The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (review)

The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras. By Stephen Lovell. London: Macmillan Press in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 2000. viii, 215 pp. $65.00. ISBN 0-312-22601-2.

In this succinct monograph, Stephen Lovell addresses one of the most familiar clichés about the former Soviet Union: for all of the regime's political repressions, it nonetheless made good on its commitment to literacy, and as a result the Soviet population read more than any other in the world. As Lovell points out, this celebration in and of itself said very little about what was read or how it was processed by Soviet/Russian readers. He therefore sets out to clarify some of the critical aspects of what he terms "Russia's reading myth." If his conclusions ultimately raise more questions than they answer about the myth, he is nonetheless to be applauded for reworking the agenda for studies that make assumptions about readership.

In the introduction, Lovell establishes his theoretical frame around issues of class and culture, as Pierre Bourdieu and others have employed these two concepts to identify both readers and the materials they consume. His brief tour of continental Europe's nineteenth-century "reading revolution" brings him to the evolution of a culturally active middle-class reader whose equivalent did not appear in Russia until, paradoxically, after the Communist revolution. Central to Lovell's argument is the notion that by the 1930s the Soviet Union had developed a homogenized culture that was not organized according to the elite/middle/popular hierarchy of readerships that characterize other developed societies. Lovell argues that when the government collapsed these categories for its own political purposes, it generated a middlebrow audience similar in many important respects to Western readerships.

Lovell develops his theme in three short historical chapters, moving rapidly from the 1920s into the M. S. Gorbachev years of glastnost, or "openness," in the 1980s. Although the brevity of his survey limits its effectiveness, Lovell has new points to raise about the "book hunger" that began to be felt acutely in the 1960s. Several factors inherent in the socialist system were responsible: faulty mechanisms for production and distribution, and inattention to the specific cravings of readers. In the 1970s the government sponsored a novel remedy to ease the hunger through makulatura, a system that allowed readers to exchange paper for coupons for free books from the list of those that were in short supply. Where a rational market mechanism would simply produce more of the books that readers wanted most, this system helped the government to recycle paper and keep the price of books low. However, this practice was upended by fashion once collecting books began to serve as a style for interior décor.

Even into glastnost and perestroika, the government fought the logic of subjecting literature to the commercial marketplace. For years the black market had relieved the pressure to treat books as commodities, just as it had made available other consumer goods that the government was reluctant to commit its limited resources to produce. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed private publishers to step in and address the publishing crisis through the publication of fewer and more expensive reading materials. In an invaluable chapter that makes a case study of the mass-oriented Ogonek (The Flame), Lovell shows how periodical literature mirrored book production, especially in its response to the political changes in the 1980s and the economic turmoil of the 1990s. Particularly interesting is his discussion of the editorial debates among liberal intellectuals who balked at having to adjust to the commercial market.

In conclusion, Lovell wisely avoids levying value judgments about the popular taste for crime and other forms of pulp fiction that emerged with commercialization. His point is more profound: the post-Soviet reading market finally...