Future research projects
Domination through
Propaganda: The Early Years of the Bolshevik Dictatorship
(long-
Few phenomena characterized the
Soviet System more fully than “propaganda.” It is not an exaggeration to assert
that the Soviet Union collapsed in large measure because Mikhail Gorbachev
instituted a policy “openness” (glasnost’) in a country in which basic
facts about the political system, social organization and economy were
systematically withheld from the public or presented to it in highly distorted
form. Earnest discussion of the problems facing the country revealed the
system’s profound lack of support within the population. The propaganda
apparatus proved to have been, along with the army and the secret police, one
of the regime’s central pillars-a pillar erected during the early years of the
Bolshevik regime.
Only one study, by Peter Kenez,
is devoted to this critical development. That monograph examines early
Bolshevik and Soviet (post-1922) efforts to construct a new “proletarian
culture,” to disseminate information and ideas and to create a radically new
system of education and upbringing in Russia. Unfortunately, the author avoids
the political implications of the Bolsheviks’ extravagant recourse to
propaganda-a practice that effectively gave birth to a new form of
authoritarian regime, a unique polity in a permanent state of emergency. Kenez
shuns the issues of state-building and political struggle, preferring to
examine film, theater, education, youth organizations, books, and newspapers.
He deliberately pays almost no attention to the institutional or organizational
means by which propaganda was used to promote specific policies. Moreover,
while he recognizes, for example, that the Bolshevik Decree on Land of November
1917 was “in part an instance of propaganda,” he then asserts that this
“obviously cannot be a part of a study of Soviet propaganda.” This seems
entirely specious: it is my contention that any policy proclaimed
largely for purposes of persuasion most definitely may be addressed in a
study of propaganda.
My study, in contrast, will
place Bolshevik propaganda campaigns in the context of state-building and
power-consolidation. It will, in other words, be a political rather than a
cultural history and will seek to illuminate the foundations of the system of
social control through propaganda that survived, in greatly amplified and
elaborated form, until Gorbachev began to dismantle it in 1986.
The very nature of Soviet
propaganda has impeded its objective study. Beginning in 1918, the Bolshevik
government imposed a “Party line” on every media outlet in Russia. Any policy,
no matter how unpopular, could be-and often was-presented as “Demanded by the workers
of Red Guard Factory Number One” or “Supported by the peasants of Sofrino
Village.” Every major act or policy of the fledgling Bolshevik government was
accompanied by a massive propaganda barrage designed to forestall the slightest
criticism or dissonance within the population. Until the recent opening of the
Soviet archives, testing the veracity of official Soviet sources was extremely
difficult, since almost no other Russia-based sources existed. With full access
to the relevant archival documentation, it is now possible to analyze the
conscious use of propaganda by the Bolshevik regime as a vital instrument of
ruling Russia.