Public debate in Russia: matters of disorder

When I accepted the request to review this book, I was intrigued by the title, but had not the slightest inkling of what awaited me. In the event, I found the scope and contents not only intriguing, but also – Russia being Russia – singularly perturbing. The volume contains 13 chapters written by a medley of linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and literary scholars attached to universities in Russia, France, Israel and the UK. The chapters range over wide domains of Russian linguistic history and experience: the specification of totalitarian language, letters to the editor at the beginning of Soviet times, the rhetoric of socialist meetings, legal language in the nineteenth century, so-called public aphasia, the past and future of Russian public language, and satirical discourse. At one moment we are reading about the famous correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Prince Kurbsky; then we are learning about Catherine the Great’s attempts to produce a law code on the basis of consensus and appropriate forms of discussion; before long, we are with Lenin at the second congress of the League of Russian Revolutionary Social-Democracy Abroad in London in 1903; elsewhere we are treated to an unravelling of therapeutic discourse on contemporary Russian television; and then, we find ourselves observing the general meeting of an allotment association in St Petersburg – grassroots democracy indeed. The entire vast sweep of subject matter confronts what the editors, Vakhtin and Firsov, call ‘a chronic, and neglected, socio-cultural malady’, a grim legacy of the period of so-called ‘mature socialism’ introduced under Brezhnev in 1981. It is worth citing in full their description of this malady: