world communism reviewed

9-20-13     "The Russian Revolution was permeated with propaganda of a forceful and brutal kind," wrote historian Dmitri Volkogonov in his 1995 "Lenin: Life and Legacy," based on materials briefly available from the Soviet archives.

The propaganda was used not so much to win people over with ideas but by bludgeoning them with coercion, repression and making examples. "The type of propaganda that the Bolsheviks carried out is absolutely central to our understanding of the regime they created," wrote Peter Kenez in "The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929."

A number of patterns emerged:
1. Ends Justify The Means

The broken promises that Lenin's regime started delivered just the opposite. He guaranteed a free press, but in his first two days of communist rule he halted it, ordering opposition newspapers shut down and censorship re-instituted. He called it temporary, but it wasn't.

Lenin also won power with promises to broaden land ownership, but immediately issued 60 decrees to end private property, including a secret directive to destroy state archives of land, factory and building title deeds before anyone could protest. To war-weary soldiers, Lenin promised peace. But he immediately impressed them into the new Red Army, holding their families hostage to ensure their loyalty.

All this was justified in his mind by one idea:  consolidating power.  In setting off civil war, Lenin put Russia on a war footing that justified any atrocity, broken promise or use of propaganda that served to establish communism.

2. Firstest With The Mostest

Besides implementing a strategy of lies, Lenin also was quick to seize the semantic high ground in the same way his military commander, Leon Trotsky, was swift to seize territory.

Like Nathan Bedford Forrest, the "firstest with the mostest" general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, Lenin swiftly altered and manipulated the meanings of words, intellectually disarming opponents.

As early as 1903, at a party congress, Lenin won a membership issue by a single vote.  But from then on he called his faction "the Bolsheviks," or majoritarians, and his opponents "Mensheviks," or minoritarians. It didn't matter that the Bolsheviks never were a true majority among Russia's revolutionaries; what mattered was the perception of power.
Lenin repeated the tactic by dubbing Bolsheviks "Reds" to signal an affinity with the bloody violence of the French Revolution, while their battlefield opponents were saddled with "Whites" to link them with the discredited French Bourbon dynasty. Lenin also took title to the word "democracy," disarming opponents who were then unable to project a coherent message. By controlling words, Lenin controlled perceptions of reality.

3. Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste 

As propagandists, however, the Bolsheviks were not especially persuasive. "The Russian socialists have contributed nothing to the theoretical discussion of the techniques of mass persuasion," wrote Kenez. They "never looked for and did not find devilishly clever methods to influence people's minds, to brainwash them."

Their newspapers were notoriously gray, mechanically spouting simple, choppy messages such as "All Power to the Soviets!" "Create a New Socialist Man!" and "Bread! Peace! Land!"
What they were expert at was making these gray organs into monopolies. Instead of persuading with words, Lenin simply closed other papers, leaving only the Bolshevik publications. The resultant monopoly intensified the impact of his Bolshevik message, according to historian Robert Service.

4. Demonization

In denouncing opponents, Lenin was obsessive, virulent and personal, calling them "bloodsuckers," "insects," "spiders," "leeches" and "vampires." The bourgeois were "ex-people."  The murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family was termed "a humane act."

Then there were "hoarders," "wreckers," "saboteurs" and, worst of all, "Kulaks" — the prosperous and industrious peasants of whom Lenin spoke only "with the most seething hatred," as Volkogonov put it.

But Lenin rarely made such statements in public. Volkogonov discovered most of these characterizations secretly hidden in Soviet archives.  In public, Lenin wanted to be pictured as a jolly apostle of Marxism.  https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/lenin-used-six-principles-of-propaganda-to-consolidate-control/
........................

  Propaganda was decisive in the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution of 1917.  From its very beginning, "The Soviet state was more permeated with propaganda than any other," wrote University of California historian Peter Kenez in The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929.

It was astonishing that a ragtag, uncouth band of conspiratorially inclined communists, led by V.I. Lenin, managed to topple the mighty czar of Russia and the weak social democratic government that followed him, decisively taking power in the October 1917 revolution.

But much of it can be explained by their mastery of propaganda, which was stronger, simpler, more centralized, more national and more quickly delivered than that of any of their socialist rivals.

The Bolshevik fascination with propaganda was influenced above all by the propaganda of the French Revolution, particularly the violent rhetoric of Jean-Paul Marat.  It also had origins in the mind of Lenin, the man who founded the Communist Party, arising from a single traumatic incident in his life as a 17-year-old in 1887.

Young Lenin's older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, age 21 and a star university student, was caught by the police trying to hurl a bomb into Czar Alexander III's carriage in St. Petersburg, and swiftly tried and hanged in 1887.  The event shocked — and within two years radicalized — the younger brother who, rejecting any possibility of sharing that fate, reportedly said:  "No, we will not go that way."

Historian Dmitri Volkogonov, in his 1995 "Lenin: Life and Legacy," derived from a rare examination of the Politburo and Communist Party archives that were opened briefly and promptly shut in the early 1990s, wrote that the event influenced Lenin strongly:

"His remark 'We will not go that way' meant ... that he realized it was not necessary to be a bomb thrower oneself, like the unfortunate Alexander, nor was it necessary to man the barricades oneself, or to put down rebellion oneself, or to go to the front in a civil war oneself. And he would never do any of these things himself. ... The main thing was to command huge, virtually unwitting masses."

And so propaganda to rouse the unwitting masses became key to Lenin's winning the revolution.  At first, the Bolsheviks seemed to be all propaganda and little else.

As a young lawyer, Lenin rapidly fell in with revolutionary circles in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was frequently arrested and found himself exiled in Siberia and Switzerland.

In exile, he put his journalistic skills to work, fighting and arguing with other fractious emigres — and recognizing their potential for propaganda as a way to get "the masses" to do the revolutionary dirty work.

In "What Is To Be Done?" Lenin outlined a plan in 1902 for a corps of Marxist "professional revolutionaries" to "agitate" for revolution among the masses.  Key to the revolution's leaders was a national newspaper that could assign tasks from a central authority and serve as a catalyst for organizing.  https://www.investors.com/lenin-used-propaganda-for-communist-takeover/
...............................................................................................

   The CCP promised that in a short time the land would be distributed equally, which attracted peasants in large number. Then it promised that control of industrial production would be "in the hands of the working class," and that profits would be divided equally among its members. This appealed to large numbers of salaried workers. 

  The CCP used its broad support among workers and peasants, as well as the energies of a large group of intellectuals, to overpower ruthlessly those few who opposed its rule.

  This campaign was immensely successful. According to still-incomplete CCP statistics, during the first five years of its rule "suppression of opponents" and "land reform" claimed the lives of between 2 million and 3 million people. 

  The Communist leadership thereby redressed grievances in the ranks of Chinese people who had suffered exploitation under past regimes, and it provided a vent for people who had various other discontents to air. 

  Thus the CCP rapidly consolidated its single-party autocracy. It won fanatical support and blind faith among the majority of the Chinese people and rendered the leadership immune to calls for more rational and just policies.

  Despite its early popularity, however, the CCP could not possibly make good on all of its promises. To practice the ideals of communism, it implemented state ownership of land by force. This antagonized the majority of peasants, and peasants accounted for 80 percent of China's population. 

  The varied and creative ways in which the peasants resisted state control provided the greatest contradiction of the first 30 years of CCP rule. The evidence of this contradiction became painfully clear during the devastating famines at the beginning and end of the 1960s....

  Deng Xiaoping, therefore, had no choice but to return ownership of land to the peasants, which briefly resolved "the problem of the Chinese countryside" and lent peasant support to Deng's leadership.

  Industrial communism faired no better than its agricultural counterpart. Mao bequeathed to Deng a pattern of steadily deteriorating ethical content in party slogans. 

  When industrial production had not kept pace with his projections, Mao changed the ideal from "to work according to one's abilities and to be compensated according to one's labor" to a phrase more characteristic of serfdom: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."...

  Next, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang used the concept of "post-industrial socialism" to make further excuses for the failures of the CCP's plans. (Editor's note: Hu served as general secretary of the CCP between 1980-1987. When student demonstrations forced his resignation, he was replaced by Zhao, whose tenure ended with the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 when he was ousted and put under house arrest.)

  But by this time, very few people still believed what the CCP had to say.  No amount of rephrasing and updating the party line could make up for 50 years of broken promises.   http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/china.50/50.beyond/point.counterpoint/wei.essay/

...............................

  However, in both cases international capitalists have been the trump card for World Communism, often acting covertly.      -r.