>Memories of Soviet children’s literature linger today. Immel recounts a story of a Russian colleague who visited her and spotted some Raduga pamphlets. “He knew exactly what they were, being old friends from his childhood,” she says. “He picked up the copy of Kornei Chukovsky’s Barmelai, illustrated by Mstislav Dobuzhinski, and began reciting it from memory.”
"Barmalei" is an innocent poetry, filled with kids-oriented story of two kids, evil~cannibal man and Dr.Aibolit ("Dr. Ouchithurts") in Africa. [1][2] If you feel that the auhor was on heavy drugs, don't worry, that was typical these days. But try to find propaganda in that.
I'd always thought it was pure unadulterated propaganda fantasy, then in my late thirties I discovered coin-operated pay TVs actually are a thing in some cheap motels. Mind=blown
The article doesn't call Barmalei propaganda, nor does it claim everything Raduga published was propaganda. Although as a case in point, Chukovsky himself ran into some trouble at the time for the inadequate ideological soundness of some of his earlier children's poetry (like Barmalei) and had to publicly renounce it.
But it leaves room to make such conslusion, so I decided to make it clear. As of ideological adequateness, such abstract story could be pulled in any way with its ears properly grabbed. People love to look for meanings of "curtain color" to make strong arguments out of the void.
Not really, it's a conclusion you're making on the basis of... I'm not sure what. It's an article talking about Soviet children's literature and the fact that much of it had an element of propaganda. Not that all of it was propaganda. The article talks about multiple aspects of it, its evolution, includes this particular anecdote, etc.
As of ideological adequateness, such abstract story could be pulled in any way with its ears properly grabbed
I think you've misunderstood what I'm saying here. Take a look at 'чуковщина' in his Wikipedia bio, for instance.
Maybe it is my personal delusion, but the article structure does pretty quick climbing from spreading ideology to escaping to exile, then to purges, and then to something lingering in minds today with the help of the story that non-native folks can't check thoroughly. Good for you not noticing that amazing curve, but most of us know the golden rules of innocent rhetoric delivery. That said, it is probably a false positive (so no accusation), which should be made clear both ways, as you did it for me. Hope this explains what my basis is.
>чуковщина
I suspect I'll miss this part of your point until it is written without vague references.
It's completely explicit, really. You linked these in Russian so I assume you can read it - it's in his wikipedia page - bring it up, hit 'find' and type the keyword. It's discussed at length in 'От двух до пяти'. He got in (comparatively slight) trouble for the lack of ideology in the poetry you quoted. Why? Exactly because ideological concerns were prevalent in Soviet literature at the time.
Soviet literature of the period was definitely encouraged and even required to have ideological subtext, there's no arguing with that. However, that doesn't tell us much about how successful that policy was. The article is evidently trying to make a point that it was successful by presenting an example of a person who could recite "Barmalei" from memory, without mentioning that "Barmalei" was actually innocent and unrelated to the propaganda-infested books mentioned previously. That is either an error on the article author's part, or a purposeful omission.
Please don't read this as a claim that the policy was not actually successful (which I don't know whether is true or not).
Let me tell you a story about a particular generation of terrorists. Namely the ones born in the 1950's. First and foremost, Osama bin Laden (1957). We all know what he did. Second, Khaled Mashal, the current Hamas leader (1956). Finally, Abbas al Moussawi, one of the founding fathers of Hezbollah (1952).
Many of us know what terrorists born in the 1950's did, but somehow we all miss the fact that they all belong to the same generation. Weird, eh?
A lot of people think they know who Vladimir Putin (1952) is, but how many of them are aware that twenty years ago Putin was involved in the Chechnya war?
In modern reality, I think authors don't have a moral right to not check the perspectives of what they not say, if the article has "hey, look at these russians/americans/asians" vibes, especially when it hits front pages. We are not claiming that thing explodes, we claim that it is potentially misleading for unaware groups. I can't see any warm reason to refuse these clarifications to appear here.
The article doesn't make such a claim, but it also doesn't make a contrary, leaving it to the structure, which feels questionable.
Oh, now I see the source of my confusion. In your first reply, I got meaning of "inadequate" wrong (probably because this word is so abused by russian natives today).
I'm sorry for your main counterargument graying, because it actually clears the "dark" side of my notice. That said, I'm not ready to simply close my eyes on the rhetorical curve I found. Chukovsky was very popular (even iconic), but propaganda wasn't so. I definitely read several books filled with invasive ideology, but can't tell that it was a big influence or someone can cite these from memory. Personally I'm not very old though, SU ended short after I went to school.
> I like how western people label propaganda anything that was made outside of the US
I grew up during the days of GI Joe cartoons. A while back, we watched the GI Joe tv movie for a laugh. My gf and I couldn't finish it because it was essentially Cold War propaganda for kids. A lot of the primary villains were foreign, the heroes were as stereotypical American as they could get, and the plot revolved around an energy crisis or something along those lines. It was offensive, considering that it was targeting children. It was political indoctrination.
Also, I remember an episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks that was anchored around the Berlin Wall. Again, the cartoon was instructing young viewers about the dangers of a foreign government. Not what I would consider appropriate for a seven year old kid's entertainment.
There are still many, many propaganda films being made in the US, and not just for kids but for adults as well. There are so many movies and shows glorifying the US military and spies, and making evil caricatures of foreign enemies. Some films are essentially recruitment films for the US military, and they even play overt military recruitment ads before feature films in theaters.
Political campaigns are also essentially propaganda, as are what's put out by the PR departments of the military, Department of State, White House, think tanks, and even corporations.
I almost never see any of this pointed out, much less questioned in the US media. It's like they're either not even aware of it or don't care.
They freak out over Russian, Chinese, or North Korean propaganda, though.
> I almost never see any of this pointed out, much less questioned in the US media. It's like they're either not even aware of it or don't care.
It should be pointed out by people first. I'm from Argentina but I was in US earlier this year. Someone was complaining about how the Russians influenced the election. I asked if he considered that in the last 50 years USA is well known for interfering in other countries politics. That his complaint was like a bully crying of having been bullied. He told me that it was a good point and didn't considered before. He is an smart and informed person but for some reason didn't saw earlier how his country affects other countries. Just the other way around.
i have heard this countless times in the last 6 months and I don't understand the point: because the us helped to overthrow peron it's okay that Russia interfered in the us elections? yes people are ignorant of the us' history but what does that have to with anything?
Moral maxims and questions of international law and sovereignty should be applied equally regardless of subject. The US, by it actions, says that intervening in foreign elections is okay, and therefore it is, according to the US, okay for foreign entities to interfere in US elections.
It is only by universally applying principles of law and moral that we can change them, because you never understand why breaching another nation's sovereignty is wrong (even though this is in the UN charter) unless it is done to you.
>because the us helped to overthrow peron it's okay that Russia interfered in the us elections?
It's never OK, because of the US past actions it's hypocritical to get overly upset when it happens to the US unless also accompanied by an effort to stop in the future. If the US deserves untampered elections, the rest of the world does too. Even if it means the new government isn't fond of the US
A huge number of Hollywood films about the military are overtly critical of the military. Even the films that valorize military service tend to have a strain of resentment about the military institutions themselves.
I don't think any of the premise of this thread is that there's no western propaganda. There obviously is.
And then there was Captain Planet, which was pro-environmentalism propaganda. In that show the American boy was a devil-may-care idiot while the Soviet girl (his crush) was smart and conscientious. It stayed on the air longer than it probably should have given its quality, mainly because of Ted Turner's enormous pull in the industry.
That's the difference between the USA and the USSR: in the USSR such counterpropaganda would have been quashed and its creators sent to the gulag.
> the plot revolved around an energy crisis or something along those lines.
I'm not going to defend the GI Joe cartoon at all, but as I recall, the plot of the movie mainly revolved around mutant snake-people trying to take over the world.
As a Soviet kid, I can assure you that there was tons of propaganda in the books that I've read as a child.
Some was pretty blatant, like the various short stories about Lenin (all adding up to how awesome he was in various respects). Some was more subtle, like the Neznaika books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno) - the second one in the series was basically a communist utopia for kids, and the third one was a capitalist dystopia (that ends up with a communist revolution).
For another example, the Russian adaptation of the Wizard of Oz, which basically diverged entirely after the first book, ended the series with an invasion and occupation of Oz by mind-controlling slavery-practicing aliens (yep, the kind that come on spaceships), which ends up in a slave uprising with strong socialist overtones in the messaging.
To be fair, I don't recall any propaganda in the first 5 of books in the Wizard of Oz series (which, admittedly, could be explained by its subtlety), and the later ones were much less popular than the first. Personally, I didn't read the 6th (and the last) one.
As someone born during a transition from "democracy where communist party gets all the seats every time because everybody loves their glorious leader Tito" to real democracy, I can tell you from personal experience that there was shitloads of propaganda in everything my parents and grandparents had access to.
I've read books and comics from the 50s and 60s in Yugoslavia and I can tell you that the Communist Party can do no wrong, the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes, and Tito himself was a poor lad who rose from nothing to ultimate power just because of how awesome he is. And of course we all are equal in everything, if someone feels unequal or god forbid better then they are stealing and robbing and doing bad things.
The history books I was taught from in the 90s and 00s painted a very different picture.
C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted.
Today's propaganda is hidden as organic voices of different organizations and you need to do some digging to see if org is genuine or someone is pulling the strings.
You vastly underestimate the volume and dimensions of proper totalitarian propaganda, like Soviet one. It is literally everywhere. You think stuff like "hidden as organic voices of different organizations" was invented recently? That's just the basics, Soviets had that in early 1930th when there were letters from workers and peasants demanding that the party would take care of Trotskyist-Bukharin traitors or whoever was the traitor du jour that day. It's something they have done for decades, and they did much more. You think you'd be able to tell truth from lie in such environment - unless you are spectacularly bright genius, you'd probably not able to. You may identify some lies, but definitely not all of them, and would be definitely driven to believe into a lot of things that were either distorted or completely false. In an environment where nearly all information sources were controlled (except for rumors and foreign radio-"voices") it would be very hard to discern and avoid it.
As an anecdata of just how tight this control was, my high school professor told us stories of how he used to smuggle rock'n'roll CDs into the country in the 60s and 70s. Selling outside music was illegal and he could leave the country regularly without suspicion because he had family in Italy.
I think it's much more likely he was smuggling vinyl, unless the smuggling was also done via a time machine, but I get your point! My wife (Estonian) had an uncle who was a respected yachtsman during the Soviet occupation, and who invariably came back from his trips with lots of 'subversive' albums. It put a different perspective on music I'd had ready access to growing up in Australia, for example Genesis' 'Invisible Touch' - I remember biking to the record store and buying it with (obvious) great ease and some pleasure. My wife told me this album was one she heard after her uncle smuggled it into Estonia, and it was copied by her Dad onto open-reel tape. The story behind the 'how and when' of hearing the music really brought home the difference between being part of the USSR and not.
> C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted.
In retrospect. At the time it was taught as real history at schools. At least according to my mum, she never even found out about all the mass graves and other attrocities until after Yugoslavia fell apart. Partisans being the absolute good guys was just the accepted default.
At least in Poland there was "official" truth (taught at shools/media) and one that was a bit closer to reality that was taught at (most) homes.
I think this may be related to slightly different history - Poland was invaded in '39 by Russians as well and suffered fair deal of their atrocities - it wasn't possible just to eradicate knowledge about that.
Yeah the tricky part of Yugoslavia is that when our king announced alliance with Hitler, we executed a civil coup and forced the king to flee to the UK.
Hitler then invaded when the new government said they were not going to collaborate.
Then as part of fighting off axis powers, we also fought an internal civil war between the communists and the ... I don't know if they had a real name, we call them the whites. It's details of that civil war that communist propaganda liked to sweep under the rug and talk only about how they singlehandedly saved the country from the nazis.
What kind of history you were taught at home depended primarily on whether your parents were Red or White. My dad for example was told a lot about the bad things the Partisans did because of his family's alignment to the religious, white, side.
"Whites" are loyalists. In Slavic languages "white" stands for "pristine, unsullied" and in the context of a revolutionary civil war refers to the side, which remained loyal to the government being overthrown.
It was a war, wasn't it? Millions and millions have died, we just can't imagine what was happening at that horrible period. Now it is very easy to say "I would never do THAT!", but who knows.
Not only Captain America. They had everybody from Horatio Alger to Joseph McCarthy, all the tele-evangelists and their ilk, all their popular movies, books, comics, tv shows etc with overly simplistic morality plays and nationalistic narrative etc. Even the 60s rock n' rollers just added some tamed dissent to an otherwise hook line and sinker adoption of the "american dream", all the way to Rambo, Rocky, Top Gun, and so on.
It's people like HST, Kurt Vonnegut, black musicians and writers, directors like Cassavetes and Kazan and such that embedded a dose of realism to the popular narrative. But anything really mainstream was always 80% sugary propaganda.
It doesn't have to be pro-government to be pro-US, pro-national interests and pro-national ideology, in other words to promote all the same that those in power promote and evangelize.
On the contrary, "anti-government" is the official party line in an era when even the President (Reagan), in his inaugural address says: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.""
In the first movie, he kills a bunch of policemen and feels he and his friends have been abandoned by the military.
In the second, the military is actively concealing the existence of live POWs in Vietnam. He ends the movie by threatening a military official.
In neither case can you reasonably call the movie "propaganda", at least not without logic that you could use to connects the dots between any movie, from Bridget Jones Diary to Being John Malkovich, to propaganda.
I'm not arguing that the movies are anti-propaganda. I'd call them neutral in that regard.
> In US they had Captain America so it balances out.
There is still a lot of propaganda in media for children. It's just not (obviously) pro government propaganda anymore. But I recall Bubble Guppies including descriptions of police as (my words) grown up hall monitors. No guns. No power of arrest. The monopoly on the use of force is basically the point of police forces. To elide that and teach about sirens and traffic tickets is a bit... overly sanitized.
The United States teaches a lot of propaganda about so much of its history. The most salient example being the veneration of the Founding Fathers as if they were saints when many of them were brutal slave owners and serial rapists.
> Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect.
Maybe sometimes? I see a lot of new media with plenty of propaganda built in. Especially in the categories of: pro-arts, pro-environment, anti-violence, pro-diversity, pro-people-with-disabilities, pro-healthy-eating, pro-exercise, pro-sports, anti-bigotry, etc.
Many of those probably seem benign or beneficial, but they all have political implications and definite viewpoints.
>Of course. The larger point is that it's nigh impossible to identify propaganda until the regime or at least public perception changes. Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect.
I think it's the opposite, at least for the old soviet regimes -- and I've read several accounts that match that. People didn't believe what the party said, and knew perfectly well what was going on, they just pretended to agree (for obvious reasons). They also made jokes (very popular ones) that clearly show a good understanding of the politics and propaganda mechanisms.
Propaganda of that kind only worked at the early years (when it wasn't pure propaganda, but people also legitimately thought, some of the leadership included) that things are going forward in the right direction.
So, when we ask "how could they be so dumb?" the answer is simple: they weren't.
True to some extent. However, while suspecting the party lies, they absolutely had no idea how deep and vast the lies were and that exactly was the truth. I've once heard an anecdote about North Korean woman who fled to South Korea and was asked how she thinks the life in the West is, how she thinks people in countries like USA live. She said she thinks it's a very good life, everybody is rich - everybody can get no less than 800g of rice every day!
The point is that when you live in the environment of a totalitarian state with little to no access to outside sources of information, you can easily deduct you are probably not being told the truth. It is much harder to know what the truth is, especially if you most basic assumptions might be based on the same propaganda you seemingly reject - because you've had nothing else to base them on.
And if you look at Russia now, it is surprising how many people who were alive at Soviet regime feel nostalgic about it and even about figures like Stalin. They experienced all the lies themselves, they knew those are the lies - and ask them now, they'd repeat them anyway.
They mostly feel nostalgic due to the economical and social hell happened to them in 1980-2000. Most of them never recovered from these times and could not adapt to new reality not because of brains washed, but because you cannot simply make it to the top after losing / not having it all. Ask your local homeless guys why they don't buy themselves a house, car and good life. Multiply that by pretty median smartness and hope for "it would fix things if returned" and you get the result.
As always, it worked much better on the kids than on the parents. My great grandparents didn't believe most of the propaganda. My grandparents are pretty sure Tito gave them a nice cushy life. My parents know for a fact that nice lives were had, but thought that maybe it's not cool that people who speak against the party go to jail and that all the really nice stuff can only be bought in Italy and Austria. They also think that maybe those hippies in the America were onto something.
Hence regime fell. Aided greatly by the overarching global political climate of the late 80's.
My generation is pretty sure modern capitalism is the savior and the only way to prosperity.
The cycle continues.
What will our kids believe? Who knows. But it's definitely going to involve the idea that overpriced organic artisanal foods are the only thing worth putting in your body.
>My grandparents are pretty sure Tito gave them a nice cushy life.
Yeah, but note that your grandparents also had life before socialism to compare, and, whatever troubles the regime had, regimes and lives before it weren't that nice in most of the Balkan either. So it might not be that propaganda worked better on them, but that they legitimately thought their conditions had been improved.
It's not like they went from cushy capitalist life to soviet style misery -- it was lots of war, national tensions, conscription, hard village life, culminating of course to the horror that was WWII.
And Tito was a bug war hero (for them, but legitimately too), and did held the country together (way better than his successors did post-socialism, so there's that).
I was born in late 1980 in North Vietnam, at that time the society and education system was still under the heavy influence of the Soviet-era propaganda. Other than the USSR, Vietnam at the time was also under some influence from the communist China as well.
For fictional novels, we had Russian books such as Nought the Seafarer, Dr. Aibolit, The Copper Jar of Old Khottabych, The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends, and many other books translated to Vietnamese. They were printed in the USSR in beautiful, high-quality paper hardcovers, and were a joy to read and was the inspiration for my destitute childhood. Even Vietnamese children literature were also quite enjoyable. For instance, De Men Phieu Luu Ky (Diary of a cricket) were about adventures of a cricket that found the traditional life boring, broke through and went exploring new places. I mostly find them inspiring and non-offensive even now (I am currently living in the US and had a liberal college and post-graduate education in the US). Adult literature was much more blatantly brainwashing.
I don't know about what happened in China and Russia, but I don't feel that western children literature books were under scrutiny in Vietnam, I still remember vividly my dad has a stash full of children's books such as Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, 1001 Arabian nights,... they were all available in Vietnamese under the mainstream publication, although the books looked awful cosmetically, because they were printed and bound domestically.
For non-fictional books, I can recall several excellent children books that were published in Russian that were my inspiration when I was young. In the Russian side, Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman was the one book that I would read and read again. On the Chinese side, One Hundred Thousand Whys is another series of books that were surprisingly well written. They have many of those on different topics such as Maths, Physics, Literature, Biology, Medicine, Astrology,... each book has several hundreds of answers to basic and advanced topics written in an accessible manner. It was kinda my childhood Wikipedia.
That was my anecdotal experience. Maybe it wasn't offensive, maybe I was used to it, or maybe I was romanticizing my uneventful, brainwashed childhood.
Ah, sorry for the confusion. I meant they were printed in Russia, in Vietnamese.
The USSR had a big pocket subsidy for smaller countries under their umbrella, so they printed books, gave aids, brought people to space, etc. to help smaller countries in their days.
Propaganda in the Soviet Union didn't have negative connotation, just like it doesn't have a negative connotation in china today. It is like blaming the west for calling the "Chinese communist party" communists even though communist is in their name. Many accusations of western media bias follow that pattern.
Propaganda never has a negative connotation within the country that produces it so long as it's centered around ideologies supported by the majority of the population, that's the entire point. The tone of your post makes me think that you probably don't even recognize propaganda in the context of your own nation.
The parent talks about the term "propaganda". In the West, the word has bad connotations and we use terms like public relations instead. In China, "propaganda" is used in the same way as we use "public relations", both by government and private enterprise.
They actually "call" it propaganda, while in the west they call it media (since the government doesn't control it, when it is government PR, they call it propaganda as well). This is not about recognizing something or not, but if the producer of X says it is X, why the f*ck would you not believe them?
As a Canadian who grew up watching American cartoons, I can say with complete certainty Soviet Union wasn't alone in using media to indoctrinate their children.
Doesn't almost every popular character from American cartoons end up in the army in at least one episode? I mean, from Johnny Bravo to Bugs Bunny to Daffy Duck to Tom and Jerry... Go as far in the past as you want. I've never seen this in cartoons from other countries.
Or maybe because this just is actual propaganda. No where here is anyone saying the Western world did not produce propaganda. That's a straw man all in your puny brain.
The difference is that these books were produced by the Soviet government. Meanwhile, stuff like G.I. Joe and Captain America were made through free enterprise.
Any government trying so hard to influence the public's opinion of it is suspect in my eyes.
I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but yes, there is something different about the Soviet government producing children's books, and Hasbro deciding to produce G.I. Joe action figures because it identified a sales opportunity.
I think the main thing is, that in the Soviet example, I'm not clear that there was a choice to not give the books to your children (maybe there was, I'm not sure). Whereas with G.I. Joe, Captain America, et. al. actually buying the toys/comics is voluntary, notwithstanding the powerful effect of advertising.
There's also the fact the creators of G.I. Joe were not later executed for nonsense reasons.
Uhhm, Russia is part of the "west" unless you think they are not --but even Japan is considered "western" in economic contexts, but regardless, most Russians consider themselves western (as would most Europeans consider them). In addition, the word "propaganda" didn't have much negative connotation in Russia. In many contexts it has similar connotation to the word "advertising" in English --which depending on context can seem negative, or positive, but many times just descriptive.
By the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet children's fiction was maybe more recognizable as such. Eduard Uspensky's [1] works are quite widely translated into Finnish (looking at the local library catalog, with remarkable number of reprints in 1990s/2000s).
My view of the Great War of Currents between Edison and Westinghouse [2] has ever since been colored by the version told in the Warranty People. (A story about tiny little engineers, living inside everyday electric appliances, keeping them running and in order until the warranty period is over, after which they leave.)
I'd like to see more real life technology and economy featured in childrens media, so they can develop appreciacion for what miracles, we, as a species have achieved.
Instead at age 10 they think it's as mundane as rain because nobody told them otherwise and most of them keep thinking it way into adulthood.
> Instead at age 10 they think it's as mundane as rain
It is. When was the last time you admired a pencil as technological marvel or thought about all the science that went into making microwave food possible?
If you tell kids about witches, they'll be amazed with witches. If you tell them about how jet engine works, they'll be amazed about that.
I'm from post communist/socialist country and was exposed to glimpses of their child propaganda. Very young age and low availability, so I don't remember much, but I remember marveling at MIG fighter jets with red star, lorries, human carrying rockets or combine harvesters, tractors or mining.
Kids are like that. Marvel at things that they are exposed to. Adults usually get solidified in their amazement, so if they marveled at soccer when they were kids it stays with them throughout their lives.
True, people don't care. My point is, it's because they were never shown to care.
This reminds me of a skit a comedy group did at my alma mater about communist rhetoric in children's books. Good for a chuckle: https://youtu.be/QpHxyFFi69w
It's hacker news jargon, with an etymology something like RTFM (read the fricking manual) -> RTFA (read the fricking article) -> TFA (the fricking article), used as shorthand for "the article."
"Barmalei" is an innocent poetry, filled with kids-oriented story of two kids, evil~cannibal man and Dr.Aibolit ("Dr. Ouchithurts") in Africa. [1][2] If you feel that the auhor was on heavy drugs, don't worry, that was typical these days. But try to find propaganda in that.
TFA can distort your opinions.