Page 198 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

behead five hundred victims per hour. Bolshevik rule was
described as a compound of slaughter, confiscation,
anarchy, and universal disorder.
(1971, p.95)

Using unchecked rumours, word-of-mouth gossip, and the kind
of atrocity stories employed against the Germans in the 1914–18
war the US media, supporting the chairman of US Steel and its allies
in business and the Congress, created a climate of political hysteria
within which to frame domestic industrial relations problems. For
Levin ‘the hysteria was an attempt—largely successful—to reaffirm
the legitimacy of the power elite of capitalism and to further weaken
workers’ class consciousness’ (Ibid., p.90).
Despite the lack of empirical foundation for the Red Scare of 1918–
20, its success as a public relations campaign may be judged by the
fact that by 1923 one million workers had left the American trade
union movement, and that by 1920 the American Communist Party’s
membership had fallen from 70,000 to 16,000. More significantly,
perhaps, the Red Scare established ‘militant anti-communism’ as ‘a
core American idea… The idea that the ultimate aim of the USSR
was, and always would be, the violent overthrow of the American
government took root at this time’ (Ibid., p.89). Robert Murray asserts
that ‘the net result [of the campaign] was the implantation of the
Bolsheviks in the American mind as the epitome of all that was evil’
(1955, p.16).
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s this ‘core’ idea was reflected in
the output of Hollywood’s ‘dream factory’. Films such as Comrade
X and Ninotchka advanced a picture of Soviet Russia as inferior,
morally and economically, to the United States. Bolshevik characters
were stereotyped as cold, austere ideologues who, in Greta Garbo’s
case, needed nothing more than a firm hand to loosen them up and
awaken them to the joys of American capitalism. These films
complemented journalistic accounts of Bolshevik atrocities and
contributed to the consolidation of anti-Bolshevik, anti-left ideology
at the heart of American culture and politics.

The grand alliance
By the 1930s, of course, Stalinism had been established in the Soviet
Union and the atrocity stories of earlier years had acquired a degree
of substance. Show trials, famine, and mass executions of political
dissidents led to millions of Soviet casualties between 1934 and the

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