Soviet Information Abroad: Working Peculiarities of TASS under the Iron Curtain

Abstract

New tasks for the Soviet press were set by the humanization of the Soviet system and the fall of the iron curtain in the latter half of the 1950s. First, it concerned TASS as the primary source of information for the USSR papers and a loud hailer of the Soviet Union on the international scene. The agency began the reconstruction and strengthening of the news service targeted at the foreign reader. It was necessary not only to inform the western reader on the achievements of the USSR in various industries, but also to win its sympathy and to propagandize a life style of the Soviet person. Initially, the foreign media considered this information “red propaganda”. But since the 1960s such point of view began to change. The management of TASS addressed the western acceptances of a material feed. Then, they started to take this information and were ready to pay for it. Nevertheless, ideological implication and propaganda in news remained. It was required by the policy of the party, and journalists of the agency skillfully and unobtrusively incorporated this information into texts. At the same time, the TASS news feed was a certain tuning fork for the Soviet press. Journalists of TASS were a role model for the workers of the Soviet newspapers and at the same time sustained the competition to the western colleagues. They perfectly coped with an application task and created the necessary image of the Soviet life in the foreign press. But they remained true to the principles of their profession. Together with obligatory information on plenums and achievements in hundreds newspapers they published stories about human dignity and lively moments in life of the Soviet people. So, TASS created a positive image of the country abroad. Refs 7.