The Truth About Truth
Photo from the December issue of the Pravda newspaper for 1941. O tanks “Matilda”, although they were never called, it was written well in the text of the newspaper - they are powerful, maneuverable, and reliable armor ... They began to write badly about Lend-Lease equipment after the war ...
The thoughts of the righteous are true
but the designs of the wicked are deceit.
Proverbs of Solomon 12:5
but the designs of the wicked are deceit.
Proverbs of Solomon 12:5
History and culture. Not so long ago, a whole selection of articles appeared on the pages of VO devoted to the Pravda newspaper during the Great Patriotic War and after it. We must pay tribute to the author, who took up such a voluminous and complex topic and dared, so to speak, to reveal it to our very sophisticated and spoiled public.
Judging by some comments about “shit and a fan”, many narrow-minded people perceived this material as another slander on the “holy USSR”, where all the streets were paved with non-depreciating rubles, but this is far from being the case.
The author, no doubt, wanted to point out, first of all, the mistakes of our propaganda, which were also reflected in the pages of this mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and then the CPSU. But insufficient knowledge of the factual material led to the fact that the author fulfilled his task at the level of clichés and clichés - and with this, his work depreciated his order, and ... caused quite fair displeasure of VO readers.
Propaganda mistakes
How should it have been done? And very simple.
When you undertake to write about the Pravda newspaper during the war years, you go to the library or archive and read all its issues in 1 days. Or you sit at the computer - since today all its numbers are digitized, and do the same. Personally, I am more attracted to the first option, without turning over the yellowed pages, the aroma of the era is not felt. Well, as you flip through its materials, you should read it carefully.
So, what advantages and disadvantages of printed propaganda in the USSR can these yellowed pages tell us?
To begin with, if we carefully read them, we will see that the information in Pravda in the pre-war years was presented in the form of three streams or trends that were completely unrelated to each other.
The first block was aimed at exposing the "decaying West" and the growing labor movement. A strike here, a strike there, that is, the impression was created that the world revolution was literally on the threshold, which in fact was not.
The second stream, largely refuting the first, talked about the achievements of science and technology in the "decaying West." They opened an air-conditioned plant with shadowless lighting using luminous tubes, the 15 millionth Ford car was produced here - and to whom were they sold then, if all the workers there were starving?
A speed tank was created, which developed a speed of 119 km / h during tests. In New York, women choke in queues for fashionable nylon stockings - in a word, judging by the reports of Pravda, despite the decay, science and technology in the West have moved forward by leaps and bounds.
Finally, feuilletons. If I were a dictator at that time, I would have banned them in the bud. After all, what did they give? Truthful information about what our people saw there. And they saw a lot of cars, luminous "glass tubes", unemployed workers in raincoats and hats, cramped apartments of workers with a toilet and a bathroom, they also wrote about salaries, converting dollars into rubles ... That is, in feuilletons, the level of exploitation of workers appeared very clearly, so It is clear that many of us at that time would have agreed to live like this.
Pravda also wrote extremely ineptly about the war in Spain. Every day the progress of the Republicans at the front was reported. Here they repulsed the attack of the Francoists, there they hit a motorcade with machine gun fire, and 200 Franco soldiers surrendered to them altogether. And then - bang and a completely unexpected and incomprehensible message:
"Republicans left Santander".
Why's that? After all, they won all the time, didn't they?
And so it was almost all the time: victories in particulars and defeats in the end. That is ... our journalists did not know how to write in such a way that they could eat fish and ride bones ...
The war began, and this sad tradition was continued. German pilots immediately began to fly over to us and drop bombs into the river. Soldiers (albeit mostly killed in letters, but also prisoners!) reported in their revelations on the pages of Pravda that they did not want to fight and saw that our army was invincible.
And from home they were told (despite the Gestapo, as if it had ceased to exist) that they were starving and even eating whale meat!
“But here in Kyiv the market is bursting with food!”
- and almost a week after this invigorating message, she also reported:
"Our troops left Kyiv."
Prisoners ... do not think that Pravda did not write about them from the very beginning of the war. But as she wrote: the ordinary soldier Ensky, being wounded, lost consciousness and woke up in captivity. They took him on a boat, but then he came to his senses, turned the boat over, swam out himself and got to his own, and the Germans, of course, drowned!
And in a similar way, Pravda wrote about our prisoners throughout the war: he was wounded, fell from a tank, was taken prisoner, woke up in a dugout nailed to the wall, but did not say anything to the enemies and accepted a martyr's death. Ours, of course, freed the dugout, but it was too late, the hero had already died, and they immediately swore to avenge him.
There were practically no other options: “fell, lost consciousness, woke up - captivity, gathered his strength and escaped, or accepted a martyr’s death.” At the end of the war, they occasionally began to write about the liberation of young men and women driven into German captivity ... And that was all. Otherwise, this topic was strictly taboo.
Hitler's bullshit
However, here, too, the matter was not without incomprehensible stupidity, and if we assume that the newspaper was read and edited by I.V. missed it altogether.
And it happened that in December 1941 in Pravda an article “Hitler’s Nonsense” was published, where it was written that he was lying like a gray gelding, and not 3 million 200 thousand people were captured by us, as he boasts, but only 500 thousand.
Well, why did Pravda need to cite these figures, because our citizens had to read them, who knew that the soldiers of the Red Army did not surrender, that we would fight with little blood and on foreign land, that ... In a word, this figure alone was simply monstrous. And what - they were all wounded, lost consciousness, fell, and then woke up at once in captivity?
But it could have been written differently: “Look what ridiculous numbers this bastard Hitler gives! Who, then, is fighting on our front from the White Sea to the Black Sea, if so many people are in captivity? Of course, we have both prisoners and missing people, but compared to these numbers, they are negligible. And how much exactly we will calculate after our victory and we will reward everyone according to their merits, both heroes and traitors!
So I would personally write like this, and what can I say?
Only in 1942, Pravda began to give the names of our tanks and aircraft: KV, T-34, Yak-7 ... True, they wrote about the IL-2 for a long time as an "anti-tank aircraft." And they also hushed up all the defeats, if only it was possible to hide them, although as a result it became unclear why the order would then come out: “Not a step back!”
For example, Pravda did not say a word about the terrorist raid by the German aviation to Stalingrad. What? Would it be a very scary picture? Probably... Although our people were already accustomed to everything then. But then again, I would then immediately give the order to post leaflets throughout the country: a burning city and against its background a woman, surrounded by flames, hugs a baby girl. And the words: “Remember Stalingrad. We will not forget, we will not forgive, we will rebuild even more beautifully!”
Of course, there will be a smart guy right there who will say that it’s easy, they say, to argue from the heights of afterknowledge, but how then ... And then there was already an example of exactly the same blow to Coventry and exactly the same posters, about which people in our guide should have known: “Remember Coventry. We won't forget, we won't forgive." All that was required was to borrow someone else's experience and replace one name with another.
Blockade
And how did the Pravda newspaper write about besieged Leningrad?
During the most difficult period of the blockade, there was not a word of approval and support addressed to him. It was written that “everything is fine”, “artels are releasing suitcases”! What suitcases, when people ate all the cats and dogs, but at the same time they didn’t disdain something else.
Of course, it was not necessary to write about this, since the Soviet people were not capable of this, but still. Moreover, Pravda nevertheless wrote about the horrors of the blockade and the resilience of Leningraders ... In the summer of 1942, when it became clear in the Kremlin that the city would not be surrendered. Here, praises in honor of the city on the Neva poured out, and the film was released to the cinemas "Siege of Leningrad", but it took quite a long time to wait for this truth.
The "Pravdists" did not know how to write correctly even those materials to which Comrade Stalin clearly did not pay attention.
“The tanker Ivanov, while in the tank, was wounded by a shrapnel, but continued to smash the Nazis with a machine gun!”
What's wrong here? And here's what: "wounded by shrapnel while in a tank." It would be quite possible to do without this clarification, there is no need for it, because after all, at that time they knew that Soviet tanks did not break through with fragments. Knew or should have known, and last but not least.
Lend-Lease
True, from the point of view of PR and propaganda, there was one message of exceptional importance in Pravda. I asked the author a question about what kind of message this was, but, alas, I did not wait for an answer.
And this, by the way, is an extremely important “thing”: “The Soviet Government’s Report on Lend-Lease Supplies” dated June 11, 1944. And here, Comrade Stalin could not do without a resolution. After all, the most important secret of strategic importance was revealed to the whole people and our enemies: how much our allies - England, Canada and the USA - gave us.
In the most detailed way, the entire newspaper sheet signed how many tanks, aircraft, aluminum, rubber and everything else had been sent to us at the time of publication, and it was added how many thousands of tons of cargo were still on the way. There were 15 million pairs of shoes alone, so it’s quite possible to say that our soldiers came to Victory in American boots!
And ... after reading all this, our people understood: with such volumes of military assistance, victory in any way will be ours. And the top of Nazi Germany began to understand the same thing, where they also regularly read our Pravda and where they knew that these figures ... they are without deceit, because their own intelligence reported the same to them, but only the Russians took all the numbers here brought together.
Like a butt on the head - bam! And it is not at all surprising that on June 11, Pravda wrote about all this, and already on July 20, Operation Valkyrie began in Berlin, the purpose of which was to kill Hitler and overthrow Nazi power in Germany.
Roughest punctures
But ... the rudest punctures immediately began again.
After all, if earlier Pravda wrote about how the Germans were terribly starving, then after the entry of our troops into Germany, she immediately began to write that the Germans’ apartments were literally littered with ... provisions, that they had both Strasbourg pies and Hungarian salami , and French cognac.
Meanwhile, the citizens of the USSR used the received newspapers not only as “pipifax” and “goat's legs”. They also filed them, and from time to time read the old issues, and simply could not help but notice such a conspicuous discrepancy. That whale meat - that Strasbourg pates! True, here one can refer to the 90 + 1 rule, but it was unlikely that it was known to the Soviet elite, or even there, at the top, people with memory were not very good.
However, another option is also possible, that this was done on purpose. So that people from those who are smarter, again, compare, discuss such nonsense and ... revealed by our valiant NKVD, join the ranks of prisoners convicted under Article 58 for slanderous fabrications against the Soviet press.
Hack and predictor Aviator
Well, the conclusion will be this: in the short term, the Pravda newspaper as a whole coped, but at the same time did everything possible so that in the long term Soviet citizens would stop believing in our media in general! Whether this happened by chance or not, I can’t say, but that it happened, no doubt.
PS
By the way, since the beginning of the war, Pravda never wrote about the plight of the working people in capitalist countries! There, with their situation, everything immediately became good, and the working people, probably, got everything they wanted. They began to write about their hard life again later ...
Information