Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Socialist Journalism

What was the Soviet press? It is a question Moscow’s foreign correspondents asked themselves and wrote about from time to time. They were, after all, dependent on the Soviet press to do their own jobs. Western journalists tried as hard as any Kremlinologist to read the inky tea leaves of Pravda, and they also mined Soviet papers for good stories, especially stories with a social angle. (If you ran across a column in an American or French paper about “hooligans” in Cheliabinsk in the 1950s, yo..

Communications and media in the USSR and Eastern Europe

Communications in socialist Europe have long been associated first and foremost with propaganda. The USSR—the world’s first “propaganda state,” to use Peter Kenez’s term— established a radical new communications order that would be widely emulated. “The Bolshevik regime,” wrote Kenez in an influential 1985 study, “was the first not merely to set itself propaganda goals but also through political education to aim to create a new humanity suitable for living in a new society.” Propaganda, in th..

Communiquer en URSS et en Europe socialiste

Les communications en URSS et en Europe socialiste sont traditionnellement associées à la propagande. Longtemps, l’Union soviétique a été considérée comme le premier «  État de propagande » du monde, expression empruntée à Peter Kenez qui, dans son ouvrage influent publié en 1985, écrivait ainsi  : Le régime bolchevik a été le premier non seulement à définir les enjeux de propagande, mais aussi à créer par le biais de l’éducation politique un homme nouveau capable de vivre dans une société n..

Socialist Dandies International: East Europe, 1946-1959

This article maps the looks and lifestyle choices of small groups of young, like-minded people who emerged in the postwar Soviet Union and East Europe in the background of huge political, social, and cultural changes. With their androgynous bodies wrapped in drape jackets and narrow trousers, and their love of jazz and swing, these young men stood in a sharp contrast to the official ideology that promoted socialism as a new, pure, and highly rationalized project, its ideal robust and strong man, and its mass culture that insisted on educational and restrained forms of entertainment. Through the categories of dress, body, and big city, the article investigates the clashes, and the eventual truce, between the socialist streamlined and rationalized master narrative and the young dandies' fragmented and disordered narrative. The article argues that the socialist dandies were not politically minded, and that their challenge to the officially proclaimed values was informed by their adolescent recklessness and a general postwar desolation. They were declared state enemies because the socialist regimes did not allow for alternative types of modernity. Consequently, the authorities condemned the young dandies' looks and interests as cosmopolitan, because they originated in the West, and as artificial, since they belonged to the culture that had preceded a new socialist world

The Soft Power of Anglia: British Cold War Cultural Diplomacy in the USSR

This article contributes to the growing literature on the cultural Cold War through an exploration of the British national projection magazine Anglia, produced by the Foreign Office for distribution in the USSR from 1962 to 1992. As well as drawing attention to the significance of national magazines in general, the article sheds light on Britain's distinctive approach to propaganda and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. It considers why the magazine was set up and endured for so long, despite considerable reservations about its value. It examines how Britain was projected in a manner that accorded with British understandings about the need for ‘subtle’ propaganda. Finally, it addresses the question of the magazine's impact in the USSR