Cambridge Speechwriter

Last week, a friend went to a second-hand book sale and bought me a pamphlet called Speech by G. M. Malenkov to the USSR Supreme Soviet. I have great friends, right? The pamphlet, with an English translation of Malenkov’s speech from April 26, 1954, was published by Soviet News of 3 Rosary Gardens, London – an ironically bourgeois address. 

Malenkov succeeded Joseph Stalin as leader of the USSR up until February 1955.

The speech is typical of the Soviet style. There are, what feels like, hundreds of impressive-sounding (but, ultimately, meaningless) statistics, and painfully long sentences. Here is one of my favourites…

The requirements for further advancing labour productivity put us under the obligation to achieve considerable increase in the introduction of comprehensive mechanisation, having in view that it should embrace not only the main production process but also all kinds of intermediary and subsidiary production processes in which often more people are engaged than in the main production.

Another gem is…

During the first three years of the Fifth Five-Year Plan, industrial output increased by 45 per cent, with the production of the means of production rising by 46 per cent, and the production of consumer goods by 43 per cent.

To me, this feels like the speech equivalent of ‘if you look at table 47 on slide 164, you fill find that…’ 

It seems unrealistic that a speech with sentences such as these would regularly receive interjections of (what the pamphlet refers to as), ‘tumultuous and prolonged applause’. There is a possibility that an element of the poetry of the Russian language was lost in translation. But, more likely, there is the possibility that statistics used in this manner was more effective in 1954 USSR than it is in today’s world. 

There is also the very real possibility that the speech wasn’t all that good but that the audience would have known when it was appropriate to applaud tumultuously – as well as what would have happened had they not clapped tumultuously enough. 

Statistics are commonly used in speeches as evidence of success or a justification for a call to action. Malenkov’s machine gun approach to firing off statistics – of which the above is just the tip of the iceberg – would have likely been better suited to a past audience than a modern one. 

Perhaps, one of the reasons that a heavily statistical approach doesn’t work as well with a modern audience is that it is much easier to fact check something which consequently contradicts the speaker – technology has had its part to play in that. 

Another reason is that statistics have been so heavily abused as persuasive tools in the past – for example, by people like Malenkov – that audiences are hesitant to trust them. The former British Chancellor, George Osbourne, once said that people are ‘fed up of experts’. 

It is, perhaps, worth noting that the truth of these figures was inconsequential to the Soviet regime. People would say whatever number got the audience to believe what they wanted the audience to believe. 

Malenkov’s speech picks up when he begins talking about international affairs. He makes a bold statement about loving peace and then, a few paragraphs later, threatens the USA with nuclear war. It is very similar to another current world leader. I’ll post more about that next week! 

If you want more content on communist speeches, be sure to check out my post from last week about Ceaușescu: The fall of a dictator…

This blog post is part of a series ahead of the release of my second book with Canbury Press, The Language of Evil, which will focus on the rhetoric of tyrants and dictators – a topic that seems to have caught quite a lot of attention in recent years. If you want to know more about rhetoric in general, check out my first book: How to Apologise for Killing a Cat: Rhetoric and the Art of Persuasion!