Agit-train

The agit-train concept was revived during the years of World War II as a mechanism for the direct spread of information during a time when ordinary means of communication and government control structures between the center and the periphery had faltered.

[2] In the summer of 1918 the Military Section of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets determined to expand the role of trains beyond that of the occasional distribution of leaflets, establishing a permanent "agit-train" (agitpoyezd) for the dedicated purpose of agitation and propaganda (agitprop), the V.I.

The best known of the agit-trains, the October Revolution, counted among its complement Mikhail Kalinin as its political commissar, who spent the bulk of the civil war years riding the rails — with the train making a dozen trips in 1919 alone, each averaging about three weeks.

[8] Throughout the year the train followed the moving military front in an effort to bolster morale of the Red Army soldiers engaged in hostilities and to build support for the revolution in the towns and populated enclaves located just back of the skirmish lines.

[8] More controversial aspects of Soviet policy like restrictions on grain trade were contextualized in terms of their end goal to benefit all, and passionate appeals were made to the peasantry to voluntarily donate food to the starving cities.

[8] Official Soviet statistics — likely inflated to some extent — indicated that over the course of 1919 and 1920 agit-trains and agit-boats and activists riding bicycles visited 4,000 offices and factories, conducted 1,891 meetings, gave more than 1,000 lectures, and distributed about 1.5 million leaflets and newspapers.

[7] Leading Bolshevik artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), El Lissitsky (1890–1941), and Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) were commissioned to paint car exteriors and their work was bold and memorable, albeit sometimes criticized as too abstract for a poorly educated and largely uncultured rural audience.