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Communications and media in the USSR and Eastern Europe

2015; Éditions de l'EHESS; Volume: 56; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4000/monderusse.8182

1777-5388

Kristin Roth‐Ey, Larissa Zakharova,

European history and politics

Communications in socialist Europe have long been associated first and foremost with propaganda.The USSR-the world's first "propaganda state," to use Peter Kenez's term -established a radical new communications order that would be widely emulated."The Bolshevik regime," wrote Kenez in an influential 1985 study, "was the first not merely to set itself propaganda goals but also through political education to aim to create a new humanity suitable for living in a new society." 1 Propaganda, in this sense, had no strictly delimited "political" sphere of operation in the Soviet/socialist context ; on the contrary, it was embedded in all aspects of cultural, social, and economic life.Propaganda was also, it bears emphasizing, devoid of dismissive ("mere propaganda") and negative (propaganda-as-brainwashing) connotations in the new lexicon-at least when applied to the socialist context.Propaganda in socialist hands was celebrated as an essential, progressive tool of socialist modernity.Communications in support of propaganda diffusion-from the early agitpoezdy and posters to publishing and broadcasting, film, theater, and so on-received major support from the hard-pressed "propaganda state." 2 2 Beyond the Soviet Union, the relationship between propaganda and public, or popular, opinion 3 has preoccupied observers since at least the1920s, when thousands of foreigners travelled East to learn what made the socialist state and society tick, and when the Soviets themselves began an expansive and, in many regards, innovative program of cultural diplomacy. 4The question of whether Soviet propaganda "worked" was thus a foundational one in the West, invested with hopes and fears alike.As the cold war heated up in the late 1940s, the problem of propaganda-now often discussed in terms of state-sponsored "psychological" (or "political") warfare-gained even greater force. 5 The main lines of what would later be dubbed a "totalitarian" school in Soviet studies presented a model of the Soviet regime as resting on the dual pillars of propaganda and repression or, in Lenin's terms, "on a balance between coercion and Communications and media in the USSR and Eastern Europe