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Soviet Union [USSR] Chapter 9. Mass Media and the Arts
SINCE THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION of 1917, the leadership of the
Soviet Union has used the mass media and the arts to assist in its
efforts at changing and regulating society. To propagate values
encouraging the construction and stabilization of the new regime,
Vladimir I. Lenin, the
Bolshevik (see Glossary) leader, centralized
political control over the mass media and the primary forms of
artistic expression. He drew upon nineteenth-century Russian
radical views that advocated politicizing literature and
challenging tsarist government policy through artistic protest.
Lenin's successors manipulated the mass media and the arts in ways
that preserved and strengthened the regime and the party's
supremacy.
Leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)
believed that strict control over mass media and the arts was
essential for governing the country. "Socialist realism"--an
aesthetic formula calling for the portrayal of Soviet society in a
positive light to inspire its constant improvement along the lines
of Marxist-Leninist ideology--was implemented under Joseph V.
Stalin. The regime required the media, literature, and the arts to
adhere to this formula. A vast bureaucracy, which included party
and government censorship organs and official political, military,
economic, and social unions and associations, together with
self-censorship by writers and artists, ensured a thorough and
systematic review of all information reaching the public. Under the
leadership of general secretary of the CPSU Mikhail S. Gorbachev,
however, Soviet mass media and the arts in the late 1980s were
experiencing a loosening of the controls governing the
dissemination of information. Nevertheless, the principle of party
and government control over newspapers, journals, radio,
television, and literature, which helped to ensure the regime's
stability, remained firmly intact.
The technological revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, however,
hindered rather than helped the regime control mass media and the
arts. New technology disrupted party and government domination of
mass media and the arts and enabled the population to gain greater
access to unsanctioned, globally available information. But the
regime needed to employ the same technological advances to maintain
its influence and power. The mass media linked the leadership to
the population, and the
socialist (see Glossary) system required a
politicizated media to endure. The regime's attempt to use this new
technology while regulating the global flow of information to
Soviet citizens presented one of the most difficult challenges to
the leadership, particularly in light of Gorbachev's campaigns for
public discussion, democratization, and societal restructuring.
In the late 1980s, newspapers, journals, magazines, radio,
television, films, literature, and music espoused poignant,
sensitive, and often painful themes that had previously been taboo.
The party deemed greater tolerance for criticism of the regime
essential in order to placate the intelligentsia and encourage it
to support efforts for change. Indeed, the censors eased their
restrictions to the point where, in the late 1980s, penetrating
historical analyses critical of previous Soviet leaders (including
Lenin) and stories about the
rehabilitation (see Glossary) of
banned writers and artists filled the pages of newspapers,
magazines, and journals. Previously proscribed information also
appeared in television and radio broadcasts and in film and stage
performances. Relaxation of restrictions was also apparent in
classical music, jazz, rock and roll, and the plastic arts.
Data as of May 1989
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