Authors

Discussion

This paper examines one of the poorly researched aspects of Soviet propaganda during World War II, specifically the military press in the frames of the front (the Red Army equivalent of Army Groups), army, and divisional newspapers. The study focuses on the organizational practices of the Soviet military press functioning from 1941 to 1945. The Red Army’s political departments oversaw the activities of the military press. The Chief Political Directorate of the Red Army executed control of the front newspapers. Fronts and armies’ political departments managed the newspapers of armies and divisions.

This paper argues that political departments’ control over military newspapers was not always efficient. Political departments attempted to remedy the situation, but they have not been successful.

Political departments exercised direct control over newspaper editorial offices. They approved thematic editorial plans and guided newspapers’ work through meetings of newspaper editors, speeches by political department employees in newspapers with leading articles, and consultations. As a result, the editors were provided with specific instructions on the nature of the published materials. However, the described management strategy sometimes did not correspond to actual practices. The studied ego-documents give grounds to assert that outgoing instructions from political departments did not always come promptly or did not arrive at all. In this regard, the editors turned to the Pravda newspaper, from the content of which they extracted the appropriate guidelines for their newspapers that corresponded to the party line. Nevertheless, the editors had a space of freedom for their own interpretations, in contrast to the specific guidelines emanating from political departments.

The editorial staff included both military personnel and civilian employees hired voluntarily. Moreover, some employees were professional newspaper staff who worked in the party-Soviet press in the pre-war period. Even so, military journalists’ affiliation with the party and political apparatus could not protect them from suspicion of loyalty to the Soviet authorities. Security checks were carried out regularly.

An indicator of the effective editorial office work was the authors’ involvement from the non-editorial assets – voenkory. According to political departments, the newspaper was supposed to be a platform for the publications of ordinary military personnel, embodying the idea of a ‘Red Army newspaper’ for Red Army soldiers. However, this idea was not realized since the journalists ignored materials from voenkory, usually not distinguished by depth and literature, ‘settled’ in the editorial offices, and were not published. As a result, the practice of journalist’s self-filling newspapers flourished until the end of the war. Political departments struggled repeatedly to resolve it but failed to do so definitively.