Propaganda in the Soviet Union
The main Soviet censorship body, Glavlit, was employed not only to eliminate any undesirable printed materials but also "to ensure that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item.
Schools and Communist youth organizations such as the Young Pioneers and Komsomol served to remove children from the "petit-bourgeois" family and indoctrinate the next generation into the "collective way of life".
[27] Long before Stalin imposed complete restraint, a cultural bureaucracy was growing up that regarded art's highest form and purpose as propaganda and began to restrain it to fit that role.
[30] The Soviet pavilion for the Paris World Fair was surmounted by Vera Mukhina's a monumental sculpture, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, in heroic mold.
[32] Art was filled with health and happiness; paintings teemed with busy industrial and agricultural scenes, and sculptures depicted workers, sentries, and schoolchildren.
[38] The issues were aimed primarily at an international audience, especially Western left-wing intellectuals and businessmen, and were quite popular during its early publications, with subscribers including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Romain Rolland.
[57] Later, during the purges, claims were made that criminals had been "reforged" by their work on the White Sea/Baltic Canal; salvation through labor appeared in Nikolai Pogodin's The Aristocrats as well as many articles.
"[31] For the Paris World Fair, Vera Mukhina depicted a monumental sculpture, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, dressed in work clothing, pressing forward with his hammer and her sickle crossed.
[63] With the Civil War, the newly formed army moved to massacre large numbers of kulaks and otherwise promulgate a short lived "reign of terror" to terrify the masses into obedience.
[64] Lenin proclaimed that they were exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class, a position reinforced by the many actions against landlords, well-off peasants, banks, factories, and private shops.
[94] When the draft of the new constitution led people to believe that private property would be returned and that workers could leave collective farms, speakers were sent out to "clarify" the matter.
[95] Stalin bluntly declared the Bolshevists must close the Tsar-induced fifty- or a hundred-year gap with Western countries in ten years, or "socialism would be destroyed".
[11] During the purges, he increased his appearances in public, having his photograph taken with children, airmen, and Stakhanovites, being hailed as the source of the "happy life," and according to Pravda, riding the subway with common workers.
[135] During World War II, this personality cult was certainly instrumental in inspiring a deep level of commitment from the masses of the Soviet Union, whether on the battlefield or in industrial production.
Retrospectively, Lenin's primary associates such as Zinoviev, Trotsky, Radek and Bukharin were presented as "vacillating", "opportunists" and "foreign spies" whereas Stalin is depicted as the chief discipline during this revolution.
[142] In his book, The Stalin School of Falsification, Leon Trotsky cited a range of historical documents such as party speeches, meeting minutes, and suppressed texts such as Lenin's Testament.
[143] He argued that the Stalinist faction routinely distorted political events, forged a theoretical basis for irreconcilable concepts such as the notion of "Socialism in One Country" and misrepresented the views of opponents through an array of employed historians alongside economists to justify policy manoeuvering and safeguarding its own set of material interests.
[144] Some historians believe that an important goal of Soviet propaganda was "to justify political repressions of entire social groups which Marxism considered antagonistic to the class of proletariat",[145][failed verification] as in decossackization or dekulakization campaigns.
"[147] The most effective means to achieve this objective "was the denial of the victim's humanity through the process of dehumanization", "the reduction of real or imaginary enemy to a zoological state".
[18] Regarding religion more as a class enemy, a cause of hate, than a contender for people's minds, the government abolished the prerogatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and targeted them with ridicule.
[156] Christian virtues such as humility and meekness were ridiculed in the press, with self-discipline, loyalty to the party, confidence in the future, and hatred of class enemies being recommended instead.
[163] Much of this was for foreign consumption, where it was widely disbelieved, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt condemning both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as atheistic regimes which did not permit freedom of conscience.
[158] Between campaigns against bourgeois culture and making the ideology of the Socialist Offensive intelligible to the masses with cliches and stereotypes, an anti-intellectual tone grew in propaganda.
[157] Soviet leaders posed as common people, lacking interest in such matters as fine art and ballet, even as they selectively chose from working class culture.
[166] Fascism was presented as a terroristic outburst of finance capital, and drawing from the petit bourgeoisie, and the middling peasants, equivalent to kulaks, who were the losers in the historical process.
The posters often featured capitalist mustached Poles dressed as lords, barons, nobles or generals holding a whip over enslaved Ukrainians and Belarusians, which were a minority in Poland at the time.
217 depicted the horrors inflicted on Soviet POWs, especially the enslavement of the main character Tanya to an inhuman German family,[181] reflecting the harsh treatment of OST-Arbeiter in Nazi Germany.
[186] In face of the threat of Nazi Germany, the international claims of communism were played down, and people were recruited to help defend the country on patriotic motives.
In a press release after Sputnik's launch the Soviet Union states that "...our contemporaries will witness how the freed and conscientious labour of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality.
[202] The victory of Stalin, who regarded the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union as a necessary exemplar to the rest of the world and represented the majority view,[203] did not, however, stop international propaganda.
