The Powers of Soviet Puppetry | Hacker News Reader

The Powers of Soviet Puppetry

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50 pointsprismatic15 comments

When I decided to learn the cyrillic alphabet, I had the advantage of being able to watch a few relevant episodes of Спокойной Ночи, Малыши; not only did I learn my alphabet but I really appreciated the puppetry of not just hands and mouth but even the eyes —to great expression— of Степашка, Филя и Хрюша.

(one of these days I suppose I should also learn the cyrillic handwriting script...)

There is such a cool puppet culture there. If you ever get the chance and are interested, you should check out a production by Obraztsov [1] – a lot of the concerts are on YouTube.

When I was in Russia in 2018 I was shocked at how big puppet theatres are there, still, and perhaps even more so. They're a vibrant part of life, very sophisticated, no doubt due to the popularity of Obraztsov and his ilk. It made me realize how neglected this part of theatre is in the US (not to mention circuses and clowns, which by now have just been thoroughly associated with horror or terrible birthday parties. Only Cirque du Soleil gets a mild pass).

I kept wishing one of my colleagues (in grad school currently) would make a dissertation about the rise of puppetry in the USSR and beyond, but alas, she abandoned her work with Russian theatre, though the probable reasons are obvious.

1 - https://youtu.be/SuR174hMr_Q?t=1208

> On 10 October 1935 the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Kazakh SSR had declared that a puppet theatre be established

Just a couple of years after communists engineered a famine that killed 2 million kazahks.

and a couple of years after starving to death 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) This was a large scale operation

It likely started as an accident, but then was really convenient....

Puppetry threads are the BEST threads for spreading fascist conspiracy theories about centuries old naturally recurring famine (that mysteriously stopped around the 50s) secretly being man made.

Propaganda?

Sure. Still better than contemporary pervasive advertising.

I wonder why that word, propaganda, is only used against foreign influences and not ones within the country. Both sides use propaganda everyday - in political speeches or social media or whatever.

In Psychological Warfare (1948), Linebarger apologises that he (having been subject to army approval for publication) only gives examples of enemy propaganda, but reassures the reader that the Allied departments in which he worked churned out exactly the same kinds of thing in the opposite direction, and even relates an anecdote of reverse engineering a captured Japanese PsyWar HQ to discover that their org charts looked very familiar, very much like his own.

Back in the day, when the first nazis were still around, they used propaganda as a neutral word and thought of persuasive mass communication as a good thing.

It's related to a progressivist and modern view of societies being at different points of the same trajectory between primitive and advanced, or later, developing and developed. Forcing mass communication on people brought their primitive minds to a better state, they thought.

During the postwar period mass communication was honed by academics and married private capital, producing somewhat scientific marketing disciplines optimising for efficiency in changing people's minds at scale. Puppet theaters as mass communication wouldn't have survived that if they were still around.

Seeing similarities with advertising is rather easy even without this historic connection.

It's such an ugly word, we prefer the term "public relations"...

It's merely a euphamism treadmill. Propaganda wasn't always a bad word - The US was proud of it's propaganda departments in WWII. The Office of War Information was quite explicit that it was propaganda, and used the term neutrally; It had both good and bad connotations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_In... https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/walt-disney-classified...

It's not. I've personally heard it used to mean political speech in general, and separately to mean dishonest political speech internally. The definition seems to vary based on cultural background.

Given the negative meaning that the word "propaganda" has today, I think we should only apply it to deceits or outright lies. If a government disseminates information that serves it's interests, but this information is also a decently subjective representation of reality, we should use some other word for it.

For example, Radio Liberty was used as "propaganda" tool by the US. However, it was also a fairly good source of information — certainly closer to the truth than soviet mass media at the time. Should we really call it propaganda, putting it into the same category as aforementioned soviet media? I don't think so.

It has become the very thing it describes, defensively

I disagree. Although ads often do have negative influence on the population, although it very much depends on what is being advertised, who is targetted and so on, it's a far cry from propaganda, where the whole nation is being convinced that it is fine to kill the members of another nation because someone declared them to be `nazi`[0].

[0] Another term that has been abused so much that not only it lost its original meaning but became almost expressionless.

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