Academic literature on the topic 'Propaganda, Soviet – History'

Abstract: “The strong Baltic nationalistic centre” and Soviet foreign propaganda: from war to peace and toward the Cold War This special issue focuses on censorship, but it is difficult to treat censorship without also considering propaganda. This article discusses both censorship and foreign propaganda as complementary tools in the Soviet Union’s arsenal for manipulating public opinion in foreign countries. The purpose of such action was to shape the behaviour of those states to further Soviet interests. The article focuses on the use of propaganda and censorship in Soviet efforts to settle the “Baltic question”– the question of the future of the Baltic countries – in the 1940s. This was the time when the wartime alliance was crumbling and giving way to a cold-war confrontation. The article is based on Russian archival sources. The Molotov collection (F. 82), materials of the department of propaganda and agitation of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU (F. 17, opis 125), and of the CC department of international information (F. 17, opis 128) are stored in the Russian State Archive of Socio-political History (RGASPI). The collection of the Soviet Information Bureau (F. R8581) is located at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). The article also draws on previous research on Soviet propaganda, such as Vladimir Pechatnov’s and Wolfram Eggeling’s studies on the work of the Soviet Information Bureau (SIB) and on discussions in the Soviet propaganda apparatus in the early postwar years. However, this article digs somewhat deeper and alongside general developments, also looks at a particular case – the Baltic problem in the Soviet contest with the West for winning hearts and minds. It analyses Soviet policies without attempting to uncover and reconstruct all the twists and turns of the decision-making processes in Moscow. The archival material is insufficient for the latter task. Nevertheless, a look into the making of Soviet propaganda, the techniques and practices utilised to bring Soviet influence to bear on an important foreign-policy issue (the Baltic problem), is interesting for scholars working not only on propaganda and censorship but also on the history of the Soviet Union and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic question was related, among other things, to the problem of repatriating people from the territories of the Soviet Union who had been displaced during the Second World War and were located in Western Europe at the war’s end. Moscow claimed that all these displaced persons (DPs) were Soviet citizens. This article helps correct the view, expressed for example by the Finnish scholar Simo Mikkonen, that the Soviet propaganda campaign to attract the remaining 247,000 recalcitrants back home started after a UN decision of 1951 that condemned repatriation by force. This article clearly shows that propaganda policies aimed at the DPs were in place almost immediately after the war, resting on the war-time experience of conducting propaganda aimed at national minorities in foreign countries. However, Mikkonen is right to point out that, in general, repatriation after the Second World War was a success, as approximately five million people in total returned to the USSR. The Baltic refugees were a notable exception in this regard. Research shows that despite displays of obligatory optimism, Soviet propagandists could critically evaluate the situation and the effectiveness of Soviet agitation. They understood that war-time successes were the result of the coincidence of a number of favourable factors: victories of the Red Army, Allied censorship and propaganda, the penetration by Soviet agents of the British propaganda apparatus, etc. They knew that the British media was extensively controlled and served as a virtual extension of Soviet censorship and propaganda. Nevertheless, the Soviets were wrong to assume that in the West, the free press was nothing but an empty slogan. Moscow was also wrong to expect that the Western media, which had worked in the Soviet interest during the war, could as easily be turned against the Soviet Union as it had been directed to support the USSR by political will. In actual fact, the Soviet Union started receiving negative press primarily because earlier checks on journalistic freedom were lifted. The Soviet Union may have been a formidable propaganda state internally, but in foreign propaganda it was an apprentice. Soviet propagandists felt inferior compared to their Western counterparts, and rightly so. In October of 1945, an official of the SIB noted jealously that the Foreign Department of the British Information Ministry had two thousand clerks and there were four hundred British propagandists in the United States alone. Another Soviet official in the London embassy noted in February of 1947 that they had so few staff that he was working under constant nervous strain. Soviet propagandists were aware of the problems but could not effect fundamental changes because of the nature of the Stalinist regime. The issue of foreign journalists working in Moscow was a case in point. The correspondents were handicapped in their work by extremely strict censorship. They could report mostly only those things that also appeared in Soviet newspapers, which was hardly interesting for their readers in the West. There had been suggestions that some restrictions should be lifted so that they could do more useful work and tell more interesting and attractive stories about the Soviet Union. Eventually, during Stalin’s first postwar vacation in the autumn of 1945, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov took the initiative and tried to ease the life of the press corps, but this only served to provoke the ire of Stalin who proceeded to penalise Molotov in due course. This showed that the system could not be changed as long as the extremely suspicious vozhd remained at the helm. Not only did correspondents continue to send unexciting content to newspapers abroad (which often failed to publish them), the form and style of Soviet articles, photos and films were increasingly unattractive for foreign audiences. Such propaganda could appeal only to those who were already “believers”. It could hardly convert. Moscow considered the activities of Baltic refugees in the West and the publicity regarding the Baltic problem a serious threat to the stability of the Soviet position in the newly occupied Baltic countries. Already during the war, but even more vigorously after the war, the Soviet propaganda apparatus realised the importance of tuning and adapting its propaganda messages for audiences among the Baltic diaspora. The Soviet bureaucracy expanded its cadres to enable it to tackle the Baltic “threat”. Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian officials were dispatched to the central organs in Moscow and to Soviet embassies abroad to provide the necessary language skills and qualifications for dealing with Baltic propaganda and working with the diaspora. The policy was to repatriate as many Balts as possible, but it was soon clear that repatriation along with the complementary propaganda effort was a failure. The next step was to start discrediting leaders of the Baltic diaspora and to isolate them from the “refugee masses”. This effort also failed. The “anti-Soviet hotbed” of “intrigues and espionage” – the words of the Estonian party boss Nikolai Karotamm – continued to operate in Sweden, the United States and elsewhere until the end of the Cold War. All this time, the diaspora engaged in anti-Communist propaganda and collaborated with Western propaganda and media organisations, such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and even Vatican Radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, the diaspora was instrumental in assisting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to regain their independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. They also helped their native countries to “return to Europe” – that is to join Western structures such as the European Union and NATO. Therefore, the inability to deal with the Baltic problem effectively in the 1940s caused major concerns for the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War and contributed to its eventual demise.

The article examines the role of the Bolshevik propaganda and agitation in the period of the Soviet power formation, methods and forms of work with the population of polyethnic Ukraine and technologies of mass consciousness manipulation. It is emphasized that the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921 activated the national and socio-political life of the Poles and Jews in Ukraine, in particular in the Volyn province. But the civil war and the Bolshevik aggression led to the destruction of Ukraine's independence, the Sovietization of all spheres of life, in particular Polish and Jewish communities, began. Communist ideology equated national movements with nationalism, fought against them with all possible means. It is noted that the confrontation between the communist party leadership and the Polish and Jewish population was inevitable because the Bolsheviks tried to monopolize and control the ideological, political, spiritual and economic life of national communities. Some Poles and Jews supported the Bolshevik slogans and the policy of the Soviet power, but many of them were not able to compromise and adapt to the needs of a rigid communist ideology.It is highlighted that propaganda was supposed to interpret the Bolshevik ideological slogans and ideas, and campaigning to adjust the masses to decisive action. The complexity of the Bolshevik propaganda and agitation among the Poles and Jews was in the diversity of the social structure. The Soviet atheistic ideology as one of the Bolshevik activities among the Polish and Jewish population of Volhynia considered anti-religious propaganda and agitation, since Judaism and the Catholic Church had authority and great influence on everyday and social life.In an effort to favor the Polish and Jewish masses, the Bolsheviks supported national cultures, created a new system of education, stopped Jewish pogroms, made Poles and Jews legally equal to all Ukrainian citizens. But gradually Bolshevik propaganda and agitation, using various forms and methods of influence on Poles and Jews, reached the goal set by the authorities, turned citizens of the polyethnic region into the Soviet people.

The work aims to study the formation of a system of ideological influence on the Izmail region’s population in 1944–1945. Based on archival sources and materials of the regional press, the tasks of agitation and propaganda activities, the general forms and methods used by the Communist Party to spread ideology among the population of the annexed region were revealed. The author paid particular attention to determining the role of the regional party leadership in managing and conducting agitation and propaganda. The methodology. The study is based on the principles of historicism, scientificity, objectivity, systematics, specificity, and reliance on historical sources. With the aid of the historical-typological method, it was possible to determine the main tasks, forms, and methods of agitation and propaganda. The historical-comparative method opens the way to reveal the peculiarities of ideological work with various categories of the citizens and to determine the specific features of the Communist Party’s agitation and propaganda activities in the Izmail region. The application of historical-systemic and historical-genetic methods contributed to the consideration of various measures to ideologize the population in co-relation, to identify the causal links between the methods and results of propaganda policy. The scientific novelty. For the first time, a comprehensive analysis of agitation and propaganda activities in the Izmail region after the territory was returned to the USSR has been carried out. The conclusions. The analysis of the party documentation of the Izmail regional committee of the Communist Party gives reason to assume that immediately after the region returned to the USSR, the Soviet leadership launched active information and propaganda activities among the population. During 1944–1945, a network of agitation teams, groups of lecturers and speakers was formed to spread communist ideology among various segments of the population, a system of party propaganda bodies was created, events to celebrate new Soviet holidays were organized, and radio broadcasting and adaptation for the cinema were organized. The media, cultural and educational institutions, Komsomol organizations, and pioneers played a significant role in propaganda activities. Propaganda and agitation departments established at the region, city, and district committees of the Communist Party were constantly monitoring the ideological activity progress.

The purpose of this paper is to observe the formation of Russia’s myth of the Great Patriotic War as a tool of Russian propaganda influence and its uses in the Russo-Ukrainian war. The research methodology. The study applies the principles of historicism and objectivity that are essential for revealing historical events in the state policy sphere. The historic and genetic method is employed to determine the sources, development and uses of the myth of the Great Patriotic War as an element of the Russian Federation’s propaganda. The historical and systematic method sustains the analysis of socio-political processes in their interrelation and causal dependence. The scientific novelty of the paper. The research determines the preconditions for the formation of the myth of the Great Patriotic War, its development and subsequent use by the Russian Federation for propaganda purposes in the hybrid war against Ukraine. Conclusions. President Putin’s rise to power in Russia and his goal to assert Russian strength and power in the world, active imperial ambitions, and attempts to maintain control over the post-Soviet space, supported by military actions, necessitated the revival and active use of the myth of the Great Patriotic War. Mythologization of the events of the Second World War became an element of ideological struggle and propaganda activity in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries. Armed actions against Ukraine were preceded by the formation of the “victorious people” attitude in the Russian society, with the myth of the Great Patriotic War being its integral part. Therefore, the Kremlin has managed not only to distract the population from internal problems, but also achieved massive support for Russiaʼs hostilities on the territories of other countries. By pursuing the policy of “appropriating” victory in the war, the Russian government thereby diminishes the contribution of both the allied states and the former Soviet republics to the defeat of Nazism.

Modernity alongside with new technologies development, fundamental changes in the printing industry and informatization of society presented the mankind with such an invention as propaganda. It became an integral part of authoritarian and totalitarian political regimes of the XXth century. However, as a tool of consciousness manipulation, it was actively used by the empires during the "long" XIXth century. In the conditions of the First World War propaganda played a significant role in the mobilization processes and in the formation of the enemy's image. The article attempts to assess the effectiveness of the propaganda during the First World War. The article examines the researches that analyze the events of the war from the point of view of Soviet, modern Ukrainian and foreign historiography and contain descriptions of the propaganda campaign on the front line and in the rear. The state of modern historical research is highlighted and the prospects of further research are indicated. The study of the experience of the First World War and the information component of the fighting can be useful, given the fact that the Russian Federation today uses ideological stamps of that period.The analysis of existing studies on the issues of the First World War in general and its propaganda component in particular proves an increasing interest in the investigation of information warfare topic. Since 2014, the number of studies devoted to the First World War has increased in domestic and foreign research. The Ukrainian regions were a part of Austria-Hungary and Russia, so the usage of the Ukrainian national question in the propaganda of those states was significant. However, the issue of the propaganda war between the two empires is not covered comprehensively.The first study on this subject was of general practical character. The first foreign scholars who examined propaganda were mass communication specialists. For Soviet historical science, the priority task was to study the revolutionary events of 1917 and the period of the civil war. The events of 1914-1918 were interpreted only as an imperialist war, their study was conducted tendentiously. Modern historiography on the First World War reflects the main directions of the European historical school at the beginning of the XXIst century with a focus on social and socio-cultural history. Foreign historiography is represented by Russian, European and American authors. In their research considerable attention is paid to the topic of military psychology and cultural-anthropological aspects of war. The analysis of the extent of the given problem research in the studies of foreign historians suggests a sufficient level of its investigation. Modern historians pay much attention to the ideological aspect, the analysis of visual propaganda. The interest in considering the mechanisms for the formation of images of the enemy, its state and allies increased. A promising object of historical research is the study of the verbal and nonverbal aspects of the propaganda production of both empires.

The emergence of a Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s was hardly predictable. Bolsheviks’ propaganda for ‘world revolution’ reduced the image of Soviet Russia to one of Leninist-proletarian victory, while the rejection of diplomatic tradition and a distrust of artists and intellectuals precluded any commitment to cultural action abroad. This article explores how, when and why a Soviet cultural diplomacy developed. It focuses on two episodes related to the famine of 1921, including, based on new archival evidence, the First Exhibition of Russian Art in Berlin in October 1922. The exhibition's spectacular success paved the way for Soviet cultural diplomacy that moved away from overtly communist propaganda in order to address Western avant-garde literary and artistic milieus.

The Yugoslav exhibition of consumer goods in Moscow was the first of its kind organized by Yugoslavia in a communist country. It opened its door to the public on May 25, 1960, amidst the super-heated international political environment after the American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Following the colossal propaganda success of the 1959 U.S. National Exhibition in Moscow, the Yugoslavs managed to deliver yet another propaganda blow to the Soviet prestige, showcasing that even socialism outside the Soviet bloc and in close collaboration with the United States was not only possible but also better.

Sociological polls and other sources, as well as electoral statistics, show that Soviet power in 1918– 1989 met the main criteria for legitimacy. In 1918–1929, the majority of voters, and in 1931–1989 over 83 % of the electorate, were loyal to the Soviet regime, trusted the communists and the general course and current policy, were satisfied with the status as ordinary builders of socialism, and believed in the socialist project. Official information on turnout and voting is trustworthy, although it has serious shortcomings and likely underestimates the scale of the protest vote (failure to appear, damage to ballots, voting against). Election results were influenced by electoral laws, propaganda, and control over the course of voting. However, clean elections have never happened anywhere. The legitimacy of power in any civilized country was supported by developed propaganda, and in the USSR it was not more powerful than, for example, in the USA or Germany. The study allows us to assume that until the mid-1980s the people’s confidence in Soviet power was ensured not so much by propaganda as, first, by achievements of the USSR, which were considered by the majority of the population to be real, significant, and deserving of respect; second, by faith in the socialist project; and third, by peculiarities of political culture of the peasantry and the proletariat inherited from pre-revolutionary times. From their perspective, the people interacted with authorities and participated in management. The socialist project for only a small minority represented only a grandiose myth, a gigantic propaganda campaign, and an adventure or scam of world-historical scale.

The article analyzes the implementation mechanism and organizational system of anti-religious agitation and propaganda in Soviet Ukraine. The author recorded a conflict between the republican and all-union centers for religious cults regarding the implementation of religious policies and atheization of the population. It is analyzed how the change in the state leadership of the USSR in 1954 led to a radical reassessment of the ideological struggle with religion as a relic of class formations in the minds of people.It was established that in the 1960s cinematographic works were actively involved in anti-religious propaganda. The actual number of regional commissioners to the Council for Religious Affairs also increased, committees for assistance were set up in all cities and districts of the regions, public councils for the coordination of anti-religious work were organized under the regional committees of the Communist Party of Ukraine. It was found out that within the framework of the atheistic education of society, the Soviet leadership introduced the concept of Soviet «non-religious» holidays and rituals, honoring the leaders of communist labor. The structural formalization of organizations responsible for the introduction of the new Soviet rituals in the 1970s is analyzed.The article describes the employment of the media resource and state publishing houses that published millions of copies of atheistic periodicals and literature for the sake of «eradicating the religious consciousness of the masses» by the party leadership. The reduction of state influence on the affairs of believers since the mid-1960s and the harsh criticism of the liberal course in relation to religion at the All-Union Conference of Commissioners for Religious Affairs in 1972 are analyzed. It is proved that, despite the «Perestroika», the idea of religion as a reactionary ideology and the need to transform the society of mass atheism into a society of general atheism prevailed in atheistic education.The author found out that in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine a discussion on the importance of rethinking the strategy of religious policy to establish a dialogue with churches and guaranteeing believers the possibility of religious freedom began only in 1990.

During the Civil War, Soviet workers had to fight against desertion and banditry. Since the majority of the country’s population was the peasantry, a confrontation arose with the Soviet government of that part of it that could not accept it. More often than not, peasants fell under such Bolshevik propaganda labels as “white gangs” or “gangs of deserters”, which had spread through the efforts of the party-Soviet propaganda machine. According to archival documents, local Soviet workers used terror not only to suppress resistance, but also as a forced measure caused by the real military-political situation in the Perm Governorate. The fight for the establishment of the power of the Soviets was fought against banditry, not desertion, and was fierce. Consequently, the widespread thesis in the history of the Civil War in the Perm Governorate about mass desertion is nothing more than an assumption. The line of the Eastern Front passed next to the Osinsky District, so the most fierce fight unfolded here, which in turn had an impact on the military-political situation in the governorate as a whole.

This thesis is the first detailed study of the way in which science and technology were portrayed in propaganda and popular culture during the Khrushchëv period, a time when the Soviet leadership invested significant resources, both at home and abroad, in order to capitalise on its scientific achievements. It draws upon a wide range of previously unseen materials from the archives of the RSFSR Ministry of Education, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the State Committee on Radio and Television and the Central Committee of the CPSU. It provides the first archive-based analysis of the lecturing organisation 'Znanie', which was crucial to the dissemination of Soviet propaganda in the post-war period. The thesis also makes use of a variety of published sources, such as popular science publications and journals, as well as a number of Soviet films from the Khrushchëv period. The thesis examines the manner in which scientific information was disseminated to the Soviet public and the ways in which public scientific opinion was able to participate in, and influence, this process. It is shown that a general lack of institutionalised control enabled members of the scientific intelligentsia to exercise a degree of control over the content of scientific propaganda, often in a very idiosyncratic fashion. The way in which the rhetorical and ideological presentation of science changed during the Khrushchëv period (often identified as 'the Thaw') is analysed, and it is shown that while Soviet popular science did become increasingly open to foreign influence it became preoccupied with new threats, such as generational and personal conflict. The thesis also uses the available sources to consider popular responses to scientific propaganda and, in particular, whether attempts to use scientific-atheistic propaganda to create a 'materialist' worldview amongst Soviet citizens met with any success. The thesis provides detailed case studies of the use of science in Khrushchëv's atheistic campaigns, of propaganda surrounding early Soviet achievements in the space race and of the portrayal of the Lysenko controversy in the popular media.

The use of arguments containing increasingly technical materials has grown significantly in the recent years. Specifically, arguments that are used to justify military expenditures or to allege violations of international agreements are becoming more sophisticated. This study examines the dissemination and use of technical argument in claims made by the United States government that the Soviet Union violated chemical and biological treaties in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan. This study employs the Jowett-O'Donnell method for analyzing propaganda to determine the extent and effectiveness of the government's claims. The study concludes that propaganda was used extensively by the government in order to justify new weapons programs and that the propaganda campaign was effective because of the technological orientation of its claims.

In both western and Russian historiography the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40 enjoys, at best, only a passing reference in any narrative of the period and is poorly integrated into existing scholarly analyses of the Soviet regime under Stalin. It is my contention that this conflict offers an invaluable opportunity to test for continuity and change in the form and function of the Stalinist system. Between the disastrous efforts of its forces and the condemnation of the international community, the Kremlin was confronted with the serious challenge of how to portray the events of the war in the media, while managing domestic and international opinion over the course of the fighting. This thesis examines the extent to which the Soviet regime under Stalin had the institutions and agents in place at the close of the 1930s to cope with the crisis of war in Finland; to be in command of the military campaign, while simultaneously controlling the direction of the official narrative about the fighting; and to censor conflicting interpretations, experiences and information channels, which might expose the Red Army's woeful performance on Finnish territory. This mobilisation of press, propaganda and censorship organs in the face of widespread international condemnation and domestic disquiet constituted a significant challenge for a regime still dealing with the sudden reorientation of the Communist International, required after the Soviet Union's conclusion of a non-aggression treat with Nazi Germany in August 1939. An international perspective is central to this thesis, with a view towards assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the public face and private practice of Soviet information controls.

La investigación ha abordado los contactos oficiales y extraoficiales entre España y la Unión Soviética durante el siglo XX, y, especialmente, se ha centrado en la proyección del modelo soviético desplegado por las Asociaciones de Amistad, tales como la Sección Española de los Amigos de la Unión Soviética y la Asociación España - URSS, como un medio de calibrar su impacto en España. Asimismo, se ha prestado atención a las asociaciones de amistad británicas para comparar el relativo éxito de estas asociaciones en los dos países. Las principales fuentes utilizadas han sido los fondos VOKS y SODD, procedentes de los archivos estatales rusos, documentos privados de las Asociaciones y testimonios, los cuales han sido cruciales para comprender estas asociaciones, los problemas que encararon así como sus éxitos y fracasos. Las Asociaciones de Amistad con la Unión Soviética fueron un medio de difundir ideales - el antifascismo y la coexistencia pacífica- defendidos por el gobierno Soviético. Así, estas asociaciones constituyeron un tipo de diplomacia popular. En términos generales, la gente que creía en un modelo diferente al capitalista se unió a estas asociaciones y proveyeron ejemplos de respecto en un mundo multicultural. Debido a ello, su mensaje no es obsoleto en el mundo de hoy.
The research deals with the official and unofficial contacts between Spain and the Soviet Union, focussing particularly on those perceptions of the latter disseminated through the various Friendship societies, such as the Spanish Friends of the Soviet Union and the Spain - USSR Society. As a way of assessing their impact in Spain, a chapter is dedicated to the British Friendship societies, which will compare the relative successes of these societies in the two countries. The main sources utilized have been the VOKS and SSOD files from the Russian Federation archives, private documents of the societies and testimonies, which have been crucial to understanding these associations, the problems they faced, as well as their successes and failures.The friendship societies with the Soviet Union were a way of spreading ideals -antifascism and peaceful coexistence - championed by the Soviet government. As such, these societies were a type of popular diplomacy. Broadly speaking, people who believed in a different model than capitalism joined these associations and they provided examples of respect in a multicultural world. Because of that, their message is not obsolete in today's world.

A travers l’étude de l’œuvre du cinéaste Roman Karmen, nous souhaitons reconstituer un patrimoine et tenter d’en définir les enjeux autour de questions historiographiques. En effet, les images de l’opérateur soviétique n’ont pas seulement marqué l’histoire du XXème, elles ont en partie contribué à la construire en un objet unique. Les propriétés métonymiques de l’image (photographies et prises de vues) ont bouleversé notre perception en même temps qu’elles ont participé à la construction d’un récit historique général d’un nouvel ordre. Il s’agit d’un récit visuel complexe où se mêlent prises de vues sur le vif et mises en scène, motifs et emblèmes, personnages principaux, personnages secondaires et masses anonymes. Disséminées, ces prises de vues constituent le principal réservoir d’images dites d’archives dont se servent régulièrement les documentaristes contemporains pour faire « témoigner l’Histoire ». Retracer le parcours de Karmen permet de revenir aux sources de ces images, de comprendre leurs enjeux, leurs contextes de production et leurs rapports au sein d’une œuvre dont le récit se confond avec l’Histoire. Nous faisons ici l’hypothèse que ce récit constitué de prises de vues, d’actualités et de films documentaires est à l’origine « d’une vulgate soviétique de l’Histoire »
With the study of Roman Karmen’s cinematographic work, we want to retrace a heritage and to identify its implications through an historiographical approach. Not only did the Soviet filmmaker’s images go down in history but they also contributed to shape the twentieth century into a single object. Indeed, the metonymic properties of Karmen’s shootings (cinematographic photography and live action) upset our perception and contributed to build an historical account that sustains a new order. It is a complex visual narrative bringing together live action and staging, subjects and emblems, main characters, secondary characters and anonymous masses. Disseminated, Roman Karmen’s work is the main reservoir of “archival images” often used by contemporary documentary filmmakers as a mean to present “first-hand History”. Following Roman Karmen’s artistic itinerary allows us to gain a better understanding of these images: their initial purposes, their making process, and their relationships in a work within which story merges with History. We assume that this narrative consisting of pictures, cinematic newsreels, and documentary films shaped the “Soviet vulgate of history”

The First Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-1921) left an important mark on the history of the country. One hundred years have passed since the occupation of Georgia by Russian troops. However, during the Soviet era, Soviet propaganda did not portray the incident as such; on the contrary, on February 25, 1921, the day the capital was captured, the country's population celebrated “Sovietization.” During the three years of independence, a lot has been done by the national government for the development of the country, as a result of selfless work in terms of establishing democracy. Thus, the chapter deals with the annexation and conquest of the independent republic of Georgia by Soviet Russia. Especially, it gives the analysis of the events of February-March 1921 which has its reflection even nowadays. Moreover, it clearly illustrates the Russian-Georgian War of 2008, which practically divided the country into three parts and damaged Georgia's territorial integrity.

By any standards, the resilience displayed byWarsaw duringWorld War II and its aftermath was awesome. The city endured three waves of destruction: during the German invasion of 1939, the Jewish ghetto uprising of 1943, and theWarsaw uprising of 1944 and their aftermaths. After the last had been put down, Adolf Hitler ordered the city to be destroyed entirely, and particular care was taken by the Nazis to individually target monuments and buildings of any historic, cultural, or aesthetic significance. This was done with grim efficiency, and by the time the Soviet army occupied the city in January 1945, over 80 percent of the buildings in the city lay in ruins. Of the 780 buildings on the historic register, only 35 survived intact. One of those buildings that survived—the Lazienski Palace—still had bore holes ready for dynamite which German sappers had not had time to insert when the city was captured. On visiting Warsaw in 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower commented that he had never before witnessed destruction executed with such bestiality. There had been no military justification for the devastation. Yet almost from the moment the city was liberated, it began to recover. In the first two months after liberation, sappers and workers were able to remove 100,000 mines and unexploded shells from the ruins, and 1 million cubic meters of rubble were removed by the end of 1947. Despite a lack of electricity, water, transportation, and other basic infrastructure, the population doubled to 366,000 within four months. Reconstruction of key streets and repairable buildings began immediately, and new residential areas were planned and later constructed. Within just eleven years, the city would recover its prewar population and could be said to be a fully functional capital. But the jewel in the crown of the reconstruction was undoubtedly the rebuilding of the Old Town, the historic core of the city that symbolized 700 years of Warsaw’s history. Its completion—in 1961—above all suggested a rebirth of Poland’s cultural and historical identity. There has been a spectrum of resilience displayed by the city’s inhabitants.

This chapter goes back in time to look at the Soviet construction of the Russian term fashizm and some of the ambiguities that the Soviet society cultivated toward the term and its historical personification, Nazi Germany. It recalls that the term fascism (fashizm), in Soviet times, belonged more to an emotional than to an analytical lexicon. The chapter also discusses Russia's history and Russians' memories of the Second World War, called the Great Patriotic War in Russian (Velikaia otechestvennaia voina) and Victory Day (Den´ pobedy). It reviews how the cult of war is intimately linked to the Brezhnev era and provided the context in which commemoration of the Great Patriotic War was institutionalized as a sacred symbol of the Soviet Union, a confirmation of the soundness of the socialist system and the unity of its peoples. The chapter then argues that the very solemnity of Soviet anti-fascism, and its centrality to the country's political identity constitute the fundaments inherited from Soviet times on the basis of which the notion of fascism is operationalized in today's Russia. Ultimately, the chapter further elaborates the three main sources of the Soviet's cryptic fascination with Nazi Germany and source of knowledge about fashizm: the Nazi propaganda, criminal culture, and cinema and culture.

This chapter focuses on Komsomol’skaia pravda’s unlikely role in the revival of Soviet sociology after many years of repression under Stalin. In 1960, Boris Grushin, a journalist in Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Department of Propaganda, created the Institute of Public Opinion (IOM), the country’s first ever polling institute. Over eight years, the IOM conducted surveys on a broad range of questions, from the public’s use of free time to their opinions about the Communist Youth League, or ‘Komsomol’. Readers responded enthusiastically to this novel initiative, which for the first time offered the Soviet public a glimpse of the views of their fellow citizens. Journalists were no less effusive, especially because the Institute’s earliest surveys produced results that seemed to prove that the public supported the regime’s policies. However, as the paper’s journalists-turned-sociologists began to probe deeper into the public mood, they uncovered gaps between rhetoric and the public mood. This placed the paper’s editors in an uncomfortable position with officials and seemed to complicate the newspaper’s propaganda tasks. This chapter analyses the IOM’s work, placing it within a longer history of Soviet sociological research, shows how readers responded to the paper’s experiment in polling, and examines the reasons for the IOM’s untimely closure in 1968.

As representatives of the West in China, to use Isabel Crook’s words, the long-term residents were active participants in the PRC’s ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ (or ‘friendship diplomacy’) which, like its Soviet counterpart, was directed towards influencing foreign public opinion, especially in the West. In her book A History of China’s Foreign Propaganda 1949–1966, PRC journalist and author Xi Shaoying saw the long-term residents, along with short-term invited ‘friends of China’, as playing an integral role in the government’s ‘foreign propaganda work’. In the West, the long-termers’ most contentious activity was their support for the PRC against their own governments.

The Conclusion summaries the book’s findings and proposes that an institutional approach to cinema history is well suited to provide specific answers about how ideology affects cinema. Films are produced not by ideologies, but by filmmakers and film executives working within a certain institutional environment. What ideology determines are the institutions. The institutions of Soviet cinema were ill equipped to mass-produce propaganda films, because the Stalinist ideological ambition to make “superior” films precluded industrial development. The combination of strong political ambition and weak institutional policy was detrimental to the success of the Soviet mass-cinema project.

This chapter considers Mikhail Suslov as the most effective and successful propaganda machine in the history of mankind that the Soviet Union produced. It details how Leonid Brezhnev left the entire ideological sphere to his party ideologue because their views on the basic political course of the regime and the strategy of the Soviet state were identical. It also discusses Brezhnev's restoration of Soviet military supremacy in the world and the tightening of control over society while ensuring continued domination over the Eastern Bloc countries. The chapter explains how Brezhnev left an indelible imprint on the Soviet politics after Joseph Stalin and analyzes why Yugoslavs perceived him as their main enemy. It recounts Marshal Zhukov's provision of army support for Nikita Khrushchev's silent coup, while the members of the “anti-party group” were sent to irrelevant positions in backwater places.

After World War II, a variety of new forces including the Cold War, decolonization, globalization, and economic development shaped the world. Books and reading were imagined to have a special place in this post-war period – shaping the modern society and the modern citizen, and through these, a modern world. This chapter will examine the various ways in which books and reading were imagined and promoted as working at a global level, especially in the promotion of modernization ideology in developing countries. Such work was effected by organisations such as UNESCO, which campaigned for literacy, fundamental education programmes, and the building of libraries. Government programmes such as the British Council, the United States Information Agency, and Soviet propaganda programmes, bound up with foreign policy concerns, aimed to use reading to shape populations around the globe. The chapter examines the specific ideologies of reading that were developed in the post-war period, and considers how these intersected with global issues such as intellectual freedom, human rights, nation building, and modernization.

After Stalin’s death, journalists began to rethink the nature of the Soviet newspaper. The press, which had acted as a vehicle for the Stalin cult and as a repository of official information, appeared hidebound and conservative, offering little to the non-activist reader. This introduction briefly sets out the changes that characterised the press after Stalin’s death. It places Komsomol’skaia pravda’s history within the broader trajectory of the post-revolutionary Soviet newspaper, and argues that Thaw journalism is best considered as an aesthetic, a professional code and a practice. As an aesthetic, journalists were committed to a more reader-friendly newspaper that would interest its young readers; as a professional code, journalists committed themselves to the public good; but as a practice, the high ideals and the more mundane day-to-day requirements of propaganda often clashed

The article analyzes the main anti-propaganda accents in Mikhail Epstein’s essayistic argumentation about such messages of modern Russian propaganda as “Russia is threatened by an external enemy”, “Russia is a significant, powerful country”, “The collapse of the USSR was a tragedy”, “Russia is a special spiritual civilization”, “Our cause in Donbass is sacred”, “The enemy uses, or may use of illegal weapons”... A special emphasis is placed on the fact that the basis of these concepts is primarily ontological rather than ideological. Ideology is rather a cover for problematic Russian existence as a consequence of Russia’s problematic identity and for its inability to find itself in history. As a result, Russia is trying to resolve its historical issues geographically, through spatial expansion, trying to implement ideologemes such as “The Great Victory. We can repeat” or “Novorossia”. That is why M. Epstein clearly identifies the national and psychological basis of the Kremlin’s behavior in 2014-2021. М. Epstein easily refutes the main ideologemes of Russian propaganda. This gives grounds to claim that Russian political technologists use the classical principles of propaganda: ignore people who think; if the addressee is the masses, focus on a few simple points; reduce each problem to the lowest common denominator that the least educated person can repeat and remember; be guided by historical realities that appeal to well-known events and symbols and appeal to emotions, not to the mind. М. Epstein’s argumentation clearly points to another feature of modern Russian propaganda: if Soviet propaganda was concerned with the plausibility of its lies, then Kremlin propaganda does not care at all. It totally spreads lies, often ignoring even attempts to offer half-truth.