10 - ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)

Summary

The statement that the traditions of public discussion are weak, and public politics practically non-existent in Russia, long ago became a commonplace. It is no accident that defenders of the first Opposition Co-ordinating Council (2012–13), in answer to the perfectly wellfounded claims of its critics, assert that even though its activities had no significant results, it did fulfil its most important function: it created an arena for political discussions and demonstrated that people with the most diverse political convictions are capable of carrying on a dialogue around the same table. In other words, the very possibility of public discussions in Russia needed to be proved, and the proof of it was (or was not, in some people's opinion) the elections to the Co-ordinating Council and its subsequent activities. It will be understood that the fact that the question is posed in this manner says in itself a great deal about the situation: it is hard to imagine that it would occur to anyone to demonstrate the possibility of public political discussions in, say, Britain, with its age-old tradition of parliamentary debates. Forays into history (see, for example, the chapters by Dmitrii Kalugin and Michel Tissier in the present volume) also confirm this regrettable diagnosis: the culture of political discussion in Russia has practically no institutional support and is not part of everyday practice.

An important element in the underdeveloped character of the public sphere, as is also shown by the research collected in the present volume, is the inchoate state of what one might call the language of public communication – a means of communication between people when they are settling questions that go beyond their private affairs and personal relationships. The dichotomy between the official (‘Soviet’) language and the ordinary everyday language (see Nikolai Vakhtin's chapter in the present volume) leaves no room for a ‘middle’ sphere of public interaction. As research into the concepts of the social and public in Russian society (Fedorova 2011) has shown, ‘society’ is always present in our speech in practice, but it is present as an empty shell, a set of sounds without meaning which evokes no response and assumes no common action.