The Bureaucracy Of Truth

How Communist Governments Manage The News

Paul Lendvai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000315004
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book deals with the Communist mass media, their structure, function and control, combining common features and variations in each country. It discusses the significance and consequences of the Helsinki accords and the Eastern record of implementation in 1975.

Part I
Communist Mass Media

We need complete, truthful information. And the truth should not depend on whom it is to serve.

V. I. LENIN

1 The Party’s Sharpest Weapon

SOME WESTERN OBSERVERS tend to regard the Soviet Union as a country ‘like any other’. Many people are convinced that industrialisation and modernisation, trade with the West and growing indebtedness are bound to lead to greater political freedom. Optimistic commentators and businessmen still predict an inevitable convergence of the Communist and Western systems. More cautious observers forsee, at the very least, a gradual opening vis-à-vis the West.

There have been such major changes since Stalin’s death that certain Western scholars reject the use of the term ‘totalitarian’ when applied to the Soviet system as ‘a relic of the Cold War’ or at best an outdated adjective. The meanings of the term are as numerous and varied as the authors who have attempted to define it. Most serious students of Communist affairs tend to agree today that it is neither terror nor one-man rule by a dictator over a single-party system which can be seen as the most important feature of totalitarian regimes. What distinguishes the Soviet-type Communist systems from ancient despotisms and modern dictatorships is, above all, the ideology; or put in another way, the assumption of a sole and exclusive truth in politics, which can be defined in any situation and at any given moment only by the true prophets of the Marxist-Leninist faith.

For all the great and visible differences in atmosphere, lifestyle and standard of living between Moscow, East Berlin or Budapest, none of the Communist ruling groups has abandoned unconditional loyalty to the doctrine in the name of which Lenin seized power sixty years ago and which justifies its monopoly of power. J. L. Talmon calls it ‘political Messianism in the sense that it postulated a preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are irresistibly driven, and at which they are bound to arrive’.² Faced with the critical problem of credibility, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism constitutes both a principle of legitimacy and an instrument to bridge the gap between reality and vision for ‘future-oriented’ systems claiming the capacity to work miracles and commit only ‘temporary errors’.

It is irrelevant whether individuals believe in the dogma as long as the unity of power and ideology is preserved and the effective power of enforcement by the leadership, acting as the only authentic representatives (vanguard) of the working class, is maintained. The essence of these Soviet-type regimes in Eastern Europe which the Communists call ‘socialist’ still lies in the fact that statements on any issue of political significance which the leaders declare to be the doctrinal truth at any given moment must be accepted by their subjects. Any questioning of ideology would undermine the monopoly of power.

Full control of all relevant means of mass communications and political indoctrination is the natural and inevitable byproduct of such ideologically structured systems. It is beyond the scope of this study to pursue the enquiry as to whether the word ‘totalitarianism’ is an ‘insult’ or a correct definition when talking about present-day Eastern Europe.³ But if it is true that all the changes since Stalin’s day have not basically affected the total control of the media from above and their close integration with the other instruments of power, then one is inclined to accept the view that the question is not really whether Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, etc, are totalitarian systems, but only to what extent in each case.⁴

Even if using a different vocabulary, Western scholars and authoritative ideological spokesmen in the East profess surprisingly similar views about the essentially unchanged structure and function of Communist mass media. Thus Richard Lowenthal describes the mechanism in these words:

The monopolistic control of all channels of public communications, from the press and other mass media to all forms of education, of literature and arts, with the aim not merely of preventing the expression of hostile or undesirable opinions by a kind of censorship, but of controlling the formation of opinion at the source by the planned selection of all the elements of information (emphases in original).⁵

Both the 1936 and the 1977 Soviet Constitutions declare that the citizens of the USSR ‘are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations’. The Brezhnev version is certainly ‘more honest’ because it limits these rights more clearly, making them all contingent upon acting ‘in accordance with the interest of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system … in accordance with the aims, of building communism’.⁶

What does this mean in practice? To start with, under the conditions of state ownership, a centrally planned economy and a single-party system, media supervision cannot be narrowed down to the classical instruments of censorship. From the printing plant, working capital and newsprint, to the typewriters, stationery and waste paper baskets, literally everything has to be provided by government departments, closely following the decisions taken by the Politbureau or Secretariat of the ruling party and the detailed instructions of the Press Sections of the all-powerful Agit-Prop (Agitation-Propaganda) Departments.

It is not for the sake of appearances, but in accord with the time-honoured practice of the division of labour, that the party and its apparatus play the role of the vanguard and guiding force, leaving the day-to-day executive functions to the government bureaucracy. In any case, the staffing, even of formally ‘non-party’ (i.e. government, union, youth or popular) papers, with reliable journalists is controlled by the Agit-Prop and Personnel Departments of the Central Committees. This control is exercised with special care when it comes to jobs with decision-making powers (‘quantitative and qualitative gatekeeping’) over the selection and editing of news and commentaries.

As Pravda put it:

A journalist is an active fighter for the cause of the party. It is not enough for him to have good intentions, he must also have clear views, a knowledge of life and the ability to present his thoughts convincingly and brilliantly from Leninist positions. The journalist and the public activist writing in the press must constantly perfect his knowledge and skill in order to see life in all its diversity, to know how to single out at the right moment what is practically important and to focus attention on the unsolved tasks of the day.⁷

It is often forgotten by Western observers, including academic communications experts, that the structure, function and circulation of Communist mass media bears hardly any relation to the place, values and changing fortunes of the press in Western societies. The introductory part of the latest Soviet party resolution not only explains the reasons why such high standards of moral and professional behaviour are expected of the almost 70,000 ‘workers of the pen, TV screen and radio microphone’. Its exhortations (and perhaps even more its harsh criticism of the entire indoctrination apparatus) provide striking proof that the observations of Lowenthal and other Western scholars are as valid as ever on the threshold of the 1980s:

A powerful information and propaganda apparatus provided with modern equipment - an extensively developed press, TV and radio - has been created in the country. Its main task is to arm the Soviet people and each new generation with the invincible weapon of historical truth and a profound understanding of the laws and prospects of social development, relying on the unshakeable foundations of the Marxist-Leninist teaching.⁸

Can anyone imagine Austria’s Socialist government, the British Conservatives or even the military junta in Argentina or Chile issuing such a resolution? The ‘abridged version’ of it filled an entire page, of Pravda. It scolded the media, for example, for ‘hushing up shortcomings and difficulties’, failing to fight resolutely against such ‘ugly vestiges of the past’ as greed, bribery, waste, negligence, drunkenness, bureaucracy, callousness and indifference, and urged government ministers and leading state officials to write regularly in the press and to ‘answer questions put forward by the people’.

The successors of the Bolsheviks are not only in the possession of ‘truth’, but also of an enormous communications system which is used to reproduce and to convey the political messages of the party and, if necessary, to substitute for reality what Alain Besançon calls ‘surreality’, a new dimension resulting from the Communists’ idea of a future conforming to ideology. The media have the key function of producing a popular consciousness that is blind to the yawning gap between what these societies are and what their leaders pretend they are. Total control of the news filtering process, reflecting every change in foreign and domestic policy priorities, and the permanent, intensive and consistent repetition of simplified political messages are the outstanding features of the Communist propaganda technique.

The character of the Communist press reflects an amazing continuity since 1902 (!) when Lenin in his pamphlet (‘What is to be done’) spelled out that:

A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, but also a collective organiser. In this respect it can be compared to the scaffolding erected around a building under construction; it marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, permitting them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour.

In this sense the journalist is a party functionary. Three years later, Lenin in an oft-quoted article on Party organisation and party literature (November 1905) also argued that articles contributed to the party press must conform absolutely to the party doctrine. Party-mindedness (partiinost), the most frequently mentioned personal characteristic demanded of a Soviet and East European newspaperman, means that a Communist must judge every issue from the point of view of his proletarian party, thus implying an absolute devotion to the party and obedience to its instructions.

The point is, however, that these statements were meant as a guideline for a small and intransigent sect fighting for superiority within the Russian social democratic movement seven decades ago. In the meantime, in the words of Raymond Aron, ‘Lenin’s fanaticism has become the orthodoxy of an empire’ and Marxism-Leninism ‘the camouflage for a satisfied bureaucracy’.⁹ The threefold function of the media, though formally upheld, has in fact been turned into its opposite. Mobilisation of the masses is not intended to change, but to strengthen, the established political order, to stifle deviant values, to counter the danger of apathy or opposition among the population, in short to stabilise, rather than to transform social-political relations.

How is it ensured that, in a world where actual conditions both abroad and at home are changing, at times with extraordinary speed, the press does not get out of control, but still operates as an obedient conveyor belt for the word of the leadership? The function of the media, now of course including television and broadcasting, is not to take a critical view of major decisions and to suggest alternative solutions (for example, a shift in investment priorities or farm policy), but to engage in political persuasion and a public relations exercise on behalf of the decisions already taken, usually behind closed doors, and to provide for their acceptance and active support by the population.

The primary task of the media is therefore not to chronicle daily events and to compete through credibility for the public’s confidence, but to serve the party. The editors do not have to worry about circulation figures since there is no competition. Newsprint, as indeed news itself, is regulated and rationed according to political priorities and propaganda. The reactions of the readers are of no consequence whatsoever for the circulation nor for the standing of the individual publications, their editors and columnists.

It is true that, in addition to the much publicised institution of so-called volunteer worker and farmer correspondents, every larger newspaper from East Berlin, Prague and Moscow to Leipzig, Debrecen and Irkutsk has special editors for dealing with the influx of readers’ letters, ranging from a dozen to a hundred each day, or even to over a thousand in the case of Pravda where a staff of forty-five researchers carefully screen the incoming complaints and refer them to the relevant party and government agencies.¹⁰ What is often hailed as a great feat of socialist democracy, a contrast to the bourgeois world where a few wealthy people or large corporations control the access to the media, is merely a safety valve and a substitute for the lack of civil rights associated with constitutional government and political freedom. People write to the newspapers or radio simply because there are no other places where they can publicly complain about discrimination in the allotment of communal flats, poor service, bribery, waste and illegal profiteering. Their letters are also used by the party leadership for gauging certain trends in public opinion. But only a few, carefully selected letters get printed and these either refer to shortcomings and problems at enterprise and local level, or praise the ‘timeliness’ of a given government decree or party resolution. Those who disagree with basic policies or major measures taken by the regimes have no access to public channels of communication.

Though newsprint is generally in short supply, prices of newspapers are kept artificially low throughout the Communist world and, except in Hungary, most authoritative central newspapers, the ones with the largest staffs, have no, or very little, income from advertising. Given the nature of the communications system, it is not surprising that Pravda has a circulation of almost eleven million copies for a population of over 250 million. The East European fraternal party papers far surpass even this per head ratio. Thus the Bucharest Scînteia boasts of a circulation of 1.3 million for twenty-two million people, Neues Deutschland in East Berlin prints about one million (population: 16.8 million), Trybuna Ludu in Warsaw also around one million (thirty-five million population) and Rabotnichesko Delo in Sofia some 830,000 for a population of 8.8 million. The circulation of the Hungarian central party organ, Népszabadság, reaches an average 750,000 people on weekdays and that of Rude právo in Prague over 900,000 with populations of 10.5 million and some fifteen million respectively. More important is the fact that the circulation of the party papers, which are everywhere considered to be boring by readers and colleagues alike, is at least three times higher than the sales of other morning and afternoon dailies with a more varied and interesting content. The relationship between sales of Pravda and those of the other Soviet dailies is more balanced, but in Russia, too, the dullest newspaper has by far the highest circulation.

How, then, does one explain that the circulations of journals in great demand are kept well below optimal levels and people are forced to subscribe, and often to queue up at the news stands, for publications such as Pravda, Rabot-nichesko Delo or Scînteia, none of which could be called a newspaper in any accepted sense of the word? It is not just the scarcity of newsprint and the shortage of foreign exchange, but primarily the unique mixture of centralised resource allocations and political priorities which constitute the background to the bizarre world of Communist news media.

The example of Yugoslavia shows how quickly and drastically readership preferences can change even under the conditions of a single-party system. When Yugoslavia abandoned state subsidies to the media and allowed market demand to operate and began to change newspapers from government institutions into autonomous enterprises run by workers’ councils and management boards, circulation of the Belgrade Borba, the former party organ, dropped by two-thirds from 650,000 copies in 1949 to 234,000 by 1958. Later, growing freedom and improved quality further sharpened the competition for the public in the decentralised market with the result that Borba, though certainly livelier and better than any ‘seriou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Communist Mass Media
• PART II The International Dimension
• PART III From Helsinki to Madrid: Prospects for a Freer Exchange of Information
• Conclusions
• Bibliographical Notes
• Index