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The 'Horrors' of Life in the West
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12763 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1987 |
2,007 Words |
| Author
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Mihajlo Mihajlov
Mihajlo Mihajlov is a special analyst for Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty covering ideological and intellectual
affairs in Eastern Europe. He is the author of Underground
Notes and other works. |
With increasing frequency, letters written by former Soviet citizens who now live in the West to relatives and friends in the USSR have been cropping up in Soviet newspapers and magazines - apparently on the theory that they will be more effective than standard propaganda fare in instilling feelings of revulsion and fear toward the society that calls itself democratic.
The purpose of this propaganda exercise is disclosed with disarming frankness in the Pravda Vostoka editorial of July 23, 1986, under the title "To Step Up the Counter-Propaganda Effort." It reads: "First-hand accounts of Soviet men and women who have been abroad and borne witness to all the vices and 'lures' of the capitalist world are a powerful antidote to the rich variety of lies and slander spread by foreign broadcasts."
Regular publications of letters from abroad in many Soviet periodicals is a relatively new phenomenon, obviously brought forth by the Communist Party's propaganda needs in a new domestic environment shaped by the drastic changes during the past 15 years. The impenetrable curtain erected by Joseph Stalin between the Soviet Union and the West has been gradually but surely wearing thin and falling apart.
Following the unmasking by Nikita Khrushchev of Stalin's "personality cult," Leonid Brezhnev of Khrushchev's "willfulness," and Mikhail Gorbachev of Brezhnevite "stagnation," the Soviet public is bound to take the writings of the regime's journalists depicting the horrors of capitalist exploitation in democratic countries with more than a grain of salt.
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