Making News Soviet: Changing Visions of Soviet Information after Stalin, 1953-1970

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• Dr Simon Huxtable, Loughborough
• Tuesday 17 February 2015, 17:00-18:30
• Latimer Room, Clare College.

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Scholars have not often associated Soviet newspapers with news. In a climate where the press was seen as a collective propagandist, agitator and organiser (Lenin), information was strictly controlled from above. But after Stalin’s death, journalists began to rethink the fundamental tenets of the Soviet newspaper. They saw news both as a means for attracting readers, but also as a prerequisite for civic engagement. Yet they equally wanted to avoid the ‘sensationalism’ and ‘vulgarity’ of western news. This paper investigates journalists’ attempts to create a new form of Soviet news after Stalin’s death. Based on archival documents from a number of newspapers, debates within the Union of Journalists, as well as the newspapers themselves, the paper will show that the momentum for change was met with an equally strong belief that news was positive information in the service of constructing communism.

About the author: Simon is a Research Associate at Loughborough University. His research focuses on the development of mass media and communications in post-war Eastern Europe. A central goal of his work is to understand how modes of communication – both vertically between Party and public, and horizontally between members of society – changed with the advent of new technologies and the emergence of new social norms. His doctoral thesis, which he is preparing for publication, investigated the changing professional climate of journalism in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, and showed how this impacted on the style and content of newspapers. He is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project exploring the culture of television in socialist Eastern Europe, entitled ‘Screening Socialism’: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/socialsciences/screening-socialism/

This talk is part of the Slavonic Studies series.

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• CamCREES seminars (Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies)
• Cambridge Ukrainian Studies Lecture Series
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