The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia

Past & Present, August, 1998 by S.A. Smith

From the 1880s a stratum of `conscious' workers emerged, who rebelled against the poverty and degradation which surrounded them and who struggled to advance themselves through education. Modelling themselves on the radical intelligentsia, they identified with the ideal of kul'turnost' which the intelligentsia represented.(38) This concept of `culturedness' connected ideas of growth of the individual to reflections on the evolution of society at large.

On the one hand, it denoted inner cultivation, in the sense of intellectual development, refinement of manners and moral development: in short, the forging of a self worthy of man's innate dignity and capable of commanding respect in others. On the other hand, kul'turnost' was a sociological category used to evaluate the level of civilization achieved by a particular society along an evolutionary spectrum. In this respect, Russia was characterized precisely by its lack of kul'turnost', perceived as lying closer to `Asiatic' barbarism than to western-European civilization. By linking the development of the individual self to the development of civilization in society, kul'turnost' could be harnessed to radical political ends, to the struggle to break out of the `kingdom of darkness' into the realm of freedom and civilization.(39) For `conscious' workers, a crucial element in the acquisition of kul'turnost' was the repudiation of swearing. Like the intelligentsia, these workers saw the ubiquity of swearing as a symptom of lack of culture that enslaved Russian society. At the individual level, swearing was a sign of the underdevelopment of lichnost', that inner sense of personal dignity and worth as a human being, and a sign of lack of respect for others. And learning to regulate speech (and emotions) was seen as vital to achieving the intellectual and moral self-activity that was at the heart of kul'turnost'.(40) By extension, the capacity to control speech indicated an individual's potential to exercise control over wider aspects of working life and, ultimately, over society as a whole. At the social level, the widespread use of mat among workers was, for the conscious minority, a depressing reminder of the political backwardness of the working class. In the mid-1880s, at the age of thirteen, Shapovalov became an apprentice in the railway workshops of the Petersburg-Warsaw railway. He writes: `I completely accepted my position as an apprentice fitter. I became much rougher, more empty: I ceased reading books, learnt to drink, smoke and curse with the most select and most rich Russian swear-words. Such obscenities were heard the whole day in our workshop -- mat, mat, mat, mat -- they cried in one corner, -- mat, mat, mat, mat, they replied in another'.(41) A despairing carpenter from the St Petersburg glass company began a letter to the Bolshevik newspaper: `Fights, drunkenness, swearing are the only things that are developed at our workplace'.(42) Sacked from the bakery where he was an apprentice at the beginning of 1905, the young Boris Ivanov described the misery of unemployment: `days and weeks passed by among the unemployed bakers against a background of drunkenness and street obscenity. The great events that were taking place for some reason failed to touch their souls, all healthy thoughts and consciousness were stifled by the intoxication of wine and bad language'.(43) Here, swearing, along with drinking, brawling and card-playing, testified to the degradation of the working class, but also to its acquiescence in that subordination.