Public meetings, which were so characteristic of the first decades of the Soviet regime, have recently become, if not a widespread phenomenon, at least a significant one. Alongside absolutely new forms of communication at a distance (such as the internet) private ‘kitchen conversations’ (some of which have moved out into restaurants and cafés) are becoming once again a notable part of social life. However, it is hard to find anything in post-Soviet life analogous to the Soviet meeting (the party, trade union, factory meeting and so on) as a means of creating an ideological and disciplinary ‘attachment’ of the individual to the authorities. Perhaps to a certain degree the church service is attempting to take on its role, but it is hard to say to what extent such attempts have so far been successful.

The Soviet meeting occupied a position somewhere in between the ‘public square’ and the ‘kitchen’, and remained for a long time the space in which – successfully or not – the socially significant communication strategies typical of the USSR were tried out and, along with other factors, generated a persistent state of universal pseudo-agreement. In attempting to understand how the Gestalt of this movement towards unity was created, it is hard to ignore the aesthetic sphere. There is not much point in making yet another demonstrative appeal to the experience of the new historicism with its idea of ‘the social presence of the world’ in literature, nor to that of other methodologies, close to it in this respect, in order to confirm the hypothesis that art ‘reflects’, and to a certain extent constructs the everyday models characteristic of its age. Without exhausting history in the slightest, art remains a part of it, and, within a discussion of public language, it may be thought that this perspective justifies the use not only of the sphere of ‘real’ communication, but of fiction as well.

The problem of selection and self-limitation in attempting to outline some sort of ‘prolegomena’ to an ‘artificial’ history of the Soviet meeting is extremely important. It is hard to find any work in the Soviet creative heritage which does not contain a description of a meeting or at least a mention of one.