None of the Party’s leading orators—in 1928 it was still possible to cite in this category Trotsky as well as Lenin and Lunacharsky—had any formal training. There was no substitute for inner conviction; actors, lawyers, and priests, however well-schooled, could never compete for rhetorical affect with the true revolutionary. Public speaking was a test of Bolshevik resolve and purpose. Speakers should avoid showing weakness, conserve and focus their energy, and eschew excessive gestures and cheap effects. ‘Exclamations from the floor’ were a legitimate part of meetings, and speakers should be ready both to deal with such interruptions to their own speech and to make their own interjections. Distracting regionalisms and Jewish or Ukrainian accents were to be avoided: the model was the language of the ‘Moscow proletarian’, which was ‘resonant and clear’, characterized by ‘excellent, soft and distinct pronunciation’. Most of all, Party workers should be ready to speak at a moment’s notice: if they were well-informed on the latest Party resolutions, the words would come: thoughts came first, words later, and speakers should not rely on notes.³⁴ By the early 1930s, a Marxist-Leninist theory of oratory had taken shape. ‘Bourgeois’ rhetoric was fake, concealing special interests and backstage deals behind the language of reason and the common good. Oratory, in the cause of communist agitation, would remain every bit as important as in the revolutionary period. But it was to be distinguished from bourgeois euphemism and dishonesty as well as from the excesses of false revolutionaries such as the ‘hysterical’ Kerensky and the demagogue Trotsky, who spoke to workers ‘as if they were children’. The ‘political language of the proletariat’ was to be distinguished from rhetoric because it was ‘scientific’: its value relied on truth, not superficial persuasiveness. It also once and for all broke down the divide between speech and writing: communist oratory had the force and immediacy of speech and the

³³ L. Gulev, Lektsii, besedy i doklady v klube (Moscow, 1926), 8–9. ³⁴ V. Rozhitsyn, Kak vystupat’ na sobraniiakh s dokladami i rechami (Moscow, 1928), 7–8, 11, 26–7, 29–30, 36–7, 39–40, 44, 47, 59, 100–1.

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depth and truth-value of writing. As in other areas, communists needed to take inspiration from Lenin, whose speech style exemplified the ‘dialectical-material concretization of expression’.³⁵ At the turn of the 1920s, the communication gap was deemed to be transcended in a dialectical move characteristic of Marxism-Leninism at its best. The jargonridden newspaper language of the early Party press was recognized as having missed its mark.³⁶ Conversely, the spoken word of the people was too erratic and lacking in political consciousness to be viable as the language of the proletarian state. The solution was to synthesize written and spoken languages and deny there was any disjuncture between them.

The Transcript of Soviet Life: The Birth of a Soviet Stenographic Profession The eventual successor regime to the State Duma, while it might decry that body’s ineffectual loquacity, did plenty of talking of its own and wanted it recorded. In the words of Georgii Chicherin in 1923, ‘Every factory meeting, every village assembly, every session of a local party cell or a local committee of a particular profession is an event in the history of the development of that social unit, an event that should be fixed and recorded’.³⁷ April 1917 saw the creation of a stenographers’ society (Professional’noe obshchestvo stenografistok i stenografov). The All-Russian Executive Committee (VTsIK) organized a permanent staff of stenographers in 1919. By 1924 all Sovnarkom debates were recorded. In 1925, not unreasonably given the pressures of working in the early Soviet state apparatus, stenography was recognized as a ‘harmful profession’.³⁸ Stenographers would later recall the huge pressure under which they had worked during the civil war period. It sometimes happened that there was simply no stenographer available to record some important gathering, and stenographers were often in the position of having to work solo and for much longer shifts than was desirable.³⁹ In one case, a session of a trade union congress got to midnight and there were still sixty delegates who had signed up to speak. The stenographers were given permission to leave the hall and work on writing up their notes, ³⁵ V. Gofman, Slovo oratora (Ritorika i politika) (Leningrad, 1932), 10, 156–7, 169, 173, 181, 228, 249, 258. ³⁶ On reader surveys, which often led to some uncomfortable conclusions about the efficacy of Soviet propaganda, see Jeffrey Brooks, ‘Studies of the Reader in the 1920s’, Russian History, 9 (1982): 187–202; on the distinctively Soviet mass journalism that developed largely as a response to the perceived failings, see Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA, 2004). ³⁷ Georgii Chicherin, ‘Privetstvie zhurnalu “Voprosy stenografii” ’, VS, no. 1 (1923): 25. ³⁸ A. M. Iurkovskii, Stenografiia skvoz’ veka (Moscow, 1969), 65–7, 69; L. Fotieva, ‘O rabote stenografov v Sovete Narodnykh Komissarov i v Sovete Truda i Oborony’, VS, no. 1 (1924): 7–8. ³⁹ S. Iudina, ‘Rabota stenografov v Sovetskoi Rossii’, VS, no. 1 (1923): 2–7.

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returning only for the final statements. But then a member of the presidium stormed in and accused them of sabotage for abandoning their post. On another occasion, stenographers were threatened with sanctions from the Cheka if they failed to turn up at short notice to record a meeting of a fraction at a trade union plenum.⁴⁰ Yet, for all the strains of the revolutionary period, many leading Bolsheviks seem to have had a close working relationship with their stenographers, fully recognizing their dependence on this communication technology. Trotsky took his own group of stenographers for the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk.⁴¹ According to various (no doubt embellished) memoirs published in the professional journal Voprosy stenografii, Lenin appreciated the work that stenographers did and on one occasion stepped in to make sure they were provided with telephones. The stenographers, for their part, admired his ability to communicate with different audiences, though were mildly exasperated by his ‘German’ syntax and his habit of striding about the stage (in vain did they try to use their table as a barricade to prevent him wandering out of earshot) (see Figure 7.1).⁴² In the mid-1920s, various living Bolsheviks expressed their appreciation of stenography in writing. In Chicherin’s words, the stenographer was ‘our closest and most faithful collaborator, to whom we confide all our thoughts’.⁴³ For Mikhail Arzhanov, recalling his work organizing transport during the civil war, ‘I didn’t do a single day’s work without stenographers and only with their help was able to get through work for which there were not enough hours in the day’. Stenographers had not only recorded his words with ‘photographic accuracy’, they had even finished off thoughts that he had left incomplete. As Anatolii Lunacharsky observed, stenography had become ‘one of those connective tissues that embraces all elements of public [obshchestvennoi] life and without which it cannot be imagined’.⁴⁴ Even before the civil war was over, the new Soviet state was making efforts to train up a post-Duma cohort of stenographers. There were about fifty applications for stenography courses organized by the union of office workers in 1920. About three-quarters came from women; the ages of applicants ranged from sixteen to mid-thirties, and secretaries and typists were the main occupations represented.⁴⁵ In 1921, forty-seven people were enrolled on these courses, though attendance was

⁴⁰ S. Iudina, ‘Vospominaniia: Stranichki proshlogo’, VS, no. 11 (1927): 6–9. ⁴¹ Iudina, ‘Rabota stenografov’, 5. ⁴² Iudina, ‘Rabota stenografov’, 6–7; R. Veksman, ‘Vospominanie o Vladimire Il’iche’, VS, no. 1 (1924): 4; V. Ostroumova, ‘Lenin, kak orator s tochki zreniia stenografa’, VS, no. 1 (1924): 5–6. ⁴³ Chicherin, ‘Privetstvie zhurnalu “Voprosy stenografii” ’, 24. ⁴⁴ Quotations from ‘Mysli obshchestvennykh i politicheskikh deiatelei Sovetskoi Rossii o stenografii’, VS, no. 2 (1923): 1–4. ⁴⁵ GARF, f. 5468 (Tsentral’nyi komitet professional’nogo soiuza sovetskikh i torgovykh sluzhashchikh), op. 3, d. 127.

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Figure 7.1. Lenin in walkabout mode at the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921. Source: State Museum of Political History of Russia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0% 92.%D0%98._%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B2%D1% 8B%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%B5%D1%82_%D0%BD%D0%B0_III_%D0% BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B5_%D0%9A%D0%BE% D0%BC%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1% 81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD% D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B0.jpg

well under 50 per cent.⁴⁶ These, of course, were very modest numbers. By 1924, however, stenographers were developing a distinct professional identity, and there was talk of overcoming the ‘appalling charlatanism’ of much stenographic practice in the provinces by providing more organized central training.⁴⁷ In March 1925, Soviet stenographers had their first all-union conference in Moscow, attended by ninety-eight delegates with voting rights from many parts of the RSFSR as well as Ukraine, Belorussia, and Azerbaijan. The main purpose of this event was to generate esprit de corps in a profession that was thinly spread and lacking a sense of common identity. Although the number of registered stenographers in the country had by then risen to 700, this was still very few, and only Moscow and Leningrad had more than a dozen or two stenographers. Moreover, practitioners of the craft were more likely to identify with the institution where they worked than with their fellow stenographers.⁴⁸

⁴⁶ GARF, f. 5468, op. 4, d. 173. ⁴⁷ GARF, f. 5468, op. 7, d. 352, l. 2. ⁴⁸ See the transcript of the conference at GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, ll. 7, 16, 18.

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By 1930 the number of registered stenographers had tripled relative to 1925; there were more than 600 in Moscow alone, and most of these had stable jobs in Soviet institutions.⁴⁹ A veteran of the ‘Bureau of Congress Stenographers’ later recalled the very heavy workload of the early 1930s. Whether it was meetings in Gosplan, Party purge hearings, lectures in the Communist Academy, endless trade union assemblies, or full-blown congresses, the stenographers of the 1930s—a combination of ‘old’ intelligentsia women, upwardly mobile wives of the Soviet professional classes, and recent (largely Jewish) migrants to the city—had their hands full. Especially demanding was so-called ‘parliamentary’ work, when the stenographers had to write up their notes on the spot; for such jobs four women had to work in sequence in order to keep pace, and a fast-talking orator made the task even more demanding. In the Soviet 1930s, given the potential for politically sensitive error, this was nerve-wracking work, even if some assignments were considered relatively easy. The less scrupulous stenographers tried to get themselves assigned to trade union events, where there were long breaks between sessions and where the language was simple, clichéd, and predictable.⁵⁰ The dignity of the Soviet stenographic profession was asserted not only internally but also internationally. In 1927, the USSR for the first time sent a delegate to the International Congress of Stenographers (held that year in Brussels); he proudly reported on the Soviet system of social insurance for stenographers.⁵¹ A few years earlier, a prominent Soviet stenographer was given a tour of the facilities for her counterparts in the British Houses of Parliament. She commented critically on the awful working conditions and noted that British parliamentary stenographers were older than their Soviet counterparts (rarely below thirty-five), exclusively male, and without specific stenographic training. Rather, they had backgrounds in journalism; a smooth text was valued over word-for-word accuracy. The chief stenographer effectively worked as a ‘newspaper editor’, that is, as a censor.⁵² Given the demand for their services, it was understandable that some shorthand practitioners in the early Soviet period voiced extravagant ambitions for stenography: that it should be made a compulsory subject in tertiary education institutions for white-collar professions, and that it was a skill uniquely well suited for the high-speed modern era.⁵³ As a rhetorically overcharged editorial declared in the very first issue of Voprosy stenografii, stenography was ‘the best means of ⁴⁹ R. Veksman, ‘Stenografiia za 5 let’, Voprosy stenografii i mashinopisi, no. 5–6 (1930): 4. ⁵⁰ N. I. Iakusheva, Vospominaniia s”ezdovskoi stenografistki, 1930–1938 (Moscow, 2003). ⁵¹ The delegate was A. Iurkovskii (b. 1901), later the author of a standard Soviet survey of the history of stenography in Russia. In his account of the trip he remarked that champagne and dancing allowed little time for serious work: GARF, f. 5468, op. 10, d. 528. ⁵² V. Ostroumova, ‘My i Oni’, VS, no. 3 (1924): 3–6. ⁵³ The idea of making stenography a compulsory subject was, for example, put forward by some speakers at a meeting of various agencies to discuss training of stenographers in September 1924: see GARF, f. 5468, op. 7, d. 352.

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instantly recording living speech and thought’, ‘winged writing, aeroplanography’ (krylatoe pis’mo, aeroplanopis’): ‘if in the centuries to come humanity continues to write, then it will write stenographically.’⁵⁴ In the future, a machine would be invented to take the place of stenographers, but for the time being shorthand was a cutting-edge technology: ‘in the previous era books were written by authors, but now a significant number of books are taken down by stenography.’⁵⁵ As Lev Trotsky commented, stenography imposed a machine-like work rhythm: ‘When two people are sawing wood, then they have to work rhythmically; when you learn how to do this, it makes the work far easier; the same with a stenogram: your thinking gets disciplined, it works more rhythmically in tandem with the stenographer’s pencil.’⁵⁶ But the Soviet stenographic profession was by no means without internal conflict. There were two overlapping sources of tension: first, the relationship between highly qualified ‘congress’ stenographers and those capable only of lower speeds; second, that between stenographers employed permanently by institutions (who were mainly what we would call shorthand typists) and freelance operators. Resentful colleagues considered freelance parliamentary stenographers to be ‘tourists’ who travelled around taking all the most lucrative work (this at a time of low pay and underemployment).⁵⁷ Parliamentary stenographers periodically complained of suffering discrimination from labour exchanges, which were inclined to consider them a privileged ‘caste’ earning vast sums while their colleagues went hungry.⁵⁸ Earnings and career prospects varied enormously from one part of the country to another. In Rostov on Don, for example, twenty-six stenographers had salaried employment and earned a healthy 80–120 roubles per month; many of them, moreover, were able to supplement their earnings with freelance work. In Krasnodar, by contrast, salaries did not exceed seventy-five roubles, rates for freelance work were correspondingly low, and there was much unemployment.⁵⁹ Whichever category stenographers belonged to, they sometimes had to fight for their professional dignity. Many employers failed to understand that a stenographer could not be expected to sit chained to a desk from nine to six, or that six hours per week of meetings to transcribe was in fact a ⁵⁴ VS, no. 1 (1923): 1–2. ⁵⁵ As remarked by a speaker at the first stenographers’ conference: GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, l. 207. ⁵⁶ L. Trotskii, ‘O stenografii’, VS, no. 3 (1924): 2. ⁵⁷ The ‘tourist’ jibe was used by a stenographer from Yaroslavl at the first stenographers’ conference: GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, l. 224. In the mid-1920s, different rates of pay were recommended for four distinct categories of stenographer, ranging from ‘congress’ stenographers capable of taking down more than 110 words per minute to secretarial stenographers who managed 75 words per minute. See GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 354, ll. 1–2 (correspondence between the stenographers’ union and the central trade union organization and the ministry of labour, 1925). ⁵⁸ This is the language used in a protest letter from a congress stenographer in Tiflis in 1928, GARF, f. 5468, op. 11, d. 500, l. 30. ⁵⁹ For these and several other examples, see GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 358.

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heavy norm (given that one hour of speech normally required five hours of transcribing).⁶⁰ Physical exhaustion was common, and there was much discussion, whether at meetings of the professional union or in the journal Voprosy stenografii, of what is now called repetitive strain injury.⁶¹ There was also a more fundamental reason for unease. For all the rhetorical insistence on the birth of a ‘Soviet’ stenographic profession, the awkward fact was that many stenographers active in the 1920s had earned their stripes in the State Duma. It was largely the same group of elite Duma stenographers that later worked in the ‘Pre-Parliament’ of 1917, the commission for preparing the Constituent Assembly, and the short-lived Constituent Assembly itself. These women and men were also involved in recording the big congresses of soviets in 1917. After the October Revolution, they remained active, even if they were not tied to a single political body as in the Duma era.⁶² The very term ‘parliamentary stenographer’ was a constant reminder of this undesirable heritage. As one speaker commented at a meeting of union representatives and other interested parties in September 1924, ‘I would suggest abolishing the word “parliamentary”. It keeps raising objections. [We should instead speak of] simply training stenographers of higher qualification.’⁶³ In due course the term was indeed replaced by the more neutral ‘congress stenographer’ (s”ezdovskii stenograf). The problem, however, went deeper than terminology. There was more than a suspicion that the pre-revolutionary origins of many stenographers correlated with a dangerously apolitical outlook. Stenographers were admitted to the inner sanctums of Soviet politics, yet many of them were apparently indifferent to what they heard there. As one speaker at the first stenographers’ conference observed: ‘[Let’s say we have] a stenographer taking down a historic speech, a stenographer taking down great thoughts, and at the same time he is politically illiterate. This is a nonsense, it’s a contradiction we can’t any more accept.’⁶⁴ Later on at the same event, a speaker suggested that some colleagues disliked the new red cover of the journal Voprosy stenografii—an allegation which, according to the stenographers’ own stenographic transcript, provoked a commotion (sil’nyi shum, protest) among the audience.⁶⁵ In 1930, a leading representative of the profession was still acknowledging the ‘social and political backwardness of stenographers’ and the fact that they had ‘given less to the country in the last five years than they have received’.⁶⁶ By this time, a kind of class war was being fomented in the profession. As early as 1925, a speaker at the first stenographers’ conference had asked: ‘who ⁶⁰ The questions of differential pay for stenographers of different levels of facility and of fair work norms for stenographers were raised by R. Veksman at the first stenographers’ conference: GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, ll. 166–74. ⁶¹ On the attitude of employers, see S. Iudina, ‘Stenografy v uchrezhdeniiakh’, Voprosy stenografii i mashinopisi, no. 6 (1928): 4–6. ⁶² S. Beier, ‘O rabote stenografov v gosudarstvennoi dume i gosudarstvennom sovete’, 6–9. ⁶³ GARF, f. 5468, op. 7, d. 352, l. 25. ⁶⁴ GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, l. 19. ⁶⁵ GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, l. 129. ⁶⁶ Veksman, ‘Stenografiia za 5 let’, 5.

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should we accept into the union, everyone who calls themselves stenographers, or according to the class principle?’⁶⁷ This question evidently hung in the air all through the early Soviet period, but it was answered decisively in the ‘cultural revolution’ that erupted in the late 1920s. In 1928, symptomatically, the stenographers’ journal was renamed Voprosy stenografii i mashinopisi, and the flamboyant futuristic covers of the mid-1920s were replaced by an emphatically plain design. Typists (mashinistki) played the role of salt-of-the-earth proletarians to the part of spoiled bourgeoises that was allotted to the stenographers. As an editorial soon acknowledged, some stenographers (and indeed some typists) could not see the sense of their forced union.⁶⁸ Concerns about the class profile and political loyalty of stenographers were related to a fundamental ambiguity of the stenographer’s craft. On the one hand, stenographers were machines for reproducing the spoken word. On the other hand, they were eminently human and could not help being affected by what they heard in what were sometimes the upper echelons of power in Bolshevik Russia.⁶⁹ Moreover, theirs was an art of interpretation: not only did stenographers have to exercise their judgement when they came to decipher their shorthand symbols and convert speech into written text, they even had room for creativity in the ways they graphically represented the words they were recording. It was an increasing source of annoyance to administrators, but a fundamental fact about the profession, that stenographers were divided by the methods they used. The systems of Stolze and Gabelsberger still had their devotees, and neither group had much incentive to work towards a ‘unified’ system that would render obsolete much of their training. In the 1920s, Soviet stenographers even found themselves wondering whether they were practising an art or a science. One observer-participant in 1924 had no time for this discussion: ‘we need to throw out the notion that stenography is an art, that’s an old debate. Stenography is not an art but a science, the most ordinary kind of science, which in the future will replace conventional writing’.⁷⁰ Even so, the question evidently continued to exercise some of her colleagues.⁷¹ A speaker at the first stenographers’ conference went so far as to cite Lombroso’s notion that genius and madness were almost the same thing:

⁶⁷ GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, l. 54. ⁶⁸ ‘K novym zadacham’, Voprosy stenografii i mashinopisi, no. 2 (1928): 1–2. ⁶⁹ Japan is an interesting comparative case. In the Imperial Diet (established in 1890) speeches were recorded by stenographers, as they later would be in Russia’s State Duma. Initially, while this kind of political eloquence retained its novelty value, stenography was a prestigious and well-paid activity that was performed by men. In the early twentieth century, however, it came to be seen instead as a labour of ‘repetition and reproduction’, and the profession was accordingly feminized. See Miyako Inoue, ‘Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth Century Japan’, Language & Communication, 31 (2011): 181–2. ⁷⁰ GARF, f. 5468, op. 7, d. 352, l. 15. ⁷¹ Witness the discussion ‘Nauka ili iskusstvo’, VS, no. 4 (1926): 5–6.

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‘When we observe outstanding stenographers, we can also say that they are not entirely normal people.’⁷² There was much interested discussion in the 1920s of inventions that might make stenographers redundant, but in the end it spurred stenographers to assert their dignity as something more than machines. Admittedly, many of the objections to the new machines were practical—they were too expensive. As one contributor argued, it was a much better use of scarce resources to buy a couple of hundred tractors than to spend thousands of roubles on importing stenographic machines.⁷³ An ‘automatic stenographer’ designed by V. I. Kovalenkov, head of the Leningrad Electrotechnical Experimental Laboratory, was effectively a tape recorder that used cinema film. The intention was that this would cut out the stenographers, as the tape could be slowed down to the speed of a typist. But there was some scepticism that this machine would prove cheaper than existing arrangements. For one thing, the services of a technician would be required, but the main cost would be the tape and the chemicals required to develop it: one hour’s worth of transcription would cost 250 roubles, or seventeen times what it would cost to hire a human stenographer.⁷⁴ A more fundamental drawback of these precursors of the dictaphone was that they could not take editing decisions. As representatives of the central stenographers’ union wrote in 1928 in response to a query from a member about how to view the new technology, the dictaphone was unsuitable for adoption not only because it was still unreliable and difficult to use. The bigger problem was that the transcripts of most speeches needed extensive correction and editing, and the combination of tape and typist was not capable of doing this.⁷⁵ The precise character of stenographic editing was itself a subject of much debate in the 1920s. Stenographers had long found it hard to strike the right balance: if they gave an absolutely faithful record of what had been said, it looked ugly; if they edited the text, speakers were liable to accuse them of taking liberties.⁷⁶ There were different views on how interventionist a stenographer should be: should she correct basic errors, carry out ‘literary’ editing of style, or vary the approach depending on the speaker and the occasion? Many meetings, especially in the provinces, included speakers of modest education, and their words would make a strange and unfavourable impression if they were not significantly edited.⁷⁷ One stenographer from Yaroslavl argued that it was only a matter of common sense: in ⁷² GARF, f. 5468, op. 8, d. 343, l. 41. ⁷³ Ne-avtomat, ‘Stenograf-avtomat i problema unitarnoi’, VS, no. 7 (1926): 20–1. ⁷⁴ Cost estimates from B. Vishnevskii, ‘Itogi po voprosu o stenografe-avtomate’, VS, no. 3 (1927): 24–5. Note also B. Vishnevskii, ‘Stenograf-avtomat prof. Kovalenkova’ and Redaktsiia, ‘K izobreteniiu prof. Kovalenkova’, VS, no. 1 (1927): 16–17. ⁷⁵ GARF, f. 5468, op. 11, d. 500, l. 135. ⁷⁶ For one statement of the predicament, see A. Egorov (Simferopol), ‘Melochi nashei zhizni (Vmesto fel’etona)’, VS, no. 1 (1927): 21. ⁷⁷ ‘Kak rasshifrovyvat’ stenogrammu’, VS, no. 1 (1925): 35–6.

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the provinces, there were not enough good speakers to make a ‘photographic’ style of stenography worthwhile. If stenographers did not smooth out the rough edges of speeches, the authority of their profession would suffer.⁷⁸ In his speech at the first all-union conference of stenographers, Mikhail Kalinin lent his support to this view: ‘You hear me now and understand perfectly what I am saying, but if you wrote down what I was saying word for word, you would get nonsense, because speech is one thing and a stenographic transcript quite another.’⁷⁹ As a ‘regime of economy’ was announced for Soviet institutions, minutes (protokoly) as opposed to full stenographic transcripts gained more advocates. A protokol cost only half as much as a stenogramma, and it was quite wrong to consider it—as many dyed-in-the-wool stenographers did—a ‘profanation’ of the stenographer’s art. Rather, it was a ‘condensed, well compressed stenogram from which all the water has been squeezed out’. Writing minutes was no easier than compiling a stenographic transcript: it required a good deal of experience and skill.⁸⁰ As ‘industrial’ efficiency became all the rage at the end of the 1920s, the main professional journal published more articles in support of the protokol. It was not true, one contributor argued, that minutes should be eschewed just because speakers preferred to see a full transcript of what they had said: ‘Orators can demand all they like, but we have to reckon with the requirements of the administration.’ As another short article noted, minutes rather than a full transcript obviously made best practical sense in most cases. If stenographers objected, this was because they were reluctant to learn a new skill.⁸¹ Yet there remained many occasions in Soviet life that required a full stenographic transcript, and it was still a matter of dispute what degree of editing was legitimate. The content was sometimes too specialized for stenographers to edit with confidence. Another problem was that they risked flattening out the distinctive features of different speakers. What, for example, if the uneducated speech of a peasant or worker was transformed into flawless literary Russian in the written record?⁸² As one contributor noted, the common notion that the stenographer ‘photographed’ speech was misleading. The transcript was not a machine-like reproduction but rather a recreation. A better analogy was film: ‘stenography is cinematography of speech and of the speaker himself where you are only the cameraman turning the handle but are also—alas!—responsible for providing an interesting story and elegant composition and everything else.’⁸³

⁷⁸ P. G. Kuvyrkin, ‘O redaktirovanii’, VS, no. 5–6 (1926): 24–5. ⁷⁹ ‘Rechi predstavitelei TsIKa, TsK Partii, TsK Soiuza Sovtorgsluzhashchikh i NKRKI na I-oi Vsesoiuznoi konferentsii’, VS, no. 2 (1925): 5. ⁸⁰ M. Kholodenko and M. Sichikov, ‘Stenograficheskii protokol’, VS, no. 1 (1927): 13–15. ⁸¹ O. Chebkasova, ‘O stenograficheskom protokole (V poriadke obsuzhdeniia)’ and N.P., ‘Ot slov k delu’, in Voprosy stenografii i mashinopisi, no. 2 (1929): 7–8. ⁸² A point made in Iu. Shcheglova, ‘Eshche o redaktirovanii’, VS, no. 2 (1927): 13. ⁸³ N. Faleev, ‘Aforizmy o stenografii’, VS, no. 2 (1924): 28.

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Speech, Stenography, and the Bolshevik Public Sphere In early Soviet Russia, these were matters not just of professional practice but also of political import. Stenographic records became a significant political tool in the period of ‘collective leadership’ after the death of Lenin. After June 1923 some Politburo meetings were stenographed, and the transcripts might then be circulated (on terms of strict confidentiality) to the wider elite of provincial party secretaries and leading comrades in various other organizations. Only a small proportion of meetings were recorded in this way; the general trend in the 1920s– 30s was for the inner circle to become more secretive, and in the late 1930s stenographic transcripts were discontinued entirely for the Politburo (to resume after 1953). But for a crucial phase in the mid-1920s they played a significant role. In March 1926, for example, Stalin accused Kamenev of playing to the stenogram, while Dzerzhinskii in June 1926 even declared: ‘I consider it a crime that we have stenograms, that we are speaking for the documents.’ As these examples suggest, Politburo members were acutely conscious of the fact of having their words recorded and took some trouble over editing the transcript before its wider dissemination. The decision to have a meeting stenographed was always taken for a reason—usually to send out policy signals or admonitions from the inner circle to its plenipotentiaries beyond Moscow.⁸⁴ Politburo meetings were one thing; Central Committee plenums quite another. The latter were conceived as a forum for Bolshevik ‘democracy’—as a means for a political elite broader than the inner circle to hammer out political issues, and also a means of transmitting their deliberations to a wider public of party functionaries. The means of transmission was the stenographic transcript. Leading Bolsheviks promoted the notion that plenums were honest and uncensored events where speakers did not shrink from articulating unpleasant truths. As Stalin said in an unscheduled speech at the July 1928 plenum, if the language used was sometimes harsh, it was also straightforward and accurate: Some people think that you shouldn’t speak the whole truth at a Central Committee plenum. But I think that we are obliged to speak the whole truth at a plenum of the Central Committee of our party. We shouldn’t forget that a Central Committee plenum is not a peasant meeting [miting]. Of course, the words ‘supertax’ [sverkhnalog], ‘something resembling tribute’ are unpleasant

⁸⁴ A. Iu. Vatlin et al. (eds), Stenogrammy zasedanii Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b). 1923–1938 gg. 3 vols (Moscow, 2007), introduction to vol. 1, 7–18, quotation 11. For more on the use made of these documents, see Paul R. Gregory and Norman Naimark, The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship (New Haven, 2008), especially the chapters by Paul Gregory, Robert Service, and Leona Toker. On measures of secrecy, see O. V. Khlevniuk et al. (eds), Stalinskoe Politbiuro v 30-e gody: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1995), 73–82.

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words, because they slap you in the face [b’iut v nos]. But, first of all, words aren’t the point. Second, these words fully correspond to reality.⁸⁵

But the harshness had never quite been unbridled. In all the chaos of the revolutionary period, it was easy to overlook that the Bolsheviks had built up a tradition of political deliberation. At the Second Congress in 1903 it was already clear that Social Democratic exiles could be sticklers for procedure no less than parliamentarians.⁸⁶ In some ways, their sensitivity to matters of protocol exceeded that of the members of the future Duma: as was to be expected in a group far smaller and more intimate than the Duma, perceived offences to personal honour were taken badly. But the Social Democrats also took from their years abroad a conversance with parliamentary procedure and (especially) with the rules of order that obtained among their far more thoroughly institutionalized German social democratic counterparts. Much in the rules of order applied at the Second Congress, and largely inherited by subsequent Bolshevik gatherings, was familiar from bourgeois parliamentary practice; at the Fifth Congress in 1907, Duma precedent could be cited without disapproval. However, two aspects of Bolshevik practice stood out against the parliamentary backdrop. The first was the lack of protection of the rights of the minority—above all, the absence of a veto for a set number of delegates on motions to terminate debate. The second was the fact that the chairman enjoyed broad powers to intervene in debate (as Plekhanov had demonstrated in his numerous, and not altogether chairmanlike, contributions to the Second Congress). Neither of these points mattered much while the Bolsheviks remained a small peer group governed by certain norms of mutual respect, or when the minority included Lenin, who was capable of making himself heard whatever the formal rules might say. But they paved the way for an increasingly disciplinary and didactic culture of political deliberation when the Bolsheviks went from an exile or underground party to a mass party of government.⁸⁷ Whatever the Bolsheviks’ disciplinary ambitions, determining and imposing the party line was not a straightforward matter in the 1920s, least of all in the Party’s own highest deliberative bodies. The Bolsheviks had a tradition of robust debate within party circles even as they attempted to create an impression of military discipline to outsiders. Lenin characterized the combative but purposeful discussion within his party as ‘open, free struggle’: this was very different from

⁸⁵ V. P. Danilov, O. V. Khlevniuk and A. Iu. Vatlin (eds), Kak lomali nep. Stenogrammy plenumov TsK VKP(b) 1928–1929 gg., 5 vols (Moscow, 2000) (hereafter Kak lomali nep), 2: 513. ⁸⁶ On the seriousness with which Lenin prepared for the Second Congress, see N. K. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow, 1957), 72. ⁸⁷ On the history of the Bolshevik culture of deliberation, see Oleg Kharkhordin, ‘The Past and Future of Russian Public Language’, in Nikolai Vakhtin and Boris Firsov (eds), Public Debate in Russia: Matters of (Dis)order (Edinburgh, 2016), 301–19.

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‘endless, boring intelligentsia debating’, but nor was it a culture of ex cathedra pronouncement.⁸⁸ Argumentativeness was central to the Bolshevik self-image, and it had rarely been more evident than in the winter of 1920–1, when the Central Committee had been split and party meetings had been marked by a ‘febrile intensity’. A ban on factions at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 ostensibly put a stop to the disunity, but it remained uncertain in the mid-1920s how centralizing ‘democratic centralism’ was allowed to be. There was still a sense that ‘the congress’ was the arbiter of Bolshevik policy, rather than the agenda of any one leader or grouping, and that individual speakers should not hold back at such gatherings. The language they used was almost pointedly unparliamentary: Bolsheviks were ‘masters of invective, diatribe, peroration, and . . . extravagant verbal vendetta’; there was ribaldry and repartee, profanation, and an abundance of violent metaphors. Orators were also guaranteed a hearing far beyond the congress venue, as transcripts were distributed to party organizations in all corners of the Soviet Union, where they were subjected to further discussion. Yet the goal, when the words had died down and the dust had cleared, was a unity more profound than any achievable under alternative systems of political deliberation: the Bolsheviks ‘wanted all mediation between the individual and the Party torn down so that the conscience of the individual and the messianic goals of the Party would naturally coincide’.⁸⁹ The uncertain relationship between ‘democracy’ and ‘centralism’ created the space for the great rhetorical struggle of 1923–4 between ‘Party’ and ‘Opposition’. This struggle was conducted in newspapers, party meetings, and (especially) in the election campaign of early 1924. The defeat of the Opposition was always likely, given the majoritarians’ control of the party apparatus and media, and the lack of patience many workers had for party ‘squabbles’, but it was not quite preordained. This was still ‘electoral authoritarianism’ rather than dictatorial rule by a tiny clique: political outcomes could not yet be determined behind closed doors, and the nature and extent of Bolshevik ‘democracy’ was the main source of contention. Even the emotional register of discussion was a matter of controversy, as the two sides traded accusations of being ‘nervy’ in the face of criticism or indulging in ‘passion’ (strastnost’) at the expense of reason.⁹⁰ But the fact that the defeat of the opposition was such a public affair had striking effects on Bolshevik political culture, hardening rhetorical divisions and opening the way for disagreement to be considered heresy. By 1926, the colourful language that Bolsheviks had always used against each other gained a more threatening edge, humour became a weapon of the majority, and violent language was less straightforwardly metaphorical.⁹¹ ⁸⁸ Quotations from Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine, 77. ⁸⁹ Halfin, Intimate Enemies, 38, 41, 77. ⁹⁰ Reznik, Trotskii i tovarishchi, 143–60, 191–203, 263. ⁹¹ Halfin, Intimate Enemies, 219–20.

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The weapon was all the more powerful because the words uttered at Party meetings were so widely disseminated and repeated. Trotsky, by now firmly on the defensive, was also well aware of the possibility that phrases from a stenogram might be quoted out of context. In correcting the transcript of his speech to the Fifteenth Party Conference in November 1926 (the last occasion that he and other leading ‘Leftists’ would be offered such a platform), he insisted on adjusting a phrase that might easily be taken to suggest that he saw the USSR as a ‘nonproletarian state’: daleko ne-proletarskogo gosudarstva became daleko ne-chisto proletarskogo gosudarstva.⁹² Less than a year later, he and Zinov’ev would be summoned to the Politburo for a dressing-down (in which, admittedly, they gave as good as they got), before being expelled from the Central Committee at a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission the following month; on this occasion Trotsky had to contend not only with verbal abuse but also with missiles (a thick volume of economic statistics and a glass of water were thrown at him). In due course, Pravda brought an edited transcript of events to its readers, who were made privy to the abuse heaped on oppositionists: one speech was punctuated by interjections from the floor such as ‘Lies, slander!’, ‘Demagogue!’, and ‘Evdokimov, what have you come to?’⁹³ At the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, where Trotsky and Zinov’ev were not present, the opposition was subjected to a full verbal lynching in front of the largest such gathering ever assembled (almost 1,700 delegates); again, Pravda readers were presented with a daily transcript accompanied by a ‘Congress Diary’ column which subjected not just the political stance of oppositionists but also their rhetorical performance to withering criticism. Rakovski, for example, had once been ‘among the party’s most talented orators’ but now seemed ‘oppressive’.⁹⁴ The reckoning with Trotsky, Zinov’ev, et al. in autumn 1927 marked a new stage in Bolshevik rhetoric: never before had a public campaign against prominent party members been conducted in such sustained and aggressive fashion. The spoken word as rendered in print played a crucial part: edited transcripts, published in the party press, served as a tool to vilify (and incite further vilification of) the oppositionists. An important window on the process by which speech became writing is provided by the recently published transcripts of the five crucial plenums at the end of the 1920s that saw Stalin, in his next political manoeuvre, vanquish the ‘Rightists’ and set the course for violent collectivization. The archives contain three different versions of the stenographic transcripts of these occasions: the initial uncorrected text; the version corrected by authors; and the final edited text for circulation around party organizations. The modern

⁹² See RGASPI, f. 55 (XV Vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia VKP(b)), op. 1, d. 78, ll. 2–3. ⁹³ Pravda, 30 October 1927, 5. ⁹⁴ ‘Dnevnik s”ezda’, Pravda, 7 December 1927, 4. For an incisive account of these events, see Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (London, 2015), 641–3, 646–9, 652–4.

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editors of the transcripts have found that the initial uncorrected version contained so many rough edges (whether due to uneducated speakers or poor acoustic conditions or inadequate stenographers) that it was unsuitable for scholarly use. With a few notable exceptions (on which more below), speakers’ corrections were limited to such stylistic matters. Differences between the speakers’ amended text and the text for circulation were only minor.⁹⁵ The most prominent exception was Stalin. Very careful control was exerted over the dissemination of his words after they were uttered. The texts of his speeches were extracted from the overall transcript and placed in his personal archive. They were subjected to close editing by his aide I. P. Tovstukha and then more minor corrections by Stalin himself. The effect of the editing was in the first instance to make Stalin’s speeches tighter. Thus, for example, his speech of 5 July 1928 was significantly shortened in the process of editing, and interruptions from Voroshilov were omitted. His main speech at the plenum, delivered on 9 July, was reduced in length by about 20 per cent in the editing process.⁹⁶ Conversely, Molotov’s speech saw significant insertions, which rendered it even more thudding and resolute.⁹⁷ At the same time, even with the clouds gathering over Stalin’s opponents, there remained a sense among the participants that the stenographic transcript was a documentary record of events that constituted a higher authority than the word of any single speaker, however powerful. On three separate occasions, the statistician V. V. Osinskii, later to be executed for his role in the ill-fated 1937 census, objected that his line of argument had been misrepresented by Stalin, in two of these cases referring listeners to the stenogram. For example: O: I am just reading that place in the transcript. S: So much the better, but I seemed to hear something different [mne poslyshalos’ nechto drugoe].⁹⁸ In many other places, moreover, the proceedings do not read like the carefully vetted transcript of authoritative Bolshevik discourse. If Stalin’s speeches were amended to give the impression of conciseness and authority, Mikhail Kalinin took the opposite approach. In July 1928, Kalinin had his back to the wall as a member of the leadership known to be ‘soft’ on the peasant question. At the plenum, he tried to stick to the line of moderation—but did this only by adopting

⁹⁵ Kak lomali nep, 1: 12–13. ⁹⁶ For these two examples, compare Kak lomali nep, 2: 149–56 with 2: 612–21 and 2: 353–69 with 2: 625–44. ⁹⁷ See especially ibid., 2: 390–2, 404–5. ⁹⁸ Kak lomali nep, 2: 153 (for the other two examples, see 2: 358, 514). In the uncorrected stenogram, Stalin’s reply read more apologetically: ‘Тем лучше, значит я не так слышал, плохо слышал’ (2: 617). Here is another example of how even minor editorial changes served to bolster Stalin’s authority.

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the persona of Bolshevik iurodivyi (holy fool). Whereas other speakers were concerned with cramming their allotted time with examples, arguments, and rebuttals of counter-arguments, Kalinin positively welcomed opportunities for digression and frivolous asides. He got involved in a joky dialogue about the ‘learned’ phrase ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.⁹⁹ He constantly wandered off topic. He played to the gallery. When asked directly by an exasperated Nikolai Skrypnik whether he supported religious communes, he replied in mock indignation: ‘I’m amazed—as if any of the orators here have spoken more directly than I have’.¹⁰⁰ At this point the stenogram records ‘Laughter’—and we can probably assume that this was not the canned Stalinist laughter of the 1930s but genuine hilarity. Even more strikingly, Kalinin repeatedly drew attention to the ways in which the transcript did not accurately reflect the sense of speakers’ words. A written text wrenched words out of the context of speaker–listener interaction that gave them meaning. In a tangled explanation of his attitude to the kulak, he forced the stenographers to resort to scare quotes: ‘The question is: how to support the kulak? You can support and “support”. You can “support” the kulak in a Marxist way.’ Unsurprisingly, this statement was followed by a ‘burst of laughter’. A little later, in one of his more striking digressions, Kalinin reminded his colleagues that Lenin, when angered by someone, would often say ‘Shoot him!’ (Rasstreliaite!). But, of course (!), the founding father had not meant this literally. When ticked off by Emel’ian Iaroslavskii that the plenum would be read by the whole party membership and that he should watch his words, Kalinin said he would take care when correcting his text for publication but that a speech was something different: ‘I’ll need to think over the stenogram very strictly, but when I deliver a speech, I want to impress my thoughts on the consciousness of people as fully as I can.’ At the November 1928 plenum, Kalinin again asserted that, whatever the imperfections of his speeches in their written form, he was unmatched in his ability to connect with an audience. When he struggled to get back to the point after yet another digression, he stated: ‘My strength relative to other authors is that people listen to me attentively . . . For that reason, comrades, it’s not the stenographers but the audience who remind me what I was talking about.’ Naturally, the reaction to this was more ‘laughter’.¹⁰¹ At the November 1928 plenum, the oppositionist M. I. Frumkin also used laughter in an attempt to disarm the audience: ‘I realize that Comrade Stalin had to choose Frumkin as a punchbag . . . I mustn’t, of course, be offended. If it’s necessary in the interests of the party, then I can reconcile myself to this.’ But Frumkin went on to refer to the stenogram as a means of setting the record straight: ‘I would not have asked for the floor if I had been confident that my ⁹⁹ Kak lomali nep, 2: 455. For similar examples from the following plenum, see 3: 395, 402. ¹⁰⁰ Kak lomali nep, 2: 520. ¹⁰¹ Examples in this paragraph from Kak lomali nep, 2: 460–1, 519, 3: 403.

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“letter” would be added to the stenogram, if it would be possible [for readers] to compare what I said in my “letter” with what comrade Stalin has said about me.’¹⁰² Yet stenograms were themselves vulnerable to misuse. Another Bolshevik on the defensive, A. M. Lezhava, objected to V. V. Lominadze’s misleading quotations from the transcript of a speech he had given in Gosplan (but not subsequently seen). What followed was perhaps the most explosive thing said at the entire plenum: ‘If you yanked phrases out of Stalin’s speech yesterday, you could cobble together any deviation you like . . . From his speech you could make a Russian nationalist, and a Right deviationist, and whatever you like.’¹⁰³ It almost goes without saying that this passage was removed from the version of the transcript circulated to party members. For its part, Pravda gave in full a number of set-piece speeches from the plenum (notably Stalin’s) but very little of the cut-and-thrust debate. A few interjections were recorded in the text of Stalin’s speech, but these were in the spirit of Socratic dialogue.¹⁰⁴ Readers of the party newspaper in autumn 1928 were left in no doubt about the importance of the struggle with the ‘Right deviation’, but the transcript of Bolshevik power emphasized unity and acclamation to a much greater extent than the previous year, when the ‘Left deviation’ had been eviscerated in the press. The April 1929 plenum, at which Bukharin was routed by Stalin, brought a rhetorical point of no return. Oppositionists were heckled incessantly in a way that leading Bolsheviks had not previously had to endure (Trotsky’s oppositionists had at least been able to deliver some blows of their own). Bukharin poignantly compared his predicament with that of a convicted prisoner in tsarist Russia enduring the ceremony of ‘civil execution’.¹⁰⁵ He was denied the opportunity to take his arguments to a wider public, as the proceedings were shrouded in secrecy; a version of Stalin’s main speech was only published just before his death, in volume 12 of his collected works. That speech itself was unprecedentedly long and peremptory in its tone; this was already the dictator speaking.¹⁰⁶ In addition to his other sources of power, Stalin now had a grip on political communication: he got to decide what version of which transcript came to light, and under what circumstances. It was symptomatic that the death blows to Bukharin’s political legitimacy in 1929 were two written versions of spoken encounters: the first was Kamenev’s account of a meeting with Bukharin in summer 1928 where the ‘Rightist’ had in ¹⁰² Kak lomali nep, 3: 250. Earlier that year, Frumkin had sent a letter to the Politburo criticizing its policy on the peasants. ¹⁰³ Kak lomali nep, 3: 276. ¹⁰⁴ ‘Rech' tov. Stalina na noiabr'skom plenume TsK VKP(b) 19 noiabria 1928 g.’, Pravda, 24 November 1928, 3. ¹⁰⁵ Kak lomali nep, 4: 151. Bukharin was also aware of the significance of the stenogram for shaping subsequent impressions of the plenum. When returning the corrected text of his own speech, he noted that some of the hostile interruptions had been amended in the process of editing, and asked to be consulted if any further such changes were made. Ibid., 710, n. 152. ¹⁰⁶ V. P. Danilov, A. Iu. Vatlin, and O. V. Khlevniuk, ‘Aprel’skii plenum TsK i TsKK VKP(b) 1929 g.’, in Kak lomali nep, 4: 5, 14–15.

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desperation reached out for support to a defeated ‘Leftist’; the second was the stenographic transcript of a speech in September 1929 by a repentant Rightist from the Industrial Academy, which clinched the matter of Bukharin’s expulsion from the Politburo.¹⁰⁷ Not only could the Party authorities control the editing and dissemination of public speech, they could also increasingly determine what was said in the first place. In March 1931, the show trial of Mensheviks set a new benchmark for such occasions, as fellow Social Democrats were given sneering treatment by Nikolai Krylenko, the agitator-turned-prosecutor, while the free-spirited chronicler of revolution, Nikolai Sukhanov, was pushed into denouncing his former views.¹⁰⁸ Another milestone was the first congress of the Soviet writers’ union in summer 1934, the real and symbolic resolution of the Bolshevik culture wars of the preceding decade. Here the keynote speeches were carefully prescripted and vetted.¹⁰⁹ From the beginning the transcript of the congress was viewed as an authoritative document—the Bible of Socialist Realism. The delegates who spoke more spontaneously were those who struggled to know how to write in this latest phase of Soviet cultural construction. Boris Pasternak, with characteristic diffidence, admitted he had only taken to the podium ‘so people wouldn’t think anything bad if I didn’t speak’, while Isaak Babel’ fired off a few witty remarks— including a joke about his own love of the ‘genre’ of silence. Even Babel’, however, held up Stalin as a stylistic exemplar: ‘look at how Stalin forges his speech, how his pithy words are hammered into shape, how muscular they are.’¹¹⁰ Soon enough, stenography was playing its part in what Jürgen Habermas termed the ‘plebiscitary-acclamatory’ public sphere of modern dictatorship.¹¹¹ In the 1930s, the transcripts of political events became largely divorced from the original speech situations. As Natalia Skradol observes in her study of Stalinist laughter, it is impossible to know what decree of collective mirth occurred in actual fact. The important thing is that the stenographic records of it, designed now for publication in the Soviet press, were a ‘communicative act’ of a new kind. They represented the power of the political leader to control the audience’s reactions, the rhetorical unity of leaders and led; they ‘affirmed society’s ideological cohesion . . . without making necessary the audience’s verbal involvement’.¹¹² ¹⁰⁷ These documents are published in Kak lomali nep, 4: 558–63 and 5: 598–619 respectively. ¹⁰⁸ Israel Getzler, Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (Houndmills, 2002), chap. 6. The trial was preceded by lengthy detention and interrogation, as recorded in A. L. Litvin (ed.), Men’shevistskii protsess 1931 goda: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1999), 2: 52–146. ¹⁰⁹ Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 2017), 472–5; Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko (eds), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (New Haven, 2007), 165–6 (memorandum by I. Gronskii, chair of organizing committee). ¹¹⁰ Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), 279, 548. ¹¹¹ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989), xviii. ¹¹² Natalia Skradol, ‘Laughing with Comrade Stalin: An Analysis of Laughter in a Soviet Newspaper Report’, RR, 68 (2009): 27–8.

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Yet acclamation of the Leader was not the only function of this Stalinist public sphere. No less important was its role in enforcing surveillance. As the original ‘self-criticism’ campaign of the late 1920s mutated into witch hunts and forced recantation, party meetings became a means of turning the entire Soviet public into a ‘collective hostage’.¹¹³ Terror and ‘democracy’ were completely intertwined: ‘easygoing tolerance’ and sheer ‘apathy’ were still in evidence in factory party committees in 1935 and 1936, but in 1937 everyone was obliged to respond to the call at the February plenum for ‘democracy’.¹¹⁴ Agitation was now called on to permeate Soviet society completely.¹¹⁵ Party meetings, more than ever, were a form of compulsory mutual surveillance by the collective where no one had the right to remain silent.¹¹⁶ To speak was, almost by definition, to incriminate oneself: there was no such thing as an innocent slip of the tongue, and conversely no conclusive proof that could be given of innocence.¹¹⁷ This public sphere was profoundly disempowering for its participants, whose words—as rendered in the ‘raw’ stenographic transcript—would be at the mercy of their first readers in the party-state apparatus; if anyone failed to keep to the script, their speech would in any case be rewritten in the version of the text that reached the reading public in the newspapers. The clearest demonstration of the point came in Stalin’s final reckoning with Bukharin in the show trial of March 1938. Not only did Stalin have a cable laid so that he could listen to proceedings in the comfort of the Kremlin, he also personally edited for publication the transcript that he received from the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. Although the defendants had on the whole kept well to the script rehearsed with them by their NKVD minders, the text was nonetheless amended to remove any lingering ambiguity and to omit any embarrassing information that had been divulged in passing. The dictator was in a hurry: the death sentences were carried out on the night of 14–15 March, but already on 28 March the full text of the transcript was approved for publication. Here was the rhetorical culmination of pre-war Stalinism: a grotesquely extended exercise in self-incrimination serving as the ultimate act of acclamation.¹¹⁸ ¹¹³ See Lorenz Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (1917–1953) (Munich, 2008). ¹¹⁴ Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge, 2007), 67, 75, 110. ¹¹⁵ Bol’shevistskaia agitatsiia: Sbornik statei (Moscow and Yaroslavl, 1937). Among other things, this volume reprints authoritative statements on the subject by Pravda in July and August 1937. ¹¹⁶ This applied even at the very top: see Arch Getty, ‘Samokritika Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933–38’, RR, 58 (1999): 49–70. ¹¹⁷ Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh, 2009), 260–1. ¹¹⁸ On the conduct of the trial and the preparation of its transcript, see the editors’ introduction in Zh. V. Artamonova and N. V. Petrov (eds), Protsess Bukharina. 1938 g.: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 2013). On the extent and nature of Stalin’s editorial interventions, see Iu. G. Murin (with afterword by A. M. Larina), ‘Kak fal'sifitsirovalos' “delo Bukharina” ’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1 (1995): 61–76. Among the excisions was Bukharin’s baffling pseudo-confession: ‘I accept responsibility even for those crimes about which I did not know and about which I had not the slightest notion’.

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Conclusion: The Rhetoric of Stalinism With the onset of Stalinism, the story of the relationship between speech and writing in modern Russia seems to come full circle. Public speaking, given new room to grow from the 1860s onwards, reached a peak of oratorical intensity in the revolutionary period from 1905 to the Bolsheviks’ defeat of their Opposition in the late 1920s. Thereafter the hegemony of writing once again asserted itself. An oral, at times exuberant revolutionary culture became the heavily scriptural culture of the Stalin era.¹¹⁹ A good Soviet citizen had to be a fanatical reader. The primacy of the written word was emphasized from childhood onwards: reading aloud and repetition of material from textbooks was the standard method in the 1930s classroom.¹²⁰ In the late Stalin period, the level of textual discipline required of speakers was raised further. ‘Control of language’ was best ensured by a careful study and adoption of the best existing models—foremost among them, of course, the lectures of Stalin himself, which offered ‘classical models of the clarity, precision and sharpness [chekannost’] of a Bolshevik politician’. There was no question that a speech should be written in advance; indeed, it should be drafted and redrafted to ensure the necessary precision. Propagandists should not leave anything to chance or expect the audience to lend them inspiration in the heat of the moment. Demonstrative gestures—banging of fist on the desk, waving of the hands, raising of pitch—were absolutely undesirable.¹²¹ Meetings and oral presentations remained a significant part of the life of Soviet citizens, especially in the cities, but they were subject to rigid norms of political and linguistic correctness; even minor departures from the collectively endorsed terms of reference were frowned on.¹²² This was not, however, merely a matter of turning the clock back. In true dialectical fashion, the Bolsheviks had achieved a synthesis of speech and writing, of authority and democracy, of the ‘cultured’ and the demotic. By the mid-1930s, high culture and the literary classics were back on their pedestal, and Bolshevik speech was governed by strict norms. Yet Stalinist rhetoric retained with pride a certain proletarian ‘roughness’.¹²³ The Bolsheviks also had to reckon with the new kind of oral performativity made possible by the new media of sound film and radio. Avant-garde film directors at the turn of the 1920s regarded sound with deep suspicion on the grounds that it would impose severe constraints on the visual medium (especially the use of montage). But in due course the Soviet film ¹¹⁹ For a good statement of this thesis, see Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 175. ¹²⁰ David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 67. ¹²¹ A. I. Efimov, O iazyke propagandista (Moscow, 1950), 29, 31, 77–8, 119. ¹²² See the observations on the formalistic and tedious meetings of the postwar Komsomol in Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford, 2010), 99–100, 102, 110–11. ¹²³ A. P. Romanenko, Obraz ritora v sovetskoi slovesnoi kul’ture (Moscow, 2003), 179.

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industry warmed up to sound, engaging in an ‘fetishistic’ quest to recreate Lenin’s voice and indulging in much metacommentary on language.¹²⁴ Last but not least, there was the dictator himself. Stalin might have been a reticent leader by the standards of Churchill or Hitler, but he was by no means silent. He had extensive experience as an agitator in the South Caucasus in the early 1900s. As early as the summer of 1917, he had been the main speaker at the Sixth Party Congress, when the Bolsheviks were fighting for their political lives. In the 1920s, he had more than held his own in a variety of party gatherings more combative than anything seen in the Palace of Westminster. As undisputed leader, he managed in his rhetorical persona to resolve the contradictions of Soviet life into a new synthesis. His Russian was heavily accented, but he spoke fluent Marxist. His blend of the catechismic and the syllogistic reconciled the scientific claims of Bolshevism with its religious essence. By combining modesty with infallibility, and avoiding the opposing pitfalls of ‘aristocratic’ eloquence and vulgarity, he found a suitable rhetorical balance for this workers’ dictatorship.

¹²⁴ Lilya Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928–1935 (Bloomington, 2018), 32 and passim.

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Epilogue The late Stalin era took textual rigidity to new extremes. It was symptomatic that no party congress was held between 1939 and 1952: even within the very strict limits set by this core ritual of Soviet politics, the practice of rhetoric had ground to a halt.¹ Yet Soviet society continued, as one scholar puts it, to be ‘engulfed in meetings’.² The public-speaking rituals of Soviet life remained, ready to be infused with new rhetorical content when circumstances allowed. Even in the late Stalin era, the silence of the upper echelons of the Party was exceptional rather than typical. Workplace and party meetings might be every bit as bitter and vindictive as those of the 1930s, even if they never made it to the newspapers.³ Signals from the top mattered enormously, and the replacement of an increasingly taciturn and enigmatic Georgian with a chatterbox Russian-Ukrainian quickly redefined the norms of public expression. From the beginning, Nikita Khrushchev was famous (or notorious) for his love of unscripted performances, which both revealed a certain hyperactive charisma and laid bare his uncouthness. Even the Secret Speech was something of an act of improvisation: although the text had been carefully drafted and redrafted over the preceding days, becoming steadily tougher in its denunciation of Stalin, Khrushchev could not resist adding extra pathos as he delivered it.⁴ The rediscovery of oratory did not, of course, have benignly liberal implications; this was not freedom of speech, and Khrushchev’s taste for not mincing his words made life more unpredictable and stressful for his associates, let alone for his audiences. The rhetorical prerogative in Soviet society was subject to the hierarchies of the party-state and to the perennial imperative of mutual surveillance and self-disciplining. As Oleg Kharkhordin has pointed out, the era of deStalinization brought greatly expanded claims for the mobilizing and disciplining potential of the kollektiv.⁵ And the kollektiv was in the first instance a fully ¹ I. Iu. Chistiakova, Russkaia politicheskaia oratorika pervoi poloviny XX veka (Astrakhan, 2006), 93. ² Karl E. Loewenstein, ‘The Thaw: Writers and the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union 1951–7’, PhD dissertation (Duke University, 1999), 11. ³ See for example recently published transcripts of meetings in the postwar Leningrad writers’ organization. M. N. Zolotonosov, Gadiushnik. Leningradskaia pisatel’skaia organizatsiia: Izbrannye stenogrammy s kommentariiami (Moscow, 2013), 24–91. ⁴ On the various drafts of the Secret Speech, see V. Iu. Afiani and Z. K. Vodop’ianova, ‘Arkheograficheskoe predislovie’, in K. Eimermacher (ed.), Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina na XX s”ezde KPSS: Dokumenty (Moscow, 2002), 41–8. ⁵ Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999), 278–303. How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930. Stephen Lovell, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stephen Lovell. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199546428.001.0001

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participating audience, a nexus of listener-speakers constituted anew at each meeting of the workplace, Party, Komsomol, or residents’ committee. The post-Stalin era also brought a revival of the Soviet mission civilisatrice in the domain of language. The early 1960s saw a boom in advice literature on ‘cultured speech’ (kul’tura rechi). The 215,000 copies of a work with the title Are We Speaking Correctly? disappeared in no time upon the book’s first publication, in 1960.⁶ The children’s writer and literary scholar Kornei Chukovskii was the most prominent participant in a new drive to set linguistic standards and do battle with cliché. The free-wheeling Thaw era had given way to an insistence on the norms of polite usage, as first- and second-generation rural–urban migrants were coached on how to avoid vulgarity.⁷ Revolutionary rhetoric was also subject to new scrutiny as the pendulum swung back from writing to speech after decades of Stalinist scripture. In historical films of the post-Stalin era (of which there were many, especially in the run-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution), the microphone drew closer to the leader, and Lenin was re-voiced as an intimate and even lyrical speaker rather than an inspiring orator or hieratic presence.⁸ Such was the renewed fascination with the political culture of 1917 that even the elderly Vasilii Shul’gin, a bête noire of the Left in the Duma period, could be brought to the Soviet screen. After serving his time in the postwar Gulag, Shul’gin was summoned from internal exile in Vladimir to star in the full-length documentary The Judgment of History (Pered sudom istorii, 1965), directed by the impeccably Bolshevik Fridrikh Ermler. While Shul’gin was evidently allocated the role of defendant in the film, he offered at best a qualified admission of his past errors and instead emerged as a compelling and charismatic figure. In one of the first scenes, he is escorted from the airport in Leningrad to the Tauride Palace, where he wanders across the Duma debating chamber and takes his old seat. As the case of Shul’gin suggested, form could take content in unexpected directions: when fluent and compelling speakers were given centre stage, they could do much to shape even a pre-scripted message. But sometimes there was not even a script. As in the era of glasnost’ in the 1860s, the new rhetorical turn was interpreted by the intelligentsia as implying a significant liberation of the norms of public expression. The Thaw era placed a premium on performativity and orality: for this brief historical moment, poetry readings might serve as popular entertainment, while the new medium of television brought intelligentsia talk to a vast

⁶ Information from the second edition of the book. B. Timofeev, Pravil’no li my govorim? (Leningrad, 1963). ⁷ Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), 234–8. As Kelly points out, the ‘cultured speech’ campaign constituted just one element in a wave of prescription in this era. ⁸ Oksana Bulgakova, Golos kak kul’turnyi fenomen (Moscow, 2015), 436–7.

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audience.⁹ In the field of rhetoric, as elsewhere, the post-Stalin intelligentsia forged an imagined connection with the vitality of the revolutionary and early Soviet period; the turgid Stalin era was largely bypassed. Emblematic was the career of Iraklii Andronikov, scion of an elite Georgian-Russian family, who in Leningrad in the 1920s had heard Vladimir Maiakovskii recite poetry in the study of the famous literary scholar and theorist Boris Eikhenbaum. It was after the war that Andronikov truly discovered his métier as a literary raconteur, attaining national prominence after he made his television debut in 1954. Andronikov practically invented a genre by turning accounts of his scholarly investigations into stage monologues. He always insisted on the improvisatory character of his performances: you shouldn’t think that I was reading aloud stories that I had written down. No! I first told them, and wrote them down only later . . . Only in oral form, only in living speech does how a person said something become what they said, since intonation can give words a multiplicity of new meanings and even the reverse meaning.¹⁰

In due course the performative élan of the Thaw era petered out, and the intelligentsia compensated by subjecting Soviet formal oratory to ironic treatment. The protagonist of Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters (Korotkie vstrechi, 1967), a municipal functionary, rehearses an address she has to make the next day, intoning the obligatory opening ‘Dear Comrades!’ This boilerplate rhetoric contrasts with the charismatic guitar-strumming of her much absent geologist lover (played by Vladimir Vysotskii). In Gleb Panfilov’s I Request the Floor (Proshu slova!, 1975), the protagonist is undeniably committed and conscientious in her work as mayor (or, in Soviet parlance, chair of the town’s executive committee). But the two main occasions when she actually requests the floor cast an ambiguous light on the rituals of Soviet public speaking. The first time comes at a boisterous wedding party, where she misleads the guests into leaving the venue because the apartment block where the celebration is taking place presents a safety risk. The second time is at a Supreme Soviet meeting where she passes forward a note with a request to speak: we are not actually shown her speech, and our view of the scene is clouded by the knowledge that her son will shoot himself in a tragic accident.

⁹ Note especially two of the calling cards of 1960s television, Kinopanorama and Little Blue Flame (Goluboi ogonek): even if subject to tight editorial control, these programmes made a strikingly informal and spontaneous impression by the standards of the time. See Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, 2011), 122–5. ¹⁰ I. Andronikov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1975), 1: 14–15.

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In the 1970s, the intelligentsia settled into the view that rhetorical authenticity was to be found only in the small group of the kompaniia. The kitchen, allegedly, was the only place in Soviet society to hear people talking without constraint. Conversely, forms of Soviet public expression were deemed to be thoroughly ossified. All political utterances were minutely pre-scripted and delivered in stilted fashion, with the ailing Brezhnev as Exhibit A.¹¹ Ceremonial speech-making of all types was widely thought to lack authenticity. Colin Thubron, on a road trip through the USSR in the early 1980s, heard from a Latvian interpreter that professional speakers, employed to deliver atheist eulogies at Soviet funerals, only went through the motions (despite being remarkably well rewarded for their perfunctory efforts).¹² The notion of the stagnation of public culture, especially its oratorical dimension, has remained largely unchallenged in more scholarly treatments of late Soviet history.¹³ There are reasons to suspect that the situation was more nuanced on the ground. Workplace meetings were not quite tame even in the 1970s.¹⁴ Faceto-face propaganda (the distinction between agitation and propaganda had now all but dissolved) continued on an impressive scale, and it was not necessarily ignored by listeners. A guide to the history and types of oratory published in the early Brezhnev period stated that it was ‘hard to imagine Marxism without vigorous public speaking animated by the ideas of proletarian struggle’. Certainly, there was no shortage of pedagogical interest in the subject in the early 1970s: the USSR had 600 ‘schools for young lecturers’ with a total of 40,000 students, while Party schools ran courses on eloquence.¹⁵ In the early Brezhnev era, the USSR had well over a million trained propagandists, and their selection and preparation was more rigorous than in the Khrushchev era. This was a formidably large network—and it was supplemented by the efforts of grass-roots ‘agitators’.¹⁶ A sociological study of the southern city of Taganrog in 1971 suggested that face-to-face oral communication remained the most effective tool of Soviet propaganda. Although the quarter of a million inhabitants of Taganrog had plenty of mass-media channels of communication open to them, they remained rather poorly informed of the main state policies and campaigns.

¹¹ See for example the literary scholar Marietta Chudakova’s disenchanted response to the 24th Party Congress in 1971, in her ‘Liudskaia molv' i konskii top: Iz zapisnykh knizhek 1950-1990-kh godov’, Novyi mir, no. 3 (2000): 134. ¹² Colin Thubron, Among the Russians (London, 1983), 118. ¹³ See for example Chistiakova, Russkaia politicheskaia oratorika, 16, and Aleksei Yurchak’s reflections on the late Soviet ‘hypernormalization’ of language in his Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 47–50. ¹⁴ See examples from Leningrad in Catriona Kelly, St. Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (New Haven, 2014), 133. ¹⁵ G. Z. Apresian, Oratorskoe iskusstvo, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1972), 6, 39. ¹⁶ Gayle Durham Hollander, Soviet Political Indoctrination: Developments in Mass Media and Propaganda since Stalin (New York, 1972), 148.

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Meetings were valued more highly than newspapers as a source of information.¹⁷ Research later in the decade found that the lecture audience in the USSR was growing despite the rise of the audiovisual mass media.¹⁸ A contemporary American observer suggested that the Soviets, in their reliance on ‘agitation’, might actually be ahead of the times: postwar Western research on public opinion had shown just how effective ‘personal influence’ might be in spreading ideas and changing minds.¹⁹ Nonetheless, the 1970s soon came to seem a deep shade of grey in comparison with the vastly more talkative and expressive society of the late 1980s. The Soviet Union once again had a chatterbox as General Secretary, but this time one with a solid university education and flawless syntax (even if he also had a much derided southern accent). In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, in an echo of Alexander II, embraced the term glasnost’ and expanded its range of meaning: it was to be understood not only as a means for the authorities to gain more information about society and secure informed approval for its policies but also as the freedom to discuss and debate in open-ended fashion. Like Alexander II, Gorbachev would have second thoughts on the matter in due course; but unlike his tsarist predecessor, he had by then made radical changes to the political system, creating the communist parliament of the Congress of People’s Deputies, whose proceedings were broadcast live to an avid public.²⁰ In fact this was ‘more a rally than a parliament’, with the size of the body (2,250 deputies) precluding orderly deliberation. As chairman, Gorbachev had considerable power to set the agenda, but he was also driven to the undignified expedient of turning off the microphone of speakers who ran over the time limit.²¹ But what the Congress of People’s Deputies lacked in procedural smoothness, it more than made up for in spectacle. It also played its part in a transformation of public, especially televisual rhetoric. The perestroika period opened studio doors to such new celebrities as the fasttalking, charismatic Aleksandr Nevzorov, who crammed the day’s news in Leningrad into a breathless ‘600 Seconds’. Tolerance of deviations from the polished standard of Soviet public speech only increased in the era of Yeltsin, a

¹⁷ B. A. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia. Ocherki massovogo soznaniia rossiian vremen Khrushcheva, Brezhneva, Gorbacheva i El’tsina v 4-kh knigakh. Zhizn’ 2-ia. Epokha Brezhneva (chast’ 2-ia) (Moscow, 2006), 520–1. ¹⁸ N. I. Mekhontsev, N. N. Mikhailov and M. F. Nenashev, Slushatel’ v auditorii (po materialam sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia v Cheliabinskoi oblasti) (Moscow, 1983). ¹⁹ Hollander, Soviet Political Indoctrination, 166. On the enduring role of word-of-mouth communication in supplementing (and at times perhaps undermining) official communication, see Thomas Remington, ‘The Mass Media and Public Communication in the USSR’, Journal of Politics, 43 (1981): 803–17. ²⁰ On Gorbachev’s glasnost’ and its slippage, see Michael S. Gorham, After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, 2014), 48–74. ²¹ Thomas F. Remington, The Russian Parliament: Institutional Evolution in a Transitional Regime, 1989–1999 (New Haven, 2001), 30.

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president whose language and delivery were rough-hewn by the standards of his predecessors. The more vigorous politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the creation of a new legal and commercial culture, brought a renaissance of rhetoric. Shedding (at least for a while) its Soviet-era connotations of meretricious bourgeois liberalism, the art of persuasion made a strong comeback. Self-help books on public speaking and forensic argumentation proliferated, and post-Soviet Russia looked back with some fascination to the great figures of the pre-revolutionary advokatura.²² But, in this domain as in others, the 1990s brought not unbridled liberation but unease bordering on trauma: the decade also saw a powerful backlash against excessive talkativeness and violation of linguistic taboos.²³ Even in his heyday, Gorbachev had irritated some of his citizens for his unceasing stream of speech. In retrospect, as he came to be held primarily responsible for the ‘Time of Troubles’ that followed perestroika, irritation turned to disdain for all such rhetorical excess. The stereotype of the parliament as a talking-shop, it turned out, was alive and well in the era of the new State Duma. It received its most notorious expression in the phrase attributed (falsely) to Boris Gryzlov as he took up his post as Speaker of the Duma in 2003: ‘Parliament is no place for discussion.’ A new mode of public speaking was required for the era of TV democracy and polittekhnologiia, and in due course Vladimir Putin and his image-makers invented it. Putin avoided the main rhetorical errors committed by his predecessors—of talking too much or too little. But this was not a return to a preexisting linguistic norm but rather a new synthesis. Putin offered a blend of technocracy and profanity along with a large dose of neo-tsarist staged benevolence whereby the President could simultaneously be of the people and above the people. The annual marathon of the ‘Direct Line with the President’, where Putin fielded calls from ordinary citizens for as long as four hours at a stretch, showed that a time-honoured ritual could be reinvented and refreshed for the televisual age. As so many earlier rulers have discovered, in Russia and elsewhere, there is ultimately nothing better than the face-to-face speech event for constructing authority and legitimacy. ‘Direct Line with the President’ was a mass media version of the unmediated encounter between leader and led, providing a very carefully prepared impression of spontaneity. As with many earlier speakers in Russian history, Putin’s ability to speak without notes was taken as a token of his authenticity, intelligence, and good intentions.²⁴

²² Besides popular accounts and anthologies, there have been a significant number of dissertations on Andreevich, Plevako, and other legal luminaries (on which I have drawn in earlier chapters). ²³ Gorham, After Newspeak, 93–7. ²⁴ Gorham, After Newspeak, 9, 141–4.

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Bibliography Main periodicals consulted Budil’nik Delo Golos Golos Moskvy Izvestiia Khristianskoe chtenie Moskovskie vedomosti Moskovskii listok Novaia zhizn’ Novoe vremia Oskolki Otechestvennye zapiski Peterburgskaia gazeta Peterburgskii listok Pravda Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik Pravoslavnoe obozrenie Rech’ Russkie vedomosti Russkoe slovo Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti Sovremennik Sovremennyi mir Stenograf Strannik Sudebnyi vestnik Syn otechestva Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii Tserkovnyi vestnik Vera i razum Vestnik Evropy Voprosy stenografii Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia

Other primary sources Abramov, M. N. Prakticheskoe rukovodstvo k oratorskomu iskusstvu (Saratov, 1908). Abramov, N. Dar slova, vols 4–5 (St Petersburg, 1905, 1909).

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’, respectively, following the page number. 1848 revolution 16, 133–4 1905 revolution 19–20, 154–64, 240, 253–4 1917 revolution 235 agitation by Russian socialists 132–7, 142, 155–6, 161–2, 164–5 in Duma election campaign 169 in 1917 revolution 235–7, 245–6, 249–50, 256–9 in civil war 264 after revolution 271–2 in later Soviet period 298–9 Aksakov, I. 62–3, 89–91, 103–4 Alad’in, A. 175–6, 192, 231–2 Aleksandrov, P. A. 94–5 Alekseev, N. A. 114–15 Alekseev, P. 92–4 Aleksinskii, G. 159–60, 195, 200–1 Alexander I 7–8 Alexander II 23–5, 62–3, 102, 299–300 Alexander III 103–4 America public speech in 6–7, 13, 15–16, 18, 105 Amvrosii (Kliucharev) 24, 117–19, 224–5 Andreevskii, S. A. 84–5 Andronikov, I. 270, 296–7 Anikin, S. 190–1 An-sky, S. 133, 142–3 Antonii (Khrapovitskii) 120–1, 226–7 Antonii (Vadkovskii) 120–1, 139 Apollos (Beliaev) 42–3 Aptekman, O. V. 74, 76–7 Arsen’ev, K. 105 Arzhanov, M. 276 Avksent’ev, N. 161–2, 178 Babel’, I. 291 Bagalei, D. I. 176–7 Bain, A. 113 Bakunin, P. A. 50, 69 banquet campaign (1904) 152–3 Bardina, S. 92–4

Bauman, N. 158, 160–1 Beletskii, S. P. 217–18, 233–4 Belinskii, V. 7–10 Bible readings 70 Bobrinskii, A. A. 206–7, 213–14 Bogoraz–Tan, V. 185–6, 188–93 Bogoslavskii, A. 95–6 Bolsheviks in 1905 162–3 in Duma era 217–18, 223, 253–4 in 1917 235–7, 245–6, 248–59 after October Revolution 259–66 Breshko-Breshkovskaia, E. 94–5, 146–7, 242 Brezhnev, L. 298 Britain 6–7, 14, 266–7, 278 public speech in 14–16, 50, 121–2, 177–8 Brooks, J. 1–2, 21 Bublikov, A. 240–1, 256–7 Bukharin, N. 2–3, 260, 264, 290–2 Bulgaria 96–7, 122 Bulgarin, F. 12 Bulygin duma 156–7 Catherine II 4–5, 8–9 censorship ecclesiastical 43–5, 117–18, 120, 138–40, 224–5 of zemstvo proceedings 53–5, 67, 124–5, 150–1 of trial proceedings 99–101, 124 of theatre 113–14, 143–4 of public lectures and speeches 130–1, 152–3 of Duma proceedings 182, 218–19 during World War I 228–31 under Bolsheviks 262, 268 Chaadaev, P. 11 Chaikovskii Circle 92 Chaikovskii, P. 124 Chekhov, A. 105, 112 Chelnokov, M. 228 Cherkasskii, V. 45–6, 65 Chernov, V. 127, 130–1, 161–2, 246–8, 253, 260–2

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Chernyshevsky, N. 36–7 Chicherin, B. 26, 45–6, 53, 84, 90, 100–1, 123–4 Chicherin, G. 275–6 China 263 Chkheidze, N. 217–19, 231, 246–50, 254–5 Chukovskii, K. 296 Cicero 166–8 civil war 264, 267–8 congresses learned and professional 129–30, 148–9 worker 217, 223 party 256, 260–1, 285–7 writers’ union 291 Constituent Assembly (1918) 260, 280 Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) in Duma elections 169–72, 195–6 in First Duma 185–6, 190–4 in Second Duma 196–8 in Third Duma 205–10 in Fourth Duma 214, 217–19 during World War I 228–30 constitutionalism 38, 78, 96–7, 100–1, 123–5, 151–4 courts 19, 55–62, 78–89, 144–7 military 57–8, 95–6 see lawyers; trials Crimean War 42 Dal’, V. 2, 21, 32–3 Dan, F. 246–7, 262 Decembrists 7–8 declamation 6–9, 112–13, 166–7, 269–70 Demert, N. 68 Democratic Conference (September 1917) 240, 257–8 demonstrations 92, 135 Denikin, A. 264 Dmitrieva, V., trial of 81–3 Dobroliubov, N. 36–7 Dostoevsky, F. 8, 14, 30–2, 85–6, 90–1 Durnovo, P. 160–1 Dzerzhinskii, F. 284 Dzhunkovskii, V. F. 160–1, 222–3 Eisenstein, S. 2–3 elections to municipal duma 46, 109–10, 221–2 to zemstvo 51, 53 to State Duma 168–72, 195–6, 205–6, 214 under Bolsheviks 273, 286 Emancipation of the serfs (1861) 17, 34–6, 38–9, 51–2 Ermler, F. 296 Ermolova, M. 114

ethnography 2, 14, 31–2 Evangelicalism 70–1 Evlogii (Georgievskii) 121, 139–40, 224–5 as Duma deputy 181, 203–4, 211–12 Evtuhov, C. 125–6, 129–30 Ezerskii, N. 176, 183–4, 188–90, 194 Farmborough, F. 243–5, 258–9 Figner, V. 100–1 Filaret (Drozdov) 6–7, 35, 41–2, 47, 121 film 272, 293–4, 296–7 First Congress of Soviets (June 1917) 254–5 Fondaminskii, I. 161–2 France public speaking in 6–7, 15–16, 121–2 Frederick William IV 16 Frish, E. V. 181 Frumkin, M. I. 289–90 Fuks, E. Ia. 59, 98–9 Gapon, G. 120–1, 140–3 Geiden, P. A. 150, 157–8, 185–6, 206 gentry 23–5, 45–6, 51–2, 125 Ger’e, V. I. 181–2 Germany 16, 121–2 Gertsenshtein, M. 188 Gessen, I. 82, 149, 205 gimnazii see schools Giunter, A. 239 glasnost’ 13, 17–19, 25–6, 28, 34, 38, 53, 55–7, 62–3, 105–6, 132, 299–300 Gogol, N. 8 Golitsyn, M. V. 151–2, 220–3, 232–3, 255–7 Golokhvastov, P. 45–6 Golos 46, 50–1, 57–8, 60–1 Golovin, F. 156, 174, 222–3 as chairman of Second Duma 196–202 Golovnin, A. V. 26 Gorbachev, M. 2–3, 299–300 Goremykin, I. 184–5, 218–19 Gorky, M. 143–4 govoril’nia (talking shop) 2–3, 102 Grabovetskii, А. 188, 190 Granovskii, T. 11–12, 29 Gringmut, V. A. 213–14 Gryzlov, B. 2–3, 300 Guchkov, A. 212–14, 218 Guchkov, N. 221–2 Gurko, V. I. 181–2, 188 Halfin, I. 268–9 Herzen, A. 29, 31, 133–4 homiletics 26, 40–5, 138–9, see priests; sermons

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 Iakhontov, V. 270 Ianyshev, I. 43 Ignat’ev, N. P. 103–4, 106, 124–5 Iliodor (Trufanov) 224 Innokentii of Kherson 42 insults 21–3 Ioann (Sokolov) 42–3 Ioann (Vostorgov) 224–5 Ishutin Circle 73–4, 88–9 Italy 121–2 Ivanin, M. I. 26–7 Japan 18 Jews 104–5, 134, 227–8, 253 hostility towards 160–1, 224 John Chrysostom 41–2, 70–1 John of Kronstadt 139, 143 July Days 256 Kachenovskii, D. 62–3, 74 Kadets see Constitutional Democrats Kaliaev, I. 158 Kalinin, M. 282–3, 288–9 Kamenev, L. 284, 290–1 Karabchevskii, N. 94–5, 115–17, 144, 146–7, 158, 211 Karakozov, D. 54, 73–4, 88–9 Kazan 36–7, 126–7, 131, 149, 239 Kareev, N. 121–2, 130, 153 Katkov, M. 46–7, 90–1, 101, 103–4, 106, 124 Kelepovskii, S. I. 206–7 Kerensky, A. 2–3, 143, 158, 216, 231–2, 251–2, 264, 274–5 in 1917 240–6, 254–8 Kerzhentsev, P. 266–7 Kharkhordin, O. 295–6 Kharkov 27–8, 59, 74 Khomiakov, N. 181–2, 206–7, 209–13 Khrushchev, N. 295–6 Khrustalev-Nosar’, G. 163, 228–9 Kiev 119–20 Kireev, A. A. 156–7, 182–3, 194, 206, 211–13 Kizevetter, A. 107–8, 130–2, 152–3, 159, 169–71, 195–6, 205, 219–20 Kliuchevskii, V. 107–8, 121, 130 Kokoshkin, F. 157–8, 169–71, 185–6, 193–4, 222 Kokovtsov, V. 181–2, 208–10, 214–16, 218 Koliubakin, A. 169, 210 Kollontai, A. 223, 249–54, 258–9 Koni, A. F. 59, 84, 86–7, 95 Konstantin Nikolaevich, Grand Prince 105–6 Korolenko, V. 144, 149 Koroviakov, D. 34 Koshanskii, N. 7–8

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Kostomarov, N. 26, 29–30 Kotkin, S. 256–7, 266 Kravchenko, V. 237 Kropotkin, P. 74–5 Krupenskii, P. N. 176, 221–2 Krylenko, N. 159–60, 170–1, 195, 245–6, 291 Kuz’min-Karavaev, V. 172, 183–4 language debates on 33, 35–6 instruction on 296 lawyers 56–7, 79–89, 104–5, 145–7 in 1905 revolution 158 in 1917 revolution 239 see also courts; trials Lebedev, P. 10–11 lectures 11–12, 26, 65–6, 73, 107–8, 130–1, 159 Legislative Commission (1767) 4–5 Legouvé, E. 34 Lena goldfields massacre 217, 224 Lenin, V. 1–2, 217, 285–6, 296 in 1917 246–56, 259 in 1918 260–3 qualities as a speaker 250–2, 255, 269–70, 274–6, 277f Lenskii, A. P. 114 Leont’ev, K. 90–1 lèse-majesté 2 Leskov, N. 14 Levshin, P. 41–2 Lezhava, A. M. 290 literacy 1–4, 14, 21, 235–6 literature public significance in Russia 1–2, 7–8, 149 public readings of 30–3, 90–1, 296–7 depiction of speaking in 104–5, 116–17, 139 Lomonosov, M. 5–7, 35–6 Loris-Melikov, M. 97, 102–3 Losev, I. 188–90 Lunacharsky, A. 253–4, 262–3, 269–70, 276 Maiakovskii, V. 270, 296–7 Maklakov, N. 218–19, 228–9 Maklakov, V. 82–3, 114–15, 127, 169–71, 195–6, 233 in State Duma 197–8, 207–8, 210, 231–3 Malinovskii, R. 217–18, 223, 233–4, 268–9 Malyi Theatre 31–3, 65–6, 113–14 Mandel’shtam, M. 146–7, 158, 170–1 Markov, N. E. 202–3, 212–16, 218, 231 Martov, Iu. 99–100, 134–5, 240, 246–7, 259 Mel’nikov, F. 224 Mensheviks 162–3, 217–18, 259–62, 291 merchants 48, 109–12, 131 Merzliakov, A. 6–7

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meshchane (townspeople) 110–11 Miasoedov, G. 68–9 Mikhail (Semenov) 140 Miliukov, P. 127–8, 130–1, 159, 170, 174, 195–7 in State Duma 181, 209–13, 230 in 1917 248–9 Miliutin, D. 35, 95, 98–9, 102, 219–20 mirovoi sud see peace courts monasticism 120–1, 138–9 Moscow 45–8, 107–8, 110–11, 125, 131 Moscow Arts Theatre 143–4 Moskovskie vedomosti 46–8, 50, 53, 68, 89–90, 101 municipal dumas 19, 29, 46–9, 65, 109–12, 129–31, 152–3, 220–2, 228 in 1905 155, 157, 160–1 in 1917 239, 255–6 see also elections Muratova, K. 297 Murav’ev, N. 98–9 Muravskii, M. 93–4 Muromtsev, S. 107–9, 125, 131, 147–8, 160–1, 219–20 as chairman of First Duma 173–6, 173f, 181–4, 192–3 Muscovy 4 Myshkin, I. 68–9, 75, 93–4 Nabokov, V. D. 184–5, 188, 193 Nabokov, V. V. 1 Nakaz see rules of order Nationalists 214–15 Nechaev, S. 73–4 Nechaevtsy 73–4, 80–1, 88–9 Nechitailo, S. 200, 201f Nekrasov, N. 14, 36–7, 62–3 newspapers see press Nevzorov, A. 299–300 Nicholas I 7–8, 24, 35, 121–2 Nicholas II 127–8, 156, 163–4, 180, 228–9, 235, 273 Nikitenko, A. 11, 29–30, 37 Nizhnii Novgorod 125–7, 130–1, 239 Nizovkin, A. 75–6 noble assemblies 8–9, 24–5, 38, 45–6, 69, 125, 194, 220–2 Novoe vremia 126–7, 129–30, 194, 199 Obolenskii, V. A. 150, 154, 161, 174, 192, 194 obshchestvennost’ 28, 129–30 October Manifesto 156–7, 160–1, 222 Octobrist Party in Duma elections 168–71, 214 in State Duma 185–6, 198, 206–8, 210–15, 218–19 in zemstvo 222–3

odes 6 Old Believers 72–3, 224 Ong, W. 13 orality 2–4, 13–14, 21 Osinskii, V. V. 288 Ostrovsky, A. 14, 32–3, 65–6 Otechestvennye zapiski 25–6, 65–8, 101–2 Oznobishin, A. 232 Paléologue, M. 3–4, 228 Panfilov, G. 297 Panina, S. 261–2 Pares, B. 164–5, 175, 185–6, 197–8, 200–1 parliaments beyond Russia 15–16, 121–2, 174–6 Russian attitudes to 2–3, 122–3, 266, 280 Pashkov, V. 70–1 Pasternak, B. 291 peace courts 22–3, 55–6, 60–1 peace mediators 51–2 peasants 2–4, 17, 21, 232 and emancipation decree 34–6 in zemstvo 51–3, 68–9, 125–6 in village assemblies 51–2, 77, 96–7, 227 and ‘Going to the People’ movement 75–8 in the courtroom 86–8 in municipal dumas 110–11 in 1905 revolution 160–1, 164–5 in Duma elections 168–9, 171–2, 195–6 as Duma deputies 176, 185–90, 196–7, 200–1, 210, 212–13, 215–16 in 1917 revolution 236–7, 248, 263–4 after 1917 revolution 271 Peretts, E. A. 103, 105–6 Perov, V. 38–9, 39f Perovskaia, S. 99–100 Peterburgskii listok 52–3, 61 Pethybridge, R. 235–6 Petrashevskii, M. 12 Petrazhitskii, L. 193–4 Petrograd Soviet 242–3, 246–9, 254–5, 261–5 Petrov, G. 120–1, 139–40 Petrunkevich, I. 52–3, 96–7, 125–6, 131–2, 151–2, 157–8, 192–3, 196–7 Pevnitskii, V. F. 226 Pisemskii, A. 32–3, 122–3 Plehve, V. 148–9 Plekhanov, G. 92, 107–8, 285 Plevako, F. 82–4, 89–90, 114–15, 131, 146, 210–12 Pobedonostsev, K. 56–7, 70–1, 90–1, 102–4, 106, 117, 147–8, 180 Pogodin, M. 29–30, 65

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 Poles 157–8, 193 policing of speech 2, 12 legislation on 21–3 in reform era 30–1, 33–4, 36–7, 62–3 in zemstvo 54–5, 63, 101–2 in courtroom 98, 100–1 in societies and associations 129–30, 148–9, 219–21 public speeches and lectures 89–90, 100–1, 130–1, 219–20 in worker movement 135–7 in 1905 revolution 155 in State Duma 182–3, 195–6, 228–9 see also censorship Polisadov, I. 70–1 Politburo 284 Polovtsov, A. A. 106 Populism 73–8, 92–5, 104, 133 Potekhin, A. 32–3 Pravda 217–18, 270–1, 273–4, 287, 290 Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik 88–9, 94–5, 99–100 Pre-Parliament (October 1917) 258 press 13–15, 17, 26, 90–1, 126–7, 129–30 trial reporting 78–80, 82–3, 88–9 in 1905 revolution 162–3 in Duma era 181–2, 212–13, 215–16, 221–2 during World War I 228–9 in 1917 revolution 235–6, 242–5, 249, 254–5 under Bolsheviks 267–8, 270–1, 275, 287–8, 290, 292 see also censorship priests 36, 40–1, 44–5, 137–40, 156, 195–6, 214, 224–5 as Duma deputies 188, 198, 203–4, 211–12 Progressists 214–16, 228–9 Prokopovich, F. 5–6, 9–10 pronunciation 32–3, 227–8, 274 propaganda and Russian populism 76–8, 133–4 and 1917 revolution 235–7 under Bolsheviks 271–2 in later Soviet period 298–9 Protestantism 40 Provisional Government 239–41, 243–5, 258–9 publichnost’ 25–6, 28–9, 57, 222–3 public sphere 19–20, 34, 291–3 Purishkevich, V. 203f, 221–2, 224, 230–1, 261–2 in State Duma 181–2, 198, 202–3, 205, 211–16, 231 Pushkin, A. 7–8 1880 celebration of 90–1 Putiatin, R. 43 Putin, V. 300

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radio 19–20, 293–4 Radstock, Lord 70 Rasputin, G. 218, 228–9 Rediger, A. 209–10 rhetoric 19–20, 105 in pre-reform Russia 5–11 in courtroom 83–6 in 1905 revolution 162–3 in Duma era 166–8, 185, 213–14, 226–7 in 1917 revolution 237–9, 245–7, 257–8, 264 under Bolsheviks 269–70, 273–5, 286–8, 293–4 after 1930s 295–300 Rightists 163–4, 224 in State Duma 198–9, 202–4, 206–7, 210–16, 231–2 Rodichev, F. 121–2, 151–2, 157–8, 170–1, 195, 221–2, 245–6 in State Duma 184–5, 193, 207–8, 210, 213–14, 232–3 Rodzianko, M. 214–15, 228, 231, 240, 245–6 rules of order in zemstvo 50–1 in State Duma 174–7, 183–4, 199, 213–14 in 1917 242 among Bolsheviks 266–7, 285 rumour 21–2, 51–2, 235–7 Rus 4 Russian Orthodox Church 38–40, 69–73, 117–21, 138, 224–5, 239 Russkoe slovo 129–30, 215–16 Russo-Japanese War 153 Russo-Turkish War 70, 89–90, 96–8 St Petersburg municipal duma in 111 pronunciation in 227 St Petersburg Soviet (1905) 162–3, 253 Samarin, A. P. 222–3 Samarin, Iu. 9–11, 35, 45–6, 65 Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti 49, 57–8, 68, 88–9, 129–30 Saratov 149, 155 schools 9, 113 Second Congress of Soviets (October 1917) 259 Serafim (Chichagov) 224 Serbia 122 Serezhnikov, V. 269–70, 273 Sergievskii, N. A. 107 sermons 5–7, 9–10, 35, 38–45, 69–72, 117–20, 138, 156, 224–7, see also homiletics Shakhovskoi, D. 179–82, 193–4 Shaliapin, F. 114–15, 143, 241 Shchapov. A. P. 36 Shchepkin, M. 31

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Shcherbatov, A. 46–7 Shidlovskii, S. M. 172, 181–2, 208–9, 213–14, 232–3, 256–7 Shingarev, A. 208–10, 212–13 Shipov, D. A. 151–2 Shliapnikov, A. 260–1 Sipiagin, D. 147–8 skhodka (student meeting) 37, 74–5, 107, 147–8, 153 Shrag, I. P. 182–3 Shubinskii, N. P. 218–19 Shul’gin, V. 203–4, 221–2, 230–1, 241, 296 Shuvalov, A. P. 49, 54 Skobelev, M. 114–15 Slavophilism 9–10, 18, 151–2, 211 Smolensk 239 sobesedovanie 71–3, 119–20 Social Democrats activities before 1905 133–7, 142, 152–3, 285 in 1905 155–6, 159–62 in Duma election campaigns 168–71 in Duma era 192, 195–6, 201–2, 210, 217–19, 228, 231 see also Bolsheviks; Mensheviks Socialist Revolutionaries 161–2, 195–6 in 1917 revolution 248, 259–60 after October revolution 261–2, 264, 268 soldiers in 1917 revolution 239–40, 243–7, 249, 258–9 under Bolsheviks 272 Sollogub, V. A. 25–6 Sol’skii, D. 95, 106, 176–7 sound recording 1, 293–4 soviets 247–8, 259–60, 263–4 Sovremennik 25–6, 32 Soyard, J. 43 Spasovich, V. 56–7, 80–1, 85–6, 88–9, 94–5 Speranskii, M. 7–8, 10 Spiridonova, M. 261–2, 264 Stakhovich, M. 185–6 Stalin, J. 1–2, 135, 263 in 1917 revolution 256–7 in 1920s–30s 284–5, 287–92 as rhetorician 291, 293–4 Stalinism 1–2, 19–20, 293–5 Stankevich, V. B. 246–7 State Conference (August 1917) 240, 256–7 State Council 103–7 after 1905 176–7, 180, 185, 215–16, 228 State Duma (1906–17) 19–20, 167–94, 233–4 elections to 168–72, 195–6, 205–6, 214, 217, 232 procedures in 174–6, 183–4, 199 first convocation (1906) 183–95, 206 second convocation (1907) 196–205, 232–3, 247

third convocation (1907–12) 205–14 in period 1912–14 214–19 during World War I 228–32 in 1917 240–1 reputation of 3, 194, 204–5, 232–3 State Duma (post-1993) 2–3 Steklov, Iu. 246–7 stenography 14–15, 19, 25–30, 63 training of stenographers 26–8, 178, 276–7 in zemstvo 53–5, 68–9, 75, 101–2 in courtroom 27–8, 57–60, 79, 88–9 in Duma era 177–83, 190, 208–10, 213–18, 222–3, 280 in 1917 revolution 249 in civil war 264, 275–6 under Bolsheviks 266, 275–84, 287–92 Stepun, F. 243–7, 255 Stolypin, P. 155, 188–9, 196–9, 202, 205–10, 219–20 Strousberg, B. H. 79 Struve, P. 197 students 29–30, 36–7 political mobilization of 37, 74–5, 127, 130, 147–8, 153–6, 159–60 Sukhanov, N. 245–6, 250–1, 255–7, 259, 291 Suvorin, A. 90–1, 129–30 Sytin, A. 129–30 Sviatopolk-Mirskii, P. 150–1 telegraph 235–6 television 296–7, 299–300 terrorism 95–101 theatre 9, 31–3, 65–6, 113–14, 143–4 Third Section 12, 33–4, 37, 62–3, 88–90, 94 Thubron, C. 298 Tikhon of Zadonsk 41–2 toasts 166 Tobolsk 9 Tolstoi, D. 106–7 Tolstoy, L. 1n.1, 2–3, 14, 82, 115–16, 121–2 Tornau, N. 27–8 trials by jury 21, 61, 85–7 political 88–9, 92–6, 98–101, 145–7, 163 ritual murder 144, 221–2 under Bolsheviks 261–2, 267–9, 272, 291–2 Trotsky, L. 2–3, 163–4, 250–1, 276, 279 in 1917 revolution 236, 246–7, 252–4, 256–61 in power struggle of 1920s 266, 287–8 qualities as a speaker 252–4, 257–8, 274–5 Trudoviks 182, 186–91, 198, 210, 216–19 Tsereteli, I. 198–202, 246–51, 254, 256–8 Turgenev, I. 14, 35, 90–1, 106–8

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 Tver 9, 24–5, 50, 69, 127–8, 132, 172 Tyrkova, A. 146–7, 149, 164, 167, 170, 184–93, 197–9 Union of Liberation 151–2, 159 Union of Russian People 163–4, 202–3 universities 10–11, 37, 101–2, 107–8, 147–8, 153–4, 159–60 Urusov, A. 81, 88–9 Valuev, P. 25–6, 38 veche 4, 105 Vestnik Evropy 52–3 Vinaver, M. 174, 186–8, 193–4, 196–7, 210 Voitinskii, V. 164–5, 239–40, 266–7 Volodarskii, V. 256–7, 262–3 Vrangel’, P. 264 Vyborg Manifesto 194–7, 222 Wallace, D. M. 77 Wilhelm II 16, 122–3 Witte, S. 135–7, 180, 215–16 women as listeners 11–12, 50–1, 57–9, 69, 184–5 as speakers 149, 170, 189–90, 223, 249–50, 264, 269 as stenographers 27–8, 178–9, 278

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workers 133–7, 152–3 in 1905 revolution 159–63 in Duma era 195–7, 217 in 1917 revolution 236–7, 239–40 under Bolshevik regime 261–2, 266, 270–1, 273, 292 World War I 228–32, 235 Yeltsin, B. 299–300 Zasulich, V. 95 zemskii sobor (assembly of the land) 4–5, 18, 102–4, 124, 156–7 zemstvo 19 in 1860s 21, 49–55 in 1870s 66–9, 75, 96–7 in 1880s 101–2, 106–7, 109, 124–7 in liberation movement 127–8, 131–2, 148–52, 157–8, 161 after 1905 222–3 in 1917 236–7, 239 Zheliabov, A. 98–9, 124 Zhilkin, I. 186–91 Zinov’ev, G. 217, 248, 253–4, 256, 261–2, 268–9, 287–8 Zubatov, S. 135–7, 140 Zurabov, A. G. 202