Soviet Talk

Abstract

This chapter describes the Bolsheviks’ creation of a new kind of public sphere in the 1920s. Although intolerant of opposition or dissent, they expected ordinary people to participate in routine forms of Soviet life such as meetings and conferences: unlike in the tsarist era, Russians now had to know how to speak in public. The Bolsheviks were themselves very active as speakers in their own public or semi-public gatherings (meetings, congresses, plenums), and their words were disseminated to an audience of newspaper readers or party functionaries: like their Duma predecessors, the Bolsheviks relied heavily on their stenographers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the shift to Stalinist rhetoric in the early 1930s.