Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
of the West at the time seeing it that way. Yet if glasnost is now seen
as ringing the death-knell of Soviet authoritarianism – with its
increased news coverage of mistakes and problems, the reporting
of bad news, even the ‘space bridge’ chat shows between ordinary
American and Russian TV audiences – Gorbachev was bowing to
the inevitable march of communications technology. The 1980s saw a
massive expansion in international satellite television broadcasting
and the arrival of such global news services such as Cable News
Network (CNN). Direct Broadcasting by Satellite (DBS) provided
alternative ways of seeing and perceiving what was happening in
the outside world, which was made further possible by the secret
and easy importation of foreign radio and television programmes
on small audio and video-cassette formats. Fax machines were to
provide another route. Many Soviet officials seemed more afraid of
DBS and CNN than they were of SDI. In a sense they were right,
since CNN and DBS were among the new technological realities of
the 1980s. News of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, for example,
reached Soviet audiences from foreign sources and prompted
Moscow to re-think completely its domestic propaganda policy.
With hopeful signs that the West was now proving more cooperative
than confrontational (such as in arms reductions talks),
the jamming of the BBC World Service, VOA and even RFE and
RFL was halted in 1987 and 1988. A long-standing ban on the
unofficial use of photocopiers was lifted while the state control over
the mass media was eased to permit greater internal communication
and discourse. Former dissidents were permitted to return while
others were released from the Gulags. At last, the old Cold War
enemy was extending to its citizens the type of freedoms which the
West had insisted were fundamental human rights. Few noted the
irony that this was taking place at a time when the US was
searching for ways of restricting its media from covering conflicts
such the American invasion of Panama in 1989. In that same year,
the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. The Bear may still have had
its claws but it had lost its teeth. The ultimate twist came during
the attempted coup of 1991 when Gorbachev, under house arrest in
the Crimea, was able to listen to what was happening in Moscow
via the very same BBC World Service which he had stopped jamming
a few years earlier. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was watching
his eventual successor, Boris Yeltsin, climb aboard a tank to lead
the forces of resistance in support of Gorbachev – live on CNN.