Journal of Cold War Studies 7.1 (2005) 203-206

Michael S. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the 
Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia.
De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. 177 pp. $40.00.


This exceptionally valuable study addresses a topic of crucial importance 
for understanding the Cold War. Had the USSR been a democracy, the 
democratic peace would presumably have prevailed in U.S.-Soviet relations, 
and the alliance forged against Nazi Germany would have persisted to this 
day. Dictatorships inevitably perceive [End Page 203]any democracy as a 
threat because the very existence of democracy convinces the subjects living 
under dictatorial misrule that the arguments for the necessity of their 
subjugation are false. In order to sustain dictatorship, rulers must 
bifurcate the population into the opposing social identities of oppressor 
and oppressed. The rulers recruit some members of the oppressed into the 
ranks of oppressors by their communications, which consist of discursive 
cues to the rulers' separateness from the population. Although most people 
respond to these cues with a mixture of indifference and hostility, some 
individuals instead identify with the rulers' distinctiveness and enforce 
their decrees on the rest. If censorship prevents the population as a whole 
from hearing other political messages, small minorities consisting of the 
rulers and their enforcers can establish dictatorships over very large 
populations. Michael Gorham explores how the discourse of separateness came 
into existence among early Soviet rulers despite their ideological motive to 
address an almost entirely illiterate population of subsistence farmers in 
the farmers' own language.

Although Vladimir Lenin and his followers seized power in a polyglot 
country, Gorham eschews the problem of multilingualism. Instead "Tongues" in 
the title refers to heteroglossia—the diversity of "voices" that emerged as 
the early Soviet leaders tried to figure out how to communicate with the 
population over which they were establishing control. They needed to 
communicate by "speaking" in "voices" because of mass illiteracy. Poorly 
educated as they were, the Bolshevik leaders could be regarded as educated 
intellectuals when compared to an illiterate population. Even Iosif Stalin, 
who barely makes an appearance in this book, attended seminary. When 
intellectuals spoke to an illiterate population, a communication gap 
immediately emerged. Gorham argues that the proposed solutions for this 
communication gap were grouped into four "voices" (the "tongues" of the 
title): the revolutionary voice, the popular voice, the national voice, and 
the party-state voice. The revolutionary voice sought to transform 
consciousness by introducing new ideas expressed largely in words of foreign 
origin. The popular voice responded by trying to integrate the revolutionary 
jargon with the authentic colloquialisms of the Russian people. The national 
voice emerged when dissatisfaction with the quality of expression in the 
popular voice prompted a reversion to the classics of nineteenth-century 
Russian realism—the aristocratic speech of War and Peace as a paradoxical 
model for a revolutionary party. The voice of the party-state developed as a 
synthesis of these three models.

Gorham provides a vivid, informative account of discussions among top 
Communist officials, litterateurs, linguists, educators, and journalists 
through which this distinctive discourse of rule took shape in the Soviet 
Union. Ideology did not motivate Soviet leaders to develop the discourse. 
Quite the contrary, as Gorham clearly shows, ideology motivated Lenin and 
the other Soviet rulers to strive for the authentic voice of the people. 
They saw themselves as transmitting Marxist ideas to illiterate Russians, 
and they encouraged the use of an oratorical style that would communicate. 
However, they also actively disliked colloquial, idiomatic Russian because 
it did not match the literary standard of the Russian realist novel they had 
been taught to regard as the best form of the language. It was not their 
fidelity to Karl Marx but their adherence to Leo [End Page 204]Tolstoy and 
Anton Chekhov that drove them to reject popular Russian. Gorham records a 
lively debate between those who favored introducing colloquial forms into 
the party's language and those who favored raising the popular language up 
to the party's standard. Although Gorham is persuasive in depicting the 
sides in this debate, he fails to notice that every senior official he 
mentions—Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin—placed himself 
unambiguously on the side of the literary standard in opposition to 
colloquialism. Only Bukharin was willing to tolerate the use of different 
"voices" for different audiences, though he viewed this solely as a 
temporary measure that could end once the process of teaching people to read 
was complete. Even the cavalry general Semen Budennyi inveighed against 
colloquial language, denouncing Isaak Babel's Konarmiya (Cavalry Army) 
stories and disparaging Babel's service under him as confined to the rear 
echelon. Because Budennyi had been a sergeant in the Imperial cavalry, his 
own language must have closely resembled the humorous mishmash used by Babel 
for the dialogue in his stories.

In presenting the four voices, Gorham constructs a chronological sequence of 
elite dissatisfaction. He argues that Soviet leaders measured each 
succeeding voice against the implicit standard of a discourse suitable for 
building identity and authority in the new Soviet Union. Because Gorham's 
field is literary criticism rather than social science, he never provides 
systematic evidence for this sequencing, and the evidence he does provide 
shows that the voice of the party-state already existed in full flower by 
1923 at the latest. He quotes a report from 1923 that, with the altering of 
a few organizational acronyms, could have appeared at any time during the 
Soviet era. Significantly, the report concerns a speech at a factory given 
by an officer of the GPU, then the acronym for the state security police. By 
that same year the linguist Grigorii Vinokur had already noticed, and 
rationalized as appropriate for a revolutionary state, the excessively 
"nouny" style that would remain a hallmark of Sovietese. Trotsky, for his 
part, was objecting at this point to party officialese. It seems more likely 
that the party immediately found its voice but, so long as its organization 
remained weak, found no alternative to tolerating the variety of voices that 
Gorham so perceptively identifies. Once Stalin had built the nomenklatura 
(privileged elite) that would rule from 1929 onward, he could dispense with 
all the other voices. The already elaborated voice of the state security 
organs would come to predominate even as its bearers imprisoned or executed 
many of the literary and linguistic figures whose works Gorham analyzes.

Gorham misreads the development as sequential because he focuses on 
communication rather than identity. Although a communications gap is bound 
to arise in any dictatorship, this is because dictatorship can persist only 
if the rulers establish a distinctive political identity (the nomenklatura 
in the Soviet case) by distancing their political discourse from ordinary 
speech. The communications gap is secondary to the identity gap. Introducing 
his chapter on the communications gap, Gorham quotes a remark recorded as 
having been overheard by a newspaper columnist: "He's speaking 
incomprehensibly—must mean he's a Bolshevik" (p.22). The first half of this 
remark does indeed provide suggestive evidence for the party's failure to 
communicate. But [End Page 205]the second half clearly indicates that the 
person who made the remark inferred political identity from linguistic 
style. It is this inference that dictatorial rule (like its variant, 
monarchic rule) requires for its existence. Lenin and the other Communist 
leaders never overcame the communications gap because if they had spoken to 
the population in a language its members would accept, they would have 
signaled their own identity with the population, rather than cueing 
recognition of themselves as adistinguishable ruling group. When Mikhail 
Gorbachev discarded the distinctive discourse of authoritarian rule in favor 
of something closer to ordinary Russian, the Soviet dictatorship collapsed 
and the Cold War ended.

Richard D. Anderson, Jr.
University of California, Los Angeles