“The incitement of public disrespect and hostility for the government ranks”: a page from a newspaper war against high ranking officials in the Amur region (1911-1912)

The article based on the documents of the Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East deals with the confrontation between the Vice-Governor of the Amur Region A.G. Chaplinskiy and journalist A.I. Matyushenskiy. The scandal happened on the eve of the First World War in the city of Blagoveshchensk. It resulted in undermining the vice-governor’s spotless reputation, on the one hand, and the journalist’s notoriety, on the other. In the focus is the operation of the bureaucratic mechanism striving to protect the high official’s reputation in the new legal conditions caused by the revolution of 1905. It concludes that in this period the printed word became an effective means of influencing the bodies of power. The attempts of bureaucracy to restore the censorship regime, canceled in 1905, failed. Despite the threat of fines and imprisonment journalists and editors were increasingly involved in the discussion of socially significant problems forming public opinion. They became a force the bureaucracy had to reckon with.