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Abstract
The article explores the kinds of institutions and networks that promoted a reading economy in periodicals in Moscow and Petersburg in the first third of the nineteenth century. The article examines why Petersburg experienced a dramatic growth in periodical publishing during this time period, and what factors constrained Moscow’s periodical publishing market. Looking at official institutions, public social venues, and individual journalists like Nikolai Grech, Faddei Bulgarin, and Osip Senkovskii, the article argues that institutional support and a thickening of public and private networks enabled the rise of a commercial and professional press in the 1820s. To bring the rise of Petersburg journalism into sharper relief, the article also examines the early career of Nikolai Polevoi and the circumstances constraining Moscow publishing in the first third of the nineteenth century. The article draws on recent scholarship examining the press as an “infrastructure” or “network” itself, as well as on theories of the press as part of a “network of means” regulating information and communication.
Abstract
In the course of the nineteenth century, Russia’s press culture underwent a dramatic cultural, technological, and political transformation. However, the question of professionalization of the press during the same period remains relatively underexplored. This article examines the extent and the limitations of editorial professionalization in nineteenth-century Russia by focusing on an emergent generation of private newspaper editors such as M.N. Katkov, A.A. Kraevskii, I.S. Aksakov, and A.S. Suvorin during the 1860s and 1870s. The article explores the emergence of a private opinion press during the 1860s with substantial autonomy in the commercial management of their newspapers, but a censorship-restricted autonomy in the management of their content. It then examines the elements of an emerging professional ethos and solidarity in the editorial profession. Drawing on a wealth of correspondence, editorials, and diaries, this work reveals the delicate world of personal relationships which allowed editors to balance both the strictures of political censorship and the account books of their commercial enterprises. This paper argues that a limited professional autonomy and considerable competition among influential editors – i.e press lords – constrained the professionalization of the journalism in pre-Revolutionary Russia.
Abstract
Many historians have questioned the accuracy of the “Tale of Ivan IV’s Campaign against Novgorod in 1570.” Cornelia Soldat now expands that critical approach to the “Tale” by arguing that it derives from German pamphlets published a century earlier. She relies upon the congruence of macro- and micro-structures to demonstrate textual influence without textual borrowing. Given the absence of Muscovite manuscripts of the “Tale” between 1570 and the second half of the seventeenth century, the composers of the “Tale” “must have” relied upon foreign sources about the raid, because no domestic sources existed. Her analysis is certainly possible, but it elides a number of issues about the transmission and translation into Russian of the German pamphlets. Reliable contemporary Muscovite sources tells us more about the “real” raid than Soldat allows. It is equally possible that the “Tale” derives from circulating native oral legends. However, the methodological and evidentiary issues Soldat raises are serious and deserve further discussion.
Abstract
This forum examines the professionalization of journalism in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union using recent revisionist approaches in press history. Four essays, ranging chronologically from the 1820s through the 1960s, use case studies of both commercial and state-owned periodicals to explore the rise of the press as a source of information and opinion in Russia. Yelizaveta Raykhlina’s article examines the institutions and networks, both formal and informal, that promoted the earliest professional and commercial periodicals in the first third of the nineteenth century. Ala Graff’s article analyzes the professionalization of the press during the 1860s–1880s, exploring how newspaper editors navigated the space between limited editorial autonomy and the growing technical complexity of the newspaper publishing business. Felix Cowan’s article examines the professionalization of the penny press in late Imperial Russia, focusing on how editors and journalists viewed their work as a vehicle for social mobility as well as a public service for the poor and marginalized. Ekaterina Kamenskaya’s article analyzes the newspaper Sel’skaia zhizn’ (Rural Life) and the role of its foreign correspondent network in both carving out space for professional autonomy as well as in bringing a unique narrative of the world to a rural Soviet audience in the 1960s.
Abstract
Through case studies of five prominent journalists, editors, and publishers, this article explores journalism at late imperial Russia’s kopeck newspapers. Exploring the lives and careers of journalists from wide-ranging backgrounds who shared a view of their work as both a business and a form of service to poor Russians, this article argues that kopeck journalists thought their profession combined entrepreneurship and upward mobility with activism and civic responsibility. The life stories and views of kopeck journalists reveal that civil society was not limited to small groups of educated middle-class Russians but rather included a wide range of actors and initiatives. Viewing these figures as members of late imperial Russian civil society also demonstrates that civil society activity could coexist with business concerns and operate within Russia’s emerging free market, despite the critiques of contemporary observers who saw commercial and social goals as inherently contradictory.
Abstract
Historiography of the study of Ivan the Terrible’s times contains many examples of demystification attempts: E. Keenan declared the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Andrey Kurbsky to be apocrypha, Anthony Grobovsky exposed the ‘Chosen Rada’, Mikhail Krom unmasked the time of ‘boyar rule’. Cornelia Soldat suggests revising the history of the ‘massacre of Novgorod’ in 1570. She believes it to be a product of a ‘literary game’. The story of the destruction of Novgorod first appeared in the German Flying Leaf in 1570 and Alexander Guagnini’s Chronicle in 1578. It was a product of European political discourse. The Novgorod Chronicles borrowed that story from Guagnini’s Chronicle in the late 17th century. However, this hypothesis lacks sufficient proof. Independent evidence exists: The Solovetsky Chronicle of the 16th century. According to Soldat, the reports from The Novgorod Uvarov Chronicle date back to the late 16t–early 17th (about 1606) centuries, rather than to the 17th century. The main argument against her concept is the confirmation in independent sources and documents of the death of many people, while the circumstances of the repression or death point to Novgorod and 1570. The Novgorod chronicles contain no evidence of text borrowings from German or Polish sources. There is no proven textual similarity between them. The story of the ‘massacre of Novgorod’ evolved in the Novgorod’s urban legends. This would have been hardly possible, if this story had been of a purely bookish, literary origin. Therefore, Cornelia Soldat’s attempt to demystify the history of the ‘massacre of Novgorod’ in 1570 cannot be considered convincing.