Authors

Discussion

Criticism of Western broadcasts in the USSR was one of the key areas of Soviet propaganda after WWII and intensified especially in the second half of the 1960s. In the context of conflicts within the socialist system, the Soviet leadership needed to contrast its interpretation of current events with information coming from the outside.

Among the various forms of counter-propaganda, the central and regional press was a channel designed for a mass audience. Some of these publications contained general criticism of Western broadcasters’ approaches to covering Soviet politics and creating a certain image of the USSR. More often, however, counter-propaganda articles were prompted by specific broadcasts and the facts mentioned in them that required an immediate response from the Soviet side. In particular, during the Czechoslovak crisis, the Soviet press regularly refuted Western broadcast data in an effort to assert the Soviet point of view. 

The counter-propaganda was based on clichés and included obligatory structural elements. At the same time the authors took into account the specifics of individual broadcasters. If the BBC, Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle were considered as representatives of certain countries, then Radio Liberty was presented not only as a US-sponsored broadcaster, but also as a destination for Soviet emigrés who had fled the USSR. In this case, the authors used anti-emigrant and counter-revolutionary images of the interwar period. Radio Liberty was the main object of criticism, since this organisation not only sought to disseminate the Western viewpoint, but also represented itself as a ‘free domestic radio’ in contrast to the state-sponsored Soviet media.

 “Counter-propaganda” in the Soviet press was intended to debunk the arguments of Western broadcasts. However, it often had the opposite effect: the critical publications, including visual material, provoked the close attention of the Soviet audience to foreign media. Comments, feuilletons, and caricatures exposing Western broadcasts were popular with readers, spreading the perspectives and opinions of Western media and expanding their audiences.