Sovietization (not the same as Russification) occurred during the Soviet Union (1917–1991). The word soviet comes from the Russian word for "council" or "assembly". Toward the end of the Russian Empire, councils or soviets of workers formed in many large cities to address poor working conditions. These soviets took political and economic action to fight the Czarist Russian Empire and are credited with contributing to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Sovietization promoted a Soviet way of life, mentality, and culture and forced citizens to speak Russian and use the Cyrillic script. Its leaders used propaganda to promote the idea of a collective Soviet people and Soviet socialist patriotism.
Today, the Russian government uses the Internet, radio, and television to reach its population. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the government has curtailed access to any information that the Russian government does not sanction. Unless Russians can connect to a virtual private network (VPN), residents only receive positive news about the war in Ukraine and negative news about those who oppose the Russian war efforts.
This article explains how Stalin used aircraft to disseminate newspapers and films about the glory of the Soviet Union to peasants across the country.
One of Russia's most prestigious cemeteries is set just south of downtown Moscow, adjoining a convent built in the 16th and 17th centuries. It contains the graves of Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol and even Josef Stalin's second wife, who killed herself in 1932 and is commemorated by a wistful white sculpture. Of all the numberless monuments, headstones and columbarium plaques, among the most beguiling is an enormous relief of an airplane that is affixed to the crenellated brick walls. A tablet gives the name of this machine as the Maxim Gorky, and although I lived across the street for several years and must have seen the memorial half a dozen times, the aircraft is little-remembered in the West except among aviation and history buffs, and I couldn't have said more than a few words about it until I came across it recently in a catalog I translated for a Moscow exhibition. The Maxim Gorky was, as I learned, considered an incandescent achievement of Soviet technology - and its story is particularly germane now.
Memorial to the victims of the 1935 crash of the Maxim Gorky, Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. Photo by carlfbagge/Flickr.
The state-controlled media in Putin's Russia has won notice for the way it has cast the Kiev government, engaged in a conflict with pro-Russian separatists, in the worst possible light. But decades earlier, the Soviet state was a leader in this sort of perceptual manipulation. It invested enormous resources into its propaganda efforts, and in its formative years deployed the latest technologies to spread its message and glorify the Party. One of the most noteworthy examples was the colossal, eight-engine Maxim Gorky. It was created entirely for propaganda purposes and first flew in 1934. On board it carried its own printing press, and the plans called for a messaging system that a present-day observer calls "a prototype of Twitter". (This is Ramiz Aliyev, writing in the catalog of the Moscow show, which was about artistic representations of aviation during the Soviet era; it took place at Moscow's Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center). There were even calls for the plane to beam slogans onto the clouds using a projector. The plane was described quite simply as a gigant, a giant.
The Soviet Union of the early 1930s, led by Stalin, was ragged and uneasy. In 1917, the communists had overthrown the government, prompting a civil war, but the country they seized was undereducated and underdeveloped. They enacted breakneck modernization plans, but were concerned about their hold on the peasantry, among others. The peasants were resentful for obvious reasons: Their harvests had been appropriated, leading to starvation, and they were forced onto collective farms. The Party also had an uncertain grip on the isolated and thinly populated regions of the Far North and Siberia. One of its responses was to hunt down opposition, both real and imagined, and by 1933 there were nearly 1 million people in forced-labor camps and colonies run by the secret police, notes historian Robert Service. Another was to amp up its propaganda.
The Soviets began a massive "aerofication" campaign and sought to copy America's transcontinental air transport system, Palmer writes in his book on Soviet aviation. Between 1928 and 1932 the number of aircraft produced annually quadrupled, to around 2,500. Technology as a whole was fetishized in Soviet propaganda in this period - tractors and blast furnaces were exalted, and there were even "production novels" dedicated to construction projects - but aviation was at the pinnacle. "The airplane had emerged as the Soviet Union's most prominent icon of progress and modernity," Palmer writes.
Admittedly the propaganda sheets that the squadron dispensed could be turgid and hectoring, such as one page proudly headlined "Thrown from a plane of the Maxim Gorky Propaganda Squadron". Its author concludes a panegyric to the Revolution with an appeal for increased production of hemp products. But David Brandenberger, an expert in Soviet propaganda at the University of Richmond, told me that while the squadron may not have transformed the populace into dedicated Marxist-Leninists, it was persuasive in another way. Whether it was the flying machines themselves or the films they brought with them, "it's going to produce a lot of people who at least have the impression that the Party is the bearer of progress and enlightenment".
Source: Alastair Gee, https://ideas.ted.com/the-strange-history-of-a-futuristic-soviet-propaganda-plane/
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