Stenography and the public sphere in modern Russia
Journal: Cahiers du monde russe
Year: 2015

Stenography brought about an unsung revolution in the modern world: for the first time ever, writing could keep up with speech*. In Russia, the adoption of this technology came later than in France or Britain, but it was concentrated in time and tied to a particular civilizational project: the Great Reforms launched in the 1860s, with their key values of glasnost´ and publichnost´. Over the decades that followed, stenography would play an important role in helping Russian society to imagine itse