138 | Mass Media and Historical Change
and regulatory measures that were increasingly adopted around 1930 demon-
strate the permanent state of dissatisfaction under which party leaders laboured,
but also their great faith in media propaganda, which they hoped would trans-
form both the people and the productivity of the country. In the 1930s they
also largely failed to make good their plan of reaching the illiterate rural pop-
ulace via radio. Any lasting achievements must be credited to the cinema of
the 1920s. The government sponsored propaganda films as well as art films,
hoping that their emotional appeal would win the allegiance of the barely lit-
erate public. Nevertheless, under Stalin, even semi-official masterpieces like
October (1927/28), Eisenstein’s film about the Revolution, were censored. For
although censorship was officially non-existent in the Soviet Union, in actual
fact the number of censors climbed to an estimated seventy thousand by the
1970s and 1980s (Lauk, in Høyer and Pöttker 2005: 173). In addition to pre-
and post-censorship, procedural censorship of past publications was introduced
in the 1930s. Now media documents were continuously subject to alteration in
both text and visuals, with pictures often being retouched (Waschik 2010: 12).
Nevertheless, recent research has made clear that in spite of manifold efforts
at control, the Soviet press was not as monolithic as had long been assumed
(Aumente et al. 1999: 18). Although where important political themes were
concerned, newspapers followed the required party line and lauded the nation’s
achievements, they still retained their individual profiles. This was partly a
result of political design but also had much to do with the editorial staff itself.
By the same token, intra-party power struggles were carried out in the press
(Lenoe 2004: 182–211). Besides propagating the Communist ideology, the
media’s main role was to promote unity and identity in a nation comprised of
heterogeneous republics with dozens of languages. For this reason Russian was
the language of the most important newspapers and television stations. From
the 1970s onwards the Russian-language press was actually expanded due to
fear of secessionist nationalism.
After 1945 the Soviet Union handed media operations over to the occu-
pied East European states. Since these systems were also part of the state appa-
ratus, their development largely depended on the prevailing political course of
the Soviet Union. Until 1947 the Soviets had granted East European countries
some latitude as a means of gaining their trust, but this phase was soon fol-
lowed by one of enforced political conformity and personnel purges. After the
1960s one can, in a somewhat generalised way, detect a slight drift towards
a modicum of government-channelled freedom that increased slightly in the
1980s. As Kristin Roth-Ey argued, ‘the Soviet culture formation was a most
successful failure’: it failed in the Cold War competition, but its films and
television programmes were greatly popular (Roth-Ey 2011: 23, 130, 221).
Expressions like ‘Communist Media System’ admittedly obscure the
differences that existed in Eastern Europe. The Yugoslavian media enjoyed