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This chapter focuses on the cult book and film Young Guard. Precisely because of its many scandalous aspects, the rise and fall of the story of The Young Guard constitutes a fascinating showcase of how Soviet propaganda succeeded and failed. The many mutations of the tale from local tragedy to bestselling novel, from riveting cinematic spectacle to populist, conspiratorial gossip demonstrate that Soviet propaganda was not static, but, much like media in Western societies, evolved and developed.

This chapter focuses on the most serious Soviet propaganda challenge in the early Cold War, the peace movement that became the World Peace Council. Peace became a fighting word in the late 1940s. Pro-Soviet partisans fought for peace and built peace fronts, while anti-Soviet forces accused them of peace mongering and tried to counter-attack against the Soviet-backed peace offensive. The Reuters news agency's objective coverage of the peace movement, with factual quotes and descriptions, presented a special problem to the government. By the mid-1950s, a non-aligned peace movement emerged in response to public worry about the next generation of nuclear weapons – the hydrogen bomb – and internal problems in the Communist movement. The Communists must take a large share of the blame for discrediting peace in the 1950s. Anti-Communist forces mobilised considerable power and influence to discredit the Soviet-backed peace movement.

This chapter explores state attempts to lure religious believers back into mainstream society. After the death of Stalin, atheist agitation and propaganda returned as a permanent feature of public life that affected both Witnesses and their neighbors. State propaganda portrayed the underground Witness organization as an anti-Soviet political network bent on the destruction of the communist state. At the same time, it argued that most ordinary believers were loyal Soviet citizens who had been misled by manipulative fanatics. These two messages sent a contradictory message to Soviet society. Further, the Witnesses actively contested antireligious efforts by challenging agitators and winning new converts, even bringing former believers back into the fold. Ultimately, the state could not compete with the dedication and skills of trained Witness proselytizers. As a result, official rhetoric on the alleged “sectarian crisis” remained profoundly static throughout the late Soviet era.

Lithuania’s first democratic government was established in 1918 and sustained by active participation of Catholic political parties (e.g., Lithuanian Christian Democrat’s Party), clergy (e.g., Bishop Jurgis Matulaitis), and grassroots movements (e.g., Ateitis). Though suppressed by Soviet rule in 1940, German Nazi occupation in 1941, and absolute Soviet control in 1944, clandestine action by Catholic clergy, social groups, and publishers (e.g., The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania) kept the dream of Lithuanian independence alive. Nevertheless, Catholicism has had minimal impact on Lithuania’s political culture since the return to democracy in 1990. Most Lithuanian Catholics were unprepared for effective participation in the new democracy after decades of Soviet propaganda and isolation of the Catholic Church from intellectual developments at the Second Vatican Council.

This chapter analyses the effects on political publishing of the party and state authorities’ urgent concerns about the language and form of Soviet propaganda, which emerged very soon after Stalin’s death, lasted throughout the post-Stalin period, and targeted Politizdat as political literature’s main producer. This major drive for more engaging propaganda gave rise, in the 1950s and 1960s, to unprecedented critique of the language of Politizdat’s previous publications, and then to the embrace of biography as the most lively and effective form of propaganda. The creation of the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series initiated a large-scale, long-term experiment with the biography genre and with literary collaboration to revitalize political literature’s popular appeal: it was intended to produce evocative and emotionally involving portraits of a huge gallery of ‘revolutionaries’. The last part of this chapter traces the early, embattled years of the series between its creation in 1964 and its launch in 1968, the same year as the party’s ideological crackdown connected to the intervention in Czechoslovakia.

This chapter describes “Spartacus”. This ballet by Yakobson is considered to be almost autobiographical in content. The ballet portrays the heroic struggle of Spartacus in a slave revolt. It effectively shows the development of Yakobson's work from the creation of a full length piece for the Kirov Ballet. The story in the ballet was shaped to advance Soviet propaganda during the early days of the war. The work sparked controversy and changed Yakobson's career. “Spartacus” was Yakobson's grandest manifesto as an artistic dissident. Internationally, the work proved to be a public humiliation, becoming the target of anti-Soviet feeling by American critics. However, in many ways “Spartacus” came to symbolize the shadier side of Cold War cultural diplomacy.

Chapter 4 explains the endurance and permutation of the ritual murder accusation in the Soviet landscape of the interwar years. The occurrence of the blood libel epitomizes some aspects of the nature of the Bolshevik experiment, and becomes an indicator of the limits (and triumphs) of the Soviet attempt to modernize society. Ritual murder accusations grew out of the power of slander and denunciatory frenzy that enveloped Soviet society. But the accusation also resulted from the encounter between Jews and peasants in the context of a system that violently promoted urbanization and new socioeconomic structures. The intensity of the anti-religious propaganda inadvertently played a role in maintaining this powerful anti-Jewish myth, as the attack on circumcision and kosher slaughtering reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes. Finally, the transformation of ritual murder echoes the process of Jewish women’s empowerment: only in Soviet society could Jewish women become perpetrators of ritual murder.

Chapter 2 explores the place that the claim of Jewish ritual murder held in interwar Soviet society. The Bolsheviks dealt a blow to the blood libel tradition by confronting aggressively the legacy of the Beilis Affair, and prosecuting those responsible for orchestrating the trial. But ritual murder accusations did not wane in Soviet society. In fact, there were numerous cases of criminal investigations of blood libels that involved investigative commissions, medical experts, the press, and the secret police. If for the Bolshevik state, the Beilis case remained the symbol of the tsarist corrupt system, written and oral references to Beilis echoed through the instances of blood libel in the Soviet Union and validated ritual murder. This chapter also examines the Jewish responses to the blood allegation, showing the assertiveness to denounce the ineptness of local authorities at bringing to justice those responsible for spreading the lie.

This epilogue reflects on the author's biggest regret: that he sacrificed his first wife and his son to his ambition. He also regrets subjecting his second wife, Louise Branson, to decades of standing by him as he insisted on quitting the Washington Post, as he lost his way as a journalist, fought the Time allegations and risked their financial ruin, and descended into lengthy bouts of depression. Nevertheless, he considers himself one of the luckiest men in the world to have reported for a great newspaper with a self-confident editor who embodied everything he felt journalism meant: being bold, speaking truth to power, telling it like it is. Today, with the plethora of media outlets and with social media liberally spewing out rumors, opinions, and propaganda that are not edited or fact checked, the author is reminded of the distortions of the Soviet propaganda machine or the wild ravings in the Yugoslav media before that country's collapse. Many news outlets, including the Post and the New York Times, continue to adhere to good journalistic principles, but with so much less influence in today's fractured society.

Chapter 5 considers psychophysiological efforts to assess the emotional responses of filmgoers by photographing their facial reactions and registering changes in their vital signs. These studies were done in the USSR for the purpose of raising the effectiveness of film propaganda among proletarian, rural, and juvenile audiences, and in the United States, for identifying crowd-pleasing narrative formulae. The chapter juxtaposes spectator tests conducted by the inventor of the polygraph lie detector, William Moulton Marston, for Universal Studios in Hollywood with analogous initiatives launched by various agencies under the jurisdiction of the Narkompros (a Soviet ministry for education and propaganda). I further trace the roots of these empirical methods to late 19th-century trends in physiological psychology, when chronophotography served alongside the kymograph for obtaining indexical records of corporeal processes that were thought to reflect the workings of the psyche. Offering a critical reading of this legacy, the chapter shows how these spectator studies replicated the universalist fallacies of biologically oriented psychology, in addition to strengthening a patronizing attitude toward the subjects of research: women, children, and illiterate peasants.