Russian Revolutions in Print: The Fate of the Ethnic Press

Abstract

Мы самоубийством кончать не желаем и потому этого не сделаем. Мы ясно видим факт: «свобода печати» означает на деле немедленную покупку международной буржуазией сотни и тысячи кадетских, эсеровских и меньшевистских писателей и организацию их пропаганды, их борьбы против нас. Although these candid sentiments were expressed in a letter to Gavriil Miasnikov in 1921, Lenin's thoughts on printing and publishing, before and after the Russian revolutions, would fundamentally alter the cultural landscape by reshaping the printing press as the "inseparable" literary organ of the party.2 In order to achieve this revolutionary goal of total consolidation, an extensive publishing apparatus was created to cultivate, manage, and disseminate information to numerous ethnic and cultural groups, with distinct linguistic and historical narratives. We can postulate that this consolidation of the press underwent three distinct stages: (1) the initial period of euphoria and confusion (often mixed with a dose of hopeful thinking), where a multitude of new publications was established; (2) a period of coexistence of Bolshevik and local press; and finally (3) a systematic and total dismantling and clampdown of press publishers that did not conform to party orthodoxy and homogeneity.Accomplishing the third stage was fraught with challenges, but ultimately the party managed to create a centrally-administered publishing outlet from which networks of producers and consumers of revolutionary publications emerged. As we reflect on the 100-year anniversary of the Russian Revolutions, the impact of these revolutions on local publishing cultures, and the impact of local publishing cultures on the revolutions, still reverberate in Russia, Central Asia, and eastern Europe.The successful integration of Soviet designs on the press and information management in every city, region, and republic is a testament to its reshaping of centuries-old center-periphery relationships established in the sixteenth century. Inheriting this multiethnic and multicultural state, the Bolsheviks encountered ethnic and cultural groups with differing levels of publishing output and printing cultures. Notable examples of strong printing cultures 1. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow, 1965(Moscow, [1958), 44: 79. "We have no wish to end with suicide and therefore will not do it. We see the obvious fact: "freedom of the press" means, in effect, the immediate purchase by the international bourgeoisie of hundreds and thousands of Cadet, Socialist-Revolutionary, and Menshevik writers and the organization of their propaganda, their struggle against us." 2. Ibid., 12: 99-105.