What bullets are to wars, words are to a revolution. Language is the battlefield of any revolution, whose warring sides compete to control it as the key to mass support and power. Words are everywhere in a revolution: slogans shouted by the crowd, revolutionary songs, speeches by the leaders, billboards, banners, and graffiti on the walls.
Ten years after the East European revolutions of 1989, this is a good moment to review their words and symbols and to place them in the context of a tradition going back to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the French of 1789. In each case the crowd was organized around a symbolic overturning of the old order -- the conquest and recasting of symbolic sites, the destruction and replacement of the old state emblems -- that gave a public meaning to the revolutionary events and sometimes even acted as a substitute for them.
Language was a vital battlefield. Whoever fixed the meaning of terms such as "freedom" or "the nation" was halfway towards mastering the revolution too.
Yet words too are overturned by revolutions and, as any leader in such chaos quickly learns, it is near impossible to control them. Key words float off the page or podium, and out on to the streets, into factories and barracks, towns and villages, where they are picked up and used in diverse ways. Some words take on real symbolic meaning and power for a time, only then to disappear or see their meanings change as different groups latch on to them for their specific ends.
One could write a book about the appropriation of the word glasnost between 1985 and 1991.
Thomas Carlyle said it was the "torrent of French speech" that swept away the monarchy and filled the streets with words in 1789.
John Reed found Russia just as talkative, with "every street corner a public tribune" during 1917. Historians will say the same of 1989. It was the climate of glasnost, by allowing dissent to be vocalized, that led to the revolutions of that year.
We need an oral history of 1989. There is nothing quite like talk to undermine the power of an ancient regime. In 1917 the Romanovs were brought down amid rumors of Rasputin and his influence at court -- about his orgies with the Empress Alexandra, and their spying for the Germans. These rumors did more than anything to puncture the belief of the peasantry in the sacred nature of the monarchy.
They were similar to the pornographic gossip that stripped the Bourbon monarchy of all authority. The sexual corruption of the royal family -- the uncontrollable libido of the queen, the king's impotence -- served as a kind of metaphor for the moral and political degeneration of the old regime. Did rumors about Brezhnev's or Ceausescu's corruption undermine the power of the communist regimes?
In any revolution, certain words and symbols provide a code of action for the people in their battles with the police and the troops. Symbolic sites and monuments serve as points of orientation for the crowd. Indeed, they often lead to the illusion that it is organized. In February 1917 the authorities (and many journalists) presumed that the huge crowds on the streets had been organized by the socialist parties. But in fact the parties had been caught entirely unprepared and the crowds had followed long-established spatial-cultural codes of demonstration in the capital.
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