Customer Reviews:
 Old news, freshly delivered May 13, 2010
Harry Eagar (Maui)
Somehow, historians have overlooked the influence, even the existence of a vibrant commercial political press in tsarist Russia. It took the imagination of University of Hawaii historian Louise McReynolds to rectify the omission, and just in time, because since she completed her research, a disastrous fire ruined a principal library of old Russian newspapers.
Past histories of ideas that led to the 1917 revolution always mentioned the "thick" journals where the Russian intelligentsia displayed themselves, and the subversive newspapers, like Trotsky's Iskra, which were printed in foreign places and smuggled in. The "thick" intellectuals looked down on the commercial papers, and since these men influenced the writing of history, the dailies were ignored.
This was a considerable oversight, since the biggest Russian daily circulated over 1 million copies. By 1913, many village councils were subscribing to a newspaper, usually this big one, called Russkoe slovo. Thus, its influence was comparable to that of Horace Greeley's Tribune Weekly in 19th century America.
All historians are agreed on the importance of Greeley in creating public opinion. McReynolds establishes that the Russian commercial press, which started in 1863, was similarly important.
She also shows that the development of a commercial press in Russia followed closely the paths of the great papers in the U.S.A., England and France, always excepting the fact that Russia was an autocracy with censorship.
The slightest opening toward free expression has always been promptly expoited in Russia, whether in 1863, 1906, 1917, 1954, 1964 or 1976, as Mikhail Gorbachev undoubtedly understood. Obviously, in every instance but the last, the opening was not permitted to develop fully.
But McReynolds demonstrates that at all times the St. Petersburg and Moscow press managed to change the frame of public discussion, even against the opposition of church and government; and on two occasions had even more dramatic effect one events.
In 1878, press clamor guided the tsar into a war with Turkey that he didn't want. The occasion, as again in 1914 and 1992, arose in Bosnia, but in 1878 the Bosnians were fighting to be united with the beloved brothers, the Serbs.
In 1904, the tsar went to war with Japan, in large part to gain the upper hand against newspaper-derived public opinion, which by that time was antiwar.
Both wars ended disastrously for Russia. Parks Coble demonstrated in "Facing Japan" that journalism-derived public opinion in China, also heretofore neglected, helped press Chiang Kai-shek into unwanted hostilities in 1937, also disastrously. Since then, journalism-derived public opinion helped whip on an eagerly straining George Bush into wars of liberation that will end (if they ever do) disastrously in Muslim countries.
This is not an argument against a free press, but it gives on to think. McReynolds, who covers every possible base in this relatively short book points out that Russian publishers and reporters were confident that their work was good for Russia. Some favored one approach, some another, but all expected Russia to evolve into a modern nation.
Thus they welcomed revolution. And were stunned when the Bolsheviks blacked out Russian news completely. The modern autocracy was much more efficient at censorship than the medieval one.
McReynolds contrasts this with the fate of the press in western democracies. If she had included Italy in her survgey, the contrast would be far less dramatic.
"The News Under Russia's Old Regime" is the best kind of history: solid yet readable for pleasure, thorough on its subject but opening vistas that beckon. In re-reading these old papers, "we exhume many remnants of (old Russia's) lost middle classes, who are the main protagonists of this story," McReynolds writes.
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