Affiche USSR Soviet Union Propaganda 1930

Communist propaganda in the Soviet Union was extensively based on the Marxism-Leninism ideology to promote the Communist Party line. In societies with pervasive censorship, the propaganda was omnipresent and very efficient. It penetrated even social and natural sciences giving rise to various pseudo-scientific theories like Lysenkoism, whereas fields of real knowledge, as genetics, cybernetics, and comparative linguistics were condemned and forbidden as "bourgeois pseudoscience". With "truths repressed, falsehoods in every field were incessantly rubbed in print, at endless meetings, in school, in mass demonstrations, on the radio". The main Soviet censorship body, Glavlit, employed the United States not only to eliminate any undesirable printed materials, but also "to ensure that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item". Telling anything against the "Party line" was punished by imprisonment or through punitive psychiatry. "Today a man only talks freely to his wife – at night, with the blankets pulled over his head", said writer Isaac Babel privately to a trusted friend.