Early Soviet rule saw a lot of improvised propaganda shows, with flashy, right-in-your-face visuals
A cable car in the Red Square converted into a coffin for Capitalists. This happened on the occasion of the 1st of May festivities in Moscow in 1927. The text says “Russian Capitalism. Now, it’s the turn for the foreign one.” The coffin is decorated by a swastika, a hangman, and an impression of the Grim Reaper preparing his tools for the Capitalist holdovers.
In Soviet Russia, candy had to serve the cause of Communist revolution
The early 1920s. Wrapping of Soviet candy brand “Red Moscow”, produced by the State Candy Plant Red October. An armed worker is guarding a mountain of proletarian sugar. The Communist pentagram is substituted by a red Star of David with abbreviation “R.S.F.S.R” (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) on it.
Posters and propaganda art give a clear idea of the core values behind their ideologies. Communism versus Capitalism illustrate this clearly.
Art celebrating state power is interesting to compare and contrast between Socialist and Capitalist societies.
The poster below was printed for the 22nd Party Congress. This was in 1961, when NikitaKhrushchev promised the nation to build Communism by 1980. It shows a procession of Soviet people marching toward a bright future of social justice, spiritual perfection and material cornucopia.
What makes it uniquely pertaining to Real Socialism?
Below, the painting “You are not forgotten”, by Jon McNaughton, from “The Empowered Man” series.
Starting the fire of world revolution at any cost was the top priority of Soviet rulers during the first years of the Communist rule.
Incendiary message from Soviet Russia in 1920. The motif below was a suggestion for decorating the city hall in Moscow, called “Red Knight”. It mimics the style of pre-revolutionary lacquer decorations popular with peasants. This is a man in ethnic Russian clothes who carries a torch of revolution around the world riding on a winged horse. In the background, a Parthenon-like edifice of Capitalism is being consumed by flames. Text: “We’ll set ablaze the entire world with the fire of the III International“.
The Soviet Union prohibited publication or even imports of “anti-Soviet” and “ideologically vague” books. Being caught in contact with them was a sure way to become a dissident.
Inside the Soviet Union, replication and dissemination of system-critical books and articles was an impossibility. Publishing was performed by state or co-operative agencies. Publishing was under total ideological control. State censorship covered everything. Individual citizens are not allowed to engage in such activities.
Even small print runs of the Bible and psalm books required explicit permission from the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Nothing deemed even remotely critical of Real Socialism was ever translated. If you traveled abroad and had such books in your luggage entering the country, they would be confiscated. If you were a foreign citizen, you risked to be expelled. Soviet citizens in possession of such books could be indicted for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. Titles in Russian and other languages spoken in the country were considered an aggravating evidence.
Single copies of “anti-Soviet” and “ideologically vague” works were available to “specialists” and “researchers” in Spetskhran, repositories of classified printed matters and publications with tightly regulated access. Selected members of Nomenklatura had access to referentskyie obzory, a kind of executive summaries on a range of classified subjects, including a description of book plots, with essential quotes.
” works were available to “specialists” and “researchers” in Spetskhran, repositories of classified printed matters and publications with tightly regulated access. Selected members of Nomenklatura had access to referentskyie obzory, a kind of executive summaries on a range of classified subjects, including a description of book plots, with essential quotes.
This job was assigned to the most trusted translators with impeccable resumes. Their work was anonymous and resembled the Wiki style.
Enthusiasts of reading sometimes translated some of prohibited works and spread them around in the form of Samizdat (“kitchentable publishing”). This involved producing six (sometimes more) carbon copies of a title using typing machines, which then would be handed to six other people who produced another batch for further cycles.
These Samizdat pieces circumvented state control and changed hands even when the disseminators were caught by the police. Novels, poems and songs
they contained enjoyed wide popularity, much more than most of the titles peddled by official media and mouthpieces.
George Orwell’s 1984 failed to impact Soviet, and later Russian culture in any meaningful way
The literary horizons of Soviet citizens were dictated by the tastes of our authorities. Few could read in English, and even fewer traveled abroad where British books were widely available.
We read James Aldridge, Bernard Shaw, Herbert Wells and other authors who held more benevolent views on the Communist project. Graham Greene, in occasional translations and a tiny circulation, was on the verge of the prohibited.
George Orwell, for understandable reasons, was not a popular author in the USSR. From time to time, we saw his name in propaganda as an example of Capitalist abomination under the guise of high literature. We were told that the story was a satire of the BBC, but the perverted mind of its author and his anti-Soviet backers projected it all on our beautiful country.
Yet, even for those few who got access to “1984”, it failed to make an impact. Orwell was way too refined and reflective, to us, to be considered effective anti-Soviet propaganda. “Big Brother”, as it was in the book, bore no allusions to our rulers or the secret service. No one in their right mind would consider these people their brothers. Stalin was our Great Father, and any brotherly affection to him in public would raise many eyebrows, to say the least.
The 1984 universe was too sanitized and rational to reflect anything of the leaden, fusty, often absurd version of totalitarianism we were used to seeing around us. It reminded us more of the Nazi ordnung, with additions of an Anglo-Saxon coolness that subtracted from the horror the story was meant to project. We knew that the Nazis were the worst enemies to us. Therefore, it was some weird story about what the world would have been, if we had not won WW2.
A total dud, propaganda-wise.
Picture: “Happy New Year, Beloved Stalin!” As you see, the portrait of Stalin bears nothing even remotely brotherly. And there was hardly anything high-tech. Our secret police always preferred unimpeded human touch.
Propaganda in 21st century is no longer an exclusive domain of top players like the state, national media, church and political parties. It’s now everyone’s game
Human are social animals. Whatever we strive to achieve in life, is dependent on cooperation from other people. Consciously or unconsciously, all of us strive to instrumentalize others in order to get through another day.
Therefore, as a propaganda veteran, I believe that hardly anything people tell each other, is ever unbiased. To be on the safe side, you always must assume that every piece of information passed around by humans is propaganda— you just have to accept that, like death and taxes.
And only then you may have a luxury to pick occasional bits that are not propaganda. Because around humans, non-propaganda happens, too.
In my time in propaganda, people believed that propaganda is something that only flows in the top-down direction. That is, it’s something only those in power do: governments, the church, political parties, established gurus, religious cults. The classic Marxist definition of propaganda is:
“popularization and dissemination of political, philosophical, religious, scientific, artistic or other ideas in society through oral speech, the media, visual or other means of influencing public consciousness”.
The arrival of the Internet and social media made this definition outdated. The new tools of mass communication made each of us capable of what earlier only governments could do. Nowadays, words of many celebrities on the Facebook and Twitter make more impact that of presidents, prime ministers and the Pope. This makes it necessary to modify the XX-century definition. The new one, that takes the 360-degree impact of today’s communication, would be comething like that:
Propaganda is any act of human communication intended to impact the behavior of the target to suit the source’s objective.
The photo below shows an example of 360-degree propaganda in the XXI century. The shoelaces of this Twitter user are tied to form Cyrillic letters ПТН ПНХ. This is an improvised attempt to communicate an anti-Putinist message in terms of the urban youth subculture: the letters are known to be the code for a subversive rally cry Pútin, poshól nákhui (“Putin, f*ck off”), which can get you a couple years in a Russian prison for “extremism”.
Documentation of WW2 in the Soviet Union was subject to strict requirement of the official narrative. Private documents were scarce and keeping them often risky
Documentation of WW2 in the Soviet Union was heavily tilted by the official narrative.
The USSR was a security-obssessed power. Especially during Stalin’s era, it strived to be a hell for spies, saboteurs and turncoats. And it was indeed.
All this explains, why on the WWII forums, even the most patriotic Russians often operate with quotes from German war memoirs, Nazi archives and German photos. We often have too few own data, and those available were heavily sanitized during the war and after it.
Which leads us to the following point.
The Soviet Communists were the most consummate ideologists of all times, probably beating to that title even the Catholic church. Bolsheviks knew not only how to lie in the most majestic, inspiring ways. They also knew that ideology should never stand in the way of expediency. That required the sublime art of covering their actions in plain sight. Stalin and his people simply excelled at this.
Contrary to Nazis, Bolsheviks, starting with Stalin, made a good job of disguising their true intentions, when they knew enemies could use it against them. No advertising for lebensraum, or unsubstantiated hate speech. No Trotskyists “permanent revolutions” and suchlike. The same went for documentation.
Suffice to say, in my time in the Soviet propaganda, we denied the existence of the secret protocols to the ’39 Soviet-German pact to the very end. The Soviet archives preceding WWII show great holes for the details of how the Red Army and the Soviet leadership were preparing for the oncoming war. Everything that’s left points in the direction of “stupid Stalin having too much faith in Hitler’s honesty”.
Why?
The victory in WWII has been the cornerstone of our national identitly ever since 1945. No Russian ruler, and very few Russian opinion leaders, or historians—with a short exception before and after the collapse of Communism—have shown any desire to dig deep into history, for the fear of disrupting the narrative of our greatness. We don’t even know the exact number of our dead during the war.
We are going to live with some huge white spots, and a myriad of tiny ones over the history of Soviet WW2 for some time, maybe forever. And you know what—the nation is perfectly fine with it.
Picture: Anyone with a camera in their possession in the Red Army needed such an ID. Their owners were stars among the troops: they could fix you a mugshot to send home—maybe, the last one, before you die in the next attack, or from an incoming mortar shell.
Top five book titles for an aspiring ruler, suggested by former Soviet propaganda executive