by Jessie Berg

Created on: November 07, 2009   Last Updated: November 08, 2009

Speech in the media, as in the arts, can never free. Before it reaches the public, and even as it is being digested, many factors of manipulation have influenced the representations. Totalitarian regimes, specifically the communist Soviet Union, developed using the theory of Karl Marx.

The Marxist, and later Marxist-Leninist theory situates all art, in contrast to the views of liberal democratic thinkers, as inescapably possessing a political message and further, as always being a statement on class. It only makes sense than that the autocratic power in the totalitarian regime would take a great interest not only in the strict censorship of art, but that it would seek to build a tradition or school of art which was carried a positive political message surrounding the regime.

Speaking at the Third Soviet Union Writers Congress in 1959, Mr Khrushchv, the First Secretary of the Communist Party,[1] made an authoritative statement on this theme. "The Party, he said, "is behind those writers who take positive phenomena as their basis and show the pathos of labour, setting men's hearts alight, urging them forward and pointing the path to a new world. In their positive heroes they somehow epitomise all the best characteristics and qualities of man and contrast them with negative images, demonstrating the struggle of the new against the old, and the inevitable victory of the new."[2]

This attitude towards art as being inescapably political also means it can easily become what the West views as 'propagandistic' through its ability to convey political messages (content) with the assumed purpose that society incorporate (receive) the artists ideology into its imagination (intent).[3]

Khrushchv outlining the party's requirement that writing construct a narrative of 'inevitable' victory demonstrates the vast power the Soviet Regime attributed towards art, in particular literature as a tool for shaping society. Within the totalitarian societies in which power radiates from the central government, it only follows that art should be censored to ensure it was not being used to express ideals which are not held, or oppositional to the governments.

The relationship between art and reality is debatably twofold: reality is reflected in art, but art also exerts an active effect upon that reality. Milan Kundera described art as the enemy of ideology because it exposes any ideology it contains[4], but this wasn't problematic for the totalitarian regimes such as Soviet Russia and Nazi

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