The Stalinist Soviet Union integrated Hungary – and the nations of Central Europe – by 1949 forcing the Soviet-style political dictatorship and economic system to these societies and emphasizing the importance of the Soviet example in the modernization of all spheres from automation through cotton harvesting to public libraries. Stalinized publicity was saturated with information on the Soviet Union. After March 1953, it became clear that a different, more effective Soviet Union propaganda was necessary; however the first delegation of writers and journalists could only enter the Soviet Union in late 1955. December 1955 was the exact date of the launching of the first organized Hungarian tourist groups to Kiev, Leningrad and Moscow as well – after the ‘years of delegations’. The revolution of 1956 brought another twist in this regard and efforts were made to shape a renewed friendly image of Khrushchev’s empire. Emphasis within modernization changed in this period – but the main goal of modernizing and overtaking the ‘capitalist world’ did not. The paper strives to reveal and analyse these changing attitudes and motives in depicting the Soviet Union as a modern empire. It thrives to explore the different threads in the de-Stalinization process – what changes stemmed from changing politics and policies, technical development and where we can grab the de-Stalinization of journalism and publicity.
The article focuses on the construction and symbolic encoding of Prague during the 1950s. After 1948 the political and professional elites constructed a suggestive propagandist image of the capital as a ‘new socialist city’. Prague began to be transformed through interventions in its physical space (architecture, monuments), production of its social reality (organized work teams) and reinterpretation of its history. The leading role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in this process was systematically popularized by the political representatives, the local press and guidebooks. The Communist rhetoric emphasized both Soviet paragons and selected Czech historical traditions (in particular, the Hussite Movement and the Czech National Revival). Citing the example of Prague, this article attempts to underline the spatial aspect of Stalinist ideology and the social ‘constructability’ of any space.
The paper starts from a consideration of two variant critiques of structuralism: in 1935, Marxistoriented historians polemicized with Mukařovský’s concept of the development of literature; in 1951, Mukařovský himself presented a critique based in the ideology of the totalitarian regime. A comparison between the state of the scholarly debate in the 1930s and the latter event allows us to develop some more general characteristics of the ingerence of power ideology into scientific discourse and its paradigm. The focus of our inquiry is the question as to what allowed Mukařovský to perform this radical turn and adopt an ideological doctrine. What we find is that a link between the topics pursued in our argument — i.e. between the structuralist theory, an ideology in the service of power and the deformation of the scholarly paradigm — is provided by the position of the individual in history, in both artistic and social discourse. The gist of the matter is that with the weakening or even elimination of the individual’s role disappears the ethical dimension of the human relating to the world, disappears individual responsibility as an essential, irreducible part of one’s identity.
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