Vera Tolz presented the paper at both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris (21 January 2025) and at the workshop ‘The Long 20th Century in Northern Eurasia,’ Amherst College, Mass, USA (1 February 2025) (https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/russian/acrc/events/node/923592).
The paper abstract: Since the 1960s, the Soviet media has been perceived in much Western research as the ‘Other’ to the Western media systems. This perspective has prompted researchers of Soviet propaganda to study their subject in isolation from global developments in political communication and from broader academic research in media studies. The isolationism shaped even the academic work on the periods, such as the 1920s, when Soviet actors themselves conceived of their work on propaganda and its influence on public opinion as part of translational efforts, in the aftermath of the First World War, to theorize the role of information in modern society. Scholars of Soviet propaganda overlooked early Soviet attempts to establish a new field of press research (gazetovedenie) both in competition with and in collaboration with the concurrent Western research on media techniques and their impact on audiences. This presentation will tell a little known story of early Soviet media and propaganda studies, while raising a broader question about the pitfalls associated with studying a global trend as if it is a unique and exceptional case.