Introduction On May 24, 1945, Joseph Stalin gave a speech at a reception in the Kremlin in honor of the Commanders of the Red Army troops to celebrate victory over Germany in World War II.
This speech in the Kremlin elicited great pride amongst Russians and set the tone for the Soviet-centered policies of the post-war years that fueled the new propaganda machine. It was through the policies of Andrei Zhdanov (collectively known as the Zhdanov Doctrine) that the Soviet people elicited a new-found sense of Soviet pride and nationalism that compelled them from the day of Stalin’s victory speech in the Kremlin up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Prior to and during World War II, the Soviet Union’s propaganda machine had been used to elicit great
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As Martin Malia notes in his novel, Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, while the First World War had “brought Communism into being” with the birth of the Soviet Union, “the Second World War made Communism a genuine global force and launched it on its grand career” (273). Following the war, it derived its legitimately not from “the logic of history,” but rather from “its role as organizer of the national victory” (Malia 273). The Soviet Union took control of the governments in Albania, East Germany, Poland, and the Baltic countries (just to name a few), while the communist governments in China and Vietnam were strengthened. This pride in the military victory gave rise to a type of cultural imperialism in which it “portrayed itself as the savior of Europe and the world,” as stressed in Stalin’s speech (Figes 237). However, the rise of cultural imperialism and start of the Cold War also meant that the Stalinist regime had to tighten its ideological grip on the intelligentsia and seal off the country from Western influence. Stalin accomplish this threw his “2nd in Command and successor,” Andrei