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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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| Issue
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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.
Another new variable in the propaganda equation is the more than a quarter of a million Soviet citizens who managed to leave the USSR during the previous decade. The perennial mainstay of Soviet propaganda - the fiction that the West is a cruel "kingdom of the yellow devil" - seems to be crumbling. Hence the recent torrent of letters from former Soviet citizens now living in America, Western Europe, and Israel that are seeing light in the pages of Soviet newspapers. Needless to say, in the past, particularly when Stalin was alive, the publication of such letters would have been utterly impossible. Anyone who contrived, by whatever means, to leave the Soviet Union ceased to exist; even their names disappeared once and for all.
Times have changed. Nowadays, hair-raising accounts even by those who left the USSR of their own free will - or, in party parlance, as "traitors to their Motherland" -
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