Page 212 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

convinced that “bolshevism” was the only strike issue’ (1955,
p. 142).
The public relations campaign against ‘communism’ was
complemented by tendentious and sensational reporting of Soviet
Russia itself. As Levin describes:

newspapers, with rare exceptions, portrayed the revolution
as an orgy of mass murder, individual assassination, rape,
pillage, and slaughter. It was commonly claimed that nuns
were raped, monasteries burned, and it was reported that
the Bolsheviks in Petrograd used an electrically operated
guillotine to 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
in 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 US. 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

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