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Unlock This CourseStalin did not only want people to obey. He wanted to control what they thought. The first step was to make sure they met no ideas except the party's own.
A state office called Glavlit, set up in 1922, checked everything before it could be printed, performed or shown. Every newspaper, book, play and film needed its approval. Bad news, such as the Great Famine or a factory accident, was simply left out. When party leaders were purged, their books were taken off library shelves and destroyed. Few people could travel abroad, and foreign newspapers and books were kept out, so most citizens had nothing to compare the official story with.
Key terms:
Censorship took ideas away. Propaganda put the party's message in their place, all day and everywhere.
Pravda belonged to the party and Izvestia to the government. Both printed the same story: record harvests, plans beaten early and 'enemies' unmasked.
Loudspeakers in streets, factories and collective farms carried Moscow radio to people who could not read. Posters urged workers to beat their targets and watch for wreckers.
Films reached millions. Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) showed a Russian prince beating German invaders, a clear warning about Hitler's Germany.
In 1932 the party closed all independent writers' groups and set up one Union of Soviet Writers. Anyone outside it could not get published. At the Union's first congress in 1934, socialist realism was announced as the only style allowed. Stalin called writers 'engineers of human souls': their job was to build loyal Soviet minds.
Socialist realism had clear rules. Art had to be easy for ordinary people to understand. Its heroes were workers, peasants and party members. It had to be hopeful, showing life not as it was but as it was meant to become.
Nikolai Ostrovsky's novel How the Steel Was Tempered told of a young Communist who gives everything for the Revolution. Vera Mukhina's giant steel statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937) showed a man and woman striding forward, holding up a hammer and a sickle.
In January 1936 Stalin walked out of an opera by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Pravda then attacked it as 'Muddle Instead of Music' and it was taken off the stage. The poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 for a poem mocking Stalin. Arrested again in 1938, he died in a transit camp.
Most artists learned to play safe. The result was a mass of cheerful paintings of tractors and smiling farmers, even while villages went hungry.
The young mattered most, because they had known no other system. The state set one curriculum for the whole country and approved every textbook. Teachers who strayed from the party line could lose their jobs or be arrested. Lessons presented Stalin as a hero and the USSR as the best country in the world.
When leaders were purged, pupils were told to ink out their faces or paste paper over them in their textbooks. Control carried on after school. Children aged about 10 to 14 joined the Young Pioneers, wore red scarves and promised to be loyal to the party. Older ones could move up to the Komsomol, which helped with a place at university or a good job.
The past was changed to suit Stalin. In 1938 a new official history of the party, known as the Short Course, was published. Stalin oversaw it and wrote part of it himself. Tens of millions of copies were printed and it had to be studied in schools, universities and party classes.
Stalin had been Lenin's closest partner in 1917 and a hero of the Civil War. Trotsky, who really organised the October seizure of power and built the Red Army, appeared only as a traitor. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were 'enemies of the people' who had plotted from the start.
A famous photograph of Lenin speaking in Moscow in May 1920 showed Trotsky and Kamenev on the steps beside him. In later versions both had been removed. A 1937 photograph showed Yezhov walking next to Stalin beside a canal. After Yezhov was shot, he was painted out.
Eisenstein had already been made to cut Trotsky out of his film October, made for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Removing rivals from the record mattered because it took away any alternative. If Stalin had always been right, and his opponents always traitors, there was nobody else to follow.
Don't treat censorship and propaganda as the same thing. Censorship removes information; propaganda supplies the message the state wants. Don't say socialist realism was 'realistic': it showed an ideal, not real life. And don't write that Trotsky was only left out of history. He was put back in as a villain.
(c) 'The main way in which Stalin controlled the people of the Soviet Union in the 1930s was through propaganda and censorship.'
How far do you agree? Explain your answer.
You may use the following in your answer:
You must also use information of your own. [16 marks]
Propaganda and censorship were an important means of control, but I only partly agree. They shaped what people believed, yet terror was what made opposition impossible.
Propaganda and censorship reached every citizen every day. Glavlit had to approve everything that was published, so bad news such as the famine never appeared in print. From 1934 socialist realism was the only style allowed in the arts, so novels, paintings and films all showed happy workers and a wise party. Schools used approved textbooks, and the Short Course of 1938 rewrote history so that Stalin was Lenin's partner and Trotsky a traitor. Pupils even inked out the faces of purged leaders in their books, and the Young Pioneers and Komsomol carried the message on after school. Because people had nothing to compare this with, many truly believed it. This was control of minds, which is cheaper and longer-lasting than force.
However, the NKVD controlled people in a more direct way. Under Yezhov, about 1.5 million people were arrested in 1937-38 and about 680,000 were shot. Order 00447 gave each region a quota of arrests. Informers in workplaces and flats meant that even a joke could lead to the gulags. As a result, people who did not believe the propaganda still stayed silent. Fear worked on doubters, where propaganda could not.
The Moscow Show Trials of 1936-38 were a third method. Old Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin confessed in public to absurd crimes and were shot. The trials removed anyone who could have replaced Stalin and showed the public that no one was safe. They also suggest that the two methods depended on each other: the terror removed the rivals, and the newspapers told people the plots were real.
Overall, I agree only to some extent. The best test is which method the others relied on. Propaganda won real support, especially among the young, but censorship itself only worked because writers feared arrest, as Mandelstam's fate showed. Terror could silence believers and doubters alike. So the NKVD's terror was the main method of control, and propaganda and censorship made that terror easier to accept.
What lifts this to the top level: it covers three aspects (one beyond the two bullets), argues both for and against the statement with precise facts, and reaches a judgement using a stated test.
An answer that uses only the two bullets cannot reach the top level, so plan a third method of control before you start, such as the show trials or the control of education. Then name the test you are using in your conclusion, for example 'which method did the others rely on?'