Chapter 31. Bottom-up messaging: applause

Chapter 31. Bottom-up messaging: applause 1 Kirill Postoutenko Introduction It might come as a surprise that applause - an old, ideologically neutral and structurally simplistic form of response to public messaging – achieved considerable significance within Soviet communicative and political systems. However, a closer look at clapping reveals its particular fitness for the society characterized by extreme political and communicative asymmetries, corroding power structures, high explosiveness, pervasive insecurity and corresponding low efficiency (see Chapter 1). Ravaged by waves of severe social conflicts, unable to accommodate either political change or political competition, the Soviet state was in need of a simple, transparent, accessible form of public acclamation which could uphold its legitimacy at home and abroad. However, the thriving of applause in Stalinist society was not a linear function of its semiotic or interactional properties: rather, it took selective recourse to various traditions and quite a bit of coercion to accommodate and prioritize applause within Soviet politics in general and Soviet public interaction in particular. In order to understand how, at what cost and to what extent applause did actually work in Leninist and Stalinist society, it makes sense to cast a brief glance at their structural properties as well as social, cultural, and political history. Applause as a messaging device: organisation, functions, limitations and ambiguities In terms of communication, applause could probably be defined as an interactional feedback to the locally dominant social activity: few exceptions aside, clapping occurs in conjunction with musical performances, talks or other ritualized events revolving around prominent actors (ensembles, speakers, autocrats and deities). In this capacity, applause appear to beat their competitors hands down both in the short and in the long run: absorbing and pushing into the background other affiliative devices (Atkinson 1984b, 371), ovations also seem to prevail in the contest for the most popular response ever to the public interactional 1 I am grateful to Jessie Barker and Alexandr Reznik for their help and advice. messaging. How could this remarkable situative strength and evolutionary fitness be explained, and should we take it at a face value? Unlike verbal language and many gestural practices, the performance of clapping retained its discernible affinity with the uncodified, spontaneous expression of joy typical for primates: the distance from slapping own body to handclapping is not that great compared to the gap between expressing sorrow in tears and words (Connor 2003, 67). To be sure, producing a good clapping sound is not as straightforward as it seems: in fact, it takes a lot of learning to progress from the impulsive clapping typical for excited toddlers to the full-blown applause (Connor 2003, 68). However, as long as the trick of striking the palms of the hands together in a proper fashion is mastered, nothing can prevent a healthy individual from applauding long and loud (Heister 1984, 115): unlike heckling or whistling, the monotonous clapping is not constrained by limited capacities of vocal chords or lungs (Atkinson 1984b, 371). Being easy to learn and cheap to produce, applause seems invincible from the outset unless its essentially collective nature is considered (Victoroff 1955/1956, 132; Jenniches 1969, 569; Atkinson 1984b, 371, 405; Kirchner 1992, 108; Connor 2003, 70): whereas the standard verbal or gestural response to a message is performed individually, a lone clapping in a music or a congress hall could spell trouble for both the messenger (whose performance was left hanging in the air) and the recipient (whose applause came either at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or both). As many natural (and some social) messaging engines, applause is a quorum-sensing device (Skyrms 2010, 29-30): unless the number of participants involved in a collective feedback goes beyond a certain threshold, applause will not spread, get noticed or count as a proper contribution to the interactional process. However, the expected flip side of this compulsory collectivity is the high contagiousness of applause (Victoroff 1955/1956, 133; Connor 2003, 71): as long the number of isolated clappers in a given interactional setting increases beyond the tipping point, clapping will spread like wildfire, growing from small minority to significant majority in a matter of miliseconds (Heritage, and Greatbatch 1986, 112; Marwell, and Oliver 1993, 1; Hosoda, and Aline 2010, 145; Mann et al. 2013, 7). In its turn, the negligible or even negative value of uncoordinated clapping is counterbalanced by the unusual permissiveness of the coordination game governing the collective use of applause. In fact, unlike many other languages, applause has two evolutionary stable semantic equiliubria (Jäger 2014, 4): generally speaking, both clapping for a long time and clapping in sync can convey a thorough appreciation of a speaker, musician or other publicly exposed addressee (Heister 1984, 96; Regan et al. 2000, 6991; Thomson, Murphy, and Lukeman 2018, 1). Last but not least, even the small risk of investing in collective applause before they reach the critical mass is amply compensated by the high returns for each participant (Heritage, and Greatbatch 1986, 112). In contrast to verbal language, applause exhibit supra-additive synergy (Berthoud 2013): indeed, the cumulative effect of ten clappers applauding together is much higher than that of 10 individual applauders scattered in time and space. All in all, not only doing applause seems to be fairly easy, but joining it pays off lavishly in most of the cases. Since applause is not so much action as reaction, it’s worth briefly looking at the conditions of its attachment to the messages, messengers and other social stimuli triggering communicative response. In general terms, the readiness to spend applause reflects the universal human propensity to cooperation, which predates specificity of communication as a system and precedes any successful transmission of information: among other things, people clap because they abhor isolation and need interaction for thinking (Levinson 1995, 223, Tomassello 2009, 4). On three counts at least, applause stand out from other forms of social communication. First of all, clapping invariably take place in public: it has hard to imagine applause to a poet or a musician occurring with a book in hand or in front of a TV set (Victoroff 1955/1956, 133; Kreidler 2015). Furthermore, applause is firmly embeded in face-to-face interaction which presupposes immediate visual and audial contact of all communicators (Laslett 1963; Kieserling 1999): cinema-watching is undoubtedly a public activity, but applauding in a movie theater is highly uncommon. Last but not least, at variance to the mostly symmetrical forms of interactional coordination such as gaze, gesticulation and speech (Goodwin 1980, 287; Condon 1982, 57; Atkinson 1984a, 88; Rotondo and Boker 2002, 151), applause not only unify, but also divide public sphere: whereas speakers or other performers typically dominate the setting by choosing efficient codes and expansive formats, their applauding audiences are supposed to stick to their business of approval without stealing the limelight (Atkinson 1984b, 371, Heister 1984, 92; Reisigl 2010, 255). Taken together, these distinct properties of applause account for their unusually immediate social, cultural and political relevance compared to other modalities of social and communicative collaboration: intensity, timeliness, synchronicity and pertinence of applauding shape reputations, bolster – or ruin – careers, foster – or dissolve –alliances, and decide upon successes of failures of individuals, parties and movements on the spot. For this very reason, applause flourished in the Augustan Rome where the modern distinctions between interaction, organization and society were frequently blurred (Gyles 1962, 195; Luhmann 1991, 9-19): in Roman theater, the applause to a prominent politican hearable to everyone were not reflecting but enacting social order (Parker 1999, 63). Furthermore, the uniquely interactional nature of applause underscored the necessity of constant mutual coordination between messaging and responding to messages: since mistimed or suspended clapping is a lose-lose-situation for all parties involved, getting senders and recipients perform (speak) and applaud in sync becomes a vital necessity for the interactional system. In theory, such an onsite communicative collaboration should not be difficult, given the aforementioned cooperative imperative, the effortlessness of learning by observation and practice, the relative simplicity of coordination rules, and the abundance of tools enabling reciprocal adjustments of the interaction partners. Similar to other contexts entailing at least some shared knowledge and common setting, applause and the applauded message or person habitually converge at some focal points created by mutual expectations and relatively invariant to the form and content of the moves and counter-moves (Schelling 1980, 57; Heritage and Greatbatch 1986, 112). In fact, the mere fact of applauding at a political conference or musical performance has little to do with the content of the speeches and nothing whatsoever to do with the semiotic construction of applause (Muldoon et al. 2014, 22): rather, the listeners clap to speakers/performers because they prefer “going with the flow” to other strategies (Asch 1955, 5; Heritage and Greatbatch 1986, 111), and also because they believe this particular behavior to be most suitable under given circumstances (Mehta, Starmer and Sugden 1994, 673). Apparently, the cooperation on feedback and coordination between the feedback and the target messages go hand in hand and mutually reinforce each other. Aside from those general social mechanisms, there are also specific communicative devices for deploying applause in interaction. Since applauding only exists in the real-time interaction with some trigger present, its description in terms of turn-taking – the universal mechanism governing the exchange of speaking turns in all sorts of conversations (Schegloff, 1986, p. 113, Holler et al., 2015) – appears to be the most natural thing to do (Atkinson 1984b, 378; Bull 2016, 473). In fact, there is ample empirical evidence that applause can function as a turn in face-to-face interaction: not only is it most frequent and abundant at the obvious transition points such as beginnings and ends of speeches, performances, ceremonies (Koestler 1941/1969, 12-13; Stuiber 1950, 100-101; Victoroff 1955/1956, 167; Fath 1989, 32; Kirchner 1992, 110; Atkinson 1984b, 374; Heister 1984, 117-118; Connor 2003, 70), but its close temporal correlation with the preceding turn is not dissimilar from the timing of a purely verbal turn change (Levinson 2006, 46; Heritage and Greatbatch 1986, 112). Nevertheless, despite all these incentives and prerequisites for successful collaboration, there is a considerable evidence that applause does not always work as intended: as a matter of fact, more than a third of applause is mistimed (Bull and Noordhuizen 2000, 275). Among the most concequential indeterminacies of applause are the underspecifications of its communicative function, addressee and setting. Indeed, both as a feedback provider and a component of turn-taking, clapping is subject to the relatively stringent limitations pertaining to its length: Whereas at an average party conference the clapping for much more – or much less – than ten seconds is unusual and often undesirable (Atkinson 1984a, 45; Atkinson 1984b, 374), in the standard performance of classical music the applause are allowed - and expected – only between the full pieces, no matter how long the internal breaks are (Heister 1984, 115). Whenever clapping occurs after every part or sentence, the rhetors, church fathers and musicians from Quintillian and John Chrysostom to Richard Wagner and Herbert von Karajan are quick to rescind its signaling and interactional credentials (Stuiber 1950, 95; Jenniches 1969; 575; Heister 1984, 116; Fath 1989, 32). At the same time, the brakes put on the frequency, length and intensity of applause obviously jeopardize its feedback function: if one is suppose to clap only at certain moments for certain periods of time, how could this tamed response provide information about the source message? Unperturbed by this paradox, the very same authorities in speech and music extoll the virtue of lively applause and uninhibited public reaction, only to condemn it once again whenever – typically after the last turn – it breaks out of control (Stuiber 1950, 96; Kirchner 1992, 113; Connor 2003, 75). In other words, the conflict between two functions of applause – enabling orderly turn-taking and providing mening ful feedback – has no obvious solution, which results in inconsistency of applauding behavior as well as ambivalence of its social reputation. The fuzzy target of applause further complicates its performance and reception. Should applause be directed at the message or the person standing behind it? Should the performance of the message or the information it contains be applauded (or excluded from applause)? The answers to these questions are complicated not so much by the concurrent popularity of the seemingly alternative options as by their frequent conflation, if not outright inseparability. To be sure, a handful of cases allow for a clear-cut differentiation: when Vergil’s lines are pointedly applauded in the theater in the poet’s absence, or a King of Egypt is getting crowned, the targets of the respective feedback are unmistakable (Victoroff 1955/1956, p. 144-145; Parker 1999, 171). But how to differentiate between the responses to messengers and messages in applause directed at the Emperor Nero’s singing, or make a distinction between the reactions to form and content in the ovations to St. Augustine’s stirring sermons (Stuiber 1950, 100, 101)? The latter question exasperated philosophers and preachers who preferred to be seen as truth-tellers rather than loquacious windbags (Stuiber 1950, 98; Kirchner 1992, 115). In practical terms, the difficulty of separating and ordering the two kinds of feedback time after time resulted in the collapse of interactional collaboration in public settings, as was the case with the Roman Emperor Constantine speaking in public, or with the King William I of Württhemberg attending theatrical performance in the Stuttgart Hoftheater in 1807. In both situations, the unresolved tensions between the presence of the leader (applaudable per se) and the ongoing performance (applaudable according to the rules of turn-taking in a given location) precipitated the degeneration of applause into meaningless, incomprehensible, incoherent noise (Stuiber 1950, 95; Jenniches 1969, 574; Heister 1984, 115-116). Arguably the biggest confusion surrounded – and still surrounds - the use of applause in various settings. The attempts to separate the sober, stern information-based environments from the frivolous, performance-oriented ones resulted in recurrent diatribes against clapping in churches or courts which, in the course of the last twenty centuries, achieved little success (Stuber 1950, 96, 101; Heister 1984, 120; Kirchner 1992, 111). Perhaps one of the reasons of this failure was the irreverence of the messaging system itself to the functional differentiation of interactional sites: suffice to say that theater – the poster example of entertainment venue – inherited applause from the cult of Dionysus (Victoroff 1955/1956, 147; Jenniches 1969, 573; Kirchner 1992, 112). Moreover, nearly every major subsystem of society dispalys a considerable disarray of norms and customs surrounding applause: there is no rational explanation for allowing clapping in the French National Assembly and prohibiting it in the British House of Commons, or discouraging messengeroriented applause in German opera while tolerating it in the Italian one (Victoroff 1955/1956, 133-134; Wheeler 2015). As much as applause is firmly aligned with the layout of the face-to-face interaction setting, its success in each specific situation is fraught with risks due to the untold internal contradictions and inconsistencies only a small part of which is outlined above. Hence it comes as little surprise that, notwithstanding semiotic simplicity and lax coordination rules of applause, its use as feedback in actual communication is a complex operation supported by multiple overlapping – and often conflicting – control mechanisms, diffused responsibilities, and habitual deceit. Since turn-taking could hardly be ever trusted to stitch together applause and their stimuli on its own, it has been habitually supplemented with regulatory practices bringing the rate of coordination between the interacting parties to the socially acceptable level. Whenever the informational value of applause fell below the correctness of their ritualistic enactment, the performers’ already considerable interactional dominance was further extended to the direct assignment of projection points: whereas Plautus at the end of his plays unambiguously advised his audiences to start applauding and having a good time (Valete et plaudite!), the live recording of TV shows habitually feature placards, teleprompters and other signaling devices performing the same function (Stuiber 1950, 96; Kirchner 1992, 112, 114; Bennett 2003, 180, 181). However, in most social environments clapping was supposed to signal something more than the beginning of the next turn – that could (or should) have been genuine excitement about aria, ratification of the performer’s legitimacy (Goffman 1972, 93-94), or even the unshakeable unity of the audiences in the face of supposed social and political threats. Since the effect of the normative regulation of clapping - from Roman legislation to the early modern techniques of civilization - was fairly limited (Parker 1999, 169; Heister 1984, 118119), the tacit management device was more or less shamelessly installed right on the interactional site in order to support the feeble coordination between the performers and the applauders. Claque – the institution of paid or otherwise committed clappers instructed to powerfully engage at the predetermined projection points – suppled critical mass to the audiences of Nero and Donald Trump, provided safety cushion for a 19th century Norwegian violionist Ole Bull traveling abroad, and fed German radio listeners the delusion of total mobilization during Joseph Goebbels’ infamous Berlin Sport Palace speech in 1943 (Heine 1844, 571; Stuiber 1950, 94-95; Victoroff 1955/1956, 144-145, 152, 154, 156-158; Gyles 1962, 196-197; Jenniches 1969, 576-577; Rosenthal, and Warrack 1979, 99; Kirchner 1992, 113-114; Claque 1995; Claque 2016; Rile 2017). The claim of supplying as many applause as needed at given moments was substantiated by the replacement of human labour with the reproduction devices: both Nazi Party Rallies and modern sitcoms countered vast coordination problems of oversized and disparate audiences by feeding the recorded applause back to the audiences, prompting the latter to join the ostensibly universal enthusiasm (Victoroff 1955/1956, 132-133; Atkinson 1984a, 13-14; Claque 1995, 344; Bennett 2003, 281; Birdsall 2012, 45). All in all, the successes and failures of applause as a messaging system appear to be inextricably tied not only to the joint capabilities of interacting parties, but also to the presence of direct regulation devices capable of furtively mending the cracks in the face-to-face society. Applause in Russia before 1917: some pre-history As any special case in the global history of applause, clapping in Russia before 1917 is a mixture of some special local circumstances and a number of general regularities. On the one hand, face-to-face society arrived to Russia exceptionally late: in any case, neither regular theatre performances nor public speaking made inroads into Russian society until 18th century (Zakharine 2005, 588-589). On the other, in the course of the 19th century the public sphere of Russia got accustomed to the traditions, forms, norms, and controversies prevalent in Europe: since then, one could hear applause at successful theatrical, musical and literary performances, stirring public lectures, jubilee salutations and award ceremonies. The ovations in Russian drama and opera were - and still are – the part of a long established international routine: fuelled by claque, the applause at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow have outlived two states and many generations (Barry 2013). Elsewhere, the applause in public was largely a spontaneous expressions of the audiences’ enthusiasm, and the usual uncertainties regarding functions, addressees and settings discussed above were habitually coming to surface. Similarly to the other interactional settings disproportionally skewed towards autocrats such as the entourage of the Sun King in 17th century France, communication at the Russian court was revolving around the monarch, and applause directed at the ruler as a person took precedence over any message-oriented feedback (Elias 1983, 63-101; Kirchner 1992, 113). For instance, having scolded Dmitry Golokhvastov at the reception in 1865 for seeking applause at any cost, Aleksander II tempered justice with mercy when the eloquent Zvenigorod marshal of the nobility retorted that clapping was a response to the Tsar’s name in his speech (Tatishchev 1903, 534-535). However, the pervasive hostility towards eliciting applause by means of elaborate rhetoric could not have been defused so easily if confronted with the questionable status of some novel interactional settings such as university. True, confronted with the epidemy of applause to popular professors which ostensibly interferred with the solemn atmosphere of higher learning and distracted from orderly knowledge transmission, Nikolai Pirogov, the famous Russian surgeon and pedagogue, defended ovations at universities as both natural outbursts of learning fervour and expressions of opinion complementing monological lecturing (Pirogov 1862, 460). But the fact that this authoritative opinion failed to stop the debate attested to the familiar difficulty of balancing procedural correctness with intactness of interaction, as well as separating rhetorical skills of such famous liberal tribunes as Timofei Granovskii (the professor of medieval history mockingly portrayed by Dostoevskii in the Devils) from their scholarly expertise. In any case, the applause to Granovsky, as his conservative critics did not fail to notice, were often merely consolidating his liberal audiences, accompanying even his poor performances and henceforth playing no feedback role whatsoever (Lubkov 2018, 121). Reviving the tradition of partisan feedback rooted in the Ancient Greek theatrical competitions (Stuiber 1950, 95; Victoroff 1955/1956, 151-152), the 19th century practice of compulsory applause to the “own” speakers paved the way to the showdowns of 1906-1917 when Duma – the short-lived Russian parliament – provided the venue for ideological confrontations in public. At the first glance, the Duma looked like a reasonably good model of a face-to-face society, offering its members the stage for running political ideas by each other, publicly argue, deliberate, compromise, and formulate joint demands to the executive. In practice, however, the negligible legislative and oversight powers of the Russian parliament turned its proceedings into the chaotic rivalry of rhetors jockeying for attention: not only the interaction in Duma was, for the most part, ineffective and inconsequential for the society, but the applause typically occurred along party lines, becoming little more than semantically irrelevant references to the fraction sizes and parties’ discipline (Berezovaı͡a 2019, 16-18). Small wonder that Pavel Krupenskii, the respected conservative deputy of Duma, suggested banning applause from parliamentary proceedings altogether (Smetanin 2016, 45-46). As in France 125 years earlier, the fall of monarchy in February 1917 destroyed the boundaries between various compartments of public interaction such as state offices, theaters and streets (Victoroff 1955/1956, 152. Figes and Kolonitskii 1999, 30-70). This merger literally cleared the stage for the populist politics: all of a sudden, the success with the immediate audience became a tangible marker of political capital. One of the main beneficiaries of this transformation was Alexander Kerensky, the Minister of War and later the Head of the Provisional Government. Skilfully combining intensive contact with the audience, rhetorical dexterity and masterful release of crucial information at the crucial points of the speeches, Kerensky was also good at strategically blurring the boundaries between various interactional settings: at the “concert-meeting” staged at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on May 26, 1917, the politician was celebrated according to the customs of operatic stardom (Kolonit͡skiĭ 2017, 346-348). Quenching public thirst for the leader, Kerensky’s carefully cultivated image time and again resulted in the unprecedented ovations, surprising even the ceasoned poliitcla observers (Kolonit͡skiĭ 2017, 338-341). To be sure, forced to flee Russia the very same year, Kerensky utterly failed in converting his extraordinary interactional achievement into the lasting political capital. However, the newly formed association between political leadership and “endless” applause played considerable role in political communication after October 1917. Applause as a messaging device in Soviet politics from Lenin to Stalin The transition from the boundless face-to-face society, which quickly spread after the Februar Revolution over the major Russian cities, to the tightly regulated Soviet communication took years and involved many intermediate steps. Contrary to the lofty ideological declarations, the novel public space of Leninism and Stalnism was not build from scratch: rather, its design revealed the amalgamation of previously employed interactional practices and settings, retuned, rearranged and otherwise gradually adjusted to the emerging personalist dictatorship (Stites 1989, 4; Chapter 26). Expectedly, applause was not excluded from this reshuffle. In some situations, the continuity was more conspicuous than modifications: for instance, the centerpice of the International Women Day celebration in a Bolsherechensky district of the Altai province in 1925 was the curious performance of a six-year old girl, combining, according to a witness’ account (Besova 1925/1998, 409), a 15 minutes-speech on women’s rights before and after the Revolution with the lively recital of Sergei Obradovich’s poem Female Worker (1920). It is rather hard to believe that the performer possessed rhetorical skills and composure of Aleksandr Kerensky or Lev Trotsky, but in quantitative terms the public response was comparable, beginning with “loud applause” before the start and ending with the equally vociferous ovation at the end lasting for three minutes (Besova 1925/1998, 410). To be sure, the contrast between the early age of the performer and the sophisticated content of the performance undoubtedly played considerable role in the success: the child as an animator of ideological manifestoes should have been seen by local propagandist as a sure vehicle of political advertisement (Kinsey 1987, 169). However, the dramaturgy of the interaction must have had significant impact upon the public as well. Having skilfully mixed political meeting and theatrical performance, the local propagandists charged with directing the show had also strategically placed the most effective invitations to clap at the crucial projection points. Indeed, having first sent the child to the stage after a string of bland official talks, they subsequently countered the inevitable listeners’ fatigue at the end of her long speech with the piece of art translating dry political content into moving images, and provided a couple of rousing slogans - “Hail the Great October – the liberator of a women!” and “Hail the free woman!”) - at the very end of the performance (Besova 1925/1998, 410). In this respect, the bits of all-encompassing face-to-face society created by Februar 1917 remained intact almost a decade ago, albeit re-enacted at a small scale and placed under increasingly tight supervision. In other, more central interactional settings, the changes in parameters and functions of applause, while equally gradual, were also more conspicuous. Already the proceedings of the Petrograd Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in July-October 1917 reveal coexistence and mutual influence of the old and new feedback practices (Gal’periina and Start͡sev 2003). On the one hand, the significance of the partisan applauding which brought interaction in the fragmented pre-revolutionary Duma to a standstill was clearly diminishing, accounting for just 18% of all applause. On the other, the semantic inflation triggered by the earlier indiscriminate use of the “endless” ovations was clearly on the rise: almost 63 % of all applause spent in the Council were recorded in the proceedings as “stormy and long” (burnye i prodolzhitel’nye)”, “thunderous” (grom aplodismentov)”, “noisy” (shumnye) and „unceasing” (nesmolkaemye). But perhaps the most interesting result concerns the relations between clapping intensity and its targets. In the absence of personalist autocracy, the applause reacting to the speeches and performances of political leaders were still rare - just over 13% - and spread out widely between several leading Bolsheviks including Trotsky, Lenin and Kollontai. However, whenever those leaders were applauded as such, they were invariably greeted with the “endless” ovations, with Trotsky – arguably the most popular politician of the extreme-left at the time – enjoing far more of the oversized clapping than the two others combined. Needless to say, the significance of this last example, based largely upon subjective evaluations of newspaper reporters, should not be exaggerated. Still, the findings are unambiguous enough to forecast the refocusing of applause from providing meaningful situational feedback and enabling turn-taking to measuring the leaders’ political power and the follower’s loyalty (Fromm 1973, 229; Wintrobe 1998, 67). The change was already well underway in a year following Lenin’s death: at the 14th Congress of the All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPb) in December 1925, Stalin - apparently for the first time – was greeted with the standing ovation (Antonov-Ovseenko 1994, 345). However, the ternary quantitative differentiation of applause reflecting the political differences between (1) the main leader, (2) other leaders, and (3) further significant personalities was by no means discarded: rather, the subsequent ritualization of public events endowed the triad with the normative significance. Indeed, the comparison between published and unpublished stenographic records of the 8th Extarordinary Congress of Soviets summoned in November-October 1936 to rubber-stamp the new Soviet Constitution, reveals the attempt to retroactively adjust the actual duration and intensity of applause to the current political status of the Congress participants. The fact that Iosif Stalin by that time firmly occupied the very top of political hierarchy found its reflection in the ”explosion of applause” (vzryv aplodismentov) accompanying his nomination for the Presidium of the Congress ([Stenographic Record/1] 1936, 5). Whereas this uncommon characterization was left unchanged by the censors (Chrezvychaĭnyĭ S“ezd/1 1936, 4), other records of applause during the same ceremony were redacted to present them as a linear function of the respective political status: thus the simple “ovation” to Viacheslav Molotov, the then Prime Minister and Stalin’s confidant, turned in the published version into the “standing ovation” ([Stenographic Record 1936, 5; Chrezvychaĭnyĭ S“ezd 1936, 4). The somewhat similar upgrade occurred to the record of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the abrasive but highly esteemed Minister of Heavy Industry who also belonged to the inner circle of Stalin: the “ovation” in response to his nomination was supplemented in the published version of proceedings with the “loud and continuous applause” ([Stenographic Record 1936, 5; Chrezvychaĭnyĭ S“ezd 1936, 4). Far below the level of excitement in response to Stalin’s name, these inflated records of enthusiastic reaction to the names of the promiment Politburo members were still wide apart from reactions to the nominations of the republican governmental bosses for the Presidium. Most likely, the bulk of Congress deputies were simply not familiar with the names of Panas Liubchenko, Ian Rudzutak, Daniil Sulimov or Gazanfar Musabekov: at any rate, the archival version of the stenographic record fails to mention any public response to their nominations ([Stenographic Record 1936, 5). In the published record, however, all the four are said to be individually greeted with “applause” upon their nominations (Chrezvychaĭnyĭ S“ezd 1936, 4). This tripartite poilitical hierarchy “Stalin – members of Politburo – other political leaders,” quantitatively expressed in three different lengths and strengths of messenger-related applause, not only persists throughout this Congress, but also shows at other high-level political events (Antonov-Ovseenko 1994, 111). Among other things, the cross-examination of published and archived references to applause at the Congress attests to the important shifts in the functions of applause in Stalinism. The two major functions of clapping in communication – sustaining orderly turn exchange and providing limited meaningful response on demand – are supplemented, if not supplanted, in Soviet Union by the task of quantitatively representing the political status of the applauded. This shift has both macro- and micro-concequences. On the macro-level, the return of Roman face-to-face society in the guise of stern plebiscitary authoritarianism inextricably tied communicative asymmetries to political disparities (Weber 1919, 862; Stuiber 1950, 95-96; Habermas 1984, 257, 264; Crespi 1997, 104–105; Parker 1999, 176; Patzelt 2011; Marquez 2017, 94; see also Chapter 9): devoid of meaningful alternatives or even semantic ambiguities, public clapping was automatically interpreted as endorcement of the politics expressed in the statements and performances of political leaders (Postoutenko, and Stephanov 2020, 181). On the micro-level, the previously exceptional applause directed at messengers and other significant performers became the norm in relation to the Soviet political leaders: in the case of Stalin, the very presence of the leader in the interactional setting - or even verbal or visual references to him - time and again disrupted the established routines of specific interaction settings, challenging at times the very definition of the faceto-face society. Despite being, formally speaking, an ordinary audience member at the premiere of Shakespeare’s Otello in the Moscow Malyi Theater (December 10, 1935), Stalin managed to steal much of applause from the star performer Aleksander Ostuzhev, becoming in a whim the epicentre of an unanimous multi-minute standing ovation (Gromov 1998, 58). Four years later, when the increasingly reclusive leader began investing much energy into creation of his media substitutes (Postoutenko 2019), his appearance on the screen in the documentary devoted to the 15th anniversary of Lenin’s death provoked a similar reaction in a movie theatre (Kozlova 2005, 361). The data on the verbal feedback to the Bolshevik leader at the same Congress confirms this fixation of listeners on the personality of the supreme messenger: in the discussion of Stalin’s talk on the Soviet Constitution, almost 43 % of all references were made to the the leader himself, with just over over 11% touching upon the content of his speech (Postoutenko 2015; see also Postoutenko 2016, 139). As the correlation of applause with the verbal and performative stimuli was increasingly giving way to their new tasks – aiding plebiscitary legitimation and upholding political hierarchy - the breakout of clapping from interactional constraints became stoppable. This, in turn, helped setting its runaway semantic inflation in motion (Deutsch 1966, 192): similar to the increasingly ornate - and ever more worthless - acclamations to the “great teacher”, the ovations to Stalin and other leaders were growing in number and proportionately declining in value (Junge and Postoutenko 2020, 6). Furthermore, this semantic emptiness was compounded by a moral hazard inherent in the signalling behavior of both senders and recepients of feedback. Indeed, besides having grotesquely low throughput capacity, the applause at the time of Stalin were also notoriously unreliable: caught in a vicious circle of growing insecurity passing from the dictator (fearing coups) to the population (afraid of repressions) and back (see Chapter 1), the signals of loyalty from below were as cheap as the proclamations of joyous life from above (see Postoutenko and Stephanov 2020, and Chapter 25). Tthe unknown delegate of the Congress of Engineers held in Moscow in late November – early December 1932, who in a letter to Vycheslav Molotov contrasted his public “clapping” to the private “hatred” and “condemination” of the high-ranking addressee (“[Letter]” 1932, 196), was probably just one of many disgruntled participants of public ceremonies venting their rage in anonymous letters to the government (Fitzpatrick 1996). Small wonder that the officials had rely on the good old-fashioned claque to ensure superficial smoothness of public interaction. In fact, the presence of claquers “responsible for enthusiasm” at important meetings and conferences was an open secret for the lowranking party officials (I�akovlev 2000, 67). Even an unsuspecting nine-year-old, while listening to the aforementioned talk on the Soviet Constitution on the radio, was puzzled by the oddly regular bursts of applause preventing ovations to Stalin from dying out (Sarnov 2002, 19). Having claimed the ever bigger share of communicative time and space in Soviet Union, clapping was less and less capable of performing its interactionals functions, becoming, as a matter of fact, both an impediment to information transmission and an obstacle to turntaking. Both of these disfunctions had noticeable interactional concequences which are worth looking at from two different perspectives. Never-ending applause from below: exhausted followers The unconfirmed account of the tribute to Stalin paid at the end of the VKPb district conference in the mid-1930s features the debilitating clapping for eleven minutes which none of the participants dares to exit under the watchful eye of the Soviet secret police (NKVD). Finally, the local industrial boss puts a stop to the participants’ suffering by being the first to quit, only to end up in jail on fabricated charges the same night (Solzhenitsyn 1973/1991, 58; see also Conquest 1992, 213). However exaggerated, fictionally embellished or even downright fictitious, the story as a whole rings true when compared to some verified witness accounts (Sarnov 2002, 19). It also sounds credible in the context of the stressinduced pathological behaviour: unable to cope with the rising tensions, unstable systems shield themselves from environment and neurotically repeat one and the same operation no matter what (Kubie 1950, 71). More often than not, such an automatic behaviour brings systems to a dead-end in which no transmission of information occurs, no turnaround is possible and yet no stopping point is foreseeable since past, present and future do not differ anymore (Watzlawick 1984, 214): a well-known example is the persistent root squaring which is bound to end with 1 (√9.57 = 3.12; √3.12 = 1.77; √1.77 = 1.33; √1.33 = 1.15; √1.15 = 1.07; √1.07 = 1.04; √1.04 = 1.02; √1.02 = 1.01; √1.01 = 1.00; √1.00 = 1.00; √1.00 = 1.00 … etc. ad infinitum – see also Ashby 1968, 115-116; von Foerster 1993, 137 and Postoutenko 2016, 145). It is easy to see that the tale told by Solzhenitsyn vividly exhibits the same standstill: at least a half of the clapping time has no informational content at all, since the only activity occupying the clappers after the sixth minute of applause is the frantic – and fruitless search for an exit stategy: “They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks!” (Solzhenitsyn 1973/1991, 58). But perhaps the main question is not whether the systemic closure modelled by cyberneticists obtains in this case, but how the overlong ovation becomes seemingly endless and interminable, and why there is no decent, face-saving, trouble-free way out of this trap? As a matter of fact, such universally valid projection points as the ends of talks and performances have always been the hotspots of self-perpetuating applause (Atkinson 1984a, 30; Connor 2003, 75): since no further turn is normally expected after the last one, the function of enabling turn-taking is typically suspended in favour of exhaustive, cumulative feedback transmission. However, the latter demonstrably does not apply to the context in which the sincere, detailed and meaningful reaction to the leader’s name is neither expected nor possible. Besides, whereas withholding applause after the successful performance is quite unusual and may cause some reputation damage (Heritage and Greatbatch 1986, 111), the dissenter is highly unlikely to be reprimanded, let alone imprisoned. In contrast, the penalties of abandoning ritual cooperation in the case discussed are exorbitant, which justifies clapping to Stalin’s name despite utter exhaustion and the risks of breakdown. More specifically, the conference participants are locked in the so-called volunteer’s dilemma (Schelling 1978, 31; Diekmann 1985; Weesie and Franzen 1998, 600; Clark 2006, 146; Otsubo & Rapoport 2008, 961; Goeree, Holt, and Smith 2017, 303): while the moderate benefits of defection (getting rid of the tiring, senseless action) are equally shared by everybody, its extraordinary costs (losing freedom and possibly life) are born by the rebel alone. At the dawn of European civilization, Aesop immortalized this problem in the fable The Mice in Council: although every single mouse supported the idea of tying the bell to the neck of the cat in order to receive some advance warning of is appearance, none was prepared to go ahead and do the trick on its own (Coleman 2009, 270-271). The unenviable choice that the mice were possibly facing was between the cat’s death and their own extinction - a harrowing resemblance to the plight of Soviet citizens at the time of Great Purges. Never-ending applause from above: infuriated leader Still, the relations between leaders and general population in Soviet Union were not so depressingly straightfiorward as the ones depicted in The Mice in Council. The fearsome cat described by Aesop could not care less about interaction with the lower rungs of the food chain ladder, as long as they were abundant and up for grabs. The Bolshevik leaders, in their turn, were dependent on information supplied (along with other agencies) by the general population (Livshin 2010, 27-28), and also reliant on people’s cooperation in public ceremonies showcasing the strength of the Soviet state (Lane 1981, 33). Since applause, as has been shown before, was traditionally employed for submitting feedback and facilitating turn-taking, it could have been a perfect messaging system for serving both purposes. However, as long as both informational and interactional functions of clapping were pushed into the background to make room for the public display of power asymmetries and demonstrations of political cohesion, applause could no longer be trusted to convey meaningful responses or be an efficient turn in interaction. Contrary to what the aforementioned accident at the district conference of VKPb may suggest, Bolshevik leaders were also suffering from the dysfunctions of applause, and looked at times as helpless as those who they were supposed to command. A close look at the couple of accidents that occurred at the beginnings of Iosif Stalin’s speeches could illustrated the point. In the first case - the outset of the Secretary General’s talk at the Labour Day’s Celebration in the Moscow House of Union (May 1, 1944) – face-toface interaction seems to work all right (Stalin 1944): in less than a minute, the speaker progresses from being introduced by the chair to receiving applause from the audience and beginning his talk. The second-to-second breakdown of this process looks tlike this: 1. (x-0). The secretary of the meeting introduces the speaker (Iosif Stalin). 2 2. (1-45). Applause. 3. (01-14). Stalin takes place at the tribune. 4. (13-32) Stalin orders his papers and pours water into a glass. 5. (33-38) Stalin establishes eye contact with the audience. 6. (42-43, 45). The secretary of the meeting engages a buzzer. 7. (45, 47) Stalin clears his throat. 8. (49). Stalin begins speaking. This schedule reveals the completion of the following interactional tasks: 1. The chair of the meeting successfully and easily allocates a speaking turn to the forthcoming speaker. 2. The audience responds to the speaker’s name with the slightly (1-2 seconds) delayed and unusually long (6-7 times the average) but orderly applause that ends at the appropriate moment – just when the speaker selected by the chair is about to begin his turn. 3. The speaker has time to both prepare himself for the talk and establish eye contact with the audience, signaling his reception of the applause back to the audience. 4. The chair successfully and easily ends applause and thus clears floor for the speaker. 2 The incomplete video of the ceremony begins at the final second of the introduction. 5. The speaker postpones the beginning of his turn, clearing his throat, but this rather long delay (8 seconds) does not break up his contact with the audience. 6. After the additional check of the audience’s attention the speaker begins his turn. Nonetheless, this best-case scenario is by no means the only one, and even the officially recorded documentation of Stalin’s speeches attests to his occasional inability to manage applause. The case in point is the beginning of his address to the voters of the Stalin Electoral District delivered in Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on December 11, 1937 (Stalin 1937). Whereas the inventory of steps taken in this conjunction is largely the same, the ensuing interactional dynamics is totally different, with the initial progress increasingly halting and then slipping into fruitless circularity: 1. (X-Y). [The secretary of the meeting introduces the speaker (Iosif Stalin)]. 3 2. (Y-157). Applause. 3. (5-17, 20-21, 35-48, 65-70, 78-91, 95-97, 100-111, 114, 120-126, 132-133, 148152, 155-158). Stalin establishes eye contact with the audience. 4. Stalin checks his appearance, inspects the tribune and its surroundings. 5. (65-67, 84-86, 101-105, 145-146) .The secretary turns on a buzzer. 6. (145, 147) Stalin expresses verbally and gesturally his disapproval of applause. 7. (Z). Stalin begins speaking. The transition from orderly interaction to the brink of interactional failure could be described in the following way: 1. [There is no information about the chair‘s allocation of a speaking term to the speaker.] 2. The audience responds to the speaker’s name and/or appearance with the abnormally long (at least 22 times the average) applause which conflicts both with the chair’s attempts to clear the floor for the speaker and with the speaker’s attempts to begin his turn. 3 In this case, too, the available video is incomplete, beginning at the start of applause and ending just before the start of the speech. 3. The speaker is very inefficient in progressing towards the beginning of his speaking turn. He makes multiple eye contacts with the audience but fails to achieve any interactional cooperation. As a result of this failure, he diverts his attention from both the audiences and the talk, checking his appearance and environment at the moment when neither action is appropriate or relevant in the given communicative context. 4. The chair makes three consecutive attempts to end applause and clear the floor for the speaker. Not only all attempts fail, but the last one is explicitly rebuffed by the audience which responds to the chair’s request of silence by intensifying applause. 5. After the chair proves incapable of stopping applause and the system of turn allocation collapses, the speaker tries to negotiate the beginning of his speaking turn directly with the audience. However, his first – gestural – signal is not considered credible by the audience, and only the direct verbal appeal (“Enough!”) succeeds. 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