Communist Propaganda at School

The World of the Reading Primers from the Soviet Bloc, 1949-1989

Joanna Wojdon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000381320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Communist Propaganda at School is based on an analysis of reading primers from the Soviet bloc and recreates the world as presented to the youngest schoolchildren who started their education between 1949 and 1989 across the nine Eastern European countries. The author argues that those first textbooks, from their first to last pages, were heavily laden with communist propaganda, and that they share similar concepts, techniques and even contents, even if some national specificities can be observed.

This volume reconstructs the image of the world presented to schoolchildren in the first books they were required to read in their school life, and argues that the image was charged with communist propaganda. The book is based on the analysis of over sixty reading primers from nine countries of the Soviet bloc: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia from the period.

Written with simplicity and straightforwardness, this book will be a valuable resource, not only to international academics dealing with the issues of propaganda, censorship, education, childhood and everyday life under communism in Eastern and Central Europe, but can also academics dealing with education under communism or with the content of primary education. It also brings educational experiences of the Soviet bloc to international researchers, in particular to researchers of education under totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

1 The wide world—the homeland

Between patriotism and communism

What is the homeland?

A patriotic upbringing, that is, shaping one’s attachment to one’s homeland, was provided in primers first and foremost by means of texts depicting geography: information about the location of a given country, its geographical conditions, wealth, landscapes, the activities of the population, investments, and finally, the capital. They were written in both prose and verse, most often by the authors of the textbooks themselves. There were also works by other artists cited.¹ They often combined cognitive, educational and ideological content, as they promoted not only patriotism—attachment to the homeland—but also a kind of “socialist patriotism,” attachment to the homeland with a strictly defined political system and alliances. One of the Soviet poems, entitled Fatherland proclaimed: “Whose is this rich land? Whose wide fields are these? All this is our Soviet land! All these are our kolkhoz fields!”²

Sometimes patriotic texts carried no cognitive content but focused instead on the ideological message only. It might be as general as in the case of loosely scattered words with positive associations: “homeland, the sun, Bulgaria, peace, mother,” which appeared at the beginning of one of the Bulgarian primers,³ or words to be read: “român, româna, româneasca” in a Romanian one, meaning “Romanianness” in various forms⁴ or simply “Rodina” (homeland) as one of the most important words in the USSR.⁵ The message may also be very specific, as in the May Day slogans: “Wir leben unsere Deutsche Demokratische Republik!”⁶ or others: “Ať žije Československá republika!”⁷; “Rodina. Rodinu zashchishchay!”⁸ or “Stranye Sovyetov—slava!”⁹ There were also pompous patriotic poems and prose fragments, usually related to national holidays.¹⁰

In Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, patriotic reading passages were sometimes accompanied by references to the friendship of the nations that lived there. The cooperation was shown by general declarations¹¹—also in the form of rhymes¹²—and by personal acquaintances or friendships of the protagonists, for example, former Yugoslavian partisans who after the war became tractor drivers,¹³ or Czech and Slovak students who met or corresponded with each other.¹⁴ In the Czechoslovak primer, it was often emphasized that Czechs and Slovaks, although they speak different languages, are able to communicate easily.¹⁵ Yugoslavian books most often referred to Serbian and Croatian brotherhood, but Dalmatians and Bosnians also appeared, as well as minority Gorani.¹⁶ In the Polish primer, a boy named Janek who returned from a holiday in the mountains noted that “the Highlanders speak Polish a little differently from the way we do. They build their houses in a different way, they have different traditional clothes, they sing and dance differently. The highlanders love their mountains.”¹⁷ The image of the coexistence of various groups within socialist societies was always idyllic.

The situation was slightly different in Western Europe. In fact, the primers were generally homogeneous and “white,” with no racial or ethnic minorities. However, West German primers began in the mid-1970s to include the Turkish minority¹⁸ and in the 1980s one of the Norwegian primers featured a black protagonist.¹⁹ In both cases, there was discernible aspiration to break negative stereotypes and show “the other” as someone similar to “us.” Mutual respect, understanding and harmony, however, were shown as a goal, a task rather than a reflection of reality—and this makes them different in comparison to books from behind the Iron Curtain.

Another character also manifests itself in patriotic reading passages. For example, in Italian books, where such texts were placed in nearly all primers at least until the 1970s, the surge of patriotic feelings was usually supposed to be awakened by the beauty of nature: high mountains, the blue sky, the surrounding sea and sometimes associated with national colors.²⁰

Behind the Iron Curtain, on the other hand, the landscape elements transformed by man were essential.²¹ If there were golden fields, agricultural machinery worked on them. Cities and towns were strewn with smoking chimneys,²² rivers with ships and the sky most often with planes. The Czech pioneer smoothly moved from the description of the springtime of nature to one devoted to major factories.²³ In the picture of young Hungarians playing football, the large number of tractors in the fields in the background must have captured most of the reader’s attention.²⁴ The patriotic panoramas accompanying reading passages about love for the homeland aimed to combine all these elements: thus, in the foreground, there were cultivated fields with working farmers as well as pylons crossing these fields, and in the distance urban buildings and factories with chimneys, a river as a waterway or a place of work for fishermen and a road with vehicles transporting goods—all complemented by miners underground and a plane streaking across the sky.²⁵

Such a picture might also appear in reading passages on traveling in the homeland.²⁶ The books often emphasized that fields belonged to a cooperative or that everyone worked for the good of their homeland: “The homeland is beautiful. Fields, forests, seas, and rivers. New factories are being built, fields are being plowed with tractors. There are sweeping trains and cars. Ships are sailing. High, high in the sky fly fast-winged Ilyushins, Tupolevs, Yaks, An...