Propaganda: the art of storytelling applied to politics

Where there is politics, there is propaganda.

The Oxford dictionary defines propaganda as follows: Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.

Whilst this is partly true, I believe, based on what I’ve learned during my travels, that this definition itself is a biased and quite denigrating statement for what propaganda actually is. So this post will clarify what I understand under the word propaganda that I intend to use on several future posts of this blog.

“Propaganda is used to promote a political cause”

Propaganda’s actual purpose is very often to increase legitimacy, either of the present, or of a claim for change.

Leaders lacking legitimacy rely on propaganda to justify their authority. They use any link they may have with a previous, charismatic, beloved leader or event, to benefit from a transfer of the positive values associated with him/it.

Examples: around 1370, Timur married a descendent of Genghis Khan to increase his legitimacy. Much later in the 20th century, see the posters where Stalin is shown inspired by Lenin, himself inspired by Marx.

Propaganda poster showing Stalin inspired by Lenin (and me playing to be inspired by Stalin) – in Stalin’s Memorial Museum located in his native town Gori, Georgia.

Of course, the Kims apply this technique very thoroughly in North Korea, where every new generation uses the cult of the previous leader to increase his own legitimacy.

Pyongyang, North Korea. Here used to be only one statue (of Kim Il-Sung, the first). But when Kim Jong-Il (the second) died, his statue was added by Kim Jong-Un (the third). How to use the popularity of your ancestors to consolidate your own legitimacy.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell figured a Party whose motto was Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

And indeed, propaganda is often used by politicians as a way to rely on the past to promote a future change. The technique is easy: you search your past to find one Killer Fact that can be used as an argument for a change. This technique is very typical in Eastern and Central European patriotism.

Metro station of Proletarians in Minsk, Belarus. Arguing that Belarus once spoke Belarusian, the authorities replaced all Russian signs by Belarusian ones, despite the reality that the majority of Belarusian are Russian-speaking nowadays.

“Propaganda is of a biased or misleading nature”

Further, the Oxford dictionary definition states that the means used for propaganda are especially of a biased or misleading nature. And indeed there are plenty of cases where this is true.

We have already said how a Killer Fact from the past is used to justify a claim for the future. It obviously does not bother the propagandists that the fact is completely isolated from its historical context and meaning: the 600th anniversary of an old battle, like the 1389 one in Kosovo, is an example.

Propagandists can also alter the history to better fit their objectives. Margherita Sarfatti, despite being the number 1 of womaniser Mussolini’s numerous mistresses, re-wrote the Duce’s biography to give him an image more in line with the family values that fascism was promoting. Beria, Stalin’s own bitch, also rewrote Stalin’s biography to glorify his role in the 1917 Revolution, in order to increase his legitimacy.

If some of the history is embarrassing, propaganda just eludes it. The heroes of the 1789 Revolution are celebrated in France; all of them? goodness, no. Controversial Robespierre played a major role in the years following 1789 but is felt as embarrassing in France because of the Terror he installed to defend the Revolution. History needed Robespierre, but posterity didn’t, and that’s how the French official propaganda completely evicted him.

(There are a few towns in France that have a Robespierre street or square, but Paris doesn’t, and it is a never-ending cause of debate)

Erasing Trotsky from the official October Revolution historiography under Stalin goes further, but is actually using the same technique.

If there is not enough history, propaganda just invents it. Macedonia as a nation was missing the national identity it needed to exist on the international market place (it is still struggling for recognition as Greece, EU member, disputes its naming).

Prime Minister Gruevski launched the huge and controversial Skopje 2014 programme to address this issue. Part of the plan consisted in rebuilding some of the city’s past monuments destroyed during the 1963 earthquake. More controversial, they would erect statues of great people believed to be of Macedonian origin

(In the meantime, Macedonia has a new government, shows more goodwill towards Greece, and the Alexander statue faces uncertain fate)

And some of the Skopje 2014, most questionable, simply created new buildings that have nothing to do with any existing history, such as baroque / Greek-style architecture.

When I visited Skopje in 2011, the city was being rebuilt almost entirely. This is the bottom part of what today is a huge statue of a rider who evokes Alexander the Great.

But propaganda does not necessarily rely on distorting the past. Sometimes it is just based on a certain interpretation of the past, and then by definition it is partisan, but not necessarily biased.

Think of what Nations decide to emphasize or not from their past. Which heroes they welcome in their Pantheon; how France reinforced the republican sentiment by naming streets ‘National’ and squares ‘Republic’ in every town of the country.

Think of some choices of vocabulary. Riga’s excellent museum about the period when Latvia was in the Soviet Union is called Museum of the Occupation. Vilnius goes further by naming its equivalent museum Museum of the Genocide Victims.

A memorial fund in Sarajevo also claims the use of the word Genocide (Sarajevo canton fund for construction and preservation of veteran’s cemeteries, memorial centres, and monuments for genocide victims) whereas, to date, the siege of Sarajevo has not legally be named a genocide.

Sarajevo’s Tunnel, that I visited in May 2011 and once more in January 2015. The museum is co-financed by a fund for “monuments for Genocide victims”.

Another example of vocabulary choice to support propaganda is how Russia refers to the Second World War. Russia only considers the part in which the USSR was involved, starting in June 1941, and names it Great Patriotic War, a war to defend the Soviet state against fascism.

The Great Patriotic War is clearly something of the past and completely irrelevant nowadays, when there is no Soviet state and no fascist threat anymore. And yet it keeps being referred to in these terms by modern-day Russia, with 9 May celebrated as the Victory Day – an excuse for vigorous Russian patriotism – whereas what other nations commemorate is rather the end of the war or the memory of its victims (Armistice Day in France, Remembrance Day in the UK, Veterans Day in the US, etc).

Behind this Lenin’s statue in Saratov, we see a huge sign celebrating the Victory Day; there is new propaganda every year in May (May 2012).

So after all, the Oxford definition is rather simplistic, and quite symptomatic of the typical Western dogma of opposing the evil of the bad dictatorships to the goodness of the Western democracy. But the truth is: everyone does propaganda, by, if not twisting, at least tweaking the reality to support their vision.

So the definition I would give to propaganda is rather a persuasion technique for politicians to make people believe in their present and future challenges’ legitimacy, which implies an interpretation of history that supports this vision – and this applies to all the countries, not just the so-called evil.

 

One day in the life of a Soviet Union citizen: the Soviet Bunker, a brilliant or a horrible idea?

Saturday 29 November 2014, 3 pm. The GPS says we have reached our destination. We are in the middle of the forests of Nemenčinė, 25 km away from Vilnius. Are you sure it’s here? It is freezing cold, there is just an old building that seems desert and is decorated with a banner that talks about the Congress of the Communist Party. It all looks pretty dodgy.

Photo of the main building. The banner says: ‘The decisions of the XXVIIth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet union are alive!’

At the entrance stands a KGB man with an extremely aggressive German shepherd dog. We are urged to remove our jackets and wear a gulag-style wadded cotton jacket.

We could not take photos during the show. This photo comes from the Soviet Bunker’s own website and shows what participants look like when being reviewed.

Suddenly arrives the Major who immediately starts yelling at us. ‘Here you are in the Soviet Union!’. ‘You are nobody!’. He is vomiting insults, obscenities, and vulgarities at us, and makes us feel like we are just meaningless pieces of shit. This will last for 3 hours. It is all pretty shocking. One of the men in our group cannot bear this – he decides to leave and wait outside.

The whole show is in Russian language, and fortunately I don’t understand much more than 20% of the verbal diarrhoea I am exposed to; but I do understand 100% of the non-verbal intentions and this is already hard enough.

The concept: 3 hours long, we are taken back to the Soviet Union, as mere citizens-comrades. All the ingredients are there to make us become authentically Sovietic:

• it starts with a goosebumps-giving flag-raising ceremony while the Soviet Union anthem is playing
• we are taken to a room to practice praising the regime and the leaders, repeating formulas as ‘Proletarians of all countries unite’ as loud as we can, and applauding endlessly
• we are taught some basics of military and defence discipline, such as standing straight, answering respectfully to the Major (‘Так точно!’, ‘Yes sir!), and wearing a gas mask
• we end up unfairly accused of being enemies of the people by the KGB and feeling our descent to hell during the instruction
• and relentlessly, we are all being abused, brutalised, humiliated

This photo comes from an article of The Guardian and shows how the dog sniffs the comrades. During this review, some items (such as a nationalistic Lithuanian banner) are placed in our pockets without us noticing and that’s how we end up accused of high treason. This all happens below a portrait of KGB boss Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Everything of course is a show. It was started several years ago by an artist, Ruta Vanagaite. Everything is performed by actors who are playing their roles incredibly seriously:

• The main actor is the Major. Honestly, we all are aware this is a show – but this man is such a fantastic performer, one who would be perfect as a stand-alone comedian (in the same way as the ‘crazy YouTube Hitler of Timur Vermes) that you may sometimes forget that this is fiction. Horribly rude, despising, misogynistic. He has great attention to detail and calls to order those not standing straight or only answering ‘Yes’ instead of ‘Yes sir’.

Posing with the Major at the end of the show.

 

• The old KGB instructor. One that properly terrorises the audience. He seems to come straight from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Spine-tingling.

• The German shepherd dog, incredibly ferocious, who constantly, aggressively barks. Turns out, at the end of the show, that this is a cutie doggie, who plays around with the guests. But when he is at work, you’d better not come too close to tickle him!

Posing, at the end of the show. The dog looks cute now, whereas it was ferocious during 3 hours.

• There is also the old nurse, authentic Soviet character, who constantly oscillates between feminine softness and hysterical intransigence of the system she represents. Never would I offer my trust to such person, I’m sure she would betray me as soon as she can.

There are also details that are actually really funny, albeit in a bitter way. The Major regularly makes us run like madmen in the corridors of the bunker, yelling at us, and every time the guard and his ferocious dog are hidden in a corner – when you pass along the dog tries to jump at you and barks fiercely, scaring you to death. Other funny detail: whenever someone refuses to obey, they are sent to the dungeon for a dozen of minutes – and the poor comrades actually miss this part of the show. Another one: during the whole Soviet anthem, the dog is barking off-beat, hilarious musical moment.

But what is this really about?

These were 3 quite painful hours for many of the participants. And yet, only 3 hours. Not even our real life but a show. We were not physically brutalised. We did not really go into the dungeon and while the dog was barking it did not actually bite us. We were wearing a warm wadded cotton jacket while many citizens from the Baltic States were deported to Siberian snows with dancing shoes. This experience, although horrible, was not even a snapshot of what life has been for millions of Soviet citizens. A form of propaganda for the younger generations to know about what happened in the past.

That being said, it is probably too soon for Russia to share my analysis. On the Soviet Bunker’s website, there are links to many different articles from the international press, but none is Russian, and a quick Google search in Russian language is not giving many laudatory results – some question the historical authenticity of the show and mock tourists who pay money to be insulted, without really discussing the educational value. Maybe one day, once Russia will have cut the umbilical cord with the Soviet Union and the KGB, and will be managed by a leadership who will finally express official resentment and apologies for the crimes of the Soviet Union, maybe then Russia will understand, and help the world understand, the difference between anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda.

Personally, what I loved about this experience, is the message it conveys, and the way it does so. This is how life was, just a few decades ago. Do we want to forget about it? Do we want to pretend it never happened? The fact that the show was done in a realistic way to educate, but with a sarcastic touch to press right where it hurts but leave the audience the opportunity to externalise the pain with a dose of laughter, is something that I find brilliant – a much smarter way, I reckon, than the too serious Exhibit B.

Me doing the Soviet style.