By Philip M. Taylor

 

The ‘war to end all wars’ did not live up to its name. Neither did the peace treaties that concluded it herald a return of world peace. As the Chief of the Imperial General Staff noted in 1919 after counting 44 wars in progress, ‘this peace treaty has resulted in wars everywhere’. The year 1918 may have seen the end of the Great War but international conflict none the less remained. Most notably, there was an intensification of a struggle that had begun with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and which raged intermittently for the next 70 years, sometimes as open war, sometimes postponed, and mostly, since 1945, as Cold War. It was essentially a struggle between two diametrically opposed ideologies in which propaganda has always played a central role. The Bolshevik Revolution may well have taken Russia out of the First World War, but it also led to a new and significant development in the conduct of international affairs. After 1917, propaganda became a fact of everyday life. For Lenin and his successors, who owed so much to the successful employment of propaganda in securing power at the expense of the tsars, propaganda also became an essential ingredient in the ideological war against capitalism and the struggle for world revolution. But it also had to be used to spread the word internally to the vast majority of peasants initially untouched by the actual events of the revolution in St Petersburg but whose lives were to be changed radically by them, particularly during the crucial days of the Civil War (1918-21).

 

The crusading element in Marxist ideology, to bring the essential ‘truth’ to the peasants and working classes of both Russia and the wider world, combined with the experience of underground struggle and covert resistance, led to great emphasis being placed by formed a central role in their daily and spiritual life for centuries. If that tradition could be adapted to transmit political images through modern means of communication, then the Bolsheviks stood a good chance of getting their message across. This meant using posters, and before long the Bolsheviks were producing posters of such design and imagination that they have often been regarded as works of art. Indeed posters of the Civil War period are regarded as being among the most impressive contributions to pictorial art ever made by the Soviet Union. The poster, like the icon, could present symbols in a simple and easily identifiable way, even to barely literate peasants. A style of visual story-board poster – not unlike the modern cartoon strip – emerged that is still popular today. Experimentation in this new form led men with no formal artistic training, such as D. S. Orlov and V. Deni, to emerge as the principal exponents of poster art. But it was Mikhail Cheremnykh who originated the most distinctive posters of the Civil War period – the ‘Satire Window’ format, sometimes known as the ROSTA windows. ROSTA were the initials of the Bolsheviks’ Telegraph Agency, set up in September 1918, and this organization published its own newspapers. Because of severe paper shortages, however, Cheremnykh devised the idea of wall newspapers to be pasted in busy parts of Moscow and in shop windows. Posters soon followed and the idea quickly spread to other cities. By the end of the Civil War, ROSTA had nearly fifty agencies around the country using these methods, the window posters of the poet Mayakovsky being especially successful. But their success was limited to the Civil War period. They often attracted more artistic than political attention, and the avant-garde movement which pioneered them accordingly went into decline after 1921.

 

The Allied invasion of Russia in support of the White counterrevolutionaries began before the First World War ended. While Britain, France, and Germany slugged it out on the Western Front, the fighting being intensified by the release of German troops from the east following the Russo-German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Allied troops (principally Japanese) landed at Vladivostok on the Pacific coast of Russia in the following month. But the western powers at this stage were not motivated by ideological considerations. Alarmed at Russia’s departure from the war, the move was designed to keep Germany distracted in the east. Hence the British occupation of Murmansk in March 1918 and of However, as the Civil War dragged on, food shortages in the cities led to requisitioning, and this merely alienated the peasantry. The Bolsheviks responded with increased ‘education’ (i.e. propaganda) and the Commissariat of Enlightenment was formed to supervise public readings for the illiterate peasants, workers, and soldiers. The young – always a primary target for any aspiring propaganda state – were organized and indoctrinated through the Komsomol. Agit-ships went down rivers and agit-trains went into the countryside to take the message to the people. Agitational outposts, agitpunkty, were set up at railway stations complete with libraries and lecture halls for the purpose of establishing links ‘between the localities and the centre, to agitate, to carry out propaganda, to bring information, and to supply literature’. Even the names of the agit-trains and agit-ships had a propaganda purpose: V.I. Lenin, The October Revolution, and Red Star. Each of these were highly decorated mobile propaganda units, covered in posters, flags, and slogans. They carried about a hundred people (including Cheka officers and representatives of all the leading Bolshevik committees) to organize selected local officials, a complaints section (always busy), its own press, a wireless transmitter, and, most important of all, a film projector.

 

Lenin’s often quoted view that ‘for us the most important of all arts is the cinema’ reflected an appreciation of the role which the new mass media could play in the revolutionary context. Although the situation varied from city to city and from town to countryside, on average only two out of five adults were literate in the Russia of 1920. The most effective means of reaching the majority of uneducated Russians was by using film. For Lenin, the cinema was primarily an educational device – for political education, that is. For the audiences, it was primarily a medium of entertainment (Charlie Chaplin being particularly popular). For many peasants, who had never seen a film until the agit-trains brought one to them, it was a miracle. The fact that films at this time were silent helped to overcome the problem of communicating to the numerous different nationalities with their different languages. Foreign films, often portraying ideas that were incompatible with Bolshevik ideology, were popular and had to be countered by a domestic film industry that was not yet capable of meeting the needs of the revolution. Indeed, the Civil War momentarily destroyed the Russian film industry. It was not until 1927, after a period of reconstruction, that Soviet films earned more at the box-office than imported products. Lenin had nationalized the Russian film industry in August 1919 but, starved of film stock and equipment from abroad, not to mention the shortages of electricity and of those many technicians, actors, and directors who had fled the revolution, it was unlikely that film propaganda itself played a significant role in determining the final outcome of the revolution. What the available films did in the countryside was to attract a curious audience, whereupon the officials from the agit-trains would disembark to deliver their message using classic techniques of crowd manipulation.

 

From this disastrous beginning, however, the Soviet film industry soon began to produce one of the most acclaimed bodies of work in the history of world cinema. A national production company, Sovkino, was established in 1925 and new studios were set up in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa; thirteen were functioning across the nation by 1928 producing 123 films in that year, each reaching an average audience of 21/2 million people. Virtually all the films were made to serve the State. Battleship Potemkin (1926), made by Sergei Eisenstein, portrayed the 1905 mutiny at Odessa but its message had more to do with propaganda than with history. Eisenstein’s next film, October ( 1927), made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the revolution, fell into a similar category. They had the feel of documentaries but concentrated on events rather than individuals. As a result, they are often mistaken even today as being film ‘records’ of what actually happened in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions rather than re-enactments designed to serve the interests of the Soviet state in the 1920s. Pudovkin’s End of St Petersburg (1927), another anniversary classic, paid more attention to the human elements of the revolutionary struggle, but here again its message was symbolic and propagandistic rather than historical. Such films legitimized the revolution and thereby the regime that inherited it. They appear, however, to have created a greater impression abroad than they did at home.

 

Although the Soviets pioneered new methods of domestic propaganda that were watched with great interest by other countries, it was their foreign propaganda that caused most concern abroad. The Bolshevik leadership was certainly quick to appreciate the role propaganda could play in undermining the position of the ‘capitalist-imperialist’ powers and spreading its ideas about world revolution. In October 1917, for example, the Bolsheviks published various secret treaties that had been negotiated by the tsarist regime with the Allies, notably the 1915 Treaty of London. The embarrassment this caused the Allies – at a time when President Wilson was calling for national self-determination – was to contribute towards Italian disillusionment with the Paris Peace Settlement. Moreover, influenced by Trotsky’s theories of world revolution, the role of propaganda in spreading an international class-based ideology that recognized no national frontiers was a serious threat to established regimes suffering from the intense socio-economic and political chaos caused by the First World War. Great hopes that the theories were about to become a reality with the revolution in Germany, followed by the establishment of a short-lived communist regime in Hungary, were reflected in the foundation of the Third International, or Comintern, in March 1919. Comintern agents were included in the staff of Soviet diplomatic missions; indeed, in the years immediately following the revolution, Soviet foreign policy and Soviet propaganda became virtually indistinguishable.

 

For Russia’s former allies, the replacement of ‘Prussian militarism’ by Bolshevism as the principal perceived threat to civilization as they knew it was clearly a matter requiring urgent countermeasures. The British Empire, in particular, was a primary target for the Comintern and was identified as the main bastion of the world ‘capitalist-imperialist’ order. Troubles in Ireland, India, and Palestine provided ideal opportunities to stir up revolutionary activity. But Britain had also largely dismantled its efficient wartime propaganda machinery and had to rely on military intervention in the Civil War as its best means of stopping Comintern activities. Following the Red victory, the Communist International continued its activities, but the chance for world revolution seemed to have passed. Aid was given to the Chinese communists until Russian advisers were expelled in 1928. And the chance seemingly provided by the General Strike in Britain in 1926 also seemed to have faded. Following the death of Lenin in 1924 and the internal struggle for power which followed, resulting in Trotsky’s expulsion and Stalin’s accession, the economic chaos that the Civil War had created in Russia required urgent attention. With the adoption of the first Five Year Plan and of the policy of Socialism in One Country by the end of the 1920s, the Comintern went into decline.

 

Fear of Bolshevism in the western democracies, however, remained. The formation of ‘Little Moscows’ in 1919 throughout Europe and America had rocked the established order. The Red Flag had even been hoisted over Glasgow Town Hall! Calls for the workers of the world to unite were made with the aid of the new medium of radio. For Lenin, radio was ‘a newspaper without paper… and without boundaries’. When Radio Moscow began transmissions in 1922, it was the most powerful transmitter in the world. In 1925, it added the world’s first short-wave transmitter. In the following year, when the General Strike in Britain conjured up memories of ‘Red Clyde’ and the widespread strikes of 1919, Radio Moscow tried to fuel the agitation until the British government jammed its broadcasts. Despite the Russian promise in the 1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement not to attack Britain by propaganda, violations continued throughout the next ten years, although by the end of the decade, with a more introspective Stalin in charge, the threat was felt to have subsided. Democracy in Britain, France, and America had survived its immediate post-war crises. Counter-measures (such as the banning of The Battleship Potemkin and other Soviet classics) seemed to have prevented the spreading of the Bolshevik word, and the powers looked forward to the restoration of peace amidst hopes for world disarmament.

 

The new spirit of optimism in the late 1920s saw important developments in the communications revolution: 1927 in fact was almost as momentous a year as 1896. That was the year of Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo trans-Atlantic flight, which heralded the beginning of the end of North America’s geographic isolation from Europe. With the rapid development of international civil aviation routes, the world was becoming more like a global village. The telephone also contributed to the feeling of a shrinking world, and in 1927 communication was established across the Atlantic by radio telephone. In the same year, the British Broadcasting Company became the British Broadcasting Corporation with the motto ‘Nation shall speak peace unto Nation’ and, within five years, the BBC had initiated its Empire Service designed to enable the far-flung peoples of the British Empire to remain in constant touch with the mother country. Australian broadcasts were heard in Britain for the first time in 1927. That year also witnessed the arrival of the first commercially successful talking picture, The Jazz Singer. Radio and the cinema, both in their infancy during the First World War, were the first true mass media and their implications for politics, propaganda, and warfare were to be far-reaching. In Glasgow, Baird demonstrated the transmission of colour television pictures in 1927 (the Russians had demonstrated the technology of television before even the First World War), although this particular medium was not to receive its real significance as a propaganda medium until the late 1940s.

 

The World Economic Depression that resulted from the collapse of the American stock market in 1929 quickly dashed the short-lived optimism of the late 1920s. In Germany, Hitler began his rapid rise to power and was appointed Chancellor in 1933. He then began to dismantle the Weimar democracy and establish the Nazi totalitarian state using many of the propaganda methods pioneered by the British and the Soviets. Meanwhile, the Japanese, also badly hit by the Depression, decided to abandon any notion of international collective security and attacked Manchuria in late 1931. World opinion was shocked by the first newsreel footage of military operations against civilians with the Japanese bombing of Chinese towns. The League of Nations, established in 1919 to safeguard a lasting peace, did nothing to punish the aggressor or protect the small power involved. Hitler walked out of both the World Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations and began rearming Germany. Mussolini attacked Abyssinia in 1935. Again the League was unable to prevent aggression. The Americans, never a League member, passed Neutrality Acts and tried to isolate themselves from mounting European aggression. France was in the middle of a political and economic crisis and was rocked by a series of scandals and riots. Britain, the only true world power with interests stretching from Europe through the Mediterranean to the Far East, found herself confronted by three potential enemies but totally unprepared to meet force with force. Russia, which could have helped by virtue of both her European and Far Eastern interests, decided to abandon her isolation and entered the League in 1934. A pact with France followed the next year. Whatever unfinished business Stalin had at home, the advent of a regime in Germany dedicated to the overthrow of communism was a threat he could not ignore. By the mid-1930s Europe was once again becoming increasingly polarized into two opposing camps and the ideological conflict between the forces of the left and the right was to become even more acute when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936.

 

Coming as it did so rapidly after the crises in Europe, the Far East, and Africa, many observers felt that the Spanish Civil War could quite easily develop into a second world war. As in the case of the Russian Civil War, the European powers became involved in affairs that might at first appear to have had little to do with them. But although the Second World War broke out in 1939, Poland, not Spain, was the immediate cause. This was to some extent due to the fact that Britain and France, at least, tried desperately to limit the effects of the Spanish Civil War and prevent it from spreading into a wider conflict by a non-intervention agreement. Russia, Germany, and Italy, however, honoured the agreement more in the breach. They exploited the conflict for their own purposes and it became a major battleground in the international propaganda war of the 1930s – a dress rehearsal for things to come. By the late 1930s, in other words, propaganda had become an established fact of everyday life. International broadcasting, State-controlled cinemas and newspapers, public opinion polls, mass rallies: all these were new features of an age characterized by an ideological struggle with world-wide dimensions thanks to the technology of the communications revolution. As such, truth was a major casualty long before the actual fighting began.