Propaganda in the Soviet Union

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"Roses for Stalin", Boris Vladimirski, 1949
"Roses for Stalin", Boris Vladimirski, 1949
Before 1940
Before 1940
After: People's Commissar for the Interior Nikolai Yezhov, the young man strolling with Stalin to his left, was shot in 1940. He was edited out from a photo by Soviet censors.
After: People's Commissar for the Interior Nikolai Yezhov, the young man strolling with Stalin to his left, was shot in 1940. He was edited out from a photo by Soviet censors.[1]

The communist propaganda was extensively based on the Marxism-Leninism ideology to promote the Communist Party line. In societies with pervasive censorship, the propaganda was omnipresent and very efficient. It penetrated even social and natural sciences giving rise to various pseudo-scientific theories like Lysenkoism, whereas fields of real knowledge, as genetics, cybernetics, and comparative linguistics were condemned and forbidden as "bourgeois pseudoscience". With "truths repressed, falsehoods in every field were incessantly rubbed in in print, at endless meetings, in school, in mass demonstrations, on the radio" [2].

Main Soviet censorship body, Glavlit employed seventy thousand full-time staff not only to eliminate any undesirable printed materials, but also "to ensure that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item". Telling anything against the "Party line" was punished by imprisonment. "Today a man only talks freely to his wife - at night, with the blankets pulled over his head", said writer Isaac Babel privately to a trusted friend [2]

According to Robert Conquest, "All in all, unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities. The accompanying falsifications took place, and on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, real statistics, disappeared into the realm of fantasy. History, including the History of the Communist Party, or rather especially the history of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons disappeared from the official record. A new past, as well as new present, was imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet population, as was, of course, admitted when truth emerged in the late 1980s".[2]

Contents

[edit] Image of the Soviet Union abroad

An important goal of Soviet propaganda was to maintain the progressive image of the Soviet Union abroad, as an ideal for all workers of the world. Tarek Heggy, a liberal Egyptian thinker, in his book "Culture, Civilization, and Humanity" demonstrates the success of Soviet propaganda to maintain this idealistic image with the help of two quotations of Andre Gide before and after his visit to the Soviet Union.

"My faith in communism is like my faith in religion: it is a promise of salvation for mankind. If I have to lay my life down that it may succeed, I would do so without hesitation"
"It is impermissible under any circumstances for morals to sink as low as communism has done. No one can begin to imagine the tragedy of humanity, of morality, of religion and of freedoms in the land of communism, where man has been debased beyond belief"[3]

[edit] Indoctrination of children

“Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth”.
“Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth”.

An important goal of Communist propaganda was to create a new man. Schools and the Communist youth organizations, like Soviet pioneers and Komsomol, served to remove children from the "petty-bourgeois" family and indoctrinate the next generation into the collective way of life. One of schooling theorists stated:

We must make the young into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists... We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family... We must nationalize them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficient influence of Communist schools... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state - that is our task." [4].

Indoctrination of children in the cult of "Uncle Lenin" began from the kindergarten. "Lenin's corners", "political shrines for the display of propaganda about the god-like founder of the Soviet state" have been established in all schools [4]. Schools conducted marches, songs and pledges of allegiance to Soviet leadership. One of purposes was to instill in children the idea that they are involved in the World revolution, which is more important than any family ties. Pavlik Morozov who betrayed his father to the secret police NKVD was promoted as a great positive example [4].

[edit] Propaganda of extermination

Some historians believe, an important goal of communist propaganda was "to justify political repressions of entire social groups which Marxism considered antagonistic to the class of proletariat"[5], as in decossackization or dekulakization campaigns [2] [4]. Richard Pipes wrote: "a major purpose of Communist propaganda was arousing violent political emotions against the regime's enemies."[6]

Soviet poster of the 1920s: The GPU strikes on the head of a "wreckler"
Soviet poster of the 1920s: The GPU strikes on the head of a "wreckler"

The most effective means to achieve this objective "was the denial of the victim's humanity through the process of dehumanization", "the reduction of real or imaginary enemy to a zoological state". [7]. In particular, Vladimir Lenin called to exterminate enemies "as harmful insects", "lice" and "bloodsuckers".[5] According to writer and propagandist Maksim Gorky, "Class hatred should be cultivated by an organic revulsion as far as the enemy is concerned. Enemies must be seen as inferior. I believe quite profoundly that the enemy is our inferior, and is a degenerate not only in the physical plane but also in the moral sense".[5] He also called to use enemy of the people as "human guinea pigs" for human experimentation in the USSR Institute of Experimental Medicine in 1933, which would be "a true service to humanity", according to him [5]. According to The Black Book of Communism, an example of such demonizing animal rhetoric were speeches by state procurator Andrey Vyshinsky during Stalin's show trials. He said about the suspects[8]:

"Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism!... Down with these abject animals! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!"

[edit] Soviet propaganda abroad

Propaganda abroad was partly conducted by Soviet intelligence agencies. GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for propaganda and peace movements against Vietnam War, which was a "hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost", according to GRU defector Stanislav Lunev [9]. He claimed that "the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad". [9] According to Oleg Kalugin, "the Soviet intelligence was really unparalleled. ... The KGB programs -- which would run all sorts of congresses, peace congresses, youth congresses, festivals, women's movements, trade union movements, campaigns against U.S. missiles in Europe, campaigns against neutron weapons, allegations that AIDS ... was invented by the CIA ... all sorts of forgeries and faked material -- [were] targeted at politicians, the academic community, at the public at large." [10]

Propaganda against the United States included the following actions [11]:

  • Promotion of false John F. Kennedy assassination theories, using writer Mark Lane.
  • Discreditation of the CIA, using historian Philip Agee (codenamed PONT).
  • Spreading rumors that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual.
  • Attempts to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. by placing publications portraying him as an "Uncle Tom" who was secretly receiving government subsidies.
  • Stirring up racial tensions in the United States by mailing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, placing an exposive package in "the Negro section of New York" (operation PANDORA), and spreading conspiracy theories that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination had been planned by the US government.
  • Fabrication of the story that AIDS virus was manufactured by US scientists at Fort Detrick; the story was spread by Russian-born biologist Jakob Segal
  • Senior SVR officer Sergei Tretyakov made the claim to writer Pete Earley that the KGB "created the myth of nuclear winter" as disinformation (see Sergei Tretyakov for details), although Earley said that the accuracy of this claim "is impossible to discern",[12] and subsequent studies using more advanced climate models have continued to support the hypothesis (see nuclear winter).

[edit] See also

Agitprop

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Commissar vanishes (The Newseum)
  2. ^ a b c d Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7, page 101-111
  3. ^ Andre Gide as quoted by T. Heggy in his book Culture, Civilization, and Humanity (2003) ISBN 0714655546
  4. ^ a b c d Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 0-08050-7461-9, pages 20-31.
  5. ^ a b c d Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-674-07608-7
  6. ^ Richard Pipes (1993) "Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime", p. 309.
  7. ^ Black Book, page 749.
  8. ^ Black Book, page 750.
  9. ^ a b Stanislav Lunev. Through the Eyes of the Enemy: The Autobiography of Stanislav Lunev, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998. ISBN 0-89526-390-4
  10. ^ Interview of Oleg Kalugin on CNN
  11. ^ Mitrokhin, Vasili, Christopher Andrew (2000). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-14-028487-7.
  12. ^ Pete Earley, "Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War", Penguin Books, 2007, ISBN-13 978-0-399-15439-3, pages 169-177