Eastern Bloc media and propaganda
State and party ownership of print, television and radio media served as an important manner in which to control information and society in light of Eastern Bloc leaderships viewing even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat to the bases underlying communist power therein.
During the Russian Civil War that followed, coinciding with the Red Army's entry into Minsk in 1919, Belarus was declared the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia.
[citation needed] At the end of World War II, all eastern and central European capitals were controlled by the Soviet Union.
[12] The Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was also wrongfully considered part of the Bloc[13][14] in spite of the Tito–Stalin Split that occurred in 1948,[15] followed by the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement.
[8] The defining characteristic of communism as implemented in the Eastern Bloc was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres.
[16] Initially, Stalin directed systems that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, multi-party governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet parlance) and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state.
[21] Furthermore, the Eastern Bloc experienced economic mis-development by central planners resulting in those countries following a path of extensive rather than intensive development and thus lagging far behind their western European counterparts in per capita Gross Domestic Product.
[23] The ruling authorities viewed media as a propaganda tool, and widely practiced censorship to exercise almost full control over the information dissemination.
[26] Eastern Bloc authorities viewed the dissemination and portrayal of knowledge as vital to the survival of communism and thus stifled alternative concepts and critiques.
Radio was initially the dominant medium, with television being considered low on the priority list when compiling five-year plans during the industrialisation of the 1950s.
[29] Unlike the rest of the Eastern Bloc, relative freedom existed for three years in Czechoslovakia until Soviet-style censorship was fully applied in 1948,[29] along with the Czechoslovak Revolution.
[30] Cultural products reflected the propaganda needs of the state[30] and Party-approved censors exercised strict control in the early years.
[31] Under Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania, weather reports were doctored so that the temperatures were not seen to rise above or fall below the levels which dictated that work must stop.
[29] One or two representatives of censorship agencies modeled on the Soviet GLAVLIT (Main Administration for the Protection of Official and Military Secrets) worked directly in all editorial offices.
[33] While the initial SVAG policies did not appear to differ greatly from those in the western occupation zones governing denazification,[34] censorship became one of the most overt instruments used to manipulate political, intellectual and cultural developments in East Germany.
Thereafter, official East German censorship was supervised and carried out by two governmental organizations, the Head office for publishing companies and bookselling trade (Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel, HV), and the Bureau for Copyright (Büro für Urheberrechte).
Technical and diplomatic considerations meant attempts at jamming Western Stations were (unlike in other Eastern bloc countries) soon abandoned.
In the Soviet Union, in accordance with the official ideology and politics of the Communist Party, Goskomizdat censored all printed matter, Goskino supervised all cinema, Gosteleradio controlled radio and television broadcasting and the First Department in many agencies and institutions, such as the State Statistical Committee (Goskomstat), was responsible for assuring that state secrets and other sensitive information only reached authorized hands.
Despite outward similarities in press policy, large differences existed in the roles and functions of the mass media in Eastern Bloc countries.
[60] In East Germany, where initial control could be less overt because of shared allied occupation rules, the Soviet SVG set up the Deutsche Verwaltung für Volksbildung (DVV) in the fall of 1945.
[70] Propaganda often worked itself beyond agit prop plays into traditional productions, such as in Hungary after the Tito–Stalin split, where the director of the National Theatre produced a version of Macbeth in which the villainous king was revealed as none other than Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito, who by then was widely hated inside the Eastern Bloc.
The program was meant to counter ideas received by some from West German television because the geography of the divided Germany meant that West German television signals (particularly ARD) could be received in most of East Germany, except in parts of Eastern Saxony around Dresden, which consequently earned the latter the nickname "valley of the clueless"[75] (despite the fact that some Western radio was still available there).
[82] The book claimed, for instance, that American bankers and industrialists provided capital for the growth of German war industries, while deliberately encouraging Hitler to expand eastward.
"[89] One of the longest-running and well-known samizdat publications was the information bulletin "Хроника текущих событий" (Khronika Tekushchikh Sobitiy; Chronicle of Current Events),[90] which contained anonymously published pieces dedicated to the defense of human rights in the USSR.
Several people were arrested in connection with the Chronicle, including Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Yuri Shikhanovich, Pyotr Yakir, Victor Krasin, Sergei Kovalev, Alexander Lavut, Tatyana Velikanova, among others.
The process of magnitizdat was less risky than publishing literature via samizdat, since any person in the USSR was permitted to own a private reel-to-reel tape recorder, while paper duplication equipment was under the control of the state.
Western countries invested heavily in powerful transmitters which enabled broadcasters to be heard in the Eastern Bloc, despite attempts by authorities to jam such signals.
[94] In late 1950, RFE began to assemble a full-fledged foreign broadcast staff and became more than just a "mouthpiece for exiles" who had fled Eastern Bloc countries.
