-
Chapter 4: Dictators Conquer Their Media: 1919–1939
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
61 4 DICTATORS CONQUER THEIR MEDIA 1919–1939 From the early 1920s on, there was a growing divergence in attitudes toward media manipulation between the democracies and those countries where dictatorships were taking root: in Mussolini’s Italy; in the new Soviet Union; in Germany, where Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and then, in 1934, führer; and in the autocratic regimes of China and Japan. While the democracies were ambivalent about the use of media in foreign affairs, the dictatorships were all too willing to continue exploring the relation between war and mass communication.1 Russia Becomes a Propaganda State As industrialization came slowly to Russia in the late nineteenth century, the apparatus of mass communication also developed. In addition to a growing number of rail and telegraph links, there were, by 1913, 1,158 newspapers , several with a circulation of over 100,000. Most of the papers had readerships only in the largest cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, although even in these cases the suburbs were not well served. Tsarist bureaucrats censored all the publications, though less so after concessions to liberal reformers in the Revolution of 1905. By that time even the Bolsheviks had sufficient press freedom to publish their party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), at least from 1912 to 1914. Lenin viewed mass communication as an essential tool of revolution. In What Is to Be Done? (1902) and other early writings, he described the establishment of a national newspaper as imperative, and he laid great emphasis on coordinating reportage closely with reinforcing action by the party organization. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the communist takeover of Russia, Lenin and the Communist Party enjoyed complete control of all communications media. Russia after 1917 has been called “the first propaganda state.”2 The term emphasizes the degree to which the Soviet rulers 62 Chapter 4 exerted a mastery of information, and to which indoctrination became an integral instrument of their rule. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had come to view propaganda in multiple ways. At times he saw it as synonymous with all types of controlled dissemination of information, as, for example, in the design of the educational system. At other times he viewed it as part of the discourse on all subjects that took place among educated people. With regard to the masses, however, he tended to speak of “agitation propaganda” (agitprop), which was the focused marshaling of carefully assembled information— backed up by party action—to get people to do specific things. In all this there was a paradox. As a true believer, one of the many Marxists who were convinced that communism would gradually spread to the whole world through the power of historical determinism, Lenin was rather smug in his attitude toward propaganda. In some ways his thinking could be said to resemble that of the Roman Catholic Church during the Counter-Reformation. If one simply disseminated the already revealed, undeniable truth, then, in Lenin’s view, all people would be persuaded by its self-evident power. In this attitude Lenin was different from Hitler and Stalin, whose use of information had a nervous, insecure quality. In action, however, Lenin was just as vigorous in his employment of propaganda as they were. Through agitation, he believed, the inevitable coming of the classless society could be hastened. Cinema received a great deal of attention. Because of tsarist censorship and the fear of new forms of communication, early-twentieth-century Russia had only an embryonic film industry, and hardly exploited the propaganda potential of the new medium even during the First World War. Tsarist rule emphasized command, not persuasion. The role of loyal subjects was to obey. Lenin proceeded to woo the few private filmmakers who were in operation, offering them much-needed supplies and cash, and then in 1919 nationalized the film industry and began its slow expansion. Most early Soviet efforts were newsreels. Soviet filmmakers also produced propaganda films, five to thirty minutes long, such as Proletarians of the World Unite, which had no plot and emphasized posed scenes evoking the French Revolution; Frightened Burzhui, about a capitalist who becomes an insomniac ; and For the Red Flag, in which a father joins the Red Army to atone for his son’s lack of communist zeal. The films were shown in cities and taken by specially equipped agit-trains to thousands of villages in the countryside , providing many peasants with the first motion picture experience of their lives, and reaching...