Table Of ContentThe Dimensions of Hegemony
Historical Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen (Paris)
Steve Edwards (London)
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)
Peter Thomas (London)
VOLUME 86
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
The Dimensions of Hegemony
Language, Culture and Politics
in Revolutionary Russia
By
Craig Brandist
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brandist, Craig, 1963–
The dimensions of hegemony : language, culture and politics in revolutionary Russia / by
Craig Brandist.
pages cm. — (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570–1522 ; volume 86)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-23185-6 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-27679-6 (e-book)
1. Language—Political aspects—Soviet Union—History. 2. Language policy—Soviet Union—History.
3. Sociolinguistics—Soviet Union—History. 4. Linguists—Soviet Union—History. 5. Hegemony—
Soviet Union—History. 6. Socialism and culture—Soviet Union—History. 7. Soviet Union—Politics
and government—1917–1936. 8. Soviet Union—Intellectual life—1917–1970. I. Title.
P119.32.S65B64 2015
306.440947—dc23
2014046303
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issn 1570-1522
isbn 978-90-04-23185-6 (hardback)
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: The Multiple Dimensions of Hegemony 1
1 Hegemony in Russian Social Democracy Before 1917 25
2 Orientology, Philology and the Politics of Empire: Traditional
Intellectuals in Late Imperial Russia 51
3 Verbal Art and Revolution: The Living Word 78
4 Metamorphoses of Hegemony in the Period of the nep 99
5 The New Paradigm in Linguistic Science 125
6 The Revolution in the West and East: Hegemony and the National
Question 150
7 Hegemony: The Decline and Fall of a Paradigm 176
8 Ideology Critique, Positivism and Marxism: The Paradoxical Legacy
of Nikolai Marr 193
Conclusion 221
Glossary of Names 229
Bibliography 252
Index 296
If we had to express the essence of Bolshevism and its role in the Russian
revolutionary movement in a phrase, and to name the main regulating
idea of Bolshevism, we would say that this idea is the hegemony of the
proletariat.1
Grigorii Zinovʹev, 1923
∵
1 Zinovʹev 1924 [1923], p. 304; Zinoviev 1973 [1923], p. 216.
Preface
The present study has been a long time in the making. It grew out of a proj-
ect to study the development of Soviet sociological linguistics in the period
1917–38 hosted by the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield and funded
by the Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2003 and 2007. This
enabled me to collect a huge amount of published and archival materials and
to meet with a number of people who were instrumental in helping me to
track down this material. I was able to work on the monograph only intermit-
tently between periods of research leave, and in this period the conception
changed and the question of hegemony, which was a recurring theme in the
early drafts, began to take a central position. This was strengthened by a small
British Academy grant to work on the materials about Gramsci held in the
Comintern archives. That research will be published separately, yet it could
not but leave a trace on the present study.
In the course of the preparation of this book, I have accumulated a number
of debts to scholars in a variety of ways. The formulation of the initial grant
application was significantly aided by consultations with David Shepherd,
while the research carried out on the basis of the grant owed much to my
then research assistant Katya Chown, without whom the base material for the
project would have been a good deal poorer. Vladimir Alpatov’s encyclopae-
dic knowledge of the area was particularly helpful in helping to track down
archival material, but credit must also go to the staff of a number of archives
in Russia and the former ussr. Peter Thomas has been supportive and helpful
at all stages. I was also fortunate to have the generous assistance of the late
Natalia Iusova and her husband Sviatoslav Iusov on visiting Kiev for archival
research. The grant application to research the Gramsci materials was sup-
ported by Alex Callinicos.
I have no doubt that the text bears marks of my valuable and constructive
conversations with a number of extremely knowledgeable people, who are
too great in number to enumerate in full. I must mention Vladimir Alpatov,
Vera Tolz, Galin Tihanov, Mika Lähteenmäki, John Biggart, Dmitrii Iunov, Boris
Gasparov, Ekatarina Velmezova, Viktoria Gulida, Iurii Kleiner, Galina Lilich,
Jonathan Hall, Abbie Bakan, Patrick Sériot and Irina Ivanova.
A number of people provided me with copies of difficult-to-find materi-
als, amongst whom I must mention John Biggart, Galin Tihanov and Evgeny
Dobrenko, Gennadii Obatnin and Jukka Pietiläinen.
I am indebted to the comments on drafts, of the whole or parts of the text,
by Mika Lähteenmäki, John Biggart, Evgeny Dobrenko, Peter Jones, Chris
viii preface
Pawling, Alan Shandro and Galin Tihanov. Such help to overcome the confla-
tions, incautious phrasing and misconceptions that ran throughout earlier
drafts has made the current work, whatever its enduring flaws, considerably
stronger than it would otherwise have been.
The following people were instrumental in allowing me to present pre-
liminary versions of the materials that make up the current study and to
benefit from the discussions that resulted: Ana Zandwais, Beth Brait, Renata
Marchezan, João Vianney Cavalcanti Nuto, Maria Inês Batista Campos,
Anderson Magalhães, Nikolai Vakhtin, Vladimir Feshchenko, Tatʹiana
Venediktova, Alessandro Carlucci, Tomi Huttunen, Ben Hellman, Tintti
Klapuri, Liisa Steinby, Arja Rosenholm, Patrick Sériot, Ulla-Maija Peltonen,
Danuta Ulicka, Juha Koivisto and the organisers of the Historical Materialism
conferences over a number of years.
I am aware that a volume dealing with material of this nature has a potential
audience with a number of specialisations. With this in mind I have provided
a glossary of names of historical figures whose names appear throughout the
book. Inevitably some such basic information will be quite superfluous to most
readers, but I am confident that all readers will find something helpful here,
especially given the blizzard of unfamiliar names any study of this nature inev-
itably generates. This is all the more important when dealing with the names of
early Soviet institutions, the key ones of which have also been included, given
that the period saw an almost constant renaming and reorganisation of the
institutional structure.
A Note on Transliteration
Transliteration of Russian proper names has followed the Library of Congress
system (without diacritics), except where there are well-established English
conventions for well-known figures such as Trotsky, Gorky, Mayakovsky and so
on. The reader is reminded that alternative transliterations may be found in
other English-language texts.
Acknowledgements
The text includes reworked material originally included in the following pub-
lications, excerpted here with the permission of the publishers: (2003) ‘The
Origins of Soviet Sociolinguistics’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7, 2: 213–33; (2006)
‘The Rise of Soviet Sociolinguistics From the Ashes of Völkerpsychologie’,
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 42, 3: 261–77; (2008)
‘Sociological Linguistics In Leningrad: The Institute for the Comparative
History of the Literatures and Languages of The West and East (iljazv) 1921–
33’, Russian Literature lxiii (ii/iii/iv): 171–200; (2010) Politics and the Theory of
Language in the ussr, London: Anthem Press; (2012c) ‘Rhetoric, Agitation and
Propaganda: Reflections on the Discourse of Democracy (with Some Lessons
from Early Soviet Russia)’, in Language, Ideology, and the Human, eds. Sanja
Bahun and Dušan Radunović with an Afterword by Ernesto Laclau (Farnham:
Ashgate), 75–93, Copyright © 2012.
