In the spring of 1928, visitors crossing the Rhine to Cologne’s International Press Exhibition (PRESSA) were greeted by an angular red-and-white pavilion designed by the avant-garde artist El Lissitzky.Footnote 1 Inside, mechanised news ticker-belts and photomontage murals showcased the Soviet Union’s mastery of modern information technologies. A few streets away, at the University of Cologne, Soviet participants at an international congress were engaged in a no less ambitious undertaking. Together with German, Czech, French, and Japanese colleagues, they debated the methods and conceptual foundations of a recently institutionalised field: Zeitungswissenschaft (‘newspaper science’, or gazetovedenie in Russian).Footnote 2 Taken together, these two scenes capture a moment when modern media was being exhibited, analysed, and theorised as a fundamentally transnational phenomenon, and when the study of news, propaganda, and public opinion was imagined as a shared, globally entangled intellectual project rather than a set of nationally bounded traditions.
This article argues that recovering such moments is essential for advancing the agenda of entangled and global media histories. Recent scholarship has called for moving media history beyond Western European and North American frames and for analysing media systems, practices, and imaginaries as products of transnational circulation, exchange, and co-constitution.Footnote 3 Yet much of this scholarship has focused on technologies, infrastructures, or content flows. Less attention has been paid to the global entanglements of the conceptual frameworks through which historical actors themselves understood mass communication. Research on these questions has largely examined intra-Western connections or, occasionally, links along the West–Global South axis, mainly in the period after the Second World War.Footnote 4
Relatedly, this article also intervenes in the historiography of mass communication research, a field that took institutional shape after the First World War as scholars sought to draw lessons from wartime media manipulation and its effects.Footnote 5 In existing accounts, the Soviet case, when considered at all, appears primarily in relation to the Cold War or through the retrospective projection of later developments onto the 1920s.Footnote 6 It is especially in the latter, anachronistic strand of the literature that one finds a simplified, distortive picture of early Soviet media thought as entirely separate from Western and pre-communist East European traditions, and as little more than the straightforward application of Leninist ideas about the press, and party-oriented media production, as if the nature and function of ‘communist’ media had been self-evident from the outset. By placing early Soviet ‘newspaper science’ of the 1920s within an international field of knowledge production, this article advances a more global, historically grounded understanding of the emergence of mass communication research as a field: one attentive to shared problem-spaces, travelling categories, and partially overlapping analytical vocabularies.
These debates were widely seen to carry stakes that were both political and scholarly. In the early twentieth century, many observers described modern democracy as being ‘in crisis’.Footnote 7 This diagnosis was closely tied to the rise of mass politics and mass communication, above all, the mass-circulation newspaper and, soon after, radio. Influential theories such as Gustave Le Bon’s account of crowd psychology suggested that modern publics were increasingly governed by emotion, imitation, and suggestion rather than reasoned deliberation, and that cheap daily newspapers both reflected and intensified these tendencies.Footnote 8 Across different political systems, scholars and practitioners worried about information overload, media concentration, propaganda, misinformation, and the unpredictability of audience reception, concerns that resonate strongly with present-day debates but were already central to interwar discussions of media and democracy. The Cologne congress was one of many sites where these issues were framed as shared challenges of a global media age.
Situating early Soviet attempts to theorise mass communication within this wider intellectual landscape requires a shift away from inherited Cold War historiographical reflexes. The long-dominant trope of the Soviet Union as an absolute ‘other’ has encouraged scholars to read Soviet experiences in the 1920s primarily as a mere prelude to Stalinism and to search early Soviet media debates for anticipations of later authoritarian practices.Footnote 9 As a result, early Soviet writings on media and propaganda have often been analysed selectively within a narrowly state-centred and Russophone frame. Even empirically rich scholarship on early Soviet studies of reader reception has tended to underplay the extent to which similar questions, methods, and anxieties were being articulated elsewhere, thereby obscuring both what Soviet scholars shared with their foreign counterparts and what, precisely, made their interventions distinctive.Footnote 10
By contrast, this article shows that Soviet researchers working under the banner of gazetovedenie, explicitly modelled on the German Zeitungswissenschaft, understood their field as inherently transnational. They treated engagement with foreign scholarship not merely as an exercise in ideological competition or as a search for convenient quotations to criticise the West, but as a serious intellectual undertaking. The problems they addressed, including how news is defined, how media messages circulate, how audiences interpret and misinterpret them, how influence and persuasion can be studied, were the same ones that animated emerging fields of political communication and media studies across Europe, North America, and beyond. Reconstructing these shared problem-spaces allows us to see early Soviet media thought not as an isolated or exceptional tradition, but as one node in a wider and contested field of global knowledge production.
Empirically, the article focuses on the formative phase of Soviet gazetovedenie from 1921 to 1930, paying particular attention to the key centres of relevant research and methodological innovation in Moscow, Petrograd-Leningrad, Kharkiv (the then capital of Soviet Ukraine), and Kyiv. Conceptually, it demonstrates a way of doing globally entangled media history that foregrounds not only the circulation of technologies and practices, but also the circulation of analytical frameworks, research methods, and theoretical expectations. In this sense, the Soviet case is not treated merely as an ‘addition’ to an otherwise Western story, but as a site from which to rethink how global media history itself is written.
This approach also invites a reorientation of how the relationship between Western and Soviet understandings of mass communication in the 1920s is conceptualised. Much existing scholarship, including important recent work, has understandably focused on conflict, rivalry, and ideological competition, particularly in relation to Cold War media systems and representations.Footnote 11 Without denying the importance of these dynamics, this article highlights, instead, patterns of transnational cooperation and adaptation in the earlier period: selective borrowing, transfer and modification of methods, and shared conceptual reference points. These processes, it argues, were central to the formation of early Soviet thinking about media and propaganda and cannot be reduced to either mere imitation or opposition.Footnote 12
Importantly, the hope of gazetovedy (newspaper scientists) that their ideas, articulated in the first post-revolutionary decade, would help shape Soviet journalistic practices proved utopian. Gazetovedy managed to establish few experimental, avant-garde periodicals based on their theoretical principles, but these attracted niche audiences and were short-lived.Footnote 13 Acknowledging this, however, should not prevent us from recognising Soviet ‘newspaper science‘ as an undertaking that deserves its place as an important episode in the history of global mass communication studies.
Finally, the article suggests that global media histories should take seriously the ways in which historical actors theorised their own media environments. In the 1910s and1920s, for scholars across different political systems, propaganda was widely understood as a structural feature of modern mass societies, including democratic ones, rather than as a pathological deviation confined to authoritarian regimes.Footnote 14 Recovering these earlier theoretical horizons not only complicates teleological narratives that read the 1920s primarily as a prehistory of Cold War media conflict, but also helps to place contemporary claims of unprecedented media crisis in perspective by situating them within a longer, globally interconnected history of efforts to conceptualise mass communication and its political consequences.
Methodologically, the article investigates Soviet gazetovedenie as a case of entangled media and communication histories, following Hilmes’s call to focus on individuals who acted as ‘cultural translators’ across national boundaries and on ‘specific texts that have been particularly significant in crossing media platforms and national contexts’.Footnote 15 We identified key representatives of Soviet gazetovedenie who engaged with a wide range of contemporary publications in multiple languages. Their major works were identified through extensive bibliographical research. We then conducted close readings of these texts primarily as sources in intellectual history. These readings encompass works in Russian and Ukrainian, alongside the English- and German-language texts most frequently cited by our protagonists, and situate them within both international debates and shifting Soviet institutional and political contexts. Our reconstruction of direct interactions between Soviet and Western actors up to the early 1930s is grounded in archival research in the holdings of the State Institute of Journalism in Moscow (GIZh), the main Soviet centre for the study of mass communication, and in secondary literature pertaining to international contacts of Ukrainian researchers.Footnote 16
We begin by reconstructing the global and Soviet-specific conditions in which early Soviet gazetovedenie emerged. Through a series of focused case studies, we then examine the dialogical relationships between Soviet gazetovedy and Western authors writing on mass communication, showing how shared perceptions of the global nature of modern journalism and propaganda were refracted through distinct institutional, ideological, and epistemic settings.Footnote 17 This methodological approach allows us to show that histories of mass communication thought that focus on a single state or national context tend to obscure what the sources themselves actually argue and why they articulate their claims in the ways they do.
Early Soviet gazetovedenie in the global context
The emergence of gazetovedenie in the Soviet context, a field largely overlooked in Western scholarship on Soviet media and propaganda, dates to 1921, with the establishment of GIZh. Alongside training journalists for the new Soviet media system, the Institute conducted research on the functioning of the press.Footnote 18 The field drew on longer-established international disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and studies of reader engagement with texts, areas of study already pursued in the late tsarist empire from St Petersburg to Kyiv.Footnote 19 The term gazetovedenie, like its German counterpart, underscored the central role of the mass newspaper as modern society’s key communicative form and reflected the view that this medium was transforming both social life and political practice.
The specific Soviet conditions shaping the discipline’s emergence were defined by the transition from War Communism and the Civil War (1917–21) to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which temporarily permitted small-scale private trade and enterprise. As the Soviet gazetoved Sergei Ingulov observed in 1923, the question of how the Bolshevik press should function as a communicative instrument in the new society arose only with the introduction of the NEP, when newspapers once again began to be sold rather than distributed free of charge.Footnote 20
As a revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks attached particular importance to the role of media and communication in political struggle during the age of mass politics.Footnote 21 Yet when, from 1919 onwards, the question of what was officially termed the ‘Soviet press’ should look like was posed, no ready-made answers existed.Footnote 22 Throughout the 1920s, this issue was intensely debated by a wide range of actors, including not only party officials and politicians but also scholars. Those who undertook serious research included not only figures committed to assisting the new regime’s state-building efforts, but also those concerned with more abstract problems of artistic theory. This is evident in the case of the leading Formalist Viktor Shklovskii, whose attempt to theorise the modern newspaper as a specific ‘literary form’ influenced Soviet gazetovedy and inspired Formalist literary scholars, such as Evgenia Zhurbina, to turn their attention to studying the press.Footnote 23 In the Ukrainian SSR, reception research, with which gazetovedy engaged, was also closely tied to formalist scholarship.Footnote 24
Several interconnected developments spurred intellectual creativity in the field of gazetovedenie. One was the scale of the problem it set itself: the attempt to invent a new media system under conditions of acute resource scarcity. The policies of War Communism devastated the pre-revolutionary press, whose development, especially in forms of journalism independent of state subsidies, had accelerated after the 1905 Revolution.Footnote 25 By 1922, across the entire Soviet state with a population of over 130 million, there were only 299 newspapers, according to Zhurnalist (Journalist), which became the main periodical for publishing ‘newspaper science’ research.Footnote 26 By comparison, in the United States, with a smaller population, more than 8,000 newspapers were published at the time.Footnote 27 Nor were there enough trained journalists.Footnote 28
Although the number of newspapers and their print runs rose rapidly, with the number of titles more than doubling in the eight months between August 1922 and April 1923, the sense of Soviet ‘lagging behind’ (otstavanie) the advanced Western countries in press development remained acute.Footnote 29 At the same time, the very types of newspapers that should be created were the subject of sustained debate.Footnote 30 Alongside Bolshevik papers such as Pravda (founded in 1912) and Izvestiia (established in 1917), the Soviet state spent the 1920s building a press for different social groups, from workers and peasants to professional constituencies, and for the non-Russian nationalities of the USSR.Footnote 31 Until 1931, independent periodicals and publishing houses continued to exist. In 1922, their print-runs accounted for 21.6 per cent of all published output, a figure that fell to just 0.3 per cent by 1931 following the policy shift initiated in 1928.Footnote 32
Throughout the 1920s, both party-state practitioners and gazetovedy lamented the poor quality of the existing press, especially newspapers aimed at the peasantry and ethnic minorities.Footnote 33 In short, the realities of early Soviet journalistic practice and the theories and practical proposals advanced by gazetovedy remained far apart.
In a context where both pre- and post-1917 domestic experience was widely judged to offer insufficient guidance, Soviet gazetovedy increasingly turned to international examples of media practice and communication research. The fact that under the NEP newspapers were expected to cover their own costs, in conditions of limited state subsidy, and therefore to rely on sales and advertising revenue, made the notion of a ‘press market’ directly relevant.Footnote 34 This, in turn, further heightened the importance of foreign publications on mass communication for Soviet authors.
Until the late 1920s, a creative engagement with global debates on mass communication was possible because party control and censorship tightened only gradually, leaving significant space for original intellectual work.Footnote 35 Despite the creation of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) at the Russian (later All-Union) Communist Party Central Committee in 1922, discussions at congresses of press workers indicate that until the end of the 1920s, the party-state did not fully control the entire Soviet media landscape, let alone intellectual debates about mass communication.Footnote 36
The development of state censorship was similarly incremental. The censorship body, the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs (GLAVLIT), also established in 1922 and from the outset working with the secret police to target publications deemed to be anti-Bolshevik, was initially tasked with conducting a ‘political-ideological review’ (prosmotr) of published material. Discussions of its role in 1922 stressed that it should not ‘damage the country’s cultural landscape’ or become a ‘pure police force’.Footnote 37 Even though in practice GLAVLIT always strove to function as a ‘police force’, initially authors and publishers could, and did, challenge its decisions, and as late as 1926 only 3.4 per cent of private publishers’ output was banned.Footnote 38 Importantly, given the focus of this article, until the late 1920s, censors were more lenient towards scholarly publications, largely because of their small readerships.Footnote 39 By contrast, a new regulation issued in 1931 described GLAVLIT as exercising ‘all-encompassing control’ over all publications in the country, a marker of a different political era.Footnote 40
On the one hand, then, the Soviet trajectory of tightening party-state control and expanding censorship in the 1920s ran counter to developments in Western democracies, where wartime restrictions on debate were eased after the war, and where the 1920s saw intense soul-searching about the morality of propaganda, mixed with deliberate misinformation, as political tools.Footnote 41 On the other hand, until the end of the decade, Soviet researchers still enjoyed a degree of latitude to articulate ideas and engage in transnational debates that would soon become unthinkable. As in other areas of intellectual and cultural life, the early Soviet period was thus marked by unusually intense innovation and transnational exchange, with some of its writings, including those of scholars working within the Formalist paradigm, achieving lasting international recognition.Footnote 42 This dimension, however, has not been acknowledged in relation to early Soviet studies of the press, which, as we shall see, were also strongly shaped by Formalist insights and methods.
The creativity and innovation of the post-revolutionary period across the former tsarist empire were facilitated by unusual institutional arrangements that could emerge in the uncertain and chaotic environment of the 1920s.Footnote 43 GIZh associated with most of the actors discussed in this article, was one such centre. In Leningrad, several institutions also engaged in newspaper studies.Footnote 44 Beyond the two Soviet capitals, the Kharkiv Institute of Public Education and the Ukrainian Research Institute of Book Studies in Kyiv became important hubs for research in reception theory, with implications for the study of the press.Footnote 45
GIZh’s activities were, of course, more closely tied to front-line politics than those of the new institutions devoted to literature, linguistics, and art history that flourished in the 1920s. Yet the actors directly involved in politics at this time often combined multiple intellectual and professional roles, combinations that would become unimaginable from the 1930s onwards. The blurred boundary between theories and practices of propaganda meant that many of the figures discussed here combined an interest in theorising mass communication, experimenting with audience reception, and literary scholarship with careers as journalists, editors, or party functionaries. A telling example is Yakov Shafir. An official of the Comintern and the Communist Party Central Committee, Shafir is described in the scholarship on Soviet media as a ‘propagandist’.Footnote 46 Yet in Aage Hansen-Löwe’s history of Russian Formalism, he appears as a Formalist scholar, thanks to his theory of the joke as a literary device.Footnote 47 That a Bolshevik official could also be an original literary theorist, and, in his work as a gazetoved, one of the best-informed figures about relevant Western research, captures well the complexity of the 1920s.Footnote 48
Some of those whose work was relevant to ‘newspaper science’ had maintained close collaborations with foreign scholars since the pre-revolutionary period, ensuring that intellectual exchange continued in both directions. Nikolai Rubakin, whose work informed the theoretical foundations of public opinion research in the 1920s, had collaborated with Belgian and Swiss psychologists since 1916 and went on to become a central figure in the establishment of the International Institute of Bibliopsychology in Lausanne in 1928.Footnote 49 The work of the Book and Reader Study Cabinet of Kyiv’s Institute of Book Studies, headed in the 1920s by Vasyl Ivanushkin and Dmytro Balika, was also known internationally, in part through staff collaborations with Ukrainian émigrés in Europe and North America.Footnote 50
The ideas and approaches of Soviet actors were thus shaped by a wide range of influences. Acknowledging this is essential for making sense of their contributions to contemporary debates on mass communication. Above all, their projects cannot be understood without recognising that Soviet actors approached these questions from a consciously global perspective. For the Soviet gazetovedy, however, ‘global’ meant predominantly Western-facing, whereas in reality, concerns about media, news coverage, and public opinion had by then become widespread well beyond the ‘European core’, as the Chinese case, for example, illustrates.Footnote 51
Writing in 1921, one of the first Soviet ‘newspaper scientists’, Vadim Bystryanskii, opened his book The Newspaper in the Bourgeois and Proletarian States with the following passage:
A close intertwining in intellectual and material spheres transforms modern society into a single whole: alongside postal services, railways, and the telegraph, everyone would acknowledge the primacy of the newspaper … Only bourgeois society, which united the world into a single whole, destroying the boundaries between people, uniting isolated principalities into single states, and individual states into powerful economic organisations, could have created such a powerful tool of spiritual interaction between people as the newspaper.Footnote 52
Importantly, these were not Bystrianskii’s own words. Nor were they the words of Lenin or other Bolshevik leaders, who are often cited in Western scholarship on Soviet propaganda as providing the primary framework for Soviet writing on political communication straight after 1917.Footnote 53 Bystrianskii was quoting Karl Bücher, the founding figure of non-market economics and the creator of the first Institute for Newspaper Science (Institut für Zeitungswissenschaft), established in Leipzig in 1916. Bystrianskii stressed that the Soviet (proletarian) press had to be studied in a global context, by comparing and learning from media practices under capitalism.
This was a characteristic position. Soviet authors who founded the field of gazetovedenie, one of whose aims was to enhance the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda, drew primarily on American scholarship on the press, propaganda, and public opinion, as well as on German theories of mass communication. The field itself was explicitly defined with reference to the German scholar Konrad Burdach’s description of Zeitungswissenschaft as a discipline aimed at providing ‘a holistic [v ego tselom] theoretical understanding of the newspaper as a historically evolving sociopolitical and cultural phenomenon’.Footnote 54
Publications by Soviet gazetovedy of the early post-revolutionary years rarely quote Lenin. Until the second half of the 1920s, the German Marxist scholar Eduard Fuchs was cited on this issue far more frequently than Lenin.Footnote 55 As early as 1902, Fuchs had proposed that the press be understood as a site for the expression of class interests and ideological struggle in his Marxist theory of culture.Footnote 56 Similarly, Soviet gazetovedy readily acknowledged that the conception of the press as a collective phenomenon and public organiser was not uniquely Lenin’s but was also widely shared by mass communication specialists of various political affiliations. The same applied to what became a standard Soviet claim about the hypocrisy of the Western notions of ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘independence of thought’, a critique that, alongside Marx, Lenin, and Fuchs, was also articulated by Max Weber.Footnote 57
This situation becomes more intelligible once we acknowledge what is largely missing from familiar Cold War-influenced accounts of early Soviet history. The first decades of the twentieth century were a period of profound questioning of self-serving narratives of European and Western superiority. This trend, prominent both in the West and in its colonies, intensified during and immediately after the First World War. Notably, much of the critique of ‘bourgeois society’ found in early Soviet publications on the press and propaganda simply repeats arguments previously advanced by a broader, international pool of authors.Footnote 58
Within this transnational critique of ‘Western civilisation’, the subversion of the press’s ideal role as a liberator of humankind through free debate by capitalist practices was already widely recognised across Europe and North America by the time of the Russian Revolution. Soviet claims on this issue contained little that was original. It was not only Marxists and socialists, such as Fuchs in Germany or Upton Sinclair in the United States, whose arguments about the conflict between commercial imperatives and the democratic ideal of a free press were quoted in Soviet publications. Concerns about the consequences of ‘yellow journalism’ had also been voiced by Western authors with varying political views, including the American journalist John Given and the founding figure of modern mass communication research, Walter Lippmann.Footnote 59
The close engagement of Soviet gazetovedy with Lippmann’s ideas, analysed in this article, adds a previously unexplored dimension to the existing scholarship on the wide reception of his work.Footnote 60 This particular attention to Lippmann in the USSR was facilitated by his critique, eagerly cited by Soviet authors, of Western journalistic coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution, which he treated as an example of the characteristic ignorance with which modern media covered foreign affairs. Lippmann’s analysis of Western press coverage of the Red Scare, presented as evidence of the persistence of partisan propaganda even after wartime media restrictions ended in democratic states, also increased his appeal to Soviet authors.Footnote 61
Crucially, this reception involved more than the selective deployment of his authority. Gazetovedy reflected seriously on the implications of Lippmann’s understanding of the relationship between news coverage and real-world events for the Soviet context.Footnote 62 Overall, until the end of the 1920s, references to the need to learn from the experience of the bourgeois press and from emerging Western scholarship on communication were frequent. The periodical Zhurnalist included two sections devoted to extensive reviews of Western publications and translations of selected texts. Notably, these early reviews were largely factual and neutral in tone, with aggressive polemics gaining momentum only later in the decade.
The importance of situating early Soviet research on the press and propaganda in its broader context is evident from the difficulty of fully understanding Soviet authors’ vocabulary without having read contemporaneous Western literature on political communication. It is often argued that the term ‘propaganda’ lost its neutral meaning in the West during the First World War, while in the Soviet context, it retained a positive connotation, equated with education. Similarly, the term ‘agitation’ is frequently treated in Sovietological scholarship as specifically Soviet.Footnote 63
In fact, during the war, ‘propaganda’ (when used to describe the enemy’s influence campaigns) did acquire a negative connotation among most Entente allies. Yet after the war, the revelation that Britain had conducted the largest information manipulation campaigns partially rehabilitated the term within Western democracies.Footnote 64 As a result, early US communication scholars and public relations practitioners used it in a neutral sense, treating purposefully framed, self-interested narratives as a normal feature of modern society and accepting propaganda via the press and other media as an ordinary aspect of it. One of the most influential American publicity experts, Ivy Lee, frequently cited by early Soviet authors, thus defended the term in 1925: ‘[Propaganda] is a bad word; I wish I had some substitute for it, but after all, it means the effort to propagate ideas, and I do not know any real derivative to substitute the word.’Footnote 65 Lippmann, in turn, used the term ‘agitation’ to describe routine press practices in democratic capitalist states.Footnote 66
Early Soviet sources also defined the ‘party’ (partiinaia) and ‘mass’ (massovaia) press with reference to Western European usage. Early twentieth-century North American and Western European writers observed a shift from politically funded, overtly partisan newspapers to mass-circulation papers aimed at broad audiences and filled with sensational or human-interest content. Against this backdrop, Soviet commentators debated how to create a newspaper that would be both partiinaia and massovaia.Footnote 67
Finally, the vocabulary of ‘shaping’, ‘forging’, and ‘making’ new subjects, often presented as specifically Soviet, was in fact central to Western debates about mass communication and public opinion.Footnote 68 As Cory Wimberly shows, early twentieth-century US authors understood propaganda, often euphemised as ‘publicity’ or ‘public relations’, not as ‘papering over reality with false beliefs’ but as a means of ‘making’ new publics, conceived as newly urbanised populations and targets of emerging consumer industries.Footnote 69 The figure of the ‘customer’ in this discourse occupied a position analogous to that of the citizen in Soviet thought: both were subjects to be moulded to act in desired ways. While the agent of this moulding differed, political leadership in the Soviet case, corporations in the American, the boundary was not absolute. For example, US scholars such as Grant Hyde, also cited by gazetovedy, explicitly asked how techniques developed in advertising and public relations might be applied to shaping voters’ behaviour.Footnote 70
As the cases discussed below demonstrate, familiar Soviet orthodoxies about mass communication only began fully to crystallise in the second half of the 1920s, and did so in the context of ongoing global intellectual exchange. Shafir played a crucial role in this process. In 1925, he for the first time brought together disparate quotations from Lenin to present him as an important press theorist and articulated an explicitly ideological framework for the study of the press, which he described as consisting of two ‘press regimes’: ‘Soviet’ and ‘bourgeois’. Drawing on authors ranging from Lenin to Fuchs and Sinclair, Shafir characterised the bourgeois press as serving commercial interests at best and, at worst, as deliberately deceiving the working class in the interests of ruling elites.Footnote 71 This class-struggle framework for analysing media dynamics also came to exercise complete dominance as the interpretative lens among gazetovedy in the context of what scholars of Soviet history sometimes call the Cultural Revolution of 1928–31.
Yet this consolidation of an ideological orthodoxy was only one dimension of a broader intellectual development. Soviet authors’ contributions to globally shared debates about news and public opinion followed a distinct intellectual trajectory in the 1920s. Although this trajectory was shaped by a changing and increasingly repressive political environment, it cannot be fully reduced to it. With this in mind, we now turn to those contributions.
Theory of information: What is news?
The questions of what news is and how it functions within modern media systems lay at the heart of the emerging field of mass communication research. The field developed amid an acute, post-war sense of ‘crisis’. Lippmann, whose Liberty and the News placed him at the centre of this field internationally, argued that the ‘present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism’.Footnote 72 In a way that sounds strikingly topical today, Lippmann was concerned about threats to democratic government, for which rational, open public debate was essential, arising from what was then a new medium: the mass newspaper. Its output was widely recognised as often biased, selective, and, at times, outright misleading.
Soviet gazetovedy embraced the idea of a ‘crisis’ in the globally predominant media model and positioned themselves among those seeking solutions. The analytical steps they took in their studies of existing media dynamics and their possible improvement closely followed those of mass communication researchers abroad, including Lippmann. The foundational question was what constitutes ‘information’ (informatsiia) in a modern society, and what kind of ‘information’ is (and should be) disseminated to the public as news (novost’).
From the outset, gazetovedy foregrounded the argument that what counts as news is defined differently across national and state contexts. This was a widely accepted position, and in articulating it, Soviet authors referenced their North American counterparts.Footnote 73 As we will see, the view that what was worth reporting primarily included anything that illuminated the inevitable course of class struggle, typically regarded as the distinct Soviet position, crystallised fully only by the end of the decade.
Initially, Soviet gazetovedy’s understanding of the press’s purpose would not have seemed controversial to their counterparts abroad. Indeed, the 1925 two-volume publication, The World of the Newspaper and the Book, advertised as the first Soviet attempt to systematise a vast body of material on the functioning of the press in the USSR and globally, approached the question of ‘information’ in modern society primarily through examples drawn from Western newspapers and news agencies. In doing so, it suggested that Western and Soviet newspapers and journalists shared comparable techniques, methods, and organisational principles, even if their goals diverged at times.Footnote 74 This claim was a particularly unambiguous summary of the contradictory debates among Soviet gazetovedy in the preceding years.
In 1922, gazetoved A. Menshoi suggested that ‘the newspaper primarily exists for informing [osvedomleniia] the reader’.Footnote 75 During the 1925 debate about Soviet journalism, Aleksandr Kurs, a key contributor to gazetovedenie, with pre-revolutionary experience as a reporter for a British newspaper, and an Agitprop official, similarly insisted that ‘information is the essence of the newspaper’.Footnote 76 In the first half of the 1920s, informatsiia was defined as ‘a range of reports [soobshcheniia] in [the form of] facts about what has happened in a specific time and territorial space’.Footnote 77 The strikingly neutral, pseudo-objective, and ostensibly non-ideological language of this definition reflected the period’s scientism, in which Soviet actors across fields imagined the new state as supremely rational and modern.
In 1925, Mikhail Levidov published a substantial book on the ‘theory of information’, in which he engaged closely with US theories of the press. In the Soviet political context, Levidov’s position aligned closely with that of Lev Trotsky, who, in the early post-revolutionary years, addressed press-related issues more prominently than Lenin did. Writing in Pravda in 1923, Trotsky argued that the newspaper should above all ‘inform well’ (khorosho osvedomliat’), ensure that its ‘information’ was ‘timely’ (svezhaia), and cover developments of interest to a broad readership.Footnote 78 Developing this position further the same year, Trotsky insisted that the Soviet press ‘has no right not to be interested in what … the proletarian street is interested in’, and therefore should not hesitate to cover ‘court cases, accidents, murders, and suicides’. Trotsky, like some gazetovedy, even cited the Western ‘yellow press’ as a model for its attentiveness to ‘the curiosity of a person, his instinct’, in its coverage of such material.Footnote 79
While acknowledging that the distinction drawn in a ‘bourgeois society’ between a political and a mass newspaper was inappropriate for Soviet conditions, Levidov nevertheless also emphasised the importance of considering ‘readers’ interests’ when selecting stories for news coverage. Concerning selection, Levidov argued that the Soviets should learn from the Anglo-Saxon countries.Footnote 80 His book detailed US studies of the ‘newsworthiness’ or ‘informational value’ (informatsionnaia tsennost’) of newspaper articles. Similar to the Western authors he cited, Levidov understood the news as an occurrence ‘outside the daily routine’ and topicality or timeliness (zlobodnevnost’) as generally referring to very recent developments.Footnote 81
Levidov concurred with Lippmann’s view that when journalists apply their criteria of selection, ‘the process of the active selection of facts naturally turns into the “making” of facts’, and he summarised Lippmann’s distinction between reality and reportable reality.Footnote 82 In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann argued that press coverage in democratic states did not, and could not, accurately reflect reality, challenging the belief that ‘truth’ would prevail through the judgment of competent citizens. Instead, driven by ignorance, biases, and prejudices, politicians, journalists, and ordinary people constructed what Lippmann called ‘pseudo-environments’ that stood between them and the world and shaped people’s actions.Footnote 83 This diagnosis also had practical implications for how information should be selected and presented. Like Western authors and Trotsky, Levidov concluded that those who determined newspaper coverage had to consider the capacity of particular kinds of information to trigger people’s ‘instincts’, including hatred and ‘sex appeal’.Footnote 84
Levidov noted that many Soviet journalists and newspaper editors failed to appreciate the need to trigger people’s ‘instincts’ because they confused ‘the entertainment of the reader’ with ‘the need to make the reader interested’. According to Levidov, the rejection of entertainment as a goal attributed to the bourgeois press by its Soviet and foreign critics led Soviet journalists to neglect readers’ interests altogether. Agreeing with foreign communication researchers, Levidov remarked that providing too much heavy political content, rather than focusing on human-interest stories people wished to read, diminished the press’s appeal.Footnote 85
The first systematic Soviet critique of the view that the newspaper, above all, ‘informs’, was articulated in 1926 on the grounds that it implied that a newspaper, ‘in principle, can be neutral’.Footnote 86 The promoters of the understanding of news coverage that we now perceive as specifically Soviet substituted the notion of the ‘informational value’ of a news story with the notion of its ‘agitational value’.Footnote 87 The shift towards the ‘agitational value’ triggered a re-evaluation of the definition of news at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in earnest in 1928, the Cultural Revolution, alongside the economic and political changes, also sought to transform the cultural and academic spheres and the private lives of Soviet citizens.
During that crucial turning point in consolidating Stalin’s rule, the attack on advocates of the press’s role as ‘informing’ intensified. The features of the Cultural Revolution that sidelined the ‘informational’ aspect of the media included prioritising the top-down transformation of human nature as a primary concern of the Soviet state, organising the entire press coverage around targeted political campaigns, and viewing political expediency (politicheskaia tselesoobraznost’) as the main criterion in the selection of facts, ensuring their ability to enhance the campaign’s ‘agitational effect’.Footnote 88
Yet, as late as 1929, one of the leading proponents of the ‘agitational value’ of news coverage, Vladimir Kuz’michev, could still engage directly with Lippmann’s theory of ‘news’. He reiterated Lippmann’s argument that news and truth were not synonymous. However, while Lippmann acknowledged the varying degrees of veracity of news reports, contended that ‘fiction’ did not need to be based on overt falsehood, and highlighted that ‘truth’ was a complex and elusive concept, Kuz’michev adhered to a simplistic truth–lie dichotomy, predicated on the assumption that the bourgeois press lied, while the intention of the Soviet press was to convey the truth. Nonetheless, Kuz’michev rendered the complexity of Lippmann’s conception of ‘news’ quite faithfully, stating that ‘not every event that really occurred is news; not every news [report] is truth, but a coverage of a particular side of the event, which for some reason has acquired public significance’.Footnote 89
A particularly clear reflection of the changed Cultural Revolution approach to understanding newsworthiness is Mikhail Gus’s book Information in the Newspaper (1930). Gus offered a new definition of news, which would thereafter be regarded as distinctly Soviet. Above all, Gus rejected the assumption held by earlier Soviet gazetovedy, such as Levidov and Kurs, and much of the Western literature on the subject that (a) the ‘informational value’ tended to relate to the uniqueness of the covered phenomenon (nepovtorimoe kachestvo iavleniia), and (b) the tiresome repetition of the same facts was detrimental to the newspaper’s ability to engage readers.
Instead, according to Gus, the aim of the Soviet press was to illustrate the typical nature of the phenomena covered, and thus ‘the selection of facts of a similar nature’ and their repetition were necessary.Footnote 90 The facts of ‘a similar nature’ were intended to reveal the unfolding historical processes as anticipated by Marx and Lenin. ‘True reality’ was thus understood as of long historical processes of class conflict, so a newspaper should, to reflect that reality, select facts linked to such processes rather than random, atypical events which were not true to ‘reality’ in this sense. Consequently, the previously mentioned zlobodnevnost’ (topicality) was redefined to pertain to that which was politically expedient in a given movement.Footnote 91
The final element of the new understanding of news was a changed attitude toward tendentiousness (tendentsioznost’) and the comprehensiveness of the coverage. From being a feature of the Soviet press to be overcome and avoided, the overtly tendentious nature of press coverage began to be presented as an advantage.Footnote 92 In this context, Kuz’michev also insisted that the early view that ‘the more comprehensive the information is, the more correct [vernee] and better it is’ was wrong. Instead, according to a newly received wisdom, ‘the comprehensive information is often more politically harmful than partial [nepolnaia] information’ and thus less ‘correct’.Footnote 93
At this juncture, Lenin’s occasional pronouncements about the media began to be consistently framed as the guiding ‘theory’, whilst his style of journalistic writing served as a model for the rhetorical organisation of Soviet public discourse. Soviet press researchers conducted a detailed analysis of Lenin’s polemical style, featuring an elaborate classification of his methods, which foregrounded assaults on individuals’ personalities and motivations as a means of discrediting their views.Footnote 94 Lenin’s approach of targeting the opponent’s personality and ascribing questionable motives was not fully utilised by the authors themselves during the period under discussion. This approach would start to be employed systematically during the Stalin era.Footnote 95
In summary, during the NEP, Soviet gazetovedy engaged in debates about the nature and function of press coverage, drawing heavily on Western mass communication scholarship. Without this context, their efforts cannot be fully comprehended. What is now recognised as a distinct Soviet model of news coverage only took shape by 1931.
From information to public opinion: Studying engagement
Soviet and internationally driven theories of information and news developed alongside cross-disciplinary concerns about how the meanings of public communications were constructed, and about the role of the reader or viewer in this process.Footnote 96 These questions were increasingly framed as central to what at the time was already termed ‘public opinion’. In post-war societies, the state of public opinion was widely seen as a political problem and a challenge to existing systems of rule. The Soviet case was no exception. Despite claims to embody a higher form of popular democracy, the regime was already authoritarian in the period discussed here. Yet Soviet actors explicitly drew parallels with Western debates over the formation of public opinion. Citing US sources ranging from Lippmann to the publicity manual by Glenn C. Quiett and Ralph Casey, Kuz’michev marvelled at how ‘carefully Yankees study their reader to develop techniques of influence’.Footnote 97 He and other Soviet authors, whose work we now examine, sought to adapt this knowledge to Soviet conditions.
Gazetovedy shared a foundational assumption of early twentieth-century research on media reception: that readers were the primary makers of meaning. Drawing on linguistic and psychological theories developed both abroad and in the former tsarist empire, as well as on philosophical traditions extending beyond Marxism, they recognised the complexity of meaning-making. Among the figures discussed here, the idea that the Communist Party held primary authority over interpretation was only fully internalised by the end of the 1920s. Until then, gazetovedy tended to adopt a more nuanced view, treating meaning-making as an interactive and multifaceted process. This perspective was widely accepted transnationally, with Soviet authors citing earlier formulations by figures such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Oleksandr (Aleksandr) Potebnia, a linguist of Ukrainian Cossack descent from the Russian empire.Footnote 98
The view that meaning is fluid and never final, often associated with Mikhail Bakhtin, was therefore far from unique. In this broader intellectual context, Nikolai Rubakin’s theory of reception offered one of the most radical versions of reader-centred meaning-making. He framed interpretation as an open-ended, dialogic process and rejected the primacy of authorial intent, arguing that ‘[t]he content [of the text] exists only in the form of its impact [vozdeistviia] on the reader’. On this view, each reader produces meaning rather than receiving a fixed message.Footnote 99 This position resonated with a core tenet of Formalism, in its various manifestations across the former tsarist empire and beyond and also informed more specialised research on readers’ engagement with texts.Footnote 100
The recognition of the complexity and unpredictability of people’s engagement with media messages was sharpened by studies of state propaganda during the First World War, which showed that citizens rarely interpreted messages as intended.Footnote 101 This problem was acutely felt in both Western democratic and Soviet contexts. In the United States, Hyde lamented that American newspapers lacked effective means to address ‘current political problems, how to get out the vote and how to get it out for a particular cause’, and sought new methods for ‘striking into the reader’s mind’.Footnote 102 His Soviet counterpart, Kuz’michev, voiced a similar concern, explaining that his book on public opinion (obshchestvennoe mnenie) aimed to show why ‘our agitation is ineffective’, why ‘we are not understood as intended’, and what might be done about it.Footnote 103
At the same time, both Western researchers and most gazetovedy shared the conviction that, despite the unpredictability of individual responses, general patterns of engagement could be identified and studied at the collective level. It was this assumption that underpinned the emergence of modern research on public opinion. Summarising his work in the 1920s, Hyde described a dual focus: on techniques to enhance the impact of press communication, drawing on wartime experience of information manipulation, and on the rapidly expanding fields of social and ‘crowd’ psychology.Footnote 104 Soviet scholars investigating the relationship between the press and obshchestvennoe mnenie engaged with the same body of literature. By the late 1920s, figures such as Kuz’michev increasingly criticised Rubakin for extending the unpredictability of individual interpretation to groups, insisting instead on the possibility, and necessity, of analysing collective patterns of response.Footnote 105
What distinguished the Western and Soviet sides was their understanding of the social significance of groupness, their views on the changeability of human beings, how ‘truth’ was defined, and the limits of what Hyde called ‘the accepted methods of propaganda’.Footnote 106 Once again, the divergence between Soviet understandings and the Western mainstream would become particularly apparent by 1931.
Writing in 1929, Kuz’michev defined public opinion as ‘a collective effort in which a person is a social actor, influenced by their group and environment … Public opinion should be imagined not in the form of completed [zakonchennykh], separate [obosoblennykh] views, but in the form of complex interactive processes, in which utilised concepts [poniatiia] are in a state of constant change’.Footnote 107 This definition reflected the influence of both foreign and domestic Soviet research of the time. Kuz’michev cited Lippmann’s Public Opinion as his key source, along with Norman Angell’s The Press and the Organisation of Society.Footnote 108 Both authors conceptualised human communication and the formation of world views as a social, collective, and interactive process. On the Soviet side, Kuz’michev referred to textual analyses by Valentin Voloshinov, widely regarded as one of the pen-names of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose works from the 1920s on the dialogical nature of meaning-making would begin to exert a significant impact on Western studies of culture from the 1970s onwards.Footnote 109
While opinions on public gullibility varied, most researchers, following Le Bon’s ideas, agreed that individuals in crowds could be influenced to think and act in specific ways. At the same time, they recognised the challenge of accurately identifying such effects.Footnote 110 Both Soviet and Western authors anticipated improvements in people’s ability to make sense of information about the world, a development they projected into the future, due to the rise of education. However, whereas Lippmann called for recognising the enduring limitations of ‘the human nature’ and ‘the human mind’, Soviet authors increasingly expressed their belief in the perfectibility of people as the decade progressed.Footnote 111
Acknowledging the difficulty of understanding how people engage with information spurred further studies. In the 1920s, Soviet investigations included experimental and quantitative studies of how individuals and groups engaged with texts and other forms of communication in different settings and different emotional states.Footnote 112 A particularly large-scale study was undertaken by Shafir in 1925, which was based on as many as 7,483 responses to his questionnaire aimed at readers, in the Russian Federation, the Ukrainian SSR and the Moldavian republic, of the main Soviet periodical for workers, Rabochaia gazeta, which were analysed with reference to gender, age, educational level, social status, and party affiliation.Footnote 113 In 1928, scholars at the Ukrainian Institute of Book Studies conducted a similarly large survey of library readers, gathering more than 7,000 responses. Importantly, Ukrainian scholars were interested not only in researching how readers engaged with texts more generally, but also in analysing how Soviet nationality policies might specifically shape readers’ preferences.Footnote 114
Gazetovedy acknowledged that a newspaper exerted influence through means extending beyond its content. These means were extensively studied, including the application of the Formalist method, which continued to be utilised even during the launch of the first anti-Formalist campaign in the USSR during the Cultural Revolution.
Within the Russian imperial and Soviet contexts, Formalist theory was primarily developed in relation to literature. The notion that form itself could generate meaning and emotional engagement led to the development of sophisticated methodologies for analysing artistic devices. Reflecting the plurality of positions within Formalism, scholars debated whether these studies should be conducted independently of the content of the examined text and whether changes in social contexts should be considered.Footnote 115 In the 1920s, the Formalist method was so influential that it was employed even in fields where its possible relevance was not immediately apparent.Footnote 116 This was true for gazetovedy, whose work, as we will see, often included detailed analyses of literary and linguistic devices in newspaper articles.
Formalist scholars of literature and gazetovedy sought to differentiate their areas of research. Shklovsky argued that the purpose of art was to prolong reader engagement by making the familiar unfamiliar.Footnote 117 This conceptualisation was not directly relevant to gazetovedy, who, despite advocating for increasing the length of time Soviet citizens spent reading newspapers, recognised fundamental differences between literature and journalism. Formalists contended that ‘poetic language’ distinguished literature from everyday language, which included journalistic writing. And yet, the fact that leading Soviet gazetovedy adopted the German press theorist Robert Brunhuber’s definition of a newspaper as a specific kind of ‘verbal creation’ (slovesnoe proizvedenie), and that Shklovsky also conceptualised the newspaper as a distinct ‘literary form’, made the Formalist method relevant to them, and they maintained that newspapers employed distinct literary devices that warranted systematic study.Footnote 118
One of the first Soviet authors to argue for the need to study the influence of ‘the literary form’ of newspaper articles on their comprehension by readers was Nikolai Ivanov-Gramen. While noting the importance of Lenin’s call for ‘the agitation by fact’ (i.e. by content), Ivanov-Gramen contended that gazetovedy should prioritise studying ‘the agitation by genre’ (e.g. in the case of feuilleton), through emotive techniques (satire and humour), literary techniques such as the use of artistic images (obrazy), as well as visual materials and graphic design.Footnote 119
Research in this area continued throughout the decade, yielding examples of sophisticated interrogations of specific media communications that are comparable to what is now known as critical discourse analysis. In the 1920s, this approach was pursued to a greater extent by Soviet authors studying the press than elsewhere, constituting their constructive and original contribution to global communication research of the period.Footnote 120
As was the case with research on ‘information’ and ‘news’, from 1927 onwards Soviet publications on reader response and public opinion reflect an increasingly coercive political environment and growing pressure to adapt arguments to ideological orthodoxies. In particular, gazetovedy were now compelled to express optimism about the capacity of Soviet state-sponsored messaging to overcome the recognised difficulty of ensuring that, at the level of specific individuals, the message was interpreted as intended.
The optimism was based on the stated class-based commonality of people’s engagement with reality.Footnote 121 In support of this position, studies were conducted on how representatives of different classes engaged with the same texts. One study that purportedly demonstrated that workers understood the writings by the famous Russian poet, Pushkin, differently from representatives of the pre-revolutionary upper classes and that the difference could be explained in class terms and, therefore, anticipated was cited as an example from which to learn how the press could ensure that workers better grasped the meaning with which journalists tried to imbue their articles.Footnote 122
Conversely, Western researchers also focused on people’s group characteristics to enhance the impact of public communications. Similarly to the Soviet case, US studies examined people’s age, gender, and social status.Footnote 123 Particular attention was given to what publicity experts in the United States considered to be stable features of human nature, as well as the existence of shared innate natural drives that advertisers had already successfully exploited to influence the public as consumers.Footnote 124
As Soviet gazetovedy hoped to learn how findings about workers’ engagement with Pushkin could be applied to achieve their desired engagement with the Soviet press, Hyde wondered whether it was possible, from the standpoint of a liberal, high-brow researcher like himself, to improve average US citizens’ engagement with ‘more significant news material’ by learning how exactly ‘certain types of [light] news (sports, crime, etc.)’ appealed to them.Footnote 125
Soviet publications on public opinion evolved from initially recognising that these natural drives existed and needed to be considered in propaganda to entirely dismissing references to these drivers as a concept that indicated the debasement of human beings under capitalism.Footnote 126
The fact that the Soviets and socialists in Western societies pinned their hopes on mobilising class consciousness to enhance the effectiveness of their press and propaganda on citizens attracted the attention of leading Western communication researchers, such as Lippmann. Unsurprisingly, despite faithfully rendering many of Lippmann’s arguments, when presenting a Soviet perspective on public opinion, Kuz’michev failed to address Lippmann’s critique of the socialist thinkers’ reliance on the socio-economic determinism of their class-based analysis, namely that each individual possessed multiple selves, which could not be reduced to the person’s socioeconomic status, and that identifying which self was activated during engagement with a particular piece of information was often impossible to ascertain.Footnote 127
Limiting the understanding of groupness primarily to class and outright rejecting the idea that some common human characteristics are enduring and should be addressed rather than overcome through re-education (perevospitanie) became a non-negotiable dogma in the Soviet context only during the period of the Cultural Revolution. The trend of the time was marked by a growing starkness in distinguishing between ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, further distancing Soviet researchers of press and propaganda from their Western counterparts. By 1931, Soviet literature on public opinion and the effects of propaganda increasingly equated ‘truth’ with the latest Communist Party line, leading Soviet authors to justify direct censorship to ensure that ‘correct’ opinions were formed.Footnote 128
The political and intellectual shifts in the development of Soviet political communication research in the late 1920s and early 1930s also manifested in other divergences from mainstream Western research. Ultimately, these differences led to distinct trajectories for Soviet and Western mass communication. Nevertheless, even with a new paradigm gaining prominence in Soviet research on mass communication, several issues continued to resonate and attract scholarly attention on both sides of the geopolitical divide in the late 1920s and early 1930s. However, the conclusions drawn and the proposed solutions began to differ much more significantly than in previous years.
Thus, another significant difference between the Soviet approach and mainstream Western research on mass communication, which was fully clarified in the Soviet context only by the end of the 1920s, was how actors from different political systems understood the purpose of their work. As the space for intellectual pursuits narrowed in the Soviet Union, the authors of late 1920s publications made it clear that the primary goal of their studies was to support the state in mounting political campaigns against perceived opponents.Footnote 129
In this context, they were not entirely wrong to recognise similarities between their own activities and those of US Public Relations advisors, whose role was to develop techniques, with little regard for ethics, to influence public opinion in order to increase sales.Footnote 130 However, Soviet actors overlooked the fact that among their Western counterparts, who engaged in academic research, ethical considerations, on which they had significant independence, were a priority. For example, Hyde’s account of his research into the formation of public opinion described his efforts to create an ‘ideal code’ of ‘newspaper ethics’.Footnote 131
Both Western and Soviet authors discussed the role of the press in holding officials accountable, though with different results. Soviet claims on this issue should not be dismissed as simple hypocrisy. During this period, Soviet gazetovedy often expressed hope that critical reader letters, considered a key expression of public opinion and thus obsessively studied, could improve government performance and ensure accountability.Footnote 132 However, regardless of their intentions, the idea that reader letters could serve as a form of oversight in an increasingly repressive regime was ultimately utopian.
Much Soviet analysis concluded that, more often than not, Soviet press coverage failed to convey its intended message, as shown by letters from critical readers.Footnote 133 Rather than serving as Lenin’s envisioned ‘organiser’ of the masses, the Soviet press was depicted by gazetovedy as a force of ‘disorganisation’, creating the impression that authorities were hiding vital information.Footnote 134 Similar concerns were expressed by US researchers: just as Soviet editors were blamed for allowing an ‘unmanaged process’ (samotek), Hyde lamented that American journalists depended on ‘hunches, habits, rule-of-thumb, tradition’.Footnote 135
Finally, concerns about the fallibility of popular perceptions of the world were not confined to the Soviet context, nor was the idea that this problem required intervention by a specialised elite. Lippmann, too, doubted that the average citizen could be relied upon to form well-informed views of the outside world.Footnote 136 Unlike Soviet thinkers, however, Lippmann, who regarded both politicians and journalists as fallible ‘common men’, did not seek to entrust the task of producing reliable information and its interpretation to the political elite. Instead, he proposed the creation of a panel of social scientists, equipped with scientific methods, whose role would be to supply decision-makers with these resources.Footnote 137
These shared concerns about the role of the press underscore the extent to which common problems of mass communication cut across different political systems. At the same time, the differences are just as revealing. Lippmann did not regard scientific experts as omnicompetent. He acknowledged that their complete political detachment, which his model required, was difficult to sustain, and he remained committed to the idea of pluralistic publics as a core element of democracy.Footnote 138 In any case, his proposal was not intended as prescriptive and was never implemented. In the Soviet context, by contrast, challenging the prerogative of the party-state leadership to define ‘truth’ soon became impossible.Footnote 139
Soviet research on propaganda, the press, and public opinion in the forms discussed in this article effectively ended in 1931, when the new tasks of ‘Marxist-Leninist gazetovedenie’ were redefined as ensuring the ‘correct understanding of Lenin and Stalin’s teaching on the press’, ‘focusing on issues of particular importance for the Party’, and prioritising ‘Marxist-Leninist upbringing [vospitanie]’.Footnote 140 Institutional and personnel changes followed. Although the term gazetovedenie continued to be used throughout the 1930s, publications produced under its banner were no longer characterised by the forms of engagement with global scholarship examined in this article. By 1936, GIZh’s press research unit and the Ukrainian Institute for Book Studies had been closed, and many of their members fell victim to Stalin’s purges.Footnote 141
Moreover, the 1930s mark a distinct period not only in the Soviet Union but also in Western mass communication research. With the rise of Nazi Germany and its uses of propaganda, US scholars such as Harold Lasswell increasingly shifted their attention toward the problem of total opinion control, attributed to the media systems of modern dictatorships.Footnote 142 The processes of co-operation and adaptation across the North American, German, and Soviet axis analysed in this article were thus interrupted. In their place emerged new frameworks for studying mass communication in each context, alongside a reconfiguration of how researchers engaged with ideas produced within different political systems. The tendency to see one’s own conception of mass communication and that of the political adversary in strictly binary terms further sharpened during the Cold War, producing the blind spots to dynamics that did not fit neatly within simple binaries, the very problem this article has sought to address.
Conclusion
Recontextualising the intellectual work of the early Soviet gazetovedy within the broader landscape of twentieth-century mass communication research yields a markedly different perspective from the one commonly found in existing scholarship on Soviet propaganda, which tends to focus on journalistic practices and Communist Party control, assuming that theorising mass communication beyond Lenin’s conception of the press was of little interest to Soviet actors. This article demonstrates that this simplified picture does not hold for the 1920s.
Much of what has come to be seen as quintessentially ‘Soviet’ in mass communication, such as the subordination of media theory to agitational practice, the privileging of class struggle over informational complexity, and the Party’s claim to define truth and re-educate citizens, did not take shape overnight. These principles became unquestioned orthodoxies only by 1931. While the argument that, in the USSR, the 1920s were a period of experimentation, international debate, and relative freedom of expression is familiar to scholars of literature and the arts, it has not been sufficiently appreciated in relation to Soviet scholarship of the press and propaganda of the period, a body of work whose very existence Western academic literature has largely neglected.
During the decade following the 1917 Revolution, Soviet press scholars actively engaged with the same core questions that were being debated globally: what role should the press play in a mass society; how does propaganda work, and why does it often fail? Far from isolated, gazetovedenie emerged as a methodologically innovative field, rooted in comparative analysis and marked by a genuine interest in emerging global communication research. Soviet researchers adapted insights from Bücher, Hyde, Lippmann, and other Western theorists, while also contributing original approaches, such as their application of Formalist techniques to media texts, that earned attention abroad.
Viewing these developments through the lens of global intellectual and media histories brings into sharper relief a forgotten episode of scholarly exchange across ideological lines. As this article has shown, the 1920s witnessed a convergence in research agendas, analytical categories, and conceptual vocabularies, even in politically sensitive fields such as mass communication. It is worth noting, however, that this convergence was not confined to the European intellectual space. In the period discussed, the same questions about the press and public opinion were being actively debated beyond Europe, North America, and the USSR, including in China, suggesting that the global history of mass communication, as an emerging field of research, remains larger than existing scholarship has yet mapped.Footnote 143 Tracing transnational interaction across a wider geographical range would allow us to reassess further the genealogy of media and propaganda studies not in terms of a Cold War divide, but as entangled, polycentric responses to the upheavals of modernity, total war, and mass politics.
This global perspective does more than contextualise Soviet developments; it helps explain how national media systems evolve in response to international paradigms and perceived global challenges. The fact that early Soviet experiments in media theory did not exercise the impact on Soviet media practices that the gazetovedy hoped to achieve, and were later silenced by Stalinist orthodoxy, does not diminish their importance. On the contrary, their brief flourishing reminds us that the boundaries between authoritarian and democratic media traditions were not always so rigidly drawn, and that the early twentieth century was a moment when actors across regimes could still recognise that their informational futures were entangled. Recovering this history refines our understanding of propaganda, not merely as a tool of statecraft, but as a shared dilemma of modernity: one that transcended ideology, was mutually constitutive and entangled, and continues to shape global political communication today.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Stephen Hutchings, Marina Mogilner, Sergey Glebov, Ilya Gerasimov, Galina Babak, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers and editor Heidi Tworek for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are grateful to Marina Korneeva for her assistance in research for this article.
Financial support
The research for this article was carried out with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, within the framework of the project ‘(Mis)translating Deceit: Disinformation as a Translingual Discursive Dynamic’, 2023–26 (Grant Reference: AH/X010007/1).
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has published widely on various aspects of Russian nationalism, history of Russian thought, and the media past and present. Her books include Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order (2024); Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television (2015); ‘Russia’s Own Orient’: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (2011); and Russian Academicians and the Revolution (1997).
Alexandr Voronovici is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Manchester. He is a historian of East European contested borderlands, Soviet nationality policies, separatism and de facto states, political communication, and memory politics. His work has appeared in the journals Problems of Post-Communism, Ethnopolitics, Osteuropa, amongst others.
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