Eastern Bloc Media - Propaganda Efforts

Propaganda Efforts

Further information: Communist propaganda, Propaganda in the People's Republic of Poland, and Propaganda in the Soviet Union

Communist leaders in the Eastern Bloc openly discussed the existence of propaganda efforts. Communist propaganda goals and techniques were tuned according to the target audience. The most broad classification of targets was:

• Domestic propaganda
• External propaganda
• Propaganda of Communist supporters outside the Communist states

Communist Party documents reveal a more detailed classification of specific targets (workers, peasants, youth, women, etc.).

Because the Communist Party was portrayed under Marxist-Leninist theory as the protagonist of history pushing toward the inevitable end result of historical materialism as a "vanguard of the working class", Party leaders were claimed to be as infallible and inevitable as the purported historical end itself. Propaganda often worked itself beyond agit prop plays into traditional productions, such as in Hungary after the Tito-Stalin split, where the director of the National Theatre produced a version of Macbeth in which the villainous king was revealed as none other than hated (in the Eatsern Bloc) Yugoslavian Leader Josip Broz Tito. Regarding economic woes, debilitating wage cuts following economic stagnation were referred to as "blows in the face of imperialism", while forced loans were called "voluntary contributions to the building of socialism".

Communist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin in his The ABC of Communism wrote:

The State propaganda of communism becomes in the long run a means for the eradication of the last traces of bourgeois propaganda dating from the old régime; and it is a powerful instrument for the creation of a new ideology, of new modes of thought, of a new outlook on the world.

Some propaganda would "retell" the western news, such as the East German television program Der schwarze Kanal ("The Black Channel"), which contained bowdlerized programs from West Germany with added Communist commentary. The name "Black channel" was a play on words deriving from the term German plumbers used for a sewer. The program was meant to counter ideas received by some from West German television because the geography of the divided Germany meant that West German television signals (particularly ARD) could be received in most of East Germany, except in parts of Eastern Saxony around Dresden, which consequently earned the latter the nickname "valley of the clueless."

Eastern Bloc leaders, including even Joseph Stalin, could become personally involved in dissemination. For example, in January 1948, the U.S. State Department published a collection of documents titled Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office, which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany revealing Soviet conversations with Germany regarding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, the 1939 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, and discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming the fourth Axis Power.

In response, one month later, the Soviet Information Bureau published Falsifiers of History. Stalin personally edited the book, rewriting entire chapters by hand. The book claimed, for instance, that American bankers and industrialists provided capital for the growth of German war industries, while deliberately encouraging Hitler to expand eastward. The book also included the claim that, during the Pact's operation, Stalin rejected Hitler's offer to share in a division of the world, without mentioning the Soviet offers to join the Axis. Historical studies, official accounts, memoirs and textbooks published in the Soviet Union used that depiction of events until the Soviet Union's dissolution.

The book referred to "the American falsifiers and their British and French associates", claimed "s far back as in 1937 it became perfectly clear that a big war was being hatched by Hitler with the direct connivance of Great Britain and France", blasted "the claptrap of the slanderers" and stated "aturally, the falsifiers of history and slanderers are called falsifiers and slanderers precisely because they do not entertain any respect for facts. They prefer to gossip and slander."

In East Germany, the Soviet SVAG and DVV initially controlled all publication priorities. In the initial months of 1946, the Soviets were unsure how to merge propaganda and censorship efforts in East Germany. The SVAG engaged in a broad propaganda campaign that moved beyond customary political propaganda to engage in the practice at unions, women's organizations and youth organizations.