Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 8 – On March 1,
1949, Joseph Stalin outlined how Soviet outlets were to carry out anti-American
propaganda, instructions that were followed to the letter throughout the
remainder of the Soviet period and that, except for a brief time in the early
1990s, are again being followed in Russia today, Maksim Mirovich says.
This propaganda, the Russian blogger
says, arose and continues because the rulers of the Russian Federation like
those of the USSR hated and hate the United States not just because of its
military power but also because the US presents an alternative model of
organization for a large and diverse country (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5D74A2639E94F).
For Stalinists and Putinists, the
United States is an appropriate object of hatred because “the US is a large
country like the USSR [and Russia] populated by a large quantity of different
peoples and having a federal structure but at the same time is one built on
completely different principles.
Unlike the Muscovite state with its “’healthy
collectivism,’” the US promotes the individual and his rights. Its federalism
is “genuine rather than fictional,” and the state is limited and operates under
its own laws for the benefit of the individual and his opportunities rather
than for the state and its power.
In fact, as could be seen by anyone,
the US had come into existence as a real revolution that gave its people real
powers, a revolution that far exceeded the impact of the more limited one in
1917 that Moscow celebrated openly in the past and less openly but no less in
real terms now.
And there was and is yet another reason
for Muscovite hatred of the US: the Americans believed in their own system and
supported the aspirations of others to live according to its principles, a
faith that led them to oppose dictatorships of all kinds including the one
ruling so much of the earth from Moscow.
According to Stalin’s orders of
1949, “Soviet ‘patriotism’ was in its essence the quintessence of hatred and
was unthinkable without an object against which this hatred could be directed,”
the United States and its alternative system. Such patriotism had to be promoted
in two ways.
On the one hand, those promoting it
had to avoid making any genuine comparisons between the two societies because in
every case, the Soviet/Russian one would suffer as a result. And on the other,
those in power in Moscow had to come up either with historical examples or entirely
new categories in which the USSR or Russia could look better.
These were often categories drawn
from the distant past such as lynching or the production of steel which was becoming
with each passing year less a measure of national strength and power than the
Muscovite propagandists thought or talk about national values where no direct
comparisons were likely to be made.
According to Mironov, only the truly
stupid believed in Soviet propaganda – and only these same people continue to
believe the Putin-era version of it. Those who didn’t believe in the past are
now pursuing businesses and seeking to send their money and their children
abroad; those who still do are supporting Putin’s “Russian world.”
One reason that the Stalin propaganda
system is becoming ever less effective, however, is that ever more people have
been abroad and know what the real comparisons are. And yet another is that the
regime hasn’t been able to hide the fact that for four times in the last 120
years, it was the US which saved Russia from famine, something that makes it
hard to hate.
Indeed, Mirovch says, “not a single
country helped Russia and the USSR so much as has America or has earned from
this only the black ingratitude of the Soviet thinking people,” past and present.
But Moscow’s effort to promote such hatred as massive as it is rests on a weak
foundation as history shows and as its authors even now know.
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