Craig Brandist is Professor of Cultural Theory and Intellectual History and Director of the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield.Katya Chown is Lecturer in Russian at Leeds University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield.

• Introduction; Soviet Linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s and the Scholarly Heritage; 'Sociology' in Soviet Linguistics of the 1920-30s; Theoretical Insights and Ideological Pressures in Early Soviet Linguistics; Early Soviet Linguistics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Essays on the Novel of the 1930s; Language as a Battlefield - the Rhetoric of Class Struggle in Linguistic Debates of the First Five-Year Plan Period; The Tenacity of Forms; The Word as Culture; Language Ideology and the Evolution of Kul´tura iazyka ('Speech Culture') in Soviet Russia; Psychology, Linguistics and the Rise of Applied Social Science in the USSR; Appendix 1: Introduction to Japhetidology: Theses - Ivan Meshchaninov; Appendix 2: Glossary of Names; Appendix 3: Contributors; Index of Names

‘A very rich and captivating book on the history of the first phase of Soviet linguistics.’ —Roger Comtet, Université de Toulouse II, in ‘Historiographia Linguistica’