Essay On Greek Propaganda

During the 1920s, the word “propaganda” did not have the passive connotation that it has today, especially in the Soviet Union. Most of the Bolsheviks’ leaders and even Soviet artists had a positive view of propaganda and considered themselves as propagandists (Russell 2009, 58). After they succeeded in their revolution, the Bolsheviks looked forward to build what they called the new social Soviet society; they wanted to enlighten the Soviet people and to create a new socialist human being. Influenced by Marxism, the Bolsheviks’ leaders believed that their role was to “raise the cultural level of people to rival that of the Western Europeans” (Kenez 2003, 26). They also believed that propaganda must be used in order to achieve their goals. They looked for a simple medium able to convey their ideas …show more content…
For Lenin, cinema had a special rank among other arts as he told Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education, in February 1922 “in our country, you have the reputation of being the protector of the arts. So, you must firmly remember that for us the most important of all the arts is cinema.” (qtd. in Kenez 2003, 27) Lenin believed that cinema could play a big role in educating people politically. Leon Trotsky also believed that cinema is “the weapon, who cries out to be used, is the best instrument for propaganda ….. a propaganda which is accessible to everyone….. cinema would serve as a the great eye opener for masses, the liberating educational weapon for a socialist society” (qtd. in Tylor 1998,35). At the beginning, the Norkompros established a movie subsection in 1918 under the heading of Lenin’s wife; this subsection was responsible for spreading the propaganda among adults. They tried to encourage using the film for political-educational purposes (Kenez 2003,