Authors

Discussion

Critically assessing the existing scholarship, the paper rethinks the birth of Soviet state propaganda by examining them within the context of the new public communication techniques developed by belligerent powers during the First World War. In the 1920s, Soviet scholars, journalists and party publicists were developing a theory of newspapers and propaganda, and an academic discipline of newspaper studies. That discipline was called gazetovedenie. Soviet scholars taught journalism and gazetovedenie at the State Institute of Journalism. The paper will trace some of the key ideas and assumptions of Soviet scholars of newspapers in the 1920s.

Importantly, the existing scholarship usually treats Soviet propaganda – especially during the interwar period – as a category of practice, rather than of theory. The proposed paper aims to challenge that perception, demonstrating profound Soviet attempts to theorize propaganda, mass media, and public communications.      

One should also view these attempts in the broader international context of the developments in public communication techniques and theories during and in the aftermath of the First World War. Soviet newspapers scholars were well aware of the attempts to research propaganda, public communications and mass media abroad (especially in the US, Germany, and the UK). They frequently referenced – even though usually critically – “bourgeois” publications and specialists in their own works. The interest was mutual, as the invitation and participation of the Soviet delegation in the international exposition PRESSA in Cologne in 1928 demonstrates.