Soviet propaganda

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"Roses for Stalin", Boris Vladimirski, 1949
"Roses for Stalin", Boris Vladimirski, 1949
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]

The biggest Soviet propaganda success was allegedly the promotion of nuclear winter theory. According to SVR defector Sergei Tretyakov, the KGB "created the myth of nuclear winter." Sergei, a former Colonel in the Russian KGB/SVR that defected to the United States in 2000, says during the 1970s the KGB wanted to prevent the United States from deploying Pershing II cruise missiles in Western Europe. The plan, under KGB Director Yuri Andropov, aimed at fostering popular opposition to the deployment included a massive disinformation campaign requiring false scientific reports from the Soviet Academy of Sciences and funding to European anti-nuclear and peace groups opposed to arms proliferation. The Soviet Peace Committee, a government organization, spearheaded the effort by funding and organizing demonstrations in Europe against the US bases.[11] [12] [13] The propaganda was then distributed to sources within environmental, peace, anti-nuclear, and disarmament groups including the publication Ambio.[11] The concept hit mainstream from there and propelled into popular culture with the help of Carl Sagan [14].

Propaganda against the United States included the following actions [15]:

[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. ^ a b 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
  12. ^ Opposition to The Bomb: The fear, and occasional political intrigue, behind the ban-the-bomb movements
  13. ^ 1982 Article "Moscow and the Peace, Offensive"
  14. ^ A 1985 Time magazine account of Alexandrov's disappearance
  15. ^ Mitrokhin, Vasili, Christopher Andrew (2000). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-14-028487-7.

[edit] External links

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