--- title: Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the agitprop model (1902-1991) url: https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/ description: 'Lenin and the Soviet agitprop model (1902-1991): what the doctrine says, how it worked in practice, and how it has been assessed.' section: About and doctrine --- ![Illustration: a dense, generic Cold War intelligence analyst's evidence wall of press photography, redacted reports and aerial reconnaissance imagery.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-evidence-wall.jpg) [About](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/) # Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the agitprop model (1902-1991) In brief The Bolshevik split of persuasion into "propaganda" (many ideas for the few) and "agitation" (one idea for the many), and the party-state apparatus built on it after 1917, gave the twentieth century its first permanent peacetime propaganda state and the word "agitprop". On this page - [The source](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#the-source) - [Context](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#context) - [What it says](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#what-it-says) - [How it worked in practice](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#how-it-worked-in-practice) - [Techniques in this archive's taxonomy](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#techniques-in-this-archive-s-taxonomy) - [Reception and criticism](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#reception-and-criticism) - [Same-standard note](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#same-standard-note) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/#sources) On this page **In one line:** the Bolshevik split of persuasion into "propaganda" (many ideas for the few) and "agitation" (one idea for the many), and the party-state apparatus built on it after 1917, gave the twentieth century its first permanent peacetime propaganda state and the word "agitprop". ## The source - **Lenin, *What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement*** (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1902), chapter III, where Lenin quotes and then reworks G. V. Plekhanov's definition of propagandist and agitator. Russian original; English translations in Lenin, *Collected Works*, vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers). - **Lenin, "Where to Begin?"**, *Iskra* no. 4, May 1901. Russian original; same *Collected Works* volume. - **Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)**, Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop), set up August 1920; decree creating Glavlit, 6 June 1922. - **Later practice:** KGB First Chief Directorate, Service A (active measures), as documented by Thomas Boghardt, Douglas Selvage and the Mitrokhin archive (see Sources). - **Rights on this archive:** Lenin's 1901 and 1902 texts are in the US public domain and are quoted from standard English translations. Later scholarship (Kenez, Boghardt, Andrew and Mitrokhin, Selvage) is in copyright or, for Boghardt's CIA journal article, a US government work, and is summarised with short quotations. ![Head-and-shoulders portrait photograph of Lenin in a suit and tie, looking at the camera](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/lenin-cult-bain-portrait-c1920.jpg) *Vladimir Lenin, author of the two texts above, photographed by the Bain News Service, c. 1920-1925. Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-34971. No known restrictions on publication.* ## Context Lenin wrote both texts in exile while building the newspaper *Iskra* as the organising centre of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The question was how an underground party could reach workers and hold a scattered network together. His answer, a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries with an all-Russian newspaper at its core, became the Bolshevik model after the 1903 split. After October 1917 the Bolsheviks held state power in a largely rural, mostly non-literate country during the Civil War (1918-1921). The pre-revolutionary vocabulary of propaganda and agitation was turned into state and party departments. In Soviet usage "propaganda" was not a pejorative term: party documents used it for political education. ## What it says **Propaganda and agitation are different jobs.** Lenin cites Plekhanov's formula: "A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but he presents them to a mass of people." Lenin adds a distinction of medium: "the propagandist operates chiefly by means of the printed word; the agitator by means of the spoken word." In his example, the propagandist explains the capitalist causes of unemployment in full, while the agitator takes one fact known to the audience, such as a family starving, and uses it to rouse indignation. **The newspaper is an organiser, not only a mouthpiece.** In "Where to Begin?" Lenin writes: "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser." He compares it to scaffolding around a building under construction: its network of correspondents and distributors was itself the party's structure. **Political exposure across all classes.** *What Is To Be Done?* argues that workers left to themselves would stay within trade-union demands, and that the party had to bring them exposures of the autocracy's abuses against every class so that political consciousness came to them from outside the economic struggle. Persuasion here is framed as bringing consciousness to a class, a premise later Soviet doctrine kept. **Propaganda as education.** After 1917 the party treated propaganda and agitation as part of mass education, linked to literacy campaigns and party schooling. Peter Kenez's reading of the record is that the Bolsheviks "thought of propaganda as part of education." **Control of the information supply.** The same state that multiplied its own channels closed others. Glavlit's mandate joined protection of state secrets with the suppression of printed material judged hostile to the state or the party. ## How it worked in practice ![Photograph of a crowd of adults and children lined up beside a railway wagon covered in painted posters and a red flag](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/soviet-agitprop-department-institution-lenin-literature-train-1923.jpg) *The "Lenin" literature-and-propaganda train at a station, 1923. Photographer unknown. New York Public Library Digital Collections ("People's house" collection), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (published before 1931).* - **Agit-trains and agit-ships (from August 1918).** Trains fitted with printing presses, film projectors, libraries, and offices for receiving complaints toured the Civil War fronts and the provinces; one was named *October Revolution*. River steamers such as *Red Star* worked the Volga. - **ROSTA windows (1919-1921).** The Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) posted stencilled poster sequences of four to twelve panels in shop windows, turning news into picture stories. The format was developed by Mikhail Cheremnykh with N. K. Ivanov; Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote most of the texts and drew roughly a third of the images. By 1921 there were ROSTA offices in more than fifty cities outside Moscow. Subjects ranged from Red Army supply appeals to smallpox vaccination. **Content note:** Caricature of Hitler with a swastika. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) ![Photograph of a crowd, including a Red Army officer, reading a stencilled cartoon poster in a shop window in Moscow](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/what-hitler-wants-tass-window-1941.jpg) *Muscovites reading TASS Window No. 5, "What Hitler Wants" (poster by Mikhail Cheremnykh), Kuznetsky Most, Moscow, July 1941. The TASS Windows continued the stencilled shop-window poster format of the ROSTA windows. Photo: A. V. Ustinov. Moscow Main Archive (Glavarkhiv Moskvy), mos.ru, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.* - **Agitprop department (August 1920).** The Central Committee created a Department of Agitation and Propaganda to coordinate the propaganda work of all Soviet institutions. It began with five subsections; the agitation subsection directed campaigns and supervised the local press, the political-education subsection set curricula for party schools. It merged with the Press Department in 1928 and, under successive names, remained a central Central Committee department until it was folded into the Ideological Department in 1988. - **Glavlit (6 June 1922).** The Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs replaced a set of separate military and civilian censorship bodies. Its lists of forbidden subjects covered military and economic data such as harvests, inflation and disease rates, as well as material judged hostile to the party. - **Active measures (Cold War).** The KGB First Chief Directorate's Service A ran "active measures": forgeries, planted articles and use of unwitting intermediaries. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin's books drawn from Mitrokhin's notes of KGB foreign-intelligence files describe many such operations. - **The AIDS story (1983-1987).** Thomas Boghardt's account in *Studies in Intelligence* (2009) traces the sequence. On 17 July 1983 the Indian newspaper *Patriot* ran an item, based on an anonymous letter from a "well-known American scientist and anthropologist", saying that AIDS came from US experiments. On 30 October 1985 Valentin Zapevalov's article in *Literaturnaya Gazeta* repeated the claim that the virus came from US military laboratories and cited the *Patriot* piece. The East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) then joined the campaign, and the retired East Berlin biophysicist Jakob Segal wrote a report on the virus's supposed laboratory origin that bloc media spread. Douglas Selvage's work in the Stasi and KGB records details the Stasi's role from 1985 to 1989. After US Secretary of State George Shultz raised the campaign with Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1987, *Izvestiya* published an article by two Soviet scientists rejecting the man-made theory. In 1992 Yevgeny Primakov, head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, acknowledged the KGB's role in *Izvestiya*. Boghardt also notes that claims of a US origin circulated before any KGB involvement. ![Printed page opening Chapter V of a State Department report, titled The U.S.S.R.'s AIDS Disinformation Campaign](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/active-measures-working-group-1987-report-aids-chapter.jpg) *Page 33, opening Chapter V ("The U.S.S.R.'s AIDS Disinformation Campaign") of Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87, U.S. Department of State, August 1987. Internet Archive scan. Public domain (U.S. government work).* ## Techniques in this archive's taxonomy - [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): Glavlit's forbidden-subject lists removed harvest, disease and inflation figures from print, so the published record could be read only one way. - [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): in the AIDS campaign an anonymous letter in a small Indian newspaper became, two years later, a foreign "source" cited by a Soviet weekly, which hid the claim's origin. - [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): the campaign leaned on a named scientist, Jakob Segal, whose standing as a scientist was offered in place of evidence for a laboratory origin. ## Reception and criticism - **Soviet self-description.** Party texts from Lenin onward present propaganda and agitation as education and mobilisation, a public and honourable function of the party. The departments carried the words openly in their names. - **Peter Kenez** (*The Birth of the Propaganda State*, 1985) argues that the Bolsheviks' distinctive achievement was institutional: a state that joined its message to control of every channel. On technique he writes that "The Bolsheviks never looked for and did not find devilishly clever methods to influence people's minds, to brainwash them." - **Alex Inkeles** (*Public Opinion in Soviet Russia*, 1950) describes oral agitation, press, radio and film as parts of one party-directed system of mass persuasion, an early US scholarly account of the model. - **On active measures,** Boghardt documents how the AIDS story moved between outlets and notes that it built on suspicion that already existed. Selvage's archival work details the Stasi's share of the campaign and finds that the KGB and Stasi files leave open how far the Stasi influenced Segal and his research. ## Same-standard note The same concepts apply to any state that fuses mobilising messages with control of channels or plants stories through intermediaries. The US Committee on Public Information (1917-1919) also used touring speakers, posters and film to mobilise a population in wartime, though it operated alongside an opposition press and was dissolved after the war; the Soviet apparatus was permanent and paired with prior censorship. The US Senate's Church Committee (1976) documented CIA placement of material in foreign media, a parallel to Service A's planted stories that this archive scores by the same technique ids. See also [Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, thought work and the mass line (1942-present)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/), which adopted the Soviet model, and [Soviet and Russian military theory, Reflexive control and information confrontation (1960s-2016)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/russian-reflexive-control/) for later Russian doctrine. ## Sources 1. V. I. Lenin, *What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement* (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1902), ch. III; English text in *Collected Works*, vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers). [marxists.org, ch. III](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm) 2. V. I. Lenin, "Where to Begin?", *Iskra* no. 4, May 1901. [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/may/04.htm) 3. Peter Kenez, *The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 4. Alex Inkeles, *Public Opinion in Soviet Russia: A Study in Mass Persuasion* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 5. "Agitprop", Encyclopedia.com. [encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/modern-europe/russian-soviet-and-cis-history/agitprop) 6. "Glavlit", Encyclopedia.com. [encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/glavlit) 7. Thomas Boghardt, "Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign", *Studies in Intelligence* 53, no. 4 (December 2009). [cia.gov](https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/volume-53-no-4/soviet-bloc-intelligence-and-its-aids-disinformation-campaign) 8. Douglas Selvage, "Operation 'Denver': The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB's AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985-1986 (Part 1)", *Journal of Cold War Studies* 21, no. 4 (2019): 71-123; and "... 1986-1989 (Part 2)", *Journal of Cold War Studies* 23, no. 3 (2021): 4-80. 9. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, *The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB* (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, *The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World* (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 10. US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), *Final Report, Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence* (Washington, DC: GPO, 1976).