Russian Propaganda

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 973 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Laurie Taylor talks to Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City about her research into the propaganda formulas deployed by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin over the last two decades. As the great granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1964, she offers personal, as well as political insights, into these developments, drawing on previous periods of oppression in Russian history. She argues that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has intensified 'hard' propaganda, leading to a pervasive presence of military images in every day life and the rehabilitation of Josef Stalin, the former dictator of the Soviet Union, as a symbol of Russian power. She suggests that lessons from past eras, described by such Soviet classics as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, can offer small grounds for optimism and hope, as ordinary people absorb alternative narratives. How else to explain the fact that George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, has been a bestseller for many years and has seen a surge in popularity since the start of the war in Ukraine?

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:54.7	Hello, although it's now several decades since my evening degree glasses in sociology at
1:01.0	Birkbeck College, I can still readily recall how certain topics arouse particularly animated
1:07.1	discussions. One such bone of contention was the Marxist prediction of the coming
1:12.6	collapse of capitalism. It's a brilliant intellectual analysis of forthcoming events, argued some.
1:20.8	Or others insisted a classic example of optimism, subverting rigorous analysis. But it was another sociological concept that provoked an almost comparably heated argument.
1:33.3	Max Weber's term charisma.
1:35.9	The idea that certain leaders, say Napoleon Bonaparte, Fidel Castro,
1:40.3	obtained and then held onto their elevated positions,
1:44.3	not because they'd obtained them by traditional or legal means,
	...

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