Cold War Propaganda: The Truth Belonged To No One Country

Cold War propaganda: the truth belonged to no one country | Aeon Essays 13/02/2024, 12:01 PM
The other side of the curtain

During the Cold War, US propagandists worked to
provide a counterweight to Communist media, but
truth eluded them all
On 22 December 1949, with Cold War tensions running high, the United
States president Harry S Truman gave a speech to dedicate the carillon at
Arlington National Cemetery. Freedom, Truman declared, was the core of
the American creed. Those buried at Arlington had given their lives to
defend it. They had prevailed, but war once again threatened the freedom
they had fought so hard to protect. Few, Truman claimed, wanted war. ‘If
we could mobilise world opinion among all men who walk the Earth,’ he
said, ‘there would never be another war.’ The problem was that many
people were not free to choose peace. Truman called them the captive
peoples. They were kept in ignorance by their governments, who
prevented them from seeing the truth about the world. They were the
puppets of their leaders, who forced them to oppose the West, and to
reject its offers of peace and friendship.
To put it in contemporary terms, these so-called captive peoples were the

victims of fake news. They were bombarded with lies disguised as truth,
and conned into supporting their own oppressors. Truman claimed that if
the captive peoples were given access to the truth they would support the
goals of the free world. In 1950, his administration proposed a ‘Campaign
of Truth’ as part of the battle against Communism.
US officials did not portray their efforts as propaganda. In their minds,

they were simply providing accurate information about the world to those
who were trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Yet, during the early years of
the Cold War, just like today, truth and ideology were intricately
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intertwined. The US would try to bring truth to the captive peoples of the
world, but its truth was never value-free.
The very idea that there were ‘captive peoples’ or ‘captive nations’ would
be one of the truths that the US would export. In his speech, Truman did
not identify the captive peoples. He didn’t need to. The term had
originated in the 1920s with Ukrainian and Caucasian nationalists who
protested the incorporation of their homelands into the Soviet Union. But
by 1949, most Americans used it to refer to the peoples of the newly
Communist countries of eastern Europe.
Anti-Communist east Europeans who had fled their countries after the
imposition of Communist rule embraced the label of captive nations. For
these exiles and their US allies, the idea that east Europeans were
captives was a simple matter of fact. The Communist governments of
eastern Europe were dictatorships, and they used terror to consolidate
their rule. Criticising these regimes was dangerous. Internal security
services (often referred to as the secret police) used networks of
informers to weed out opponents. From 1948-53, hundreds of thousands
of east Europeans were jailed or sent to labour camps for political reasons.
But calling east Europeans captives was a matter of ideological conviction

as well as fact. The term suggested that east Europeans were helpless
victims languishing under a foreign oppressor. It implied that they were
not responsible for the actions of their governments. It also suggested
that no east Europeans truly supported Communism. Rather, they were
coerced into submission. In recent decades, historians of eastern Europe
have established that this picture is too simple to encapsulate the variety
of experience in Communist eastern Europe. During the early Cold War,
however, few challenged its validity.
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Portraying east Europeans as captives also implied that they were cut off
from the rest of the world. In reality, the Iron Curtain was never the
impenetrable barrier many imagined it to be. Even if they could not travel
themselves, east Europeans had access to ideas and information from the
West. A number of western radio stations, including the BBC and Voice of
America (VOA), served east Europeans during the Cold War.
One of these radio stations, Radio Free Europe (RFE), was created in 1950
specifically to broadcast to eastern Europe. Based in Munich and staffed
by a mix of east European émigrés and Americans, RFE presented itself as
a non-governmental organisation funded by the donations of ordinary US
citizens who gave ‘truth dollars’ to enlighten captive east Europeans. In
reality, the station relied on funding from the CIA.
RFE’s purpose was to provide a counterpoint to eastern Europe’s

Communist-led news media. For RFE, ‘Communist news’ was ‘fake news’:
it was propaganda with no basis in fact. RFE would challenge this
propaganda by exposing its lies. RFE’s mission was to transmit objectively
true news stories to eastern Europe. Its employees did not set out to
spread disinformation. Nonetheless, their sense of what was newsworthy
was strongly influenced by their anti-Communist ideology. Their
broadcasts might not have been ‘fake’ but they were definitely biased.
This bias would be transmitted to RFE’s audience as the truth.
One RFE programme, ‘The Other Side of the Coin’, was dedicated to
exposing the lies in Communist news. This show, which had separate
Czech- and Polish-language versions, would repeat stories from the
Czechoslovak or Polish news, and then tell the audience what the real
facts were. In a May 1951 episode for the Czech version, the narrator
declared that the Czechoslovak press heaped up so many lies that the
general rule of thumb was to always assume that the truth was precisely
the opposite of what the Communist-dominated media asserted.
Some thought racial discrimination didn’t really exist in the US because

they’d read about it in Polish newspapers
To judge the impact of their broadcasts to eastern Europe, western radio

stations such as RFE were forced to rely on refugees who had illegally fled
across the Iron Curtain. Data gathered from these refugees suggested
that audiences at home did regard western radio broadcasts as more
truthful and more objective than their local news media. A number of
refugees reported that they followed the practice RFE suggested in ‘The
Other Side of the Coin’, and always assumed that the truth was the
opposite of whatever their local media told them. Some Polish refugees
took this to extremes. They claimed that racial discrimination must not
really exist in the US because they had read about it in Polish newspapers.
Eastern Europe’s domestic news media often presented Bulgarians,

Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians and Romanians as happily engaged in
building socialism. In contrast, RFE’s staffers were certain that east
Europeans were powerless victims forced to acquiesce to Communist rule
by fear and terror. Many of RFE’s early broadcasts concentrated on
refuting what it saw as Communist lies by presenting east Europeans with
news about their own oppression.
Some RFE stories were devoted to exposing brutality in prisons and labour
camps. One broadcast from the Romanian service from February 1951
consisted entirely of accusations of police cruelty, noting offenders by
name and location. ‘The list of the victims of these criminals is much too
long to be read,’ intoned the narrator. ‘It is made up of men murdered, men
who vanished in the prisons of Bucharest, of patriots who were picked up
at home in the eyes of their families, or in the streets, or sent to Russia, or
to work on the canal, or to the darkness of the mines at Ocnele Mari, or of
the workers beaten up and maimed or disabled for life, of students
manhandled because they refused to bow their heads or sell their souls to
the Communist beast, or even of innocent women and children accused
of being “reactionary”.’
Other programmes were devoted to exposing people who supposedly

worked as informers for the secret police. According to refugee reports,
these programmes were popular and influential. In 1951, for example, the
VOA interviewed a young Hungarian refugee identified only as ‘KA’. KA
singled out the Bálint Boda show on RFE as his favourite programme,
specifically because Boda named secret police informers on air. A series
in which Boda listed all the informers in KA’s home village of Suttor made a
big impression on him. ‘He named several persons we would never have
thought were informers,’ KA remarked. Whenever Boda named informers
in the area, KA wrote down their names. He even once went by bicycle to
a nearby village to tell some relatives who lived there the names of those
whom RFE alleged were informers. While some of the names surprised
KA, he did not doubt Boda’s accusations. The information came from the
West, and he believed it. RFE had helped him to see his own community
as infested with spies.
Was the information KA heard on RFE actually true? There is no way to

know for sure. RFE undoubtedly got the names it broadcast either from a
refugee such as KA himself or from an anti-Communist contact inside
Hungary. Other than to check it against the statements of other refugees
or similar informants, its analysts had no way to fact-check this kind of
information. RFE’s journalistic standards would grow more professional,
but in the early 1950s, their anti-Communist fervour often persuaded
them to accept unsubstantiated statements as fact. Once broadcast,
these rumours acquired an aura of credibility.
According to interviews with refugees from the early 1950s, many east
Europeans believed that the secret police had informers everywhere. In
1951, for example, one source told RFE that the Czechoslovak secret
police had agents in all workplaces, coffeehouses, pubs, restaurants,
movie theatres and places of amusement. With every utterance against
the regime, the source said, people expected the concentration camp. A
Bulgarian who left his country in 1951 made similar statements, declaring:
‘In Sofia, there are more secret police agents than flies. They are
everywhere, at every corner of the streets, in every public place.’ The
Bulgarian’s claims echoed those of a young Hungarian refugee who told
RFE in 1954: ‘The number of spies in the country cannot be figured. If
someone makes an unequivocal remark he will be arrested immediately
and will be tortured.’
Recent research on eastern European security services from this period

makes it clear that there were not nearly as many police informers as
these refugees imagined there were. Nonetheless, many east Europeans
believed these kinds of statements to be true, as did RFE. The radio
station and its audience had got caught in a feedback loop. Listeners
heard broadcasts that told them about informers in their neighbourhoods.
They believed them, and began to imagine even more informers lurking in
the shadows. Some of these listeners then fled and became refugees.
They told RFE that informers were everywhere. RFE judged their
statements to be probably true because other refugees had given similar
accounts, and because they matched RFE’s own presumptions about life
under Communism. These new refugee statements were then used as
material for future broadcasts.
RFE’s constant emphasis on Communist terror had an another unintended

effect: it encouraged east Europeans to see themselves as powerless.
RFE staffers eventually realised this. As an internal RFE document noted:
‘by highlighting the scope of this terror, [RFE] unconsciously embarked
upon promoting its irresistible power’. By bombarding its audience with
tales of Communist evil, RFE potentially increased its listeners’ sense of
vulnerability and weakness. One internal analysis asked: ‘As we emphasise
the injustices the prisoner peoples are forced to endure, do we not also
underline their essential helplessness?’ In other words, RFE encouraged
its listeners to identify with the image of themselves as captive peoples.
All the theories predicted that Communism would fall. None required
action on the part of ordinary people
Refugees and other informants who spoke to RFE in the early 1950s
mirrored the ways that the western media talked about east Europeans as
powerless captives. People opposed the Communist system, they said,
but felt trapped in the face of its enormous repressive apparatus. A 31-
year-old Czech man from the town of Gottwaldov told RFE that everyone
in the city was ‘waiting from one year to the next for the liberation, in the
way in which a prisoner waits for the day in which he will be released from
prison’. Unlike most prisoners, however, their release would only come
from outside intervention. The residents of Gottwaldov accepted their
status as passive victims. They did not act, they only waited, hoping to be
saved by military intervention from the West.
The Czech man from Gottwaldov told RFE that many people he knew took
refuge in mystical theories that purported to reveal the day of liberation
from Communism. Proponents of the ‘Pyramid Theory’ for example,
believed that calculations based upon the length of the corridors in
Egyptian pyramids proved that Communism would end on 20 August
1953. Adherents of the ‘Titanic Theory’ claimed that Communists would
suffer the same downfall as the designers of RMS Titanic, who mocked
the power of God by claiming that they had built an unsinkable ship. All
these theories predicted that Communism would suffer an inevitable fall.
None of them required action on the part of ordinary people.
Among those who spoke to RFE and other radio stations, such magical
thinking was very common. Many expressed it in the form of a war
fantasy: they dreamed of a new world war that would drive the
Communists from eastern Europe. In the fantasy, the West always won,
and eastern Europe somehow escaped with little damage. Boguslawa
Smolka-Bauer, a high-school teacher from Poland who left the country in
1951, told an interviewer that most Poles believed war would liberate them
from Communism. ‘People think that America will, first of all, hit Russia
with atomic bombs, while US armies will immediately invade the satellite
countries,’ she said. They imagined the atomic weapons would hurt only
the Russians, and Poland would be painlessly liberated.
Some imagined even more incredible scenarios. One Czech source told
RFE in 1952 about a persistent rumour that the Americans had developed
a ‘soporific bomb’ that would put everyone not wearing a special mask to
sleep; those spared the sudden nap could then easily cut the throats of
the comatose Communists. A Hungarian tailor claimed that he read in the
Communist newspaper Népszava (Referendum) that the US had used a
gas in Korea that put opponents to sleep for 12 hours. The Communists,
he said, called this an illegal use of chemical weapons. But the Hungarian
tailor and his friends thought it was quite humane, and boded well for the
possibilities of another world war.
In these fantasies, east Europeans imagined themselves powerless to

oppose the state. Its power was too great and its network of informers too
deep. They could do nothing but wait and put their faith in miracle
weapons or western armies. These fantasies, however, were just that –
fantasies. In everyday life, many east Europeans acted in ways that were
anything but powerless.
Refugees who spoke to western radio stations noted that east Europeans
often broke the law for economic gain. They hoarded scarce goods,
traded on the black market, and stole from their workplaces. A Polish
black-market dealer told RFE in 1952: ‘Every law can be broken. The only
question is how to go about it.’ Anyone who was even ‘a bit clever’ he said
could live well through illegal activity. As a Polish refugee claimed in 1951:
‘swindling is an integral part of the Communist system’. Working on the
black market was just as illegal as anti-Communist political activity, yet,
according to him, everyone did it. A man from Poznań recounted in 1952
that local police had started to check passengers on trains for contraband
as part of a campaign to cut down on the black-market sale of food,
especially meat. The source claimed that dozens of people a day were
being arrested for bringing meat into the city illegally. Despite the threat of
time in a labour camp, people continued to smuggle meat in hopes of
making an illicit profit. In these narratives, refugees presented themselves
as resourceful and clever, not scared and powerless. They defied the
police to do as they wanted.
Of course, risking jail to provide for their families does not mean that they
could have successfully rebelled against their Communist governments.
The failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 certainly suggests that even
genuinely popular uprisings against Soviet bloc governments faced very
long odds. Nonetheless, these refugee accounts tell us that the image of
captivity promulgated by the West did not adequately describe the
realities of life in Communist eastern Europe. East Europeans did not have
many of the freedoms Westerners enjoyed. Yet they were not passive
bystanders in their own lives. They acted in defence of their own interests
and even opposed the state in significant, if small and personal, ways.
RFE analysts and other western observers who talked to these refugees or
read their statements did not comment on these contradictions in their
stories. Their own ideological blinders prevented them from seeing their
significance. According to the totalitarian thinking of the time (still
prominent even today), those who lived under Communist rule were by
definition powerless. Only those who lived in the West had any freedom.
Because they could see the world only within this totalitarian framework,
RFE’s journalists, like most of those in the West, could never fully
understand Communist societies.
This history brings another dimension to the current obsession with ‘fake
news’. RFE’s mission was to counter disinformation, not to spread it. But
even though RFE did not try to broadcast lies, its unwavering anti-
Communist stance left it open to accepting unsubstantiated rumours as
facts, and prevented its analysts from seeing the significance of their own
sources. Most of us don’t want to see our own political convictions as

‘ideology’. We want them to be based on facts. The problem is when we
can’t tell the difference.

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Cold War propaganda: the truth belonged to no one country | Aeon Essays 13/02/2024, 12:01 PM

The other side of the curtain

To put it in contemporary terms, these so-called captive peoples were the

US officials did not portray their efforts as propaganda. In their minds,

But calling east Europeans captives was a matter of ideological conviction

Join over 250,000+ newsletter subscribers

RFE’s purpose was to provide a counterpoint to eastern Europe’s

Some thought racial discrimination didn’t really exist in the US because

they’d read about it in Polish newspapers

To judge the impact of their broadcasts to eastern Europe, western radio

Eastern Europe’s domestic news media often presented Bulgarians,

Other programmes were devoted to exposing people who supposedly

Was the information KA heard on RFE actually true? There is no way to

Recent research on eastern European security services from this period

RFE’s constant emphasis on Communist terror had an another unintended

action on the part of ordinary people

In these fantasies, east Europeans imagined themselves powerless to

sources. Most of us don’t want to see our own political convictions as

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