8 - Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

Summary

As dancers must know the basic steps so as not to look silly, so it is desirable for participants in a discussion to have basic debating skills so as not to make themselves a public laughingstock.

Mary McAuley, from her contribution to the final discussion at the ‘Russian Society in Search of a Public Language: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’ conference, European

University at St Petersburg, 17 January 2013

A LAND OF THE ‘DUMB’?

The majority of Russians today are not well acquainted with the ‘basic steps’ of public discussion and experience communicative difficulties when they discuss their common affairs and try to solve their common problems in a collegial manner. The speakers cannot formulate their position so as to be understood, nor can they criticise other people's opinions in a polite and well-founded manner. Observations of the practice of public discussion in St Petersburg in 2008–12 have shown up a lack of skills in public discussion and the underdeveloped state of the language of public debate itself. The inability, typical of our compatriots, to listen and speak to Others in the presence of Others (i.e. publicly) results in the communicative stupor denoted in this chapter by the metaphor of ‘public aphasia’.

Perestroika, which opened up the possibility of the public expression of one's opinion, did not in the end create a new public language in which it would be possible to come to agreement or work out a common position without sliding into the informality of ‘kitchen conversations’ or the clichés of officialese, which were the fundamental communicative registers of Soviet society. Mary McAuley, who conducted research at the end of the 1980s in Perm’, Tomsk province, Krasnodar territory and Leningrad, notes that neither the ‘Soviet’ language of the party meeting nor the ‘anti-Soviet’ language of private conversation in the kitchen was really adequate for the new possibilities of public expression which had suddenly been opened up to the Soviet people by the policy of glasnost:

It appears that in the new world the structures and practices inherited from the Soviet experience had lost their former functions and become dysfunctional. […] People now had for the first time the opportunity and necessity of telling each other in public something of personal importance, divorced from the ritual formulas that they had learnt.