Karel C. Berkhoff on Stalin, the Media, and World War II

Randall Stephens

How did Stalin control the media during World War II?  And how did that level of control shape the direction of the war and compare to similar efforts in Germany?   Karel C. Berkhoff explores these and other questions in his June 2013 Historically Speaking essay, "Motherland In Danger: How Stalin Micromanaged The Media During The War With Nazi Germany and Hurt Mobilization Efforts." (See the full piece at Project Muse.)

Asks Berkhoff: "If you lived, say, in Novosibirsk or Tashkent during World War II, what were you told? What did Soviet newspapers and radio tell Soviet civilians, and what did it all mean for the outcome of the war?" 

Throughout he notes that Stalin's extensive wartime propaganda stood out when compared to contemporaries.  Here's a brief excerpt:

A close look reveals that during the war with Nazi Germany, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, Soviet propaganda was much more centralized than in Nazi Germany. Joseph Goebbels led the German Ministry of Propaganda, but he lacked dictatorial power; competing forces remained in place. In the Soviet Union, however, one man basically decided everything. Stalin created a central information bureau, instructed editors, studied drafts of newspaper articles, glanced at page proofs, and immensely tightened censorship. He squeezed out the voices of real people, quite contrary to the view that the war made him loosen his grip.

A Leadership Legacy: Happy 138th, Winston

Philip White

November 30 was Winston Churchill’s birthday. 138 years after his birth, historians, politicians and the public are still as fascinated as ever about this most iconic of British Prime Ministers. Of course, as with every major historical figure, the

Ivor Roberts-Jones statue of Churchill, Oslo, Norway

amount of one-sided deconstructionism has increased over the past few years, no more useful to the reader than one-sided hagiography. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle–a deeply flawed (aren’t we all!) larger-than-life figure who botched a lot of decisions–notably his resistance to home rule for India and well-meaning but ill-conceived support of Edward VIII during the 1936 abdication crisis–who got the big things right.

Among the latter was Churchill’s foresight over the divisions between the democratic West and the Communist East. Since the inception of Communism and its violent manifestation in the Russian Revolution, Churchill had despised the movement, calling it a “pestilence.” Certainly, his monarchial devotion was part of this, but more so, Churchill believed Communism destroyed the very principles of liberty and freedom that he would devote his career to advancing and defending. Certainly, with his love of Empire, there were some inconsistencies in his thinking, but above all, Churchill believed that the individual should be able to make choices and that systemic freedom–of the press, of religion, of the ballot, must be upheld for individuals to enact such choices. That’s why he vowed to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle,” though his plan to bolster anti-Communist forces was quickly shot down by Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George as another of “Winston’s follies.”

Russian History Roundup

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Michael Johnson, "A Romp Through History," American Spectator, July 18, 2011

Alexander Motyl was clearly having great fun when he wrote his latest book, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, a comic novel with half-serious historical underpinnings. It manages to amuse and challenge without losing its headlong momentum into the realm of absurdist literature.>>>

Jennifer Siegel, "A Statesman For the Czar," Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2011

No political figure looms quite as large over late imperial Russia as Sergei Iulevich Witte. Among much else, he was Russia's finance minister from 1892 to 1903; its plenipotentiary representative at the Portsmouth negotiations ending the Russo-Japanese War; the foremost instigator of the manifesto that introduced moderate parliamentary representation and united government into the autocratic empire in the wake of the 1905 Revolution; the country's first prime minister; the political and financial architect of the Trans-Siberian Railway; and the mastermind behind the stabilization of the ruble and the implementation of the gold standard, through the construction of an intricate web of foreign capital investment in the empire.>>>

Tony Halpin, "Gulags reveal awful secrets," The Australian, July 18, 2011

The journey to the heart of Joseph Stalin's reign of terror was long and arduous. Finally, hidden behind a clump of trees, the gulag emerged. This is where victims of Stalin's repressions were imprisoned as slave labourers and worked to death on the Road of Bones, the notorious Kolyma highway that connects Khandyga to the port of Magadan, in Russia's far northeast.>>>

Gary J. Bass, "Why the Crimean War Matters," New York Times, July 8, 2011

The Crimean War was the first major war to be covered by professional foreign correspondents, who reported on the disastrous blundering of commanders and the horrors of medical treatment at the battlefront. Today, we remember fragmentary stories: the charge of the Light Brigade, symbolizing the blundering; Florence Nightingale, for the medical treatment. But the real war has faded away, eclipsed by the two vastly worse world wars that were to come.>>>

Thomas Gladysz, "He Who Gets Slapped," San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 2011

As its closing film, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will show He Who Gets Slapped (1924). It is, in my mind, the finest "sad clown" movie you'll ever see.

He Who Gets Slapped tells the story of "HE," a disgraced intellectual forced to find work as a circus clown. His popular act consists of being repeatedly slapped by the other clowns whenever he attempts to speak even a simple truth. The crowd, which likes to laugh at the misfortunes of others, loves this bizarre and rather pathetic act.>>>