The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

Merging together Orwellian and (according to Conquest’s quotation above) Tolkienian myths and language, there has been a strong tendency among historians to turn the Soviet Union into a synonym for villainy and cruelty. Indeed, even contemporary historians who do not fully subscribe to the Conquest view—those historians that we might say occupy the centre ground—are broadly sympathetic to his “totalitarian” paradigm. For example, in a recent chapter, John Keep wrote of his qualified approval for the term. While not exactly a wholesale endorsement he argued that nonetheless, “There is something to be said after all for using it…”²⁴ On the other hand, the United States has come to be represented as both the flame and watchtower of liberal democracy. Democratisation and Americanisation will naturally advance hand in hand, and with the entire world democratised America will act as a kind of elder brother to humankind.²⁵ That is, the US has become a synonym for the enlightenment principles of freedom and positivism. The result of this binary structure is to discourage, as either redundant or apologistic, lines of inquiry which problematise the issue of difference and similarity.²⁶

The approach to be adopted in this book is to attempt a comparative analysis of one specific facet of the Soviet and American establishments, namely the manner in which they sought to win popular consent. A key dimension in the analysis of any political order, this issue recommends itself precisely because the assumption that in this the two were binary opposites is the virtual point of departure for the current orthodoxy. To sharpen the focus of the comparison, I will concentrate in particular on the role of the visual arts and the manner and extent to which the two establishments employed them to attempt to win popular consent. In other words, this book poses two questions: Firstly, to what extent did the establishments in both the USSR and the US believe they needed the people to have faith/trust in the system? Did the Soviet regime think that terror and coercion were sufficient to gain popular legitimacy? Did the American power-elites think social libertarianism was enough? Secondly, different as the two societies were, to what extent might they have similarly employed visual cultural media in their attempts to win “hearts and minds”?