Week 1, Week 5

On Trotsky and Putin: Propaganda Out of Hands?

Photo from The Atlantic

In 1923, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky published his idealistic paper “The Newspaper and its Readers,” pinpointing the direction the Soviet newspaper should take to most effectively convey the beliefs of the party. Trotsky essentially considers the press as “a means of propaganda” (120) and a “weapon of enlightenment” (122). Outright, Trotsky takes Soviet news to be biased under the influence of political ideologies. Despite the fact that the press is a tool for the Soviet government, it must nevertheless “carefully and attentively” (120) convey factual information.

Trotsky’s idea of providing factual information is twisted. He stresses that “our newspaper can and must throw light on facts, since it is called upon to educate, elevate, develop. But it will only reach this goal if it starts off from facts, thoughts, and moods that really affect the mass reader” (126). Thus, the ends are the political goals and not necessarily objective truth. Blurring the bounds between factuality and political motivation, Trotsky writes:

Hard factual information gradually sinks into the readers’ minds. It becomes increasingly easy for them to understand new facts, and they learn to seek and find in the newspaper in the first place the most important information. (123)

The first sentence would have been approved by Walter Lippmann, that the press should pursue the factual and the objective. Yet, the second sentence is a contradiction, for these “facts” must aid the peasant workers’ understanding of the “most important information,” which presumably refers to information colored with political ideology. In all cases, “information” is fully determined by the Soviet government and “facts,” while they may still be objective truth, are chosen selectively to convey the Soviet ideology. 

In addition, Trotsky is very much concerned that the masses should understand this controlled information:

The danger of a split between the party and the nonparty masses in the field of agitation is expressed in the exclusiveness of the content of agitation and of its form, in the construction of an almost arbitrary party language, inaccessible to almost nine-tenths not only of the peasants but even of the workers. (128)

Not only does Trotsky take pains to explain the factual basis of these politically-charged information, he also seeks to make this information understandable to the masses. But in comparison to Trotsky, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s perspective on the role of media is extreme. In the article “How the Media Become One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons” by Jill Dougherty, Putin outright says, “It’s not an institution of civil society, it’s propaganda.” In other words, media is knowingly controlled by the Kremlin, and you should just deal with it.

According to TV Dozhd’s Sindeyeva, “This propaganda has begun to do its thing, to unite people around a certain idea that the country has risen from its knees and is strong. But right now, they have made the propaganda so coarse, so clumsy, that people have begun to doubt it.” This thought is echoed in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, in which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer state on the last page that people “see through” the purpose of the propaganda (24). Sindeyeva says Russians are “reading between the lines” of propaganda, thus while Putin has made such extreme efforts to hold the nation together, his extremity has resulted in propaganda’s castration.

In Dougherty’s article, I have come to understand that while Putin seeks to eliminate “free” media—free in terms of ideology, the “neutering” of any other political stance—he does not necessarily root out “independent” media, or media that is run separate from the government. Thus, the important distinction is Putin cares about how media transfers political thought, and it is this political thought that must unify Russia.

Works Cited

  • Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectics of Enlightenment. New York, Continuum, 1987.
  • Dougherty, Jill. “How the Media Become One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons.” The Atlantic, 21 April 2015.
  • Trotsky, Leon. “The Newspaper and its Readers.” Problems of Everyday Life: And Other Writings on Culture & Science. Monad Press, 1923.

25 thoughts on “On Trotsky and Putin: Propaganda Out of Hands?”

  2. I believe that both Trotsky and Putin were very skilled in propaganda and almost completely took control of all free media. Putin’s regime sends out communiqués to federal and even regional media outlets on how to cover and evaluate certain events. I know this situation quite well, as I have been to Russia dozens of times. I once worked as a department head at the CARSHE company, a well-known developer of exhibition stands from Kyiv https://carshe.com. Until 2014, this company built a lot of exhibition stands in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Krasnodar. I remember well these business trips to Russia, where after successfully completing work at the exhibition center, we walked around Russian cities, looked at their sights and talked with people. Almost all of them were intoxicated by the propaganda that poured from all federal channels. In Russia, it has become so skillful and so widespread and regular that most of the population no longer even realizes that they are under its influence.

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