AHC: More effective Soviet/communist indoctrination

[Ryker of Terra]

I was reading a bit about AANW a while ago and one thing that interested me was the Nazi society of that timeline. I believe @CalBear specifically stated (don't remember if it was in the TL itself or in a reply to a question) that indoctrination in the Reich was basically the most effective in history. What happens to a person at a young age greatly contributes to what they will be like as an adult (their psychology and worldview and so on), and in this case the citizens of Nazi Germany were raised whilst being bombarded with propaganda that told them they were intrinsically better than everyone else. This occurred practically from birth, all the way through the Hitlerjugend and to the SS, which resulted in a fanatically loyal generation. Couple that with basically the highest standard of living on the planet due to the economy being built on the backs of untermenschen slaves, and you have a population that is deeply satisfied with their lot in life and have effectively no reason to question the ideology or system they live under, to the point where there was very little dissent before the Hot War kicked off.

The USSR fell apart because most of its citizens simply didn't believe in its message/ideology anymore, if they ever had. They saw that the standard of living in the capitalist West was greater than back home, that the system had consistently failed to deliver on its promises, and they wanted a change. By the time someone in Moscow recognized the need for this change, it was far too late - Gorbachev opened the floodgates and that was that. So I started wondering what it would take to make indoctrination in the USSR more effective - so that people were MUCH more supportive of the system/ideology, especially if its on a level roughly comparable to the Germans supporting the Third Reich in AANW. I will be doing some soapboxing here to present my opinion on some things, so bear with me.

I believe that Nazi indoctrination was always going to have an advantage simply because of human psychology. Tribalism seems to be, on some level, an instinctive aspect of the human psyche that the Nazis and other fascists exploited to the fullest. The core message of Nazi ideology was likewise much easier to grasp and digest; to explain communism to a child (and indoctrinate them into believing it), you'd also have to explain the basics of labor relations, how the capitalists profit by exploiting the workers while adding nothing of value themselves, etc. (very BIG etc.), whereas to explain Nazism, you just have to tell the kid that he belongs to a nation that is intrinsically better/greater than any other, and dehumanize other peoples. There are less "moving parts" in Nazism - you are just naturally better by birth. So, how can Soviet indoctrination compare?

My take is that there are two ways to do this. The first is that they go the North Korea route - complete and utter isolation from the outside world, so that people can't look outward and see just how much better everyone has it. Given the size of this country and its commitment to supporting socialist causes abroad, I don't think this would be very likely. They couldn't really even cut themselves off I imagine, as the Nazis will come knocking eventually and the Soviets will want more defensible borders.

The second way requires much less ideological and much more pragmatic Bolsheviks (preferably from the beginning), similar to how China is today. They would have to realize fairly early on that the people need bread and circuses, need comfort lest they grow resentful - a little less stick and a little more carrot. They would probably need to be more economically liberal, i.e. nationalize the vital industries, but don't try to plan the ENTIRE economy, give people the freedom to work for their own good (to an extent) as it will also be good for the state (more revenue in taxes), all the while maintaining an iron grip on politics/ideology through the NKVD/KGB as well as its own youth organizations. Another aspect I've thought about is korenizatsiya. By allowing the various nationalities to express themselves a bit more, it might result in less resentment for the central government. Russian domination would be felt a tad less as well, and if everyone across the Union has a fairly equal standard of living (which is also comparable to the West), maybe you'd get the level of support seen in, at least, modern day China?

So what are your thoughts? How could support for the Soviet Union among its citizens (within all Republics, including the Baltics) be much greater, preferably as much as in AANW's Nazi Germany?

 

[CHKeeley]

I would just say that I think the idea that proper ideological indoctrination of youth is a thing that would fundamentally stick to the human mind throughout their life with no reason to question it usually never really turns out to be true. The brain reacts to stimuli, and human experiences will almost always clash with an officially rosy state-sponsored narrative of reality. A German kid might be taught that he is biologically superior and lives in a great German rechtstaat where each Aryan son is looked after, but when he’s out in the forests of Belorussia slinging a rifle in the mud and cold or installing toilets for some NSDAP or IG-Farben executive, he’s going to grumble. And sullen grumbling can lead to dangerous conclusions.

The best example of this would probably be the United States. For centuries, the white settler population was indoctrinated with the catechisms of white supremacy and the extermination or enslavement of others. While racist feelings were prevalent, it didn’t create mindless drones who were completely beyond any sort of redemption. Contradictions in the official ideology caused changes among some sectors, and competing interpretations of just how far white supremacy should go (chattel slavery versus free labor, etc.) driven by economic transformations occurred. Things changed and developed from there.

The USSR didn’t collapse because of lack of ideological purity or fervor. Plain apathy was a factor, but a factor downstream of the actual lived experience of its citizens versus what the state-sponsored image of life was. Grumbling and disillusionment because officially you were building socialism but unofficially that appointment you made to fix the faucet is three weeks late and you don’t have the party credentials to speed up the process. It also required the willingness of the nomenklatura to put up the USSR on the international marketplace. That process was downwind of failing economic returns bringing a crisis period.

The same would apply in Nazi Germany, theories of innate human tribalism notwithstanding. You might be educated as a kid that you are great and live in a utopia of genetic supermen, until the necessities of the economy mean you get thrown into a shell factory with shitty pay and a foreman who is constantly denigrating you for wanting to take a thirty minute lunch break instead of a ten minute one. And the labor demanded for maintaining a multi-continental völkisch reich will generate a lot of shitty jobs and unfulfilled expectations that contradict the official ideology. Our friend Donald Duck is actually pretty instructive on this point. “Welcome workers of Nazi Land. What a glorious privilege is yours to be a Nazi. To work 48 hours a day for the Führer.” You can lambast the population with official ideology, but if the bread is crusty and the working conditions suck then good luck maintaining that façade. The daily lives experience will be bitter with conscription for far flung occupation duties and the associates psychological toll, economic bust in the years following the war with cartels dominating the market, power struggles among the elite, citizens getting chosen by lottery to leave their homes and livelihoods to go east and start small private farms and estates, etc. It was more effective in the pre-war because it contrasted itself against the world that was made around it. It sought to reverse the “aberration of Versailles” and cleanse the nation so it could be strong. It further benefited from its initial victories in the war. But if you have created your ideal Reich and still things aren’t a paradise, things become trickier.

All this is to say that ideological indoctrination only works if the official state narrative meshes with lived experience. Bread and circuses are primary, and ideology works on top of that to further bind the population into the system. If they aren’t content about day to day humdrum of life, then there’s no reason they would choose to wholeheartedly buy in. If they are then it’s far easier. So instead of asking how we could get stronger ideological programs, a better question would probably be how living conditions could improve for the statistically largest part of the citizenry.

 

[Fries]

The USSR didn’t collapse because of lack of ideological purity or fervor. Plain apathy was a factor, but a factor downstream of the actual lived experience of its citizens versus what the state-sponsored image of life was. Grumbling and disillusionment because officially you were building socialism but unofficially that appointment you made to fix the faucet is three weeks late and you don’t have the party credentials to speed up the process. It also required the willingness of the nomenklatura to put up the USSR on the international marketplace. That process was downwind of failing economic returns bringing a crisis period.

IIRC, this holds up. The vast majority of people in post-Soviet states (excluding the Baltics) think the USSR's dissolution was a net negative, and a 1991 referendum on the Union's preservation had 76% of the voters vote for its continued existence. The only reason (with a heavy asterisk) the USSR was dissolved was because of the Belavezha Accords, which was signed behind Gorbachev's back by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

 

[Ryker of Terra]

IIRC, this holds up. The vast majority of people in post-Soviet states (excluding the Baltics) think the USSR's dissolution was a net negative, and a 1991 referendum on the Union's preservation had 76% of the voters vote for its continued existence. The only reason (with a heavy asterisk) the USSR was dissolved was because of the Belavezha Accords, which was signed behind Gorbachev's back by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Indeed, but ideally, it would have never come to that. If the Soviets had improved the economy/provided better living standards early on, people might have been satisfied enough that there would be no need for referendums or reforms.

.

I agree with what you said and I did address the Soviet situation in my post. People no longer believed in the ideology/became apathetic because the living standards were horrible, unlike the Party had promised. Living standards are more important than ideological indoctrination, but both are needed IMO.

So instead of asking how we could get stronger ideological programs, a better question would probably be how living conditions could improve for the statistically largest part of the citizenry.

How could this feasibly happen? Would economic liberalization + korenizatsiya, as I suggested in my post, suffice?

Thanks for your comments

 

[JamesBond88]

The ideological strength of the USSR could be helped by a different post-Stalin period. A quieter de-Stalinization and no Secret Speech type condemnation of the Stalin regime would be one less mark against the infallibility of the state. That would also mean less of an ideological element in the Sino-Soviet split. The split would probably still occur due to power politics, but the reputation of Marxism-Leninism wouldn’t suffer as much.

Ultimately though it will come down to the ability of the government to deliver on promises. A USSR that reforms its economy(somewhat contradictory in the context of less de-Stalinization) would be better equipped to actually provide for the population and keep up the illusion of the eventual victory of socialism. If that’s not an option then there needs to be greater foreign policy victories, such as a Red revolution in India or Iran.

What may end up happening if the USSR still collapses in this case is the stronger polarization of politics in post Soviet countries. With an ideologically consistent and more prosperous history to rely on, new left wing parties may see greater success.

 

[Portucale]

IIRC, this holds up. The vast majority of people in post-Soviet states (excluding the Baltics) think the USSR's dissolution was a net negative, and a 1991 referendum on the Union's preservation had 76% of the voters vote for its continued existence. The only reason (with a heavy asterisk) the USSR was dissolved was because of the Belavezha Accords, which was signed behind Gorbachev's back by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

The 1991 referendum is not really indicative of popular feeling because the New Union would have amounted to de facto independence for the Soviet Republics because of how weak the Soviet central government was going to be.

 

[CalBear]

The Key to the Nazi's success in indoctrinating the population, both IOTL and in AANW was that they provided the average German with a standard of living that was at least on par with the best in Western Europe, State paid vacation, including cruise ships, better appliances, the promise (unfulfilled "due to the war") of a private automobile (a HUGE perk, the U.S. was the only country in the world with a truly mass private car ownership*), and a general feeling of prosperity, something that was a marked change from the rough times of the Weimer Republic. The Nazi also brought back pride for Germans, although how many would have felt that pride had they know they were living in a giant Ponzi scheme and most of their prosperity was the result of theft is an open. question. There was brutality, to be sure, the Gestapo was rightfully feared, but they only went after "bad people".

The Soviets, on the other hand, defined dreary and privation, did so four the entire existence of the USSR. What matters was the State, since the state would ensure that all had their needs met. It never worked, it is questionable, out side of some sort of "post scarcity" Sci-fi world if it could work based on hard wired human motivations, The Communist system promised prosperity for all, once the Global Revolution succeeded, but until then it was privation for all but the elite. Until then everyone dreaded "the knock on the door", often for nothing more that something said in frustration or anger.

Both systems did a great job of trying to indoctrinate, but the Nazis had a lot more carrot than stick. The Nazi also had everyone, except "the other" taking part in the Hitler Youth (it was virtually impossible to avoid joining, many schools wouldn't even issue a diploma to non members) or "The German Girls League (Bund Deutscher Mäden aka BDM) and starting at 10 year old. The Soviet version, the Komsonol, was the exact opposite. It was limited to only the children of Communist Party member.



*In 1937 British vehicle production, both for private use and commercial was ~ 500,000, the US produced 3.3 MILLION cars.

tl;dr: Soviets need to lighten up

 

[Yankeewolf]

This blog post by Tanner Greer basically is focused on why Soviet Communism didn't keep hold of the population as well as it once did. Here are the relevent passages in full regard to this.

The central generational conflict of Failed Empire lies between the Party ‘old guard’ whose careers were unnaturally advanced in the Terror and the generation that Zubok calls, following Russian practice, “the men and women of the 60s.”

Brezhnev is characteristic of the first type. Like Brezhnev, most of his leadership cohort came from working class or peasant stock; most had technical degrees, but took management or administrative jobs sometime between 1937-39 when Stalin’s purges opened up great chasms in the Soviet bureaucracy. Hitler’s surprise attack on the U.S.S.R. was the great test and great trauma of their lives. They emerged from The Great Patriotic War confident in their own powers and well versed in making the machinery of the Stalinist state work in their favor. In many ways these men were the true builders of the Soviet state; when Stalin died, their impulse was not to revolutionize the institutions they helmed, but to systematize, rationalize, and solidify their structures and rules. While their Soviet Union would not be subject to rule of law, it certainly would be subject to rule by law. Under their tutelage even the KGB and the Gulag camps would be bound up in a web of rules and red tape.5

---

Ideology was one weak point of this generation of leaders. Zubok explains:

Stalin, who knew his cadres better than anyone else, was concerned about the ability of the next generations of Soviet nomenklatura to provide ideological leadership. In his words, the political class that replaced and destroyed the Old Bolsheviks was too busy “with practical work and construction” and studied Marxism “through brochures.” And the generation of party and state officials that followed was, in Stalin’s estimation, even less prepared. The majority of them were raised on pamphlets, newspaper articles, and quotations. “If things continue this way,” Stalin concluded, “people might degenerate. This will mean the death [of Communism].” Stalin believed that future party leaders should combine theoretical vision with practical political talent

Indeed, there was nobody in the Kremlin who could be a political leader with a vision. Mikhail Suslov, the last survivor among the theoretically minded party apparatchiks, turned out to be the least imaginative and politically talented. The post-Khrushchev oligarchy, as Robert English writes, embodied “the last hostages” of orthodox thinking. Their collective thinking did not stem from pro- found ideological faith or revolutionary passion but was rather the product of their lack of education and tolerance for diversity and their Stalinist formative experiences.”

…In domestic politics, many of them supported the abrogation of de- Stalinization, the greater suppression of cultural diversity, and the freezing of liberal trends in literature and art. On the other hand, they were not the masters but rather the prisoners of ideology, afraid to abandon the orthodox tenets and unable to reform them. (196)

The Soviet Union of the ‘40s was directed by energetic bureaucrats barely entering middle age; by the ‘70s the USSR was directed by these exact same bureaucrats, now more geriatric than energetic.

Waiting in their wake were the “men and women of the sixties.” This cohort experienced World War II not as a heroic victory of their own making, but as children or young teenagers. They remembered it chiefly in terms of the fear they felt as the Germans swept through their hometowns or in the searing loss of parents, family members, and homes. They were young party apparatchiks, college students or Komsomol activists when Khrushchev gave his Secret Speech; they imbibed its spirit so totally that they were often called “the children of the 20th Congress.” The optimism of Khrushchev’s domestic program infected their souls. But these political events were not the only shapers of their worldview. Just as important was…. Tarzan.

I will let Zubok explain:

After Stalin’s death, a great number of works of American writers in translation, among them Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and J. D. Salinger, were published in hundreds of thousands of copies; they were available in thousands of public libraries around the Soviet Union. American films became another window into the New World for the curious public. After World War II, state authorities authorized a controlled release of trophy German and American films captured in Europe. These were mostly musicals, light-hearted comedies, and soap operas. The response of the Soviet public, from children to the old, to these releases was wildly enthusiastic. Music from American films, especially swing by Glenn Miller’s orchestra, successfully competed with the Russian classics repertoire. The Tarzan series with Johnny Weismuller and His Butler’s Sister with Deanna Durbin became as much a part of the generational experience as American canned food from Lend-Lease, ration cards, and fatherless childhood.”

During the Thaw, the trickle of Western films became bigger. State film distributors in Moscow and the provinces liked American blockbusters for monetary reasons and won bureaucratic fights against party propagandists concerned by the enormous popularity of Hollywood productions among viewers in the cities and the countryside. Many of the best-known American dramatic films (by Elia Kazan, Cecil B. DeMille, and others) did not reach broad Soviet audiences because of their cultural and religious content. Still, millions saw The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner, Some Like It Hot with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon, and others. Their impact on Soviet audiences cannot be overestimated. As the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who lived then in Leningrad, recalled, these films “held us in greater sway and thrall than all the subsequent output of the neorealists or the nouvelle vague. The Tarzan series alone, I daresay, did more for de-Stalinization than all Khrushchev’s speeches at the 2oth party congress and after.” Writer Vasily Aksenov remembers: “There was a time when my peers and I conversed mostly with citations from those films. For us it was a window onto the outside world from the Stalinist stinking lair.”8

A surprisingly influential event for this generation was the 1957 World Youth Festival, held in Moscow in the August of that year:

For a quarter of a century, the Soviet Union had remained virtually closed to foreigners, and there was almost no tourist infrastructure in place. The festival’s organizers tackled many daunting tasks, such as what to do with the squalid look of most urban areas; the inadequacy and small number of hotels; the absence of nightlife, advertising, attractive quality clothing, carnival costumes and paraphernalia; and the lack of fast-food places and restaurants and opportunities for shopping. All this exposed the relative backwardness of Soviet society and economy in comparison with the capitalist West.

Khrushchev let the leadership of the Komsomol run the show, with instructions “to smother foreign guests in our embrace.” As a result, the festival became the first “socialist carnival” in the streets and squares of Moscow since 1918. Even the Kremlin flung its doors open for the young crowds. Soviet authorities were unprepared for the scale of the event and failed to maintain centralized control over it.

The festival turned into a giant grassroots happening that paralyzed all attempts at spin control, as well as crowd control. Three million Moscovites provided enthusiastic hospitality to over 30,00o young foreigners. The curiosity and enthusiasm of the hosts was immeasurable. Many corners of the capital turned into impromptu discussion clubs-a completely new experience for Soviet citizens. The festival did in peacetime what the last stage of World War II had done before. In 945, the war brought Ivan into Europe. In 1957, the Soviet regime itself brought the world to Moscow. The appearance of young Americans, Europeans, Africans, Latins, and Asians in the streets of the Soviet capital shattered propagandist clichés. In the Soviet media, a memoirist recalls, “Americans were depicted in two ways-either as poor unemployed, gaunt, unshaven people in dregs or as a big-bellied bourgeois in tuxedo and tall hat, with a fat cigar in the mouth. And there was a third category-hopeless Negroes, all of them victims of Ku-Klux-Klan.”

As Russians saw freethinking and stylishly dressed youth, their xenophobia and fear of secret police informers evaporated virtually overnight. Many witnesses of the festival would concur later that it was a historical landmark as important as Khrushchev’s secret speech. Jazzman Alexei Kozlov believes that “the festival of 1957 was the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system. After the festival the process of fragmentation of Stalinist society became irreversible. The festival bred a whole generation of dissidents and intellectuals who lived a double life. At the same time, a new generation of party-Komsomol functionaries was born, double-dealers who understood everything perfectly well but outwardly professed to be loyal to the system.” Vladimir Bukovsky recalls that after the festival “all this talk about ‘putrefying capitalism’ became ridiculous.” Film critic Maya Turovskaya believes that at the festival Soviet citizens could touch the world for the first time after three decades: “The generation of the Sixties might have been different without the festival.” 9

 

[Ryker of Terra]

Thank you all for your comments and insight, but I'm still a bit confused on how to accomplish the AHC. I understand that the Soviets would basically have to rule with a gentler hand. Less brutal repression, less lofty promises that go unfulfilled, more focus on meeting the needs (and wants) of the population so they wouldn't look at the West with so much envy. More carrot and less stick basically, but what are the specifics? I'm having a hard time imagining it at all.

 

[Drizzt]

Thank you all for your comments and insight, but I'm still a bit confused on how to accomplish the AHC. I understand that the Soviets would basically have to rule with a gentler hand. Less brutal repression, less lofty promises that go unfulfilled, more focus on meeting the needs (and wants) of the population so they wouldn't look at the West with so much envy. More carrot and less stick basically, but what are the specifics? I'm having a hard time imagining it at all.

I think the Hungarian concept of Goulash Communism is a good start. Build on that. One of the biggest issues to solve would be the USSR leadership realising, that as long as a they have a nuclear deterrent, they don't need a massive army and spend only about say 1/3rd of OTL on defence. The two biggest hurdles would be 1. PostWW2 paranoia 2. After a decade of massive military spending they army becoming so powerful that you cannot downsize them anymore, even if you realise you don't need it that big.
Squandering money on utterly unproductive stuff is never good for consumer goods.
Now assuming you manage that you still merely narrow the gab between Published Opinion and what kind of living standards people experience in practice. You don't improve indoctrination itself. Gotta admit I'm not sure. But one idea I'd have: Go more subtle. Don't throw out propaganda-pieces, but aim to make good entertainment that happens to subtly support Communist ideology. Problem there is getting people to actually make those, instead of piece that will please the various commissars, watchdogs, etc. You can tell your directors what types of movies you want a 100 times, as long as those who make boring movies totally parroting the party line get accolades and promotions, they wont believe what you say. My attempt at a solution, which I have no idea what chance it has of ever being implemented would be: Try and get access to Western cinemas, offering limited showing of Western movies in return and use only ticket sales in Western Cinemas as the yardstick for judging the quality of a Soviet-made movie. Of course that might give people dangerous ideas about how if consumers know better than central planners in this particular case, why not elsewhere as well?

 

[Sam R.]

The USSR fell apart because most of its citizens simply didn't believe in its message/ideology anymore, if they ever had.

Incoherent. An absence of change causes change. Also dubious.

 

[Changundramon]

Instead of focusing on Marxism and doctrine, focus on the desired human values: sharing and altruism. This could be juxtaposed with the hated West and their individualism and selfishness. Basically, making an idealistic, secular form of religion should work well.

 

[CHKeeley]

How could this feasibly happen? Would economic liberalization + korenizatsiya, as I suggested in my post, suffice?

Thanks for your comments

Of course, and sorry if I had missed your initial point about bread and circuses in the OP! Sometimes I have a habit of talking past a point someone has already covered. I have no great knowledge of the late Soviet economy and the attempted reforms, let me do some cursory reading and I'll get back to you on this!

 

[CalBear]

Thank you all for your comments and insight, but I'm still a bit confused on how to accomplish the AHC. I understand that the Soviets would basically have to rule with a gentler hand. Less brutal repression, less lofty promises that go unfulfilled, more focus on meeting the needs (and wants) of the population so they wouldn't look at the West with so much envy. More carrot and less stick basically, but what are the specifics? I'm having a hard time imagining it at all.

Easiest way to describe it is a version of "a chicken in every pot, and a car in every garage". You would need to make the people BELIEVE that they are prosperous and the government is the reason things are better.

This is extremely hard for the Soviet Government given the fact that individual prosperity violated everything the stood for, and the Lenin/Stalin era was marked by brutal suppression and literal outright genocide once Stalin came to power.

There is another version, but it takes longer, that followed by the Kim family in the DPRK. The Kim family has essentially set themselves up as small "g" gods. It is a national brainwashing effort that put even the Reich to shame, Young women literally cry and even pass out if they get close to Kim, sort of a combination of Elvis/the Beatles/Bieber and a venerated religious figure (no, I won't give examples, figure it out) rolled into one. It is remarkable, and utterly terrifying, a Cult of Personality covering multiple generations and encompassing the vast majority of the population.

 

[Timthehuman]

The USSR didn't fall apart because people didn't beleive in it. It fell apart because it could not economically keep up with the US due to America's industrial lead dating back from all the way before WWI

 

[M79]

Would the alt-USSR be above adding drugs/chemicals to the food and water supply as well as promoting/exploring the worst of German and cult psychological tactics for indoctrination and retention?

 

[Ryker of Terra]

Would the alt-USSR be above adding drugs/chemicals to the food and water supply as well as promoting/exploring the worst of German and cult psychological tactics for indoctrination and retention?

I imagine so, so long as it results in a more "loyal" population. The problem is finding drugs/chemicals that are effective and won't harm the population too much.