Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
7 - Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Summary
Even when we were thinking like human beings (who wants war?) we spoke the language of ideology.
(Cherniaev 2008: 19)INTRODUCTION
The author quoted in the epigraph – Anatolii Sergeevich Cherniaev – worked in the apparatus of the supreme state power in the USSR for over twenty years. His individual culture, upbringing and way of life in no way corresponded to what he had to do at work for the greater part of those twenty years. Cherniaev writes truthfully and frankly about what he heard and read and took part in. The words quoted from his diary, to which I shall be referring as an invaluable source, were written in 1972, at the beginning of his career in the apparatus.
Cherniaev's diary is full of evidence for how and why the members of the apparatus switched from ‘human’ to official language. There were several reasons. First, they were under pressure from the notion of the state as an ideological power, part of the international communist movement, engaged in the struggle for the affirmation of communist ideas. Second, the decades had taught them to represent any phenomenon only in ideological terms. Third, ideology was the source of the livelihood of a vast number of people, the whole social and party mechanism. Fourth, ideology helped them to settle personal scores and keep science, culture and art under control. Fifth, ideology had merged with the false propaganda of success. It was the chief means of maintaining the status quo and at the same time a tool for hiding the true state of things (grain was constantly being imported!) at a time when the West was always ‘lying’, proclaiming our ‘difficulties’ to the whole world.
The scale on which this language was churned out made one think not only of its limitless potential, but also of its ubiquity and immanence. Everyone had to learn the science of Marxism from the same textbook, namely the Short Course of the History of the ACP(b). In fifteen years, from 1938 to 1953, it was published 301 times, with a total print-run of 42,816,000 copies in 67 languages, and was a means of unifying the national consciousness on the basis of the ideas of Stalinism, the personality cult of Stalin, and the concept of barracks socialism.
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- Information
- Public Debate in RussiaMatters of (Dis)order, pp. 149 - 166Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016