The cultural and linguistic dimensions of hegemony:

aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy

Craig Brandist

Abstract

Gramsci spent almost two years living in Moscow in 1922–23 and 1925, where he
was closely involved in the work of the Comintern as representative of the Italian
Communist Party. While information on Gramsci’s time in Russia is still sketchy, we
know that in addition to attending official events, he travelled to several Russian cities,
including Petrograd, where he gave lectures. A trained linguist, Gramsci achieved a
significant level of competence in Russian and was exposed to a wide range of political
and intellectual debates where the cultural and linguistic dimensions of hegemony were
central concerns. This pertained to questions of mass literacy, the standardization of
languages and public discourse, the national question and questions of agitation and
propaganda. The traces these debates left on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks have not been
subjected to adequate scrutiny. This article will discuss these points of contact and
correspondence, delineating how Gramsci was able to preserve and develop some of the
most important critical thinking on the question of hegemony in the 1930s, when in
Russia this had been severely stifled by Stalinism.
Keywords: Gramsci; Comintern; language; USSR; proletarian culture; national
question

The cultural dimensions of Gramsci’s political thought have attracted the attention
of scholars for some decades now, but it is only relatively recently that the importance
of Gramsci’s training in historical linguistics under the tutelage of Matteo Bartoli has
begun to receive the attention it deserves. Some excellent scholarship has opened up
the linguistic dimensions of Gramsci’s thought to scrutiny (Lo Piparo 1979; Ives
2003, 2004), undermining the facile attempts to absorb Gramsci’s ideas about
hegemony into a ‘culturalist’ politics based on a post-structuralist theory of language
that were all too common in the 1980s. Recognition of the importance of the question
of the language in post-unification Italy and the theoretical debates that followed in
its wake, such as Ascoli’s discussion of the idea of linguistic substratum and Bartoli’s
linguistic geography, have emerged as especially significant in furthering our
understanding of Gramsci’s central concepts. An appreciation of the understanding
of hegemony in Italian linguistics has served to supplement Perry Anderson’s (1976)
still valuable discussion of the history of the term in the Russian revolutionary
movement, concentrating on the way in which the numerically small Russian
proletariat could achieve leadership of the peasantry and the oppressed in the struggle
against the autocracy. What has emerged is, however, a kind of stereoscopic vision in

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 12 Number 3, Winter 2012: 24–43

doi:10.3167/jrs.2012.120303 ISSN 1473–3536 (Print), ISSN 1752–2331 (Online)
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 25

which the specificity of Gramsci’s political thought is to be explained by a fusion of

Italian linguistics and cultural politics on the one hand and Russian Marxism on the
other. In his frequently excellent work on Language and Hegemony in Gramsci Peter
Ives (1984: 100) goes so far as to argue that, in his 29th notebook, Gramsci suggests
that structures of language, especially different types of grammar, are metaphors for
hegemony, but I think it would be more accurate to say that the debates to which
Gramsci was exposed in Russia alerted him to the fact that linguistic and cultural
questions were crucial dimensions of hegemony; that they were integrated at a
molecular level, as it were.
Anderson usefully began an attempt to historicize Gramsci’s theory of hegemony
by placing it within the debates of the Comintern in the early 1920s, when the
concept was applied to the struggle in the West. However, we still have no adequate
study of the integration of Gramsci’s ideas into the debates in Russia in the mid-
1920s, which were more wide ranging than is generally supposed. This article is an
attempt to open one aspect of this integration to further consideration. Gramsci spent
the periods from June 1922 to November 1923 and March to April 1925 in Moscow.
He attended, as representative of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the Second
Plenum of the Comintern in June 1922, the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in
November and December 1922 and the Fifth Plenum in March 1925.1 During his
first visit Gramsci also attended the Twelfth All-Russia Party Conference as a
Comintern delegate in August 1922 (Carlucci and Balistreri 2011), and the crucial
Twelfth Party Congress took place in April 1923, which he undoubtedly followed
closely. We also now know that despite illness, Gramsci developed wider contacts in
Russia; he evidently made significant progress in learning Russian, had sustained
discussions with Bukharin, Zinoviev, Radek, Commissar of Enlightenment
Lunacharskii and Trotskii. He travelled to several cities, including Petrograd on more
than one occasion, moving in literary and publishing circles and giving lectures at
Party schools. While details are still very sketchy, it is clear that Gramsci did not limit
his attention to the narrow business of the Italian delegation to the Comintern.
One reason for the stereoscopic vision noted above was Anderson’s (1976: 17)
contention that after the October Revolution, the term hegemony fell into ‘relative
disuse in the Bolshevik Party’ since it had been forged to theorize the role of the
working class in the bourgeois revolution and was ‘rendered inoperative’ by the
advent of a socialist revolution. This led many to assume Gramsci’s later development
of the concept was due to purely Italian sources. This was not accurate, however. Peter
Thomas (2009: 232–34) shows that Gramsci’s use of the term was significantly
influenced by the way the problematic of hegemony was reformulated at the Eighth
and Tenth congresses of the Bolshevik Party in 1919 and 1921, respectively. The
latter marked the Party’s shift to the new situation of the New Economic Policy
(NEP). Thomas rightly notes that the new orientation combined a retreat to guarantee
survival of the revolutionary state and a political form that would support and nourish
an international struggle just as the revolutionary wave was subsiding. This found its
expression in a strategy that coupled the maintenance of proletarian hegemony over
subaltern classes and dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. This required the proletariat
26 Craig Brandist

to make ‘economico-political’ sacrifices to the subaltern masses to help them to move

towards socialism. The contemporary importance of the concept of hegemony was
stressed while Gramsci was in Russia in a speech by Grigorii Zinoviev, then (with
Stalin and Kamenev) a member of the ruling triumvirate and head of the Comintern,
speaking at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923:

One has to know how to understand the hegemony of the proletariat. In 1895 it led to
the formation of the ‘Union for the Liberation of the Working Class’. In 1903 it led us
to create an organization of professional revolutionaries. In 1912 it led us to maintain
the Bolshevik centre at a time of counter-revolution […] In 1917 it led to an uprising.
In 1918–1919 it led us to organize the Red Army and learn to wage war. In 1920–1921
the hegemony of the proletariat consisted in helping to improve the situation of the
peasantry and enter into contacts with them, to revive the agricultural economy. In
1923 hegemony demands we organize the export of bread. And in 1930 hegemony may
be expressed in Russian communards fighting side by side with foreign workers on the
streets of European capitals. (RKP(b) 1968 [1923]: 28)

Bukharin also used the term on numerous occasions, stressing the need to maintain
the smychka [union] between the proletariat and peasantry, and this undoubtedly
helped to shape Gramsci’s conception of hegemony in the 1920s (Boothman 2008;
McNally 2009, 2011). Even though many commentators since Anderson (1976: 21)
have commented on the ‘powerful cultural emphasis that the idea of hegemony
acquired in Gramsci’s work’, this has not been connected to the way in which the
term ‘hegemony’ became a vital concept in discussions about the cultural sphere in
conditions of the NEP. Indeed, the term was most commonly used in debates over
the cultural dimensions of policy when Gramsci was in Russia.

Cultural hegemony
The cultural dimensions of the struggle for hegemony had been present in the
programme of the Vpered [Forward] group within the Bolsheviks before the
revolution, which included Aleksandr Bogdanov and Lunacharskii among its leaders.
Responding to the defeat of the 1905 revolution, the group combined an abstentionist
position over participation in the Duma, and a syndicalist belief that the proletariat
needed a collectivist myth to unite in the face of bourgeois individualism, with a
pedagogical conception of politics that ultimately matured into the idea of proletarian
culture.2 Bogdanov was the intellectual driving force of the Vpered group, basing his
ideas on a monistic positivism that presented the world as pure experience, with the
experience of the proletariat, organized collectively in its labour activity and
developing comradely relations, seen as providing the decisive force for revolutionary
change. He argued it was possible and necessary for the proletariat to create its own
culture within the current society that would be more vibrant and free than the
declining culture of the bourgeoisie, which should be approached and utilized with
considerable caution. The hegemony of bourgeois ideology beyond the immediate
workplace rendered workers unable to act as a revolutionary collective because it
prevented them from perceiving their actual position and role in society. The Party
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 27

must therefore establish proletarian universities in advance of the seizure of power to

counter this influence and systematize the lived experience of the proletariat.
Proletarian culture would organize human perception and action, overcome mere
spontaneity and so move society towards the classless culture of the future. The Party
should thus foster a collectivist psychology among the proletariat and recognize that
the ‘general cultural hegemony’ [‘vseobshchaia kul’turnaia gegemoniia’] (quoted in
Sochor 1981: 72; Scherrer 1989: 201) of the proletariat precedes and determines the
success of the political and economic revolution.3 For Bogdanov, writing in 1909:

There is only one solution: to use the past, bourgeois culture to create a new proletarian
culture that can be counterposed to bourgeois culture, and to spread it among the
masses: to develop proletarian science, strengthen genuine comradely relations among
the proletarian milieu, work out a proletarian philosophy, to direct art to the side of
proletarian strivings and experience. (Bogdanov 1995 [1909]: 56)

This became the focus of the school for socialist workers that Bogdanov,
Lunacharskii and Maksim Gor’kii established on the Italian island of Capri in 1909,
and then in Bologna in 1911. However, drawing on German Romanticism and the
ideas of Joseph Dietzgen, Lunacharskii and Gor’kii accentuated the mythical
dimension of proletarian culture, arguing such culture would appeal to the religious
needs of the proletariat, since the individual proletarian would achieve immortality
through the body of the collective.4 The programme of Vpered influenced the
development of Proletarskie kul’turno-prosvetitelnye organizatsii [Proletarian Cultural
and Enlightenment Organizations] known as Proletkul’t, which was established one
week before the October 1917 revolution, with Lunacharskii as one of its main
organizers. Bogdanov became involved the following year. Proletkul’t was not,
however, a simple expression of the Vpered programme. Between the February and
October 1917 revolutions Lunacharskii returned to Russia, rejoined the Bolsheviks,
was reconciled with Lenin and, following the October Revolution, became the first
Commissar of Enlightenment, working alongside Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaia.
As Maria Levchenko (2007: 39–40) argues, the Proletkul’t programme emerged as a
fusion of the Vperedist conception of culture and the Bolshevik political programme
in the context of a victorious proletarian revolution, and the main pronouncements
of the Proletkul’t theorists at the inception of the organization constituted a
‘palimpsest’ of the two trends. Proletkul’t developed into a large organization with a
significant number of publications during the Russian Civil War 1918–21. This was
less a result of the Vperedist programme, however, than of the success of the October
Revolution, even though the Vperedist conception of proletarian culture still
predominated and Bogdanov played an important role. When Lenin and Bogdanov
clashed over the latter’s demands for the independence of Proletkul’t from the new
proletarian state, Lunacharskii sided with Lenin, and Proletkul’t was subsequently
subordinated to the Commissariat of Enlightenment headed by Lunacharskii. In the
summer of 1920, Lunacharskii established an International Bureau of Proletkul’t at a
meeting that immediately followed the Second Congress of the Comintern with
Nicola Bombacci as representative from Italy. The bureau identified its first tasks to
28 Craig Brandist

be ‘spreading the principles of proletarian culture, creation of Proletkul’t organizations

in all countries and to prepare for a World Congress of Proletkul’t’ (Anon. 1920: 5).
Gramsci’s intellectual debt to the ideas of the Vperedists has been discussed by
Zenovia Sochor (1981), who must be credited with opening up a valuable line of
enquiry by showing an important source of Gramsci’s thinking about the cultural
dimensions of hegemony. Her argument is, however, based less on a search for sources
than an exaggerated contrast between Gramsci and Lenin. Gramsci’s exposure to the
ideas of the Vperedists came through Proletkul’t in the post-revolutionary period
when the Vperedist conception of culture had been fused with the Leninist
programme.5 Indeed, we can see a shift of emphasis in Gramsci’s ideas about
proletarian culture that coincides with his shift towards Leninism and the foundation
of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci was involved in setting up an affiliated
Institute of Proletarian Culture in Turin and was clearly familiar with the project of
attaining ‘general cultural hegemony’. In June 1920 he was arguing in terms distinctly
reminiscent of the Vperedists that ‘esistono già gli elementi di una civiltà originale
proletaria’ (Gramsci 1987: 558) [‘elements of an original proletarian civilization
already exist’ (Gramsci 1985: 18)] and that ‘esistono già le forze proletarie produttive
di valori culturali’ (1987: 556) [‘there are already proletarian forces of production of
cultural values’ (1985: 41)]. By January 1921, however, Gramsci was facing the defeat
of the Factory Council movement and was struggling against the legacy of syndicalism
and abstentionism in the workers’ movement. Focus was shifting decisively to the
political terrain and to the formation of a Communist Party, with Lenin’s 1920
pamphlet Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder providing crucial guidance.
Gramsci was now clear that the full development of a proletarian culture was possible
only having passed ‘dal potere capitalista al potere operaio’ (Gramsci 1966: 20) [‘from
capitalist power to workers’ power’], and that before this time the only foreseeable
thing was

questa ipotesi generale: esisterà una cultura (una civiltà) proletaria totalmente diversa da
quella borghese; anche in questo campo verranno spezzate le distinzioni di classe, verrà
spezzato il carrierismo borghese; esisterà una poesia, un romanzo, un teatro, un costume,
una lingua, una pittura, una musica caratteristici della civiltà proletaria, fioritura e
ornamento dell’organizzazione sociale proletaria. (Gramsci 1966: 22)

[this general hypothesis: there will be a proletarian culture (a civilization) totally

different from the bourgeois one and in this field too class distinctions will be shattered.
Bourgeois careerism will be shattered and there will be a poetry, a novel, a theatre, a
moral code, a language, a painting and a music peculiar to proletarian civilization, the
flowering and ornament of proletarian social organization. (Gramsci 1985: 50–51)]

In present conditions what remains is

distruggere gerarchie spirituali, pregiudizi, idoli, tradizioni irrigidite, significa non

aver paura delle novità e delle audacie, non aver paura dei mostri, non credere che il
mondo caschi se un operaio fa errori di grammatica, se una poesia zoppica, se un quadro
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 29

assomiglia a un cartellone, se la gioventù fa tanto di naso alla senilità accademica e

rimbambita. (Gramsci 1966: 22)

[to destroy spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols and ossified traditions. It means not
to be afraid of innovations and audacities, not to be afraid of monsters, not to believe
that the world will collapse if a worker makes grammatical mistakes, if a poem limps,
if a picture resembles a hoarding or if young men sneer at academic and feeble-minded
senility. (Gramsci 1985: 51)]

Gramsci’s involvement with the projected Institute was evidently significant enough
for him to take a leading role in the drafting of the programme and statutes of the
Institute, which were submitted to the Moscow Proletkul’t for approval in January
1922 (Gramsci et al. 1922). The Central Committee of the Institute allegedly met
much less frequently after Gramsci left for Moscow in May of that year (Carlucci
2009: 137). While in Moscow as delegates to the Comintern in October 1922,
Gramsci and Angelo Tasca were among Comintern delegates who met with the chair
of Proletkul’t Valerian Pletnev to develop the cultural dimensions of the work of the
International (Biggart 2001). In this light it is highly likely that Proletkul’t conceptions
of cultural hegemony and what Gramsci was later to call organic intellectuals informed
his sensitivity to the cultural and political dimensions of proletarian hegemony, even
if there is little evidence he shared the utopianism of the organization’s founders
(Sochor 1981; Scherrer 1989 and 1999). By this time, however, Proletkul’t was in
terminal decline, starved of resources as part of the swingeing public spending cuts
that followed the end of the Civil War (Mally 1990: 193–228).
During the NEP period, many of Bogdanov’s ideas about proletarian culture
found an advocate in Nikolai Bukharin, who ultimately tried to reconcile certain of
Bogdanov’s ideas with Lenin’s final writings about combating the growth of the
bureaucracy to create a general theory of cultural revolution (Biggart 1992). One of
the many differences between Lenin on the one hand and Bogdanov and Bukharin
on the other, regarding this question, was the latter’s contention that it was the
technical intelligentsia that represented the greatest danger to the revolution, by
potentially becoming a new ruling class. Bukharin thus linked the struggle against
bureaucratization with the development of proletarian culture, but this was to develop
fully only after Lenin’s death, since the latter specifically viewed the intelligentsia as
an ally in the fight against bureaucratization. The debate about proletarian culture was
launched in the Soviet press while Gramsci was in Russia, as a result of rising concern
that a restoration of bourgeois ideology would accompany the restoration of market
forces under the NEP. The Politburo launched the debate in Pravda at the end of
August 1922, and it engaged the Party’s leading theoreticians for a number of years.
As Biggart (1987: 235) notes, the debate concerned whether, in exercising political
and economic dominance, the proletariat had a culture specific to itself, and it ‘raised
the broader issue of redefining socialist revolution in cultural terms’.
The term ‘hegemony’ (gegemoniia) soon became a crucial point of contention in
the debate. On 16 September 1923 Trotskii published an article in Pravda, which
would also appear in his book Literature and Revolution, arguing that the idea of
30 Craig Brandist

proletarian culture was incoherent since the proletarian dictatorship would only mark
a relatively brief period between capitalism and a classless society. He thus maintained
that a party that lays claim to ‘ideological hegemony’ should not presume to judge
the work of fellow traveller writers with the arrogance characteristic of certain
‘Marxists in literature’ (Trotskii 1991 [1923]: 251, 243). The point infuriated
bellicose advocates of proletarian literature, who linked Trotskii’s position with his
lack of confidence in the ability of the Russian proletariat to move towards socialism
in conditions when the immediate revolutionary wave in Europe had subsided. The
argument was thus connected to Trotskii’s move towards opposition to the policy
that would subsequently become ‘socialism in one country’. Writing in one of the
periodicals of Proletkul’t, Nikolai Chuzhak (1923: 81) objected that Trotskii reduced
the exercise of the Party’s ideological ‘hegemony’ in literature to ‘attentive monitoring’,
while between 1923 and 1925 the Moscow-based journal Na Postu [On Guard]
constantly demanded the implementation of the hegemony of proletarian literature
by giving its advocates a leading role in all Soviet literary publications. These claims
became especially bold after the On Guardists had gained control of the All-Union
Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP). At the First Congress of VAPP in January
1925 a resolution was passed in which it was stated that mere recognition of
proletarian literature was no longer sufficient, for now there must be ‘recognition of
the principle of the hegemony of this literature […] an unyielding, systematic struggle
[…] for victory, for the absorption of all types and kinds of bourgeois and petty-
bourgeois literature’ (VAPP 1925).
At a meeting of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party to
discuss the question of the Party’s literary policy a month later Bukharin (1993
[1925]: 73) slapped down the On Guardists for actually demanding the ‘principle of
the hegemony of VAPP’, but he endorsed the principle of the hegemony of proletarian
literature:

When we won power, then in that very struggle, the direct revolutionary overturn,
we already won the historical right to hegemony. We have that. We earned it by
standing out in the struggle on the barricades, a struggle that brought all our previous
organizational work, political tempering, political experience – all those features that are
necessary for a triumphant revolution, to fruition. But when we turn to the question of
art, science and so on, and we ask ourselves whether our hegemony has matured, then
I maintain that it has not. If it has still not matured, and if we are entering an epoch
when we conquered political power while our cultural hegemony had still not matured,
then, comrades, it is quite clear that it is our task to pose the matter in such a way that
will enable us to win that hegemony. Or, as I say, we must earn the historical right to
social leadership [rukovodstvo] through our own prominence in the fields of literature
and culture.

This principle was codified in the Party decree of July 1925, in which the possibility
of proletarian culture was officially accepted for the first time, and where it was stated
that ‘There is not yet a hegemony of proletarian writers, and the Party must help these
writers win for themselves the historic right to this hegemony’ (RKP(b) 1925).
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 31

Herman Ermolaev (1963: 44–54) was undoubtedly correct to note that in placing
proletarian culture as ‘a practical task of the moment’ the 1925 resolution marks the
abandonment of the Leninist policy towards literature. It nevertheless codified the
merging of the Vperedist and Leninist approaches that had coexisted since the
beginning of the revolution. Gramsci inherited this dual perspective, and it formed
one of the most fundamental aspects of his theory of hegemony. Thus, in the
Notebooks, Gramsci highlights the ‘contrasto tra il pensare e l’operare’ [‘contrast
between thought and action’] that expresses the ‘contrasti più profondi di ordine
storico sociale’ (Gramsci 1975: 1379) [‘profounder contrasts of the social historical
order’]. Gramsci’s famous discussion of the ‘coscienza contraddittoria’ [‘contradictory
consciousness’] of the ‘uomo attivo di massa’ [‘active man-in-the-mass’] revolves
around a contrast between a conception ‘implicita nel suo operare e che realmente lo
unisce a tutti i suoi collaboratori nella trasformazione pratica della realtà e una
superficialmente esplicita o verbale che ha ereditato dal passato e ha accolto senza
critica’ (Gramsci 1975: 1385) [‘implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him
with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one,
superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically
absorbed’ (Gramsci 1971: 333)]. Here we have precisely the Vperedist contrast
between embryonic proletarian culture which, in Bogdanovian style, is implicit in the
collective labour experience of the proletariat, and the inherited culture of the
bourgeoisie which bears the organizing principle of social life appropriate to that class.
The development of a ‘comprensione critica di se stessi’ [‘critical understanding of
self’] now grows out of a struggle of hegemonies, moving from the ‘senso […] di
indipendenza appena istintivo’ [‘instinctive feeling of independence’] to the
‘elaborazione superiore della propria concezione del reale’ (Gramsci 1975: 1385)
[‘possession of a single and coherent conception of the world’]. This involves the
creation of intellectuals who are specialized in the ‘elaborazione concettuale e
filosofica’ (1975: 1386) [‘conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas’] but who
‘sorgano direttamente dalla massa pur rimanendo a contatto con essa per diventarne
le “stecche” del busto’ (1975: 1392) [‘arise directly out of the masses, but remain in
contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset’ (Gramsci 1971:
340)].

The national-popular question

Gramsci develops this argument in a very different direction to Bogdanov, however.
While he was in Russia Gramsci was won over to the perspective of the United Front,
which meant the need for the proletariat’s ‘economic-corporate’ self-interest to be
subordinated to the cause of building alliances with the peasantry and other ‘subaltern’
social groups. In place of proletarian culture we now have the need to build a
‘national-popular’ collective will, which entailed, inter alia, the development of a
shared language and cultural forms. In these discussions Gramsci went beyond both
Lenin and the Vperedists in developing a theoretical understanding of the importance
of language in political life. Lenin had significant insights into the relationship
between the language and national questions, a sensitivity to the importance of
32 Craig Brandist

language use in concrete political situations and he was keenly aware of the importance
of raising the level of literacy among the general population, but this was not backed
by theoretical insight into linguistic questions.6 Bogdanov’s writings on language were
largely a restatement of the ideas of the German monistic philosopher and philologist
Ludwig Noiré (1885) who, following Schopenhauer, grounded both thought and
language in the Will. In Noiré’s interpretation this meant language originated in
labour cries, which Bogdanov linked to his own theory that forms of culture all derive
from the work process as such.7 As recent scholarship has shown, Gramsci’s grounding
in Italian linguistic theory led him in a different direction, however, and this allowed
him to distil theoretical principles from the extraordinarily prescient and complex
linguistic issues that forced their way into the attention of political leaders and
intellectuals more generally as the Soviet Union was in the process of formation.
The Tsarist linguistic legacy did not provide a common vernacular any more than
in the Italian case, but for different reasons. Full literacy existed in pockets across a
huge area, while the majority of the population was either illiterate or partially literate,
and spoke a range of non-standard dialects among themselves. The collapse of the
state bureaucracy, military disintegration and tsunami of mass democracy destroyed
the official public discourse, while the Civil War destroyed the social ties within
communities, mixed up the population, led to a militarization and bureaucratization
of what remained. Semantic shifts, neologisms, acronyms, foreign borrowings and
military metaphors flooded the spoken language, disrupted communication and
obstructed education among the nominally Russian-speaking population. This
attracted the attention of linguists as early as 1919, and Lenin himself was among the
Party leaders who expressed concern about the situation. By the mid-1920s a series
of competing solutions were being formulated, ranging from the propagation of the
language of the pre-revolutionary classics (favoured by Gor’kii and others), through
investing the colloquial language with wider social functions and encouraging the
emergence of a standard that was close to that spoken by the masses, to an
interventionist strategy through which radical intellectuals (poets, linguists,
journalists) would act as linguistic technicians (favoured by the futurists and given
theoretical expression by the leading linguist Grigorii Vinokur), drawing on the
linguistic creativity of the newly enfranchised masses to renew the public discourse
and make it into a medium of enlightenment.8 This was precisely a debate about the
relationship between what in Notebook 29 Gramsci was to call normative and
spontaneous or immanent grammars (1975: 2342–45, 2346–48; 1985: 180–82, 184–
85): was the former to be imposed on the latter, or was a new norm to emerge from
the interactions between spontaneous grammars? It also, crucially, raised the issue of
the role of intellectuals in this process: of the traditional intellectuals inherited from
pre-revolutionary times, and of the organic intellectuals that arose from the workers
and peasants themselves. This last group included Proletkul’t but also the worker and
peasant correspondents (rabkory and sel’kory) that formed the backbone of the Soviet
popular press in the 1920s and acted as verbal conduits between the state and the
masses (Clibbon 1993).9 Here, language was by no means simply a technical medium,
but the embodiment and articulation of socio-specific world views, and the attention
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 33

of many Party leaders, including Trotskii (1973 [1924]) and Bukharin (1924), were
concerned with the delicate balance between the need to adjust the language of the
press to the needs of the masses, and the need to raise the verbal skills of the masses.
The same issue came to light in a path-breaking 1924–25 study of the language of
Red Army soldiers in which it was found that many soldiers left the army still making
elementary mistakes, mixing up the meaning of words on the basis of phonetic
misrecognition and mechanical assimilation of political language into a substratum
of pre-existing notions. Instead of being integrated into the world view of the recruits,
helping to structure and enable independent thought and articulation, jargon led to
a distorted understanding where the capacity to form an independent and coherent
perspective was being undermined (Brandist 2010). The question of normative
grammar was the question of hegemony, and the principle that needed to be decided
was which hegemonic principle would be adopted.10
These questions were particularly being pursued at Party pedagogical and state
research institutions in Petrograd when Gramsci visited there, beginning with the
formation of the Institute of the Living Word in 1918 but quickly spreading to other
institutes. At the opening of the Institute of the Living Word in Petrograd in 1918,
Lunacharskii explicitly connected the mission of the institute to ‘teach the masses to
speak publicly’ to isegoria, the equality of speech, that formed the basis of ancient
Athenian democracy (Zapiski 1919: 23–25). It was in these institutions that some of
the pre-revolutionary linguistic scholarship, which had just begun to turn to questions
of the social stratification of language, began to form into path-breaking work on the
relationship between social dialects and the standard language, and between what the
Formalist turned Marxist, Lev Iakubinskii (1931), would call ‘proletarian discursive
method’ and political leadership (see also Brandist 2007 and Brandist and
Lähteenmäki 2010). We now know that Gramsci visited party schools in Petrograd
in 1923 and the Red Army Pedagogical (previously the Tolmachev) Institute in 1925
(Lussana 2007), at precisely the time when techniques of agitation and propaganda
were being subjected to linguistic analysis, along with systematic attempts to address
the much-discussed communication gap. Top linguists were working simultaneously
at Party pedagogical and state research institutes. While the theoretical work only
really began to find systematic exposition in the later part of the 1920s, when the
political situation had changed quite drastically, the practical work at this time laid
the basis for important theoretical work that, as we shall see, has so many conceptual
and terminological parallels with the later work of Gramsci, that it seems very unlikely
that there was no significant influence.

The national question

Another crucial area in which hegemony remained a vital concept, and was closely
entwined with linguistic and cultural issues, was the national question. Speaking at
the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, Zinoviev noted that ‘we must remain the
hegemons of the Union of Soviet Republics and be an example to all the peoples of
the East and to the whole world’, the ‘hegemony of the proletariat […] cannot
properly exist if we do not solve the national question’ (RKP(b) 1968 [1923]: 606–7).
34 Craig Brandist

The Russian proletariat had to try to achieve and maintain leadership over a wide
variety of ethnic groups and cultures, many of whom had none of the features
fundamental to a nation state such as a specifically national sense of identity, culture
or even a standard form of language. Here both Bukharin and Zinoviev followed
Lenin’s advice, the former arguing that as members of a ‘former great-power nation’
the Russian proletariat must ‘head-off national strivings and place ourselves in an
unequal position in the sense of making even greater concessions to national currents’
as only this would allow us to ‘purchase the real trust of previously oppressed nations’
(RKP(b) 1968 [1923]: 613). Zinoviev claimed that ‘despite our poverty’, and though
‘our nation’s resources are miserly’, we must provide ‘material help to the peasants,
and especially to the peasants of the frontier areas that speak other languages, to all
peoples that were previously oppressed’ (RKP(b) 1968 [1923]: 605).
The language question was here a particularly important aspect of maintaining the
hegemony of the Russian proletariat. Before the revolution Lenin had specifically
opposed all calls for the status of Russian as the official language and demanded all
nationalities have the right to education and administration in their native language.
Imposition of Russian could only be perceived as a colonial policy, but Lenin believed
that as long as there was no compulsion and all languages had equal rights, the
Russian language would naturally become the lingua franca of the voluntary union
because of the advantages its use implied (Lenin 1983: 134–36). This became policy
in 1917, but the problem was that many peoples had a very weak sense of national
identity and no standard, written form of language, making implementation an
enormous task, while resources were scarce indeed. The proletariat here still had to
lead the struggle to achieve the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, but this no longer
required the overthrow of an autocracy, but the construction of the cultural forms of
the nation state in alliance with the progressive intelligentsias of the former colonies.
Here the formation of normative grammars from spontaneous grammars was even
more problematic than in the Russian-speaking territories since there was no previous
norm that could inform it. There could scarcely have been a better example of the
entwinement of language, culture and hegemony. Across central Asia and the
Caucasus, Soviet ethnographers and linguists worked with groups of nationalist
intellectuals such as the Jadids, to delimit national territories and codify standard
forms of languages that would facilitate the development of an indigenous
administration, education system and publishing industry.11 Resources were redirected
from the Russian heartland to the less developed national regions to facilitate this
development, all understood as economic concessions made by the Russian proletariat
to demonstrate to the national regions that their interests were best served through
voluntary alliance with the Russian proletariat. Here, writ large, was a clear illustration
of the need for hegemony to be won and maintained through economic-corporate
concessions by the northern Italian proletariat to the less developed parts of the Italian
peninsula.
Throughout 1922 and 1923 it became increasingly apparent that there were
important areas in which this policy was not being implemented, and influential
figures within the Party and administration, such as the head of the Jewish
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 35

Commissariat and chief Narkomnats spokesman on education S.M. Dimanshtein

(1886–1938), arguing that since the revolution had overthrown the domination of a
single nationality, that is, Russia, there was no longer a need for any national
guarantees. For Dimanshtein the national question was now simply one requiring the
translation of central policies into local languages, for language was merely a technical
medium rather than the embodiment of a world view (Smith 1999: 146–47). The
central administration was now beginning to assert itself at the expense of the
autonomous regional administrations that formed the foundation of what became
known as the policy of korenizatsiia or ‘indiginization’ (Martin 2001). The conflict
came to a head with the so-called Georgian affair that led to a split between an already
ailing Lenin and Commissar of Nationalities and Party General Secretary Stalin.
Lenin’s critical letters on Stalin’s approach to the national question were released to
delegates as the Twelfth Party Congress opened in April 1923, but it seems that
despite Lenin asking Trotskii to champion this cause, Trotskii agreed with the Party
leadership not to do so either in exchange for the right to state his positions on the
economy or because he knew Stalin would accept amendments on the issue (Deutcher
1987: 92, 98–99; Vilkova 1996: 23). After an extremely lively debate Stalin did
indeed face a series of amendments on the national question, to which he yielded. As
Jeremy Smith notes, while centralization of the political and economic structures was
being reinforced, the rights and status of the national minorities remained strong for
most of the 1920s as a result (1999: 213–28). Central to the concessions Stalin made
were legal guarantees for the language and education rights of the nationalities, with
the result that national cultures would be promoted as a crucial element of the Soviet
Union (Smith 1999: 227–28). While the issues surrounding the treatment of national
minorities and cultures were less important for the Italian situation than for Russia,
exposure to such debates heightened Gramsci’s sensitivity to this issue, as is illustrated
by the April 1926 programme of work for the PCI, part of what is better known as
the Lyons Theses. Archival material shows Gramsci authored a short section on the
‘National Movement’, in which he argues the Party needs to pay special attention to
the German and Croat national minorities in order to create a left wing within
national parties to oppose the opportunism of their leaders, limit bourgeois influence
and promote union with the revolutionary proletariat (RGASPI 513/1/398/ll.19-41,
l.18; cf. Pecchioli 1985: 321).
Being schooled in Bartoli’s linguistic geography, Gramsci was well placed to
perceive the cultural and linguistic dimensions of the national question and to
appreciate the political significance of the relationship between national languages
and regional and social dialects. In the early 1920s philologists and orientalists, many
of whom had advocated policies strikingly similar to korenizatsiia in the years between
1905 and 1917 (Hirsch 2005; Tolz 2011), were drafted in to codify standard forms
of languages and create scripts for them (Smith 1998). Grants were made available
for these practical matters and for theoretical reflection on the relationship between
language, world view and social structure. A variety of theoretical approaches arose,
most claiming to be specifically Marxist, and some claiming to be leading to a
specifically Marxist linguistics. However, all tended to be Marxist recastings of pre-
36 Craig Brandist

existing philological, anthropological and sociological trends (Alpatov 2000). The

results were no less impressive for all that: for the first time an elaborated
sociolinguistics emerged along with path-breaking investigations into what is now
generally known as ‘linguistic ideology’ (Brandist 2003). The relationship between
language structure and other domains of culture were pioneered decades before
structuralists turned to the problem, and the relationship between philology, oriental
scholarship and imperialism was subject to a systematic analysis long before Edward
Said was to launch the paradigm of ‘orientalism’ at the end of the 1970s.
The resulting formulations of Soviet linguists in the late 1920s and 1930s are
remarkably similar to Gramsci’s writings on language and hegemony in the Notebooks,
which may explain why one of the earliest works dedicated to Gramsci’s linguistic
ideas was published in Russia (Egerman 1954). One notable example is Evgenii
Polivanov, who simultaneously worked on the creation of national languages for the
Turkic-speaking peoples of central Asia and theorized the relationship between
national languages and social dialects. In Russia, he argued, in terms distinctly
reminiscent of Gramsci’s adoption of Ascoli’s theory of linguistic substratum, there
had been a transferral of the national language to what he called a new ‘collective
human substratum’, which inevitably brought about changes in the language itself
(Polivanov 1974 [1927]: 181). Polivanov seeks to characterize the mechanism of
‘evolutionary innovations’ (novshchestvo) (1974 [1931]: 84; 2003 [1931]: 40), tracing
the sources of new terminology and concepts that have entered official languages and
‘collective consciousness’ (1974 [1928]: 197) because of the revolution. These are
found, variously in other national languages, social dialects or political discourse, the
latter of which had changed fundamentally. Gramsci similarly traces the sources of
diffusion of linguistic innovations in Notebook 29 (1975: 2345–46). In Notebook 6
Gramsci argues the following:

La storia delle lingue è storia delle innovazioni linguistiche, ma queste innovazioni non
sono individuali (come avviene nell’arte) ma sono di un’intera comunità sociale che
ha innovato la sua cultura, che ha ‘progredito’ storicamente: naturalmente anch’esse
diventano individuali, ma non dell’individuo-artista, dell’individuo – elemento storico-
[culturale] completo determinato. Anche nella lingua non c’è partenogenesi, cioè la lingua
che produce altra lingua, ma c’è innovazione per interferenze di culture diverse ecc. […]
L’interferenza e l’influenza ‘molecolare’ può avvenire nello stesso seno di una nazione,
tra diversi strati ecc; una nuova classe che diventa dirigente innova come ‘massa’; il gergo
dei mestieri ecc. Cioè delle società particolari, innovano molecolarmente. (Gramsci
1975: 738–39)

[The history of languages is the history of linguistic innovations, but these innovations
are not individual (as is the case in art). They are those of a whole social community
that has renewed its culture and has ‘progressed’ historically. Naturally, they too
become individual, yet not in the artist-individual, but in the individual as a complete,
determinate historical-cultural element. In language too there is no parthenogenesis,
language producing other language. Innovations occur through the interference of
different cultures (…). There can be interference and a ‘molecular’ interference within a
single nation, between various strata, etc.; a new ruling class brings about alterations as a
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 37

‘mass’ but the jargons of various professions, of specific societies, innovate in a molecular
way. (Gramsci 1985: 177–78)]

The problem was that, just as these developments were reaching fruition in the USSR,
the entire sociopolitical situation was changing fundamentally. With the launch of
the first Five Year Plan the bureaucracy decisively separated itself from the interests
of the proletariat and oppressed masses and was transformed into an independent and
self conscious force. Korenizatsiia was drastically curtailed. The distinction between
Party and state institutions collapsed along with the primacy of scientific over
statutory authority in the distribution of what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital.
Debates over the way to solve the communication gap and forge a new public
discourse were resolved in one way: the Party-state bureaucracy would regulate the
production, and nurture the growth, of a new public discourse according to the
necessities of its own reproduction. Figures closely associated with propagating
alternative approaches to the questions of cultural and linguistic hegemony were
removed from positions of influence, expelled from the Party or sometimes worse.
The National Communists, who were the embodiment of the attempt to integrate
and organize diverse world views, were subjected to particularly harsh treatment, and
few survived the 1930s. Political discourse underwent a fundamental distortion,
symptomatic of which was the fate of the Institute of the Living Word, which
ultimately became the Volodarskii Institute of Agitation, a management training
institute aimed not at facilitating democratic engagement but cajoling workers into
fulfilling plans laid down in advance.
Effects on the theoretical work that emerged in the wake of these political and
institutional changes were profound, but less direct and immediate. One of the most
significant works of the late 1920s was Lev Iakubinskii’s 1929–30 articles on the
formation of the Russian national language, in which he traced how the development
of capitalism had led to the rise of a common urban language that progressively but
unevenly displaced the self-enclosed, dialectal plurality of the peasantry.12 Under
capitalism, public speaking assumes the character of mass communication, both oral,
in parliaments and courts, and written. As large-scale industrialization gathered the
proletariat into large units and the national language was consolidated, professional
began to displace regional differentiation, but it became clear to workers that their
interests lay in the adoption of the common, public language. They also needed to
participate in fora such as trade union meetings, court etc. Iakubinskii saw this in the
splintering of the unitary language according to the ideological fissures of the
contending classes under capitalism, for the proletarian social dialect embodies a
socio-specific psychology and ideology. For Iakubinskii, this ideology is not defined
by specific linguistic differences as such, but through the way in which common
linguistic material is selected and applied in concrete circumstances. Lenin’s use of
language in his polemical writings is held up as a model for this ‘proletarian discursive
method’. Three years later, in 1932, one of Iakubinskii’s most talented students,
Viktor Gofman (1932), developed this into a full-scale study, The Word of the Orator,
in which the Party of Lenin and Stalin was held up as the model for a unitary
38 Craig Brandist

proletarian discourse in all areas of social life and the chief legislator in the formation
of a truly common national language which is only possible under socialism. Social
dialects would now disappear into a unitary national language.
While the ideological distortions of Stalinism are here quite plain to see, the
conceptions underlying Gramsci’s ideas about the politics of language have also
survived. This is especially clear if we turn to Viktor Zhirmunskii’s 1936 study
National Language and Social Dialects. In a passage from Notebook 6, immediately
preceding the passage about innovations quoted above, Gramsci argued that ‘tra il
dialetto e la lingua nazionale-letteraria qualcosa è mutato: precisamente l’ambiente
culturale, politico-morale-sentimentale’ (Gramsci 1975: 738) [‘between the dialect
and the national-literary language something changes: precisely the cultural, politico-
moral-emotional environment’ (Gramsci 1985: 177)]. Basing his discussion on the
formation of the German and French national languages, which relieved him of the
necessity for excessive ideological genuflection, Zhirmunskii (1936: 15–16) defined
‘national languages’ as the ‘late products of the convergent developments of dialects
[…] [evolving] under definite historical conditions, after nations and national
governments have been formed’. The fundamental difference between the national
language and social dialects was now defined as one of social function:

The social dialects arising as a result of the class differentiation of society are in no
way [the national language’s] equals, and their interrelationship is not limited to
mechanical co-existence: they are interconnected by complex interaction, by hierarchical
subordinations and struggles evoked by the general direction of social evolution of the
given epoch and country. In this interaction and struggle the national language acts as
social norm which dominates all other social dialects […]. The cultural hegemony of
the ruling class in turn conditions its linguistic hegemony.

Here we see precisely the same convergence of dialect geography, historical linguistics
and the Marxist political theory that we find in Gramsci’s work. Like Gramsci,
Zhirmunskii points out that alongside the written standard, the territorially varied
social dialects spoken by subordinate social groups constitute unwritten languages
whose functional use is limited to unofficial private situations. Here is precisely the
same distinction as between Gramsci’s normative and spontaneous grammars, for the
national language (normative grammar) is posited as ‘una “fase esemplare”’ (1975:
2343) [‘an “exemplary phase”’ (1985: 181)] of the language, ‘un atto di politica
culturale-nazionale’ (1975: 2344) [‘an act of national-cultural politics’ (1985: 182)].
The difference is that Gramsci was largely spared the crippling effects of Stalinist
orthodoxy and so was able better to think through the political lessons of the debate
in the Soviet Union of the mid-1920s and continue to apply them to the specific
context of Italy.

Acknowledgements
Research for this article, and for the translation published in the appendix to this
volume, was supported by a small research grant from the British Academy.
Aspects of Gramsci’s debt to early Soviet cultural policy 39

Notes
1. For an overview of what we know of Gramsci’s time in Russia see Grigor’eva (1998).
2. On the passage from syndicalism to proletarian culture see Williams (1980). On the
pedagogical dimension see Marot (1990a, 1990b).
3. Bogdanov wrote a huge amount, but his most important ideas about proletarian culture
can be found in Bogdanov (1910, 1911). For a general view of Bogdanov’s ideas about
proletarian culture see, inter alia, Dement’eva (1971), Scherrer (1989), Mally (1990:
3–16), Marot (1991) and Karpov (2009: 52–66). Both Sochor and Scherrer cite
Bogdanov as using the term ‘general cultural hegemony’, but I have been unable to verify
this quotation.
4. See, especially, Lunacharskii (1908, 1911). It is worth noting that in a 1931 letter to
his mother from prison Gramsci makes the following comment: ‘If you think about it
seriously, all questions about the soul and immortality of the soul and paradise and hell
are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed
on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one
generation to the next, in a perpetual movement’ (Gramsci 1994, Vol. 2, p. 40). The
notion of the proletariat making up a ‘collective body’ later runs throughout Gor’kii’s
speech to the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress at which the principles of Socialist Realism
were encoded (Gor’kii 1977 [1934]). On the roots of the conception see Beiser (2003:
43–55) and Dietzgen (1906 [1870–75]).
5. It appears Gramsci did have some direct acquaintance with Bogdanov’s work since he and
his wife began to translate one of Bogdanov’s novels, most likely Red Star, into Italian,
and three further pieces of Bogdanov’s work were published in the daily Ordine Nuovo
[The New Order] (Gramsci 2010: 415–20). I am indebted to Alessandro Carlucci for this
information. Gramsci (1971: 323) and Bogdanov (1923:19) both argue that all people are
spontaneous philosophers. There is also is a striking similarity between Gramsci’s rejection
of epistemological realism on the grounds that it is rooted in religious belief (1971: 440–
48), and that developed by Bogdanov (1910), but this falls outside the current article and
will be developed separately. Gramsci was, however, much more familiar with the ideas
of Lunacharskii, whose work Gramsci knew well, and published several of Lunacharskii’s
writings in his periodicals (Il Grido del Popolo, L’Ordine Nuovo), on which see Béghin
(2007: 223–29).
6. Lenin’s scattered comments on language were collected and published more than once
after his death (in English see Lenin 1983).
7. Noiré’s work makes an appearance in much of Bogdanov’s work, but see especially the
first part of Bogdanov (1910). It should be noted that Noiré’s work was highly respected
both by Georgii Plekhanov and Nikolai Marr, both of whom exerted a considerable
influence on Russian linguistics in the early Soviet period.
8. For an overview see Gorham (2003).
9. Gramsci mentions the rabkor movement in letters he wrote to his wife from Vienna (see
Gramsci 1992: 144, 321).
10. In an article on orthographic reforms in the USSR, the Marxist linguist Evgenyi Polivanov
argued that the specific direction the reforms take depends mainly on ‘which class holds
political power and the hegemony of book culture in a given country’ (1968 [1937]: 257).
11. See, inter alia, Hirsch (2005); Martin (2001); Khalid (1998).
12. The articles were published as a separate volume as Ivanov and Iakubinskii (1932); for an
overview see Brandist and Lähteenmaki (2010) and for a discussion of the place of the
articles in the rise of a theory of the national language see Desnitskaia (1974).
40 Craig Brandist

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