Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1959. / Includes vita. Photocopy. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1981. 21 cm. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 266-274).

This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian Avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Mar. 25, 2010). Research paper (M.A.), 3 hrs. Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-45).

This dissertation examines the image of the child as it appeared in the propaganda and public rhetoric of the Cold War from approximately 1950 to 1968. It focuses on how American and Soviet politicians, propagandists, and critics depicted children in film, television, radio, and print. It argues that these groups constructed a new lexicon of childhood images to meet the unique challenges of the Cold War. They portrayed the young as facing new threats both inside and outside their borders, while simultaneously envisioning their children as mobilized in novel ways to defend themselves and their countries from infiltration and attack. These new images of the next generation performed a number of important functions in conceptualizing what was at stake in the Cold War and what needed to be done to win it. Politicians, propagandists, and individuals in the Soviet Union and the United States used images of endangered and mobilized children in order to construct a particular vision of the Cold War that could support their political and ideological agendas, including the enforcement of order in the private sphere, the construction of domestic and international legitimacy, and the mobilization of populations at home and abroad. At the same time, these images were open to contestation by dissenting groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain who refashioned the child's image in order to contest their governments’ policies and the Cold War consensus. What these images looked like in Soviet and American domestic and international discourse, why propagandists and dissent movements used these images to promote their policies at home and abroad, and what visions of the Cold War they created are the subjects of this dissertation. This project argues that the domestic demands of the Cold War altered American and Soviet visions of childhood. It is common wisdom that the 1950s and 60s was a period when child rearing practices and ideas about children were changing. This dissertation supports current arguments that American and Soviet parents sought more permissive approaches in raising children who they perceived as innocent and in need of protection. Yet it also finds substantial documentation showing that American and Soviet citizens embraced a new vision of idealized youth that was not innocent, but instead was mobilized for a war that had no foreseeable end. In the United States, children became participants in defending the home and the country from communist infiltration. In the Soviet Union, the state created a new vision of idealized youth that could be seen actively working towards a Soviet-led peace around the world. By using the child’s image as a category for analysis, this project also provides a window into how the Cold War was conceptualized by politicians, propagandists, and private citizens in the Soviet Union and the United States. In contrast to current scholarship, this dissertation argues that the Soviet state worked hard to create a popular vision of the Cold War that was significantly different from the “Great Fear” that dominated American culture in the 1950s and 60s. While in the United States, the conflict was portrayed as a defensive struggle against outside invasion, in official Soviet rhetoric it was presented as an active, international crusade for peace. As the 1960s progressed, and as the official rhetoric of the state came under increasing criticism, the rigid sets of categories surrounding the figuration of the Cold War child that had been established in the 1950s began to break down. While Soviet filmmakers during the Thaw created images of youth that appeared abandoned and traumatized by the world around them, anti-nuclear activists took to the streets with their children in tow in order to contest the state’s professed ability to protect their young. In the late 1960s, both the Soviet Union and the United States struggled to contain rising domestic unrest, and took the first steps in moving towards détente. As a consequence, the struggle between East and West moved to the post-colonial world, where again, the image of the child played a vital role in articulating and justifying policy. Visual and rhetorical images like that of the child served as cultural currency for creating and undermining conceptual boundaries in the Cold War. The current prevalence of childhood images in the daily construction and contestation of public opinion are the legacies of this era. / text

A free and competitive media environment is the cornerstone of political accountability. News media provide citizens with the information necessary to assess policy performance and attribute it to the correct political actors. Many non-democratic governments attempt to manipulate citizens' beliefs about the competence and performance of political leaders by controlling the news media. In this dissertation, I investigate the extent to which this strategy is effective. I conduct a series of online experiments in Russia, a prominent modern autocracy. The three chapters of this dissertation illuminate how the public reacts to the coverage of domestic politics by state-controlled media; whether independent local media in an otherwise controlled media environment can give rise to partial accountability; and how citizens' prior experiences, knowledge, and beliefs moderate what citizens learn from the news. Chapter 1 studies a kind of coverage produced by many state-owned media: messages that target citizens’ perceptions of whether the central or the local government is responsible for policy outcomes. I report results from a survey experiment with over 4,000 respondents in Russia. The experiment randomly assigned respondents to watch news reports from Russia’s popular state-owned TV channel, Rossia-1. The reports emphasize the central government’s monitoring of road maintenance and natural disaster management – two policies that fall under the purview of local governments. My findings suggest that even though the reports did not shift beliefs about the locus of policy responsibility, they improved policy performance perceptions and increased government support. One explanation for these findings is that citizens know that the central government would only associate itself with local policies if the performance is high. I show that my findings are consistent with a Bayesian learning model in which citizens can be aware of biased media reporting strategy and update positively on policy performance and government competence when they observe central government associating itself with the policy. The broader implication is that propaganda can be effective not despite, but because citizens know that news outlets are controlled by the government. In Chapter 2, I focus on the effects of independent news outlets in an otherwise controlled media environment. Existing empirical evidence suggests that such news outlets can decrease support for the government, encourage collective action and ultimately lead to regime change. In this chapter, I show that the information provided by media outlets that are not controlled by the government can have limited effects on citizens' beliefs. I rely on data from an experiment conducted in one of the largest cities in Russia, Novosibirsk. I show residents pre-recorded local news reports on one of the most salient policy issues, healthcare delivery. Despite high compliance rates, the effects of exposure to local independent media reports are limited. I also find no evidence for treatment effect heterogeneity across a number of dimensions. Overall, these findings cast doubt on the ability of independent local media to bring about partial accountability. Chapter 3 investigates another type of coverage that is common in state-controlled media environments: messages that attribute successes in macroeconomic policy to an authoritarian leader. I propose a simple model of belief-updating in which citizens are simultaneously uncertain about the government's competence and the bias of the media source. Since macroeconomic performance is difficult to observe for citizens, the model in this chapter allows the media outlet to lie about government competence. The model makes predictions about the types of citizens who are most and least susceptible to being persuaded. I derive hypotheses about the effects of propaganda on citizens’ beliefs about government competence and media bias. To test the model's predictions, I design and implement an online panel experiment that uses news reports from the leading state-owned TV channel in Russia. Contrary to the model's predictions, I find that positive policy events presented by biased media can backfire and lead citizens to worsen their perception of policy performance and government competence.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-47).

M.A. / The aim of this study is to determine the utilisation and effect of literature as instrument of patriotism in order to get the active support of the Soviet population for the war effort of the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1946. In the Soviet Union literature was well able to fulfil this role due to the fact that the Soviet leadership identified the propaganda value of literature, with the result that literature became the official expression of the government's policy. By making use of the different literary genres the inherent patriotism could be awakened and inspired. Literature was therefore mainly responsible for the change in the attitude of the Soviet population from indifference and uninterestedness to one of active support. It is, however, not possible to award to literature solely the responsibility for this change of attitude because other instruments were also used between 1941 and 1946. There is enough evidence that the reaction of the population was to a great extent influenced and determined by literature. Through literature the Soviet population wanted to act as the heroes of the literary works and save their Russian fatherland from the German onslaught.