Eastern Bloc media and propaganda
Eastern Bloc media and propaganda was controlled directly by each country's communist party, which controlled the state media, censorship and propaganda organs. State and party ownership of print, television and radio media served as an important manner in which to control information and society in light of Eastern Bloc leaderships viewing even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat to the bases underlying communist power therein.
Circumvention of dissemination controls occurred to some degree through samizdat and limited reception of western radio and television broadcasts. In addition, some regimes heavily restricted the flow of information from their countries to outside of the Eastern Bloc by heavily regulating the travel of foreigners and segregating approved travelers from the domestic population.
Background
Creation
took power following the Russian Revolution of 1917. During the Russian Civil War that followed, coinciding with the Red Army's entry into Minsk in 1919, Belarus was declared the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia. After more conflict, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was declared in 1920. With the defeat of Ukraine in the Polish–Ukrainian War, after the March 1921 Peace of Riga following the Polish–Soviet War, central and eastern Ukraine were annexed into the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1922, the Russian SFSR, Ukraine SSR, Byelorussian SSR and Transcaucasian SFSR were officially merged as republics creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.At the end of World War II, all eastern and central European capitals were controlled by the Soviet Union. During the final stages of the war, the Soviet Union began the creation of the Eastern Bloc by occupying several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were originally effectively ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. These included eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, part of eastern Finland and northeastern Romania.
By 1945, these additional annexed countries totaled approximately 180,000 further square miles, or slightly more than the area of West Germany, East Germany and Austria combined. Other nations were converted into Soviet satellite states, such as the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia, the People's Republic of Romania, the People's Republic of Albania, and later East Germany from the Soviet zone of German occupation. The Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was also wrongfully considered part of the Bloc in spite of the Tito–Stalin Split that occurred in 1948, followed by the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Conditions
Throughout the Eastern Bloc, both in the USSR and elsewhere, Russia was given prominence, and referred to as the naibolee vıdayuşayasya naciya and the rukovodyaşy narod. The Soviets encouraged the admiration of everything Russian and the reproduction of their own communist structural hierarchies in each of the Bloc states.The defining characteristic of communism as implemented in the Eastern Bloc was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres. Initially, Stalin directed systems that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, multi-party governance and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state. The Soviets mandated expropriation and etatization of private property.
The Soviet-style "replica regimes" that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced the Soviet command economy, but also adopted the methods employed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet secret police to suppress real and potential opposition. Communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc saw even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat because of the basis underlying communist power. The suppression of dissidence and opposition was a central prerequisite for the security of communist power within the Eastern Bloc, though the degree of opposition and dissident suppression varied by country and period.
While over 15 million Eastern Bloc residents migrated westward from 1945 to 1949, emigration was effectively halted in the early 1950s, with the Soviet approach to controlling national movement emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Furthermore, the Eastern Bloc experienced economic mis-development by central planners resulting in those countries following a path of extensive rather than intensive development and thus lagging far behind their western European counterparts in per capita Gross Domestic Product.
Media and information restrictions
Media and information control
In the Eastern Bloc, the state owned and operated the means of mass communication. The ruling authorities viewed media as a propaganda tool, and widely practiced censorship to exercise almost full control over the information dissemination. The press in communist countries was an organ of, and completely reliant on, the state. Until the late 1980s, all Eastern Bloc radio and television organizations were state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party.Youth newspapers and magazines were owned by youth organizations affiliated with the communist party. The governing body in the Soviet Union was "USSR State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting", or USSR Gosteleradio, which was in charge both of Soviet TV and Radio in the Soviet Union.
The communist party exercised control over the media and was responsible for censorship. Media served as an important form of control over information and thus of society. Eastern Bloc authorities viewed the dissemination and portrayal of knowledge as vital to the survival of communism and thus stifled alternative concepts and critiques. Several state communist party newspapers were published. Radio was initially the dominant medium, with television being considered low on the priority list when compiling five-year plans during the industrialisation of the 1950s.
Censorship and squashing of dissent
Strict censorship existed in the Eastern Bloc, though it was at times circumvented by those engaging in samizdat. Censorship institutions in the countries of the Bloc were organized differently. For example, censorship in Poland was clearly identified whereas it was loosely structured, but no less efficient, in Hungary. Strict censorship was introduced in the People's Republic of Albania and Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia as early as 1944, though it was somewhat relaxed in Yugoslavia after the Tito–Stalin split of 1948. Unlike the rest of the Eastern Bloc, relative freedom existed for three years in Czechoslovakia until Soviet-style censorship was fully applied in 1948, along with the Czechoslovak Revolution.Throughout the Bloc, the various ministries of culture held a tight rein on writers. Cultural products reflected the propaganda needs of the state and Party-approved censors exercised strict control in the early years. During the Stalinist period, even the weather forecasts were changed if they would have otherwise suggested that the sun might not shine on May Day. Under Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania, weather reports were doctored so that the temperatures were not seen to rise above or fall below the levels which dictated that work must stop.
In each country, leading bodies of the ruling communist party exercised hierarchical control of the censorship system. Each communist party maintained a department of its central committee apparatus to supervise media. Censors employed auxiliary tools such as: the power to launch or close down any newspaper, radio or television station, licensing of journalists through unions and the power of appointment. Party bureaucrats held all leading editorial positions. One or two representatives of censorship agencies modeled on the Soviet GLAVLIT worked directly in all editorial offices. No story could be printed or broadcast without their explicit approval.
Initially, East Germany presented unique issues because of rules for the occupying powers in the divided Germany that prevented the outright seizure of all media outlets. The Soviet occupation administration directed propaganda and censorship policies to East German censorship organs through its "sector for propaganda and censorship". While the initial SVAG policies did not appear to differ greatly from those in the western occupation zones governing denazification, censorship became one of the most overt instruments used to manipulate political, intellectual and cultural developments in East Germany. Art societies and associations that had existed prior to World War II were dissolved and all new theatres and art societies had to register with SVAG. Art exhibits were put under a blanket ban unless censorship organs approved them in advance.
After East Germany's official establishment, while the original constitution provided that "censorship of the media is not to occur", both official and unofficial censorship occurred, although to a lesser extent during its later years. Thereafter, official East German censorship was supervised and carried out by two governmental organizations, the Head office for publishing companies and bookselling trade, and the Bureau for Copyright. The HV determined the degree of censorship and the method of publishing and marketing works. The Bureau for Copyright appraised the work, then decided if it or another publication was permitted to be published in East Germany or in foreign country. For theatres, a "repertory commission" was created that consisted of the Ministerium für Volksbildung, the ruling SED party, the applicable theatre union and the East German office for theatrical affairs.
After a long visa procurement process, western visitors driving over the West German border to East Germany had their car strip-searched for prohibited Western "propaganda material". Nevertheless, the East German authorities found it extremely difficult to prevent their citizens listening to Western radio stations and Western TV was available across most of the GDR. Technical and diplomatic considerations meant attempts at jamming Western Stations were soon abandoned.
In the Soviet Union, in accordance with the official ideology and politics of the Communist Party, Goskomizdat censored all printed matter, Goskino supervised all cinema, Gosteleradio controlled radio and television broadcasting and the First Department in many agencies and institutions, such as the State Statistical Committee, was responsible for assuring that state secrets and other sensitive information only reached authorized hands. The Soviets destroyed pre-revolutionary and foreign material from libraries, leaving only "special collections", accessible by special permit from the KGB. The Soviet Union also censored images, included removing repressed persons from texts, posters, paintings and photographs.