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

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

It is the use of mat by those in authority that looms largest in the discourse of the `conscious' workers. Even in the relatively advanced engineering plants of St Petersburg the style of management was often crude, a throw-back to the days of serfdom. Managerial power worked by making a spectacle of itself, imposing discipline through fear. A worker at the steam-engine workshops of the Nikolaev railway in St Petersburg described the working conditions thus: `The worker works to the sound of the foulest obscenity and the despotic cries of the foremen, senior workers and brigade-leaders. And the workers do not lag behind their bosses [nachal'niki] when it comes to vulgar abuse'.(59) At the Zhukov oil mill, a worker wrote: `the administration [nachal'stvo] treats us crudely. The senior worker stands out for his insolence and roughness. He was formerly a worker like us ... He swears at us using all kinds of words, forcing us to do intolerable jobs by means of obscenity'.(60) In the sorting shop of the State Engraving Plant, the senior guard, Boriska, was said to regard himself as king of the shop: `he deals with the workers extremely crudely, and frequently turns from choice swear-words to action with his fists'.(61)

During the 1905 Revolution one of the principal demands of the nascent labour movement was for polite treatment by employers. As a consequence of strikes and organization, as well as of the concessions made by the autocracy, workers became much less tolerant of abusive language, which they construed not merely as a denial of dignity, but as a symptom of the arbitrariness (proizvol) of the social system as a whole. An insult from a foreman now came to resonate with all the injustices to which working people were subject under autocratic capitalism. Even after the regime regained the upper hand in 1907, complaints to the Factory Inspectorate about insulting and humiliating behaviour continued at a high level.(62) It was not that management was behaving worse -- if anything the reverse was true -- rather that the political context in which workers perceived linguistic usages had changed. A flavour of the new-found sensitivity to insult can be seen in a report of an incident on the Krylov building site on Vezembergskaia street in the capital on 28 June 1912. A brick layer dumped his load on a spot that did not please the official foreman (kazennyi desiatnik):

the foreman began to roast [kalit'] the brick-layer, but he, being a

conscious worker, demanded that he address him in a proper fashion. This

provoked a torrent of abuse such as even a den of "former people" can

have seldom heard. A gentleman, who happened to be passing by, pointed

out that he had no right to use such foul language on the street. The

foreman began to make excuses, but the brick-layer told the gentleman:

"this is the way the government foreman talks to us workers". When the

gentleman had gone, the foreman told the worker he was fired, but the

worker threatened to report him to his superiors. At this the foreman