and the sequence in which the various statements of the leaders are to be presented. For instance, after Malenkov's "resignation" in February 1955, Radio Moscow issued such special instructions to all the provincial papers. In addition to Izvestiya and Pravda, there are a large number of specialized papers for youth, the trade unions, the military, and others, published centrally and distributed throughout the USSR. All these newspapers, with a combined circulation of over forty-seven million in the 1950s, play an important role in the Soviet process of indoctrination. 25

This process is backed by the other two basic media of propaganda and indoctrination: the radio and personal agitation. The radio, with an estimated listening audience of about forty million, quite naturally devotes a great deal of its time to political matters. 26 A reliable estimate places the amount of time devoted to political and scientific broadcasts at 28 percent of the central program time. One of the most important Moscow radio broadcasts is the morning reading (7:00 a.m.) of the Pravda editorial, which is relayed simultaneously by all other Soviet stations.27 Soviet radio publications openly admit the political importance of radio broadcasting, as seen in the following statement: "Radio helps considerably in the Communist education of the workers. It is one of the most important means of disseminating political information, of spreading the alltriumphant ideas of Marxism-Leninism, popularizing the most advanced industrial and agricultural techniques and the achievements of socialist culture, science, and art." 28 News and editorial programs particularly are designed to complement the press propaganda coverage and highlight the important points in the current propaganda themes. Foreign news is rarely given prompt treatment, and it is usually presented as a commentary. Furthermore, the use of radio-diffusion speakers, which work on the basis of wire transmission and are therefore useless for listening to non-Soviet stations, is promoted. This, of course, insures complete monopoly for Soviet broadcasting, and about 70 percent of all sets in the USSR are of this type. 29 Similar sets are now being introduced in the satellite regimes of Central Europe.

The third and, in some ways, the most important device is that of direct, personal agitation. This involves literally millions of agitators, some full-time, some part-time during special campaigns, who organize mass meetings, give lectures, visit families in their homes, distribute literature, set up study and discussion groups, and, in general, attempt to draw everyone into active participation in the indoctrination process. The estimated number of regular agitators is around two million, thus providing one agitator for every hundred Soviet citizens (including children). 30 In a sense, this mass indoctrination constitutes an effort to conduct a nationwide process of brainwashing, which only a very few succeed in completely avoiding. It is on these propaganda processes, as well as on the educational training system, that the regime depends for the achievement of total ideological integration of its people. It is these instruments of mental molding that are used by the administration to

produce a generation of convinced followers, thinking and acting in disciplined unison.

The technique of personal agitation has been elaborated by the leaders of Communist China. Based upon their experience during the long period of incubation when they were struggling to survive-a time they speak of as the "low ebb"-they have evolved, systematized, and tested what they call the democratic "mass line." As early as 1934 Mao charged the party cadres with mobilizing the broad masses to take part in the revolutionary war. 31 Although the situation has radically changed, since Mao and his party took over the government of all mainland China and established a totalitarian dictatorship, they have retained, adapted, and elaborated these techniques. "The mass line is the basic working method by which Communist cadres seek to initiate and promote a unified relationship between themselves and the Chinese population and thus to bring about the support and active participation of the people." There is nothing particularly novel about the mass line; it is the propagation of the party line, applied under primitive technical and intellectual conditions, to millions of illiterate followers. To vulgarize and in the process distort and corrupt Marxist economic and social analysis was and remains no mean task. The detailed methods are in each case molded naturally by the folkways of the particular people. "This method includes the two techniques of 'from the masses, to the masses,' and 'the linking of the general with the specific,' the basic formulization [sic] given by Mao Tse-tung in 'On Methods of Leadership' (June 1, 1943)," writes the most penetrating student of Communist Chinese leadership methods. 32

Fascist propaganda techniques placed a similar emphasis upon the spoken word. Both Mussolini and Hitler were powerful orators who served as examples to many of their subleaders. Both also explicitly favored the technique; Hitler had supported this method emphatically in Mein Kampf, and it became a key policy of the Goebbels operation. One whole section of the party's propaganda apparatus was dedicated to the training of speakers, and there was a deliberate effort made to cultivate oratory rather than written communications. Thousands of men were thus trained to emulate Hitler in developing the technique of rousing the mass assembly, with its emotional outbursts and its vague longings, to violent action against the Jew, the Marxist, and the November criminal.

All in all, the system of propaganda and mass communication developed in the totalitarian systems is of crucial importance for the maintenance of the regime. It may be doubted whether it could function so well without the terror, but it cannot be doubted that as it actually functions it is highly effective. If manipulative controls are carried beyond a certain point, the system becomes self-defeating. Hence the loosening up after Stalin's death was intended to make the anti-Stalin propaganda effective. Now that there has developed a distinguishable "Soviet style of thinking," there can be some easing of the controls. But "it would be unduly optimistic to assume that the Soviet leadership is to any major degree

moving toward the establishment of free discussion." 33 The principles of thought control, as maintained by Lenin and other Communist leaders, are merely more flexibly applied. In a sense, such thought control dehumanizes the subjects of the regime by depriving them of a chance for independent thought and judgment.

NOTES

1. Klaus Mehnert, Soviet Man in His World, (New York: 1962), pp. 261ff.

2. Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy, Boston, 1950, Chapter 24. 3. Carl J. Friedrich, The New Image of the Common Man (Boston: 1951), Chapter 3. All attempts to define propaganda in terms of the content of the communications or the psychological effect tend to obscure these crucial political features.

Otto Dietrich, Zwolf Jahre mit Hitler (Munich: 1955).

5. Derrick Sington and Arthur Wiedenfeld, The Goebbels Experiment—A Study of the Nazi Propaganda Machine (London: 1942), esp. Chapters 2, 3.

6. Ibid., p. 17. It may, however, be argued that the real dualism was that between Goebbels and Dietrich. In the party, Dietrich's position was equivalent to Goebbels'; he was Reichsleiter as press chief of the Reich, and although he was Goebbels' subordinate as secretary of state in the Ministry of Propaganda, he wore another hat as press chief of the government, which gave him direct access to Hitler.

7. H. R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-1944 (New York: 1953), pp. 389-390; see also Adolph Hitler, Tischgesprache, edited by H. Picker (Bonn: 1951), p. 128.

8. F. Borkenau, European Communism (London: 1953), passim.

9. Hitler, Tischgesprache, p. 128; Trevor-Roper, Hitler's Secret Conversations, pp. 341–342. 10. Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler, 2nd ed. (Chicago: 1948), esp. pp. 85ff.; Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany's Underground (New York: 1947), p. 136 and elsewhere. 11. Bernhard Vollmer, Volksopposition im Polzeistatt-Gestapo-und Regierungsberichte 1934-1936 (Stuttgart: 1956).

12. Guido Leto, Memoirs. OVRA. Fascismo-Antifascismo (Bologna: 2nd ed., 1952). 13. Royal Commision, Reports on Espionage in Canada, 1946, and Australia, 1955 (Ottawa and Canberra), for excellent source material.

14. Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany, 1950, pp. 358-392; J. Bennett, "The German Currency Reform," Annals of the Academy of Political Science, vol. 267 (January 1950), pp. 43-54.

15. Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), Chapter 20.

16. Louis Lochner (trans. and ed.), The Goebbels Diaries (London: 1948).

17. Ibid., p. 519.

18. Dietrich, Zwolf Jahre mit Hitler, p. 154.

19. Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse: A Study of German Diplomats Under the Nazi Regime (Berkeley: 1954); Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution (New York: 1948).

20. Sir Neville Henderson, The Failure of a Mission (New York: 1940), pp. 258–301.

21. H. D. Lasswell, in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: 1954), 367.

22. Dietrich, Zwolf Jahre mit Hitler, translation ours.

23. Lochner (ed.), The Goebbels Diaries, passim.

p.

24. Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen-Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass.: 1959), pp. 185–186.

25. Alex Inkeles, Public Opinion in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: 1958).

26. M. Strepukhov, "Powerful Instruments for Mobilizing the Masses to Carry Our Party and Governmental Decisions," Kommunist, vol. 6 (April 1955), pp. 91–102.

27. Inkeles, Public Opinion, p. 275.

28. Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of History and Culture of the USSR, vol. 2, no. 1 (1955), p. 10.

29. Radio Moscow, September 1954.

30. Inkeles, Public Opinion, p. 248.

31. Ibid., p. 333.

32. Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (5 vols., 1954-1961) (London and New York).

33. John W. Lewis, Leadership in Communist China (Ithaca, N.Y.: 1963).

THE CHANGING SOVIET UNION*

BY ITHIEL DE SOLA POOL

Monopoly of mass communications has been made more difficult as technological progress has improved and increased the channels of communication the sender and receiver may

use.

"When Stalin ruled the Soviet Union only 2 percent of the Soviet people had the physical possibility of hearing foreign radio broadcasts. Today over a third of the people have that chance. That is a difference of monumental significance. . . .

...

"There never was a time when the Bolshevik attempt totally to control the information that reached Soviet citizens succeeded in full. There were always heroes who kept alive in the privacy of their heads, or within their families, political or national or religious faiths that the regime proscribed. There were also always islands of freedom in prison. Men to whom arrest and imprisonment had already happened, who had already written off rewards in this life, who knew that their neighbors also were enemies of the regime could sometimes talk more freely to each other than could people still trying to make their way up the treadmill. . . .

...

"There was also always in Stalin's Russia a rumor net that covered the country. Typically, each person in a totalitarian society, for sanity's sake, has to have one or two trusted friends in whom he can confide. Without that his thoughts will change; brainwashing will work. A completely unexpressed view does not survive. In Stalin's Russia. . . the net of personal confidence covered the country even though each person usually could talk freely to only one or two close friends. That is enough to permit very high saliency messages to diffuse rapidly thoughout the country. . . .

"That kind of rumor net is, however, an inefficient kind of information channel. It carries only the dramatic item. It provides little richness of detail and little interpretive background. The best feature of rumor is that it may be accurate, contrary to common impressions. The evidence from various rumor studies suggests that rumors change little in the

*From "The Changing Soviet Union," Current, no. 67 (January 1966), pp. 12-17. Reprinted with the permission of Current, copyright holder, and the courtesy of the author.

and needs to be inquired into, if propaganda is to be understood. And since propaganda is carried on in behalf of an organization, it is equally important to inquire into who finances it. Many propagandists are reluctant, therefore, to reveal the source of their funds.2

In totalitarian dictatorships, virtually all propaganda is directed ultimately to the maintenenace in power of the party controlling it. This does not mean, however, that there are not many sharp conflicts between rival propagandists. As will be shown later, the maintenance of totalitarian dictatorship does not preclude the occurrence of many internecine struggles; on the contrary, it lends to these struggles a fierceness and violence which is rarely seen in freer societies. This issue of the rival component elements in the totalitarian society poses very difficult problems for the over-all direction of propaganda. The chief propagandist often has to opt between such rival groups. (In the National Socialist Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, these rival claims to some extent found expression in the organization of the "desk," that is to say, of different bureaus which would report on different sections of the society and would thus mirror the conflicts.)3

The documentary evidence that has become available since the war tends to support earlier views regarding the inner workings of Goebbels' propaganda organization. There is no need here to go into details of the organization, but some outstanding features deserve brief comment. Perhaps the most important aspect of this "monopoly" control was the dualism of government and party. Each had its elaborate propaganda setup, both headed by Goebbels, who succeeded in maintaining a measure of effective coordination. But on the whole it would seem that the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment and the party office of propaganda were in a coordinate position. However, key officials of the ministry who stood in sharpest antagonism to Goebells, like Otto Dietrich, the press chief of the Hitler government, also occupied pre-eminent posts in the party's propaganda machine. This "personal union" extended fairly far down the line. The relationship has been described as follows: "The task of the Propaganda Ministry in the whole machine for controlling and creating public opinion might be compared with a Ministry of War. It coordinates, plans, and is responsible for the smooth carrying out of the whole propaganda effort of the German government. The Party Propaganda Department, on the other hand, is comparable to the General Staff of an army which actually directs operations and musters and organizes the forces and their supplies and ammunition." 5 It is seen from this and other evidence that the two organizations had different functions within the regime, comparable to the difference between party and government. The aggressive boldness of a leader of the National Socialist movement was as much a quality required of Goebbels as was the forceful caution of a leading government official. It is generally agreed that the most important instrument of Goebbels in planning and coordinating all the far-flung activities of his two organizations was the Coordination