861.00/7–1047: Airgram
The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Smith) to the Secretary of State
A–700. Lead editorial in Izvestiya July 5 entitled “Pride of the Soviet Man” provides most striking example thus far of note of self-exaltation which has recently characterized Soviet Government’s propaganda line for internal consumption.1
Bragging and self-praise are no new developments in Soviet propaganda, but concentration on eulogy of Soviet man (Sovetski Chelovek) is a recent trend.2 This line parallels and probably forms part of current campaign to whip up patriotic sentiment among Soviet people.
Editorial summarizes its own rather tiresome redundancy in first two paragraphs:
Every Soviet patriot has a special feeling of pride, a happy feeling of pride in his country, in his great people, in his leading place in the history of mankind.
Every day the great deeds of his people engenders and increases more pride. On opening the newspapers, in following events and news in the whole world, the Soviet man sees especially clearly and graphically the leading role and superiority of our fatherland.
Item also contains statement that Soviet “strength has always proven itself sufficient for victory,” a reassurance to Soviet people which may represent chief purpose behind this whole campaign of self-exaltation.
Editorial later reveals sense of insecurity and inferiority lying behind its self-adulation by directing phrase after phrase of xenophobic criticism and unfavorable comparison of “bourgeois culture” with Soviet culture:
Bourgeois culture falls ever lower and lower, dirtying itself in the slough of mysticism and amorality. After the Second World War in [Page 576] the literature, art and philosophy of the capitalistic countries blossomed in rich profusion “theories” of human self-humiliation, of hopelessness and of cynicism. The time when capitalistic culture could still say a living word has long since passed. It has nothing further to give the world ….
Our culture is many times higher than bourgeois culture; it reflects a higher order than any bourgeois democratic order. Our literature, our art, our philosophy have the right to teach others a new morality common to mankind, a new order of feeling, a new relationship to the world. And if we still have with us persons who, in their worship of the “West”, want to publish their works first of all in foreign journals3 or snatch up the latest “ism” from abroad, then such persons simply have not noticed how far they themselves have fallen behind their people and the times, and how thoroughly they have lost the sentiment of civic dignity.
These almost mystic phrases of self-exaltation conclude on a fitting note: “Soviet Man—there is a name which resounds proudly throughout the whole world!”
- Further illustrations, none printed, of the growing propaganda line of exuberant self-exaltation in the Soviet Union were sent from the Embassy in Moscow throughout the remainder of the year.↩
- For an earlier extolling of the fortune of being a Soviet man, see “Civis Sovieticus Sum” in despatch 567 from Moscow on November 20, 1946, Foreign Relations, 1946, vol. vi, p. 814.↩
- Illustrative of this assertion was the fate of the geneticist Professor Anton Romanovich Zhebrak. He had earlier published an article in the American magazine Science which had disparaged the theories of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, the Marxist biologist in vogue in the Soviet Union. After authoritative criticism, Zhebrak resigned as President of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences late in 1947.↩