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 Germany, who recognised art as the powerful tool for expressing their ideologies to the masses.

A central position in the Marxist-Leninist aesthetics was occupied by the problem of nardnos, which is described as the meeting point of artistic quality, ideological content and social function.[5] For a work to be classified as good in the Soviet Union, leaders proclaimed art must contain this element as well as partiinost (roughly translated as allegiance to the party) and klassorost (appropriate class allegiance).[6]

Soviet Russia therefore backed the style of Socialist Realism, which was based in the aforementioned concepts, viewing it as the best way to communicate socialist propaganda aimed as mobilizing the masses towards communist goals.[7] To advocates of socialist realism, the style developed world wide with the rise of political consciousness and is therefore the reflection in the arts of the battle for the creation of a socialist society.

Leaders such as Hitler and Stalin saw this battle for the creation of their societies played out through the arts, as it was recognised, (especially in the poorer and larger Soviet Union) as the most effective way to reach and mobilise the masses.

Arguably though, extremely similar methods for shaping society such as those used in totalitarian propaganda were simultaneously being used in the West to promote liberal democracy albeit in a much more obscure way. The development of socialist realism within art in the Soviet Union can be compared with the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, the two styles being antithetical to each other much like Communism and Capitalism.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) displayed exhibitions accompanied by curators' statements in which nationalist rhetoric contrasted the mark of freedom in American painting with the regimented kitsch of Soviet communism.[8]

In the 1970's it became known that some of MoMA's exhibitions from this period were funded by the CIA, challenging the idea that it was even possible or necessary to always separate art from political concerns as well as the statement that artistic expression has always been marginal to politics in liberal-democratic societies.[9]

While the artists of literature, music and the visual arts tended to look down on those of their colleagues who overtly aimed for political influence in their work, they essentially missed the fact that their own efforts inevitably also had some kind of message, albeit less obvious. [10]

In the case of abstract expressionism, as Toby Clark argues, propaganda in art is not always inherent in the image itself, and may not stem from the artists intentions. While artists such as Jackson Pollock attempted to eradicate their work of any 'kitsch' elements, kitsch being associated with propaganda in totalitarian regimes,[11] his art can be described as functioning as liberal-democratic propaganda through its situated use to create a dialogue of the achievements of democratically free artists.[12]

The distinction must be draw however between Political propaganda, which appears when a group, (government or one of its agencies such as the CIA), uses techniques of influence in order to achieve goals which are clearly distinguished and Sociological propaganda, which is a sort of 'persuasion from within'.

The later resulting when an individual has accepted or assimilated the dominant economic and political ideologies of his society and then uses them as a basis for making what he regards as spontaneous choices and value judgments.[13]

While Pollock's work unintentionally came to function through its government sponsorship as political propaganda, the Pop art movement is an example of work which unintentionally functioned as sociological propaganda. While the pop artists such as Andy Warhol attempted to critique capitalism through outrageous glamorisation of everyday consumer items, such as a Campbell's soup can, the artists went on to sell their work for high prices inadvertently promoting consumer items as worthy icons to be loved by the Western public.

The notion of a central doctrine for art is viewed suspiciously in the west as a manipulation and control, yet while totalitarian regimes have openly attempted to exert central control through unity surrounding specific ideologies, the idea that liberal democracies can exert control through its opposite -disunity and multiplicity of ideologies - is often overlooked.

Works of art which could be categorized as 'popular' (nardy), in the Soviet Union were those which give strong expression to the highest level of social awareness attained in the era, that is, works which were a reflection of 'true' social conditions and of man's most human aspirations in his struggle for a more dignified mode of existence.[14]

Lenin took up the theme of accessibility of art to the masses, laying the foundations of subsequent Soviet policy declaring: "Art must have its deepest roots in the very depths of the broad masses of the workers. It must be understood by those masses and loved by them. It must unite the feelings, thoughts and will of the masses and raise them up."[15]

In the west meanwhile, art developed as something which should be viewed as somehow separate from social life. [16] Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes this rational as developing from the Age of Enlightenment and manifesting the western notion of humanistic autonomy: "the principle proclaimed in theory and followed in practice, of man's autonomy from any higher force above him".[17]

He argues that the complete lack of censorship is almost equally as detrimental to the people of a nation, as is the total censorship of totalitarian regimes and that through the multiplicity of messages, the west has become psychologically weak and therefore compliant to governmental power in a similar way that those of the Soviet Union were forced to be.

In the chapter 'fashion in western thinking', Solzhenitsyn argues that without any censorship in the West, trends of thought are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, has little chance of finding a way into academic literature or colleges.

He further proclaims in an effort to show the similarities between complete censorship and complete lack of censorship that "Your [western] scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad".[18]

Extending on Solzhenitsyn's argument it would follow that a complete lack of censorship creates collective weakness through the constant multiplicity as well as rising and falling fashion trends of ideology so that no overt coercion is ever needed by liberal governments.

It was necessary for the former Soviet Union to place so much importance on ideology within the arts as the leaders saw it as imperative for the success of their regime that they build a strong collective identity, a factor which was unnecessary for liberal democratic governments who were able to exert control through weakness and disunity of ideology as well as through more subtle discourses within the capital economy (such as the CIA backed abstract expressionism exhibition or Warhol's unintentional promotion of capitalism).

Artistic expression may have also become insignificant to politics in the West because as Solzhenitsyn suggests; the press has become the greatest power within the Western Countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.[19]

He makes the comparison between the Communist East in which journalists are frankly appointed as state officials and the West, where the media hold a serious position of power yet never make it clear who is ultimately responsible for the views being expressed.

Media Moguls such as the departed Kerry Packer perhaps exert then the same level of control and censorship as totalitarian governments yet they are equally as undemocratically elected as some of the dictators of the East.

[1]Mr Khrushchv held this position from 1953 to 1964 and Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. He went on to become the chief director of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin.

[2] Soviet Socialist realism (from source 20) p. 92. The author argued that it was still true to this day when he wrote the book in the 70s.

[3] this definition of propaganda is losley taken from APBP lecture 11

[4] From APBP lecture 11

[5] (this is a summary of Bases of Marxist-Leninist A60, State Publishers of Political Literature, Moscow, Institutes of Philosophy and History of Art of the Academy of sciences of the USSR, edited by A. Sutygin.) p.3

[6] APBP lectures 12 both translations of Russian words are quite rough as they are both quite broad concepts.

[7] Soviet socialist realism p. 89

[8] Oliver Thomson Easily Led: A history of propaganda 1999 p. 8

[9] ibid page 9.

[10] Defining where propaganda begins and ends P. 2/ 52 of reader

[11] I use the term Kitsch here as defined by Clement Greenberg a friend of Pollocks.

[12] Page 13 CLARK art and porpoganda in the twentieth century.

[13] Fuolkes, A.P Literature and propaganda 1983

[14] Socialist realism p.6 (summary of source 13- Lenin on literature).

[15] Socialist realism p. 6 (summary of source 13- Lenin on literature)

[17] solzhentisyn p. 64 Humanism and its consequences- the nobel lecture? / a moral vision ?

[18] Solzhenitsyn page 54 of nobel lecture

[19] Solzhenitsyn nobel lecture p. 52

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