Glavpolitprosvet

The Leninist version of Marxism, “scientific” Marxism, implies a paradox. On the one hand, it claims that thought and ideology emerge from experience: Specifically, the workers come into possession of this priceless weapon, revolutionary socialist theory, in the course of their daily toil in the factories and their participation in class struggle. On the other hand, since it is a science, scientific Marxism evidently can be fully accessible only to those who have the proper intellectual equipment and background and who have taken the time to study it. Lenin's famous rejection of the spontaneity of the workers' movement, as represented by the trade unions, was based on this understanding. In other words, Marxism cannot be either the ideology of the workers, who do not understand it, or of the revolutionary intellectuals, from whose experience it did not emerge. To square the circle, to transcend this paradox, has always been a central concern for the Bolsheviks. Soviet preoccupation with propaganda must be understood in this context. The help the workers – and peasants – to understand their true interest, to give them the one and only correct interpretation of their immediate and long-range goals, was the Soviet definition of their own propaganda.

The end of the Civil War was the turning point in almost every aspect of Soviet life and politics, including matters of propaganda. As long as the fighting continued and the central government itself was in jeopardy, propaganda had to concentrate on the all-important task of defeating the Whites. It was a Utopian period. The Bolsheviks believed that their problems would be relieved by the defeat of their enemies and by the coming of world revolution.