Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804-1906

351 Pages·2009·17.914 MB·English

by  Charles A. Ruud

FIGHTING WORDS:
IMPERIAL CENSORSHIP AND THE RUSSIAN PRESS, 1804-1906
Censorship took many forms in Imperial Russia. First published in 1982,
Fighting Words focuses on the most common form: the governmental sys-
tem that screened written works before or after publication to determine
their acceptability. Charles A. Ruud shows that, despite this system, the
nineteenth-century Russian Imperial government came to grant far more
extensive legal publishing freedoms than most Westerners realize, adopt-
ing a more liberal attitude towards the press by permitting it a position
recognized by law.
Fighting Words also reveals, however, that the government fell far short
of implementing these reforms, thus contributing to the growth of opposi-
tion to the Tsarist regime in the second half of the nineteenth century and
the first few years of the twentieth. Now back in print with a new intro-
duction by the author, Fighting Words is a classic work offering insight
into the press, censorship, and the limits of printed expression in Imperial
Russia.
CHARLES A. RUUD is professor emeritus in the Department of History at the
University of Western Ontario.
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CHARLES A. RUUD
Fighting Words:
Imperial Censorship and the
Russian Press, 1804-1906
With a New Introduction
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1982, 2009
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
Published in 1982, reprinted in paper with new Introduction in 2009
ISBN 978-1-4426-1024-8 (paper)
To my parents and Julie
(5c)
Printed on acid-free paper
Publication cataloguing information is available from Library and Archives
Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council.
Canada Council Conseil des Art ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL
for the Arts du Canada EIL DES ARTS DE L'ONTARIO
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
PREFACE / vii
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2009 EDITION / ix
Introduction / 3
1 The European pattern and the beginnings of Russian censorship / 7
2 The early administrative system and the rise of mysticism,
1801-17 / 24
3 Golitsyn's fall and the decline of mysticism, 1817-25 / 38
4 Nicholas I's censorship innovations, 1825-32 / 52
5 Censorship and the new journalism, 1832-48 / 67
6 A system under siege, 1848-55 / 83
7 Confused steps towards reform, 1855-61 / 97
8 The dilemmas of liberal censorship, 1862-63 / 118
9 The reform of 6 April 1865 / 137
10 The first year of the reformed system, 1865-66 / 150
11 Control of press freedom: warnings, court cases, and libel laws,
1867-69 / 167
12 Censorship, repression, and the emergence of a 'European' press,
1869-89 /181
13 The last years of the administrative system, 1889-1906 / 207
14 Autocracy and the press: the historic conflict / 227
APPENDICES
Appendix 1 Regulations on the press, 6 April 1865 / 237
vi Contents
Appendix 2 Tables / 253
NOTES / 259
BIBLIOGRAPHY / 311
INDEX / 315
Preface
TRANSLITERATION
The Library of Congress system of transliteration has been followed, but
with adjustments. Instead of the 'ii' ending that would occur in Russian
surnames, I have adopted the Anglicized 'y'; 'Chernyshevskii' in the LC
system is 'Chernyshevsky' in my text. I have also eliminated the apostro-
phe which serves to replace the Russian soft sign in the LC system; what
would be 'Murav'ev' according to the LC system becomes 'Muraviev' in
my text, and sometimes no letter replaces the apostrophe. Nor did I use
the LC symbol for the Russian hard sign (") or the soft 'e' (e). I have, how-
ever, used these symbols in the bibliography.
I have standardized spellings to conform to modern orthography. 'Russ-
kago' in the old style becomes 'Russkogo' in the new. Numerous titles of
publications appear in the text as well as in the notes. In the text, I cite
them in English translation with the transliterated Russian version in pa-
rentheses upon first mention.
CALENDAR
All Russian dates are in the Julian calendar, in effect in Russia until 1918.
Dates in the Julian calendar were eleven days behind the western Gre-
gorian calendar in the eighteenth century; twelve, in the nineteenth; and
thirteen, in the twentieth.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have benefitted from the encouragement and example of many persons
viii Preface
while writing this book, especially my teachers at Berkeley, Professors
Martin E. Malia and Nicholas V. Riasanovsky; K.A. Papmehl of the Uni-
versity of Western Ontario; Adam B. Ulam of Harvard University; and
PA. Zaionchkovsky of Moscow State University. The editorial work by
Marjorie L. Ruud has been invaluable. Principal typists were Marion Dun-
das and Jacqueline Jones and I thank them for their patience and kindness.
I wish also to express my thanks to those who have supported this work
financially: the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, the Canada
Council, and the Dean of Social Science at the University of Western On-
tario. I am grateful, as well, to the Russian Research Center at Harvard
University, where I spent a year as a fellow.
This book has been published with the help of grants from the Social
Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Publications Fund
of the University of Toronto Press. A grant from the J.B. Smallman Fund
has also been provided by the University of Western Ontario.
Introduction to the 2009 edition
My research since the first issue of Fighting Words has added to its scope
but not altered its arguments. This introduction to the work's reprinting in
2009 makes the present volume a supplemented edition and allows add-
ing some of my findings over the last twenty-seven years.
One is the evolving usage in tsarist days - by officials and strictly in the
sense of the government's wider dissemination of published ideas and
information - of the Russian word glasnost' with credit going to an Im-
perial censorship official, Fedor I. Tiutchev, for its first known, to date,
documented application to censorship reform in the sense used in 1985
by Mikhail Gorbachev: full circulation in the press of reporting of public
issues but within limits. This idea was sometimes taken to mean 'freedom
of the press,' but that has never been the intention. A second of my find-
ings since 1982 is how the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion fared
with censorship when private publishers first circulated it to a Russian
audience through a newspaper in 1903 and a book in 1905. A third is the
leitmotif trial of a satirical journal's editor in 1906, or after the government
ended its preliminary censorship system, showing how the government
effected post-publication censorship by means of the courts.
Fighting Words touches only briefly on the role of Tiutchev as a reformer
of Russian censorship. Five experts that I have since consulted discuss him
as a poet and judge him an intellectual whose inner psycho-social conflicts
made him an extreme nationalist, but they say nothing about his advocacy
as a censorship official of freer published expression in Russia.1 Given that
Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev rank as Russia's best nineteenth-centu-
ry poets, all five experts stress, of course, both Tiutchev's eminence as a
Russian wordsmith and also his fluent command of German and French.
It was thanks to his verbal deftness, then, that he became a publicist for
x Introduction to the 2009 edition
the Imperial regime paid by, as of September 1843, in his fortieth year, the
Russian political police, or Third Section, and, six months later, the Minis-
try of Foreign Affairs.
Tiutchev had held no post in the four years before he turned publicist,
having been dismissed in 1839 for poor performance in the Russian dip-
lomatic service abroad. His re-entry into the Imperial bureaucracy came
in 1843 through a Russian diplomat's wife who had been his mistress
years before - Baroness Amalia von Krudener. By her use of connections,
Tiutchev met on 7 September 1843 in St Petersburg with the head of the
Third Section and Corps of Gendarmes, Nicholas I's top police official,
A.Kh. Benckendorff.2
At that time, Tiutchev well knew, Benckendorff had for months been
engaged in an urgent project for the Emperor: that of countering in Europe
through hired writers criticism of Russian society and governance widely
aired in French, German, and English by the French nobleman Marquis
de Custine in a best-selling work whose English title is Russia in 1839.3
Because he came seeking a job, Tiutchev handed to Benckendorff what he
later termed a 'hastily' written offer to mediate between the Russian gov-
ernment and 'blind, enraged, hostile' German journalists.4 In quick order,
Benckendorff got approval from Nicholas and invited his publicist for five
days of talk at his estate. On 19 September Tiutchev headed home to Mu-
nich to begin his project to influence the European press and its readers.
His first of four major political essays appeared in the summer of 1844
in the Allgemeine Zeitung of Augsburg, a daily newspaper Tiutchev con-
sidered 'the first of German political forums.' He reminded the paper's
readers that Germany and Russia were the main defenders of historical
legitimacy against revolution.5 On 20 September, having established him-
self as an articulate defender of Russia in Europe, Tiutchev returned with
his family to live in his native country and to serve the Imperial govern-
ment for the rest of his life.
When revolutions swept the major capitals of Europe in 1848, Tiutchev
reacted sharply and wildly. The two assessments he wrote were 'Rus-
sia and Revolution,' published in Paris in April 1848 and personally ap-
proved by Tsar Nicholas i, and his 'The Roman Question' of October 1849
that Revue des deux Mondes of Paris published in January 1850. The argu-
ment in the latter - Western Europeans, as failed Christians, need submit
to the Orthodox East led by Russia to return to the Christian fold - evoked
intense debate in Europe. Both had unrealistic charges and claims.
Seven years later, Tiutchev rose in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to
chair the Foreign Censorship Committee. He succeeded A.I. Krasovsky,