Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 by Orlando Figes

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 Reviews

• 
  tomsyak

  Summary of Argument:
  
  This book, which as I heard was mostly Kolonitskii's work, sees the February Revolution and its aftermath as a struggle of competing symbolic systems and describes the ways in which language (texts and symbols) was used to shape identities and create new meanings. This history of the revolutionary political culture could have been very dry and theoretical, but actually turned out to be an extremely engaging work and an easy and enjoyable read. The source base is very wide, as necessitated by the subject matter - letters, petitions, songs and many other types of sources from a variety of Russia's archives have been used; this is probably a book that could not have been written before the archival revolution because it works with popular orientations that in the Soviet Union remained mostly unpublished.
  
  Figes and Kolonitskii see social groups such as classes and political parties not as fixed realities, but rather as identities that are constructed through language. The struggle to define the values of a new society that they describe is then neither military nor political, but linguistic. Language, however, is not something that warring sides are able to control - through appropriation it starts to live a life of its own a could be waged against its creators. The flexibility of a symbol increased its effectiveness; for example, the revolutionary discourse (red flag, etc.) was able to unite different anti-monarchical political movements but also to hide their diversity, which later emerged with a vengeance and made the Bolshevik victory over its disunited opponents possible. Figes and Kolonitskii argue that the discourse of class was dominant in 1917 because it was both flexible (able to include people with different political and socio-economical identities) and meaningful (able to unite all these people on the basis of their exclusion from society and their common struggle for human rights) (I think this latter point could have been better developed, and Raleigh also noted in his review that this chapter was "loose" and "preliminary"). Figes and Kolonitskii also point out that the February Revolution was not spontaneous in the sense that it was organized around pre-determined symbols - protesters walking along certain streets to certain buildings, destroying certain objects on their way.
  
  The book consists of six chapters which explore the following themes: the importance of rumors in overthrowing of the monarchy and the later appropriation by the people of persistent revolutionary themes such as treason in high places to de-legitimize Kerensky's government; the destruction, replacement or redefinition of the symbols of the old order (tearing off the white and blue strips from the imperial flag and leaving only the red to hang, expropriation by the Bolsheviks of many symbols of the February Revolution) and the failure of the Kadets to do so; the persistence of a "monarchical psychology" (cults of leaders adopted by the population - Kerensky, Kornilov and Lenin); the reception and appropriation of revolutionary symbols by workers and peasants ("demokratiia" comes for the workers to mean "toiling people," no "democratic" government can have bourgeois officials; the peasants also project their own ideas of social justice onto the revolutionary rhetoric, "republic" for them comes to mean "peasant authoritarianism, and the image of the enemy (Jews, Germans and the English before and during the war, "dark forces" during February Revolution, and the bourgeois afterward (originally a class term, redefined to mean almost anyone), which became the emotional basis of the terror that developed from below as well as from above). Language of revolution brought by socialists from the underground into the public sphere did not create but reinforced the divides between "us" and "them" and can explain why the Russian Revolution was so violent.
  
  
  Comments/Critiques:
  
  I think this book is an important addition to the historiography of the February Revolution in that it discusses the power not of weapons but of symbols. Studying rumors can be very insightful for understanding the popular culture that does not make it to print, and I think that the post-revolutionary era could also benefit from such a discussion. Donald Raleigh noted in his review that the book is at times repetitive and rushed, and I do wonder whether the six chapters are coherent and present an important enough argument - sometimes they read more as a collection of articles and I still cannot say, other than the need to study language along politics, what the main idea of this book was.
  
  Read in his review critiqued the "linguistic determinism" of the book, arguing that language did not create, but rather reflected existing identities. This might not be a fair point since Figes and Kolonitskii state exactly that in the conclusion of their book, but perhaps do not emphasize it enough it its body. Their discussion of the image of the enemy actually was to me convincing of the performativeness of symbols in some cases. Figes and Kolonitskii claim that rumors were instrumental in bringing down the monarchy, no matter whether they were true or not; however, could they have done it without at least to some extent being grounded in facts?
• 
  Rebecca

  This book is a broad study of how songs, words, and various symbols were used and interpreted by various groups during 1917 in Russia. It's especially interesting when it describes how words like "democracy" and "bourgeois" took on very different meanings from what we think they mean today. I felt like the authors were more just describing the phenomenon than trying to draw any conclusions from it, which is reasonable since they said that it's hard to conclude just how widespread the use of language and symbols actually was. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in how language affects history, and anyone interested in Russian culture in 1917.