The Rhetoric of Suppression: Soviet Media Analysis of Eastern European Interventionism

This project seeks to understand if and how the Soviet media attempted to justify the violent suppression of anti-Soviet and anti-communist public dissidence in Eastern Europe. The selected case studies are the Berlin Blockade, the Poznan Uprising, and the institution of martial law in Poland. Each case represented varying degrees of Soviet interventionism. Primary sources were selected from Soviet newspaper articles collected and translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

In the cases of Berlin and Poznan, the Soviet media avoided justifying their government’s involvement and instead downplayed the seriousness of the two events as an effort to promote domestic order in the communist sphere. During martial law in Poland, the Soviet media did in fact justify martial law by claiming it brought order to the country. These three case studies reveal the concern the Soviet Union had for protecting the public image of the supposed stability of communism and the popularity of the Soviet government. The Soviet Union feared that if those living under communism and members in the international community saw unrest in Eastern Europe, both groups would believe that the Soviet Union and their system of communism had failed in governance and ideology. This strategy of propagandistic state media remains an important tool for the current Russian Federation, which has continued to misrepresent and downplay the seriousness of any military operations in Crimea and Ukraine. Consequently, this project has demonstrates state run media is an important insight into the public image concerns of state governments.