Mind-Munitions

Chapter 22
The Bolshevik Revolution and
the War of Ideologies (1917-39)
The ‘war to end all wars’ did not live up to its name. Neither did
the peace treaties that concluded it herald a return of world peace.
As the Chief of the Imperial General Staff noted in 1919 after
counting 44 wars in progress, ‘this peace treaty has resulted in
wars everywhere’. The year 1918 may have seen the end of the
Great War but international conflict none the less remained. Most
notably, there was an intensification of a struggle that had begun
with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and which
raged intermittently for the next 70 years, sometimes as open war,
sometimes postponed, and mostly, since 1945, as Cold War. It was
essentially a struggle between two diametrically opposed ideologies
in which propaganda has always played a central role. The
Bolshevik Revolution may well have taken Russia out of the First
World War, but it also led to a new and significant development in
the conduct of international affairs. After 1917, propaganda
became a fact of everyday life. For Lenin and his successors, who
owed so much to the successful employment of propaganda in
securing power at the expense of the tsars, propaganda also became
an essential ingredient in the ideological war against capitalism
and the struggle for world revolution. But it also had to be used to
spread the word internally to the vast majority of peasants initially
untouched by the actual events of the revolution in St Petersburg
but whose lives were to be changed radically by them, particularly
during the crucial days of the Civil War (1918-21).
The crusading element in Marxist ideology, to bring the essential
‘truth’ to the peasants and working classes of both Russia and the
wider world, combined with the experience of underground struggle
and covert resistance, led to great emphasis being placed by