Soviet-America Propaganda in a 1936 Life Magazine
Decades of Soviet Cover-Ups, Lies, and Deflections in American Media
The Soviet Union was a gangster state run by bloodthirsty madmen.
Most of the blood they shed were those of their fellow citizens.
Many of the worst abusers weren’t even Russian, they were Georgians like Beria, or Jews like Yagoda, or Poles like Dzerzhinsky, or Lithuanians like Yezhov.
There were several flashpoints in Soviet history where it should have been obvious to anyone paying attention that the regime was monstrous. Deliberate famines in order to bring regions of the country in line. Massive prison systems. Brutal repressions.
Emma Goldman, a self-described Anarchist and Communist who was deported by J. Edgar Hoover to the Soviet Union in 1919, decided that the Soviet reaction to the Kronstadt rebellion in 1919 made it obvious what was really going on: the Soviet Empire would be the most repressive and totalitarian in history.
![Shot Like Partridges': The Crushing Of The Kronstadt Uprising Shot Like Partridges': The Crushing Of The Kronstadt Uprising](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b8fe225-edfa-4bed-b21a-8faab3a52ad1_1071x654.jpeg)
It was enabled by their friends and allies in the American media for generations.
The “Great Purge” started in July 1936. There were three main ‘show trials’ in Moscow. They were public affairs.
One of the main people prosecuted was Grigory Zinoviev, he was one of Lenin’s closest aides.
U.S. papers covered the trials. Here’s August 20, 1936 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
British paper, the Manchester Guardian on August 30, 1936, was very clear that these purge trials were political in nature and were meant to consolidate power.
So if you were like disgraced NYT correspondent Walter Duranty or Harold Denny, and you were present at the trial, it’s hard to understand how you could have a hard time understanding what was going on.
For context, here’s a picture of Zinoviev at his trial:
Zinoviev was threatened with his children being similarly charged unless he cooperated.
He ultimately cooperated on a promise from Stalin, personally, that his life would be spared. It would not be so.
He referenced the promise to his children, obliquely, in his last words to the court before his execution:
“I should like to say a few words to my children. I have two children, one is an army pilot, the other a Young Pioneer. Whatever my sentence may be, I consider it just... Together with the people, follow where Stalin leads.”
Now, I’m not going to say that I don’t find Stalin executing Communists hilarious.
Because I do.
But there was zero reason why reporters weren’t accurately relaying what was really going on. Perhaps they felt motivated to protect their positions of access and status. Perhaps, having finally won access to the new Soviet Union, they wanted to protect that access. We can come up with all sorts of reasons.
But it’s nevertheless telling that these reporters with access to the trials, with access to the Soviet elites, chose to repeat the propaganda and not the truth.
Meanwhile, back in America, not only was the coverage of the show trials skewed, but the entire representative picture of the Soviet Union was false.
Eight years later Owen Lattimore would write glowingly about Soviet Agriculture. The US Vice President Henry Wallace would tour regions of the country where tens of thousands were being worked to death mining gold in the Arctic. And they can always say, ‘we had no idea!’ because the media lets them lie.
The media chose to show a lie rather than educate the public with facts.
It’s no wonder hundreds of Americans, motivated by these media lies and oppressed by Wall Street economics combined with FDR’s economic collectivization regime, fled America and went to work in the Soviet Union. When they arrived, their passports were confiscated and many were executed or otherwise worked to death.
Their plight is featured in 2009’s great work, “The Forsaken” by Tim Tzouliadis.
The mainstream American media was ‘in’ on the crime: they covered up Soviet crimes and atrocities. They made the American people think that Communism was just the Russian form of ‘Americanism.’
Here’s what Life Magazine was reporting about Russia on November 23, 1936, on page 76, in an article called “Russia Relaxes” presented below:
David Cort was the Life Assistant Foreign Editor at the time.
Daniel Longwell was the Editor. John Shaw Billings was the Managing Editor.
Clair Maxwell and Henry Luce were the Publishers.