Washing Away the Truth

...He demonstrates that from the very start of the Soviet regime Lenin, never a liberal, imposed press censorship...

...Kenez demonstrates that this training ground, this "recruitment agency" for future Communist Party members, served two goals: It was a transmission belt of ideas to the workers and peasants, and, equally important, it provided a sphere of activity for thousands of young enthusiasts...

...The Bolsheviks cameto power in 1917 armed with the Marxist conviction that they alone had access to "true knowledge," and reinforced by the Leninist concept of a vanguard of Party intellectuals serving as missionaries to the backward masses...

...Its initial products were newsreels, spread throughout the country by "agittrains...

...The greatest success in the Bolshevik regime's drive to liquidate illiteracy was achieved in the Army, where tens of thousands of young peasants learned the alphabet...

...As late as 1927 more than 50 per cent were imports, because they brought in 10 times as much profit us domestic films...

...Book publishing was a similarly important tool of early Soviet propaganda...

...In such circumstances, "the distinction between belief and unbelief and truth and untruth is washed away...

...In Kenez' opinion, "today's Pravda would please" Lenin, too...

...Nevertheless, the newspaper network played a decisive role as " the blood circulation of the body politic...

...Lower down the hierarchical ladder came the scout-like Young Leninist Pioneers, composed of boys and girls between the ages of 10-16...

...The last major category investigated is the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, also destined to become a permanent feature of the Soviet State...

...The unforgettable "revolutionary spectacles" of these innovative directors should not be considered typical of the ordinary fare, the author cautions...

...Lacking any blueprints for a propaganda system, they gradually brought various established media under their control, and created others...

...Basic textbooks were published with relentlessly political sentences such as "We are building a new world, without the tyrants and slaves," and "The Communists defend the interests of the working classes of the entire world...

...Vladimir Mayakovsky, who both drew and wrote satirical texts, was a key contributor to a special version of the poster, the Rosta "windows...

...Lenin and his colleagues understood the propaganda potential of the cinema, and invested their government's scarce resources in filmmaking...

...Clearly," says Kenez, "theSoviet people, ifgiven a chance, preferred foreign, especially American, films...

...Cheap to produce and easy to disseminate, posters were a particularly effective way to reach the masses, since they as yet had little or no ability to read...

...Itsucceededinpreventing the formation and articulation of alternative points of view," with the result that "nobody remained to point out the contradictions and even inanity inherent in the regime's slogans...

...The fledgling regime launched a relatively large-scale publishing venture, but it did not eliminate private publishers in the first decade...

...By the end of the 1920s they had laid the foundation for many of the features of Soviet indoctrination policies that have endured to the present...

...2) the avid interest in uncen-sored information from abroad—e.g., it is currently estimated that in an average week 28 million Soviet people listen to the Voice of America, 18 million to Radio Liberty, 15 million to the BBC...

...Young artists and poets were attracted to the form...

...and (3) the outspoken expressions of dissent by a courageous minority of Russian and non-Russian human rights activists who have produced tens of thousands of pages of samizdat...

...Nonetheless, his provocative conclusions inevitably lead one to contrast the success of Soviet propaganda then and now...

...As did the Komsomol, the Pioneers marched on political holidays, listened to lectures on agriculture and world politics, took part in the anti-religious campaign, and addressed meetings in factories...

...It must maintain constant vigilance to prevent competitive ideas from penetrating its borders via newspapers and magazines, books, films, radio and TV broadcasts, and tourists...

...No attempts were made at the outset, either, to prevent the importing of books: "The regime was not yet ready to break with the old, prewar intelligentsia, which even at the end of the nep period, continued to occupy the top positions in academic life...

...Whatever one thinks about the policy of turning literacy classes into opportunistic political indoctrination sessions, notes Kenez, "there is something genuinely moving about the picture of unwashed peasant lads leaning over their texts and making out for themselves their first written phrase, 'We are not slaves.'" Again the indefatigable Mayakovsky was involved: He composed satirical comments for each letter of the alphabet, and illustrated them in his inimitable style...

...When Kenez describes the "orchestrated demonstrations" and "phony elections" and "meaningless celebrations" of the 1920s, one can only add "plus fa change...

...A fascinating section of Kenez' study describes the poster as a propaganda weapon in the first few years of the Soviet era...

...Other short films, called agitki, aimed primitive, didactic messages at the uneducated audience...

...Kenez traces the evolution of mass mobilization from the Revolution through the Civil War and the New Economic Program (nep) period by concentrating on areas such as the press, book publishing, films, posters, education of the peasants, and the youth movement...

...Genuinely independent and spontaneous groups such as the Helsinki monitors of the late 1970s and the Moscow Trust Group, a peace movement, have been ruthlessly suppressed...

...Although one may deplore the content of the Bolshevik leaders' indoctrination of the masses, Kenez says, "it would be difficult to argue that [their] most reprehensible act was to attempt to bring their ideas to the people...

...Sixty-eight years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Party must still use its secret police to stamp out internal dissi-dence...

...Foreign hits, such as Robin Hood or The Mark of Zorro...

...Its victims included the Boy Scout movement, an incipient Jewish youth organization and sports clubs...

...Led by Mikhail Cheremnykh, a talented graphic artist and the originator of the idea, and Mayakovsky, who wrote 90 per cent of the texts, a small group of artists turned out 1,600 "windows," distributed in about 2 million copies...

...By the end of the Civil War, crowds gathered in front of these windows in various parts of the country to learn, for example, that "The dead of the Paris Commune have risen again under the Red Banner of the Soviets...

...And despite such prophylactic measures, the myth of infallibility projected by Soviet propaganda is increasingly being challenged...

...The powerful and handsome worker with his hammer smiting the fat and disgusting burzhui was the ultimate in simplification—and a staple of early Soviet posters...

...The film medium also suffered from a gap between intentions and reality...

...This minor art form, he points out, was "ideally suited to the expression of the Bolshevik mentality, which stressed conflict and simple juxtapositions: proletarian versus capitalist, progressive versus reactionary, good versus evil...

...The government's financial difficulties and organizational weakness prevented it from reaching most of the population, though, so the Bolsheviks created a "voluntary" unit called "Down with IIliteracy...

...The two-liner Mayakovsky wrote was vulgar and effective...

...Lenin helped shape the character of the Communist newspapers by insisting that they present concrete situations close to life, exhorting the proletariat to work harder, rather than what he called "intelligent-like discussions'' of large political issues in terms of alternatives . From exhaustive reading of the press of the 1920s, the author finds it hard to reconcile the dull format and boring articles with the image of the Bolsheviks as master propagandists...

...His discussion of theearly Soviet cinema is enriched by the fact that he viewed many of them in the Pacific Film Archives of the University of California, Berkeley...

...Having collected several of these posters myself, I can agree with Kenez when he writes: "Looking at these drawings today, one is struck by their simple charm...

...In one recorded instance a 12-year-old was haranguing the adults: 'We workers are tired of being exploited.'" Kenez concludes from his analysis of the all-pervading vehicles of mass indoctrination that the propaganda system has played as vital and indispensable a role as industrialization and coercion in the survival of the Soviet regime sincel917...

...Lenin did not accept the principle that one fights ideas with ideas, for "he did not trust the workers to arrive at 'correct' conclusions if two sides of an ideological issue were presented...

...Moreover, the regime still did not have the resources to make the peasants read what it wanted them to read, so "unsatisfactory" books that the peasants enjoyed—adventures, cheap romances, and of course books concerned with religion—were removed...

...On the other hand, one cannot overlook (1) the strong evidence of political cynicism among the majority of the USSR's population...

...The letter M, for instance, was accompanied by the drawing of a Men-shevik with a money bag in one hand while his other hand is held by his mother...

...Political indoctrination was of course the primary Pioneer objective, and in the Bolsheviks' system of values, says Kenez, indoctrinating children was a "major and positive good," for it prepared them to become useful citizens of a new and better society...

...In addition, the Komsomol prevented the growth of independent youth organizations...

...Rosta was the Bolshevik news agency, the forerunner of Tass, and it issued short agitational messages that were displayed in empty shop windows...

...The Party-controlled trade unions are credited with playing the most sustained role of all civilian mass organizations in the literacy drive...

...Kenez observes perceptively that these government-sponsored societies came to play an important role in the Soviet political system: "They represented counterfeit spontaneity, they filled a void, and they became instruments of mass mobilization...

...Within two weeks of their takeover, the new rulers repudiated freedom of the press, and by the middle of 1918 all non-Bolshevik newspapers had disappeared...

...By 1925, there were almost as many Pioneers as Komsomol members—1 million...

...Like other groups fighting alcoholism and the remnants of religion, it had no real autonomy...

...What is more, as this revolutionary century draws to a close, the Soviet regime will be further threatened by the explosion of information in the new revolutionary era of the computer...

...It would be a mistake to underestimate the power of the official media today...

...The author does not deal with the contemporary Soviet scene...

...West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, "the finest comedy of the decade," which satirizes a rich American who comes to the USSR on business and brings a cowboy as his bodyguard...

...Moviegoing became popular: In 1928, for example, 300 million tickets were sold, and an average film was seen by 2.5 million viewers...

...Further, many if not all Bolshevik leaders continued to have a respect for scholarship, as Ihey had for "culture.' They continued to hope that t he values of culture and socialism were compatible, and that one could work for botlt at the same time.' Bringing culture to the countryside through books was amoredifficult task, because the drive for literacy in the villages was only moderately successful...

...In the late 1920s, however, the "golden age" of the Soviet cinema saw the silent films of Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhdnko, and above all Sergei Eisenstein, achieve world fame...

...both with Douglas Fairbanks, played in the capital for months and were seen by many more people than Potemkin...

...In his scrupulously researched study of the Soviet regime's early years, Peter Kenez defines it broadly as "nothing more than the attempt to transmit social and political values in the hope of affecting people's thinking, emotions, and thereby behavior...

...Since a very substantial segment of the intelligentsia refused to cooperate with Gosizdat, the State publishing house, private enterprise was tolerated to expand the variety of books available to Soviet readers...

...But with little or no electricity available, plus a shortage of raw film, the industry took years to develop...

...This balanced approach informs his interesting portrait of Russia's pioneering efforts in political education after the October Revolution...

...Indeed, Gorbachev's fulminations against the West's "information imperialism" at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in February recall the apocryphal legend of King Canute's attempt to hold back the waves...

...Thus he offers synopses and critiques of productions like The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr...

...the stylized drawings have not lost their ability to make us smile...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Program Planning Director, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty "Propaganda" is a word usually uttered with a sneer...

...If many aspects of Soviet life have changed in the past six decades, here is one striking example of continuity...

...By the 1930s, of course, audiences were cut off from the outside world and deprived of the experimental genius of their native directors when Stalin put the cinema, along with all the other arts, into the straitjacket of Socialist Realism...