Propaganda Mellows : Soviets See U.S. in More Kindly Light

The white dove of peace reappeared on holiday greeting cards in the United States last Christmas after a long absence, Pravda reported in early January.

The doves, the commentator for the Communist Party’s most important newspaper solemnly observed, were a sign that “the average American has grown tired of the warlike rhetoric of his leaders. . . . His concern has increased for his own future and that of his children.”

“The New Year’s Day address by (Soviet leader) Mikhail S. Gorbachev . . . found a sympathetic chord in the souls of Americans,” the same writer also reported. “On the first day of the New Year, Americans were telling me, a ray of hope once again shone over the world.”

Pravda’s Christmas-card analysis is part of the accumulating evidence that the carefully controlled image of Americans that is presented to the Soviet people is changing ever so slightly for the better.

The ‘Ruling Circles’

There have even been a few relatively kind words for America’s “ruling circles,” which are routinely condemned for the world’s ills.

“In the highest echelons of power in the U.S.A., there are people with rational minds,” Yevgeny Primakov, a specialist on American life said. “I think it would be wrong to present the political superstructure (in the United States) as permanently attached to the process of arms race and preparation for war.”

He even suggested that President Reagan himself wants to go down in history as a peacemaker. In addition, Primakov added, the force of public opinion is pushing Reagan to acceptance of some of the arms control views put forth by Gorbachev at his meeting in Geneva last November with Reagan.

New Theme Emerges

Still, almost any newspaper or television news program here continues to include an item about the dark side of life in the United States. There is endless propaganda about the warlike U.S. military-industrial complex. And judging by the content of the state-run media, great numbers of Americans are homeless, jobless or victims of racial persecution. Others are supposedly being whipped into an anti-Soviet frenzy by movies like “Rambo” and “Rocky IV.”

But a new theme has emerged since the Geneva summit. Not only has the white dove of peace made a comeback in the United States, but the Soviet media are crediting ordinary Americans with the same peace-loving qualities traditionally attributed to the Soviet people.

Reagan, once reviled as a trigger-happy cowboy, the ultimate cold warrior, has appeared twice on Soviet television, bringing messages of good will and friendship to startled Soviet viewers.

For the first time in Reagan’s five years as president, his photo was displayed on the front page of Pravda and other Soviet newspapers while he and Gorbachev were in Geneva.

All this is in sharp contrast to the conventional Soviet portrayal of life in the United States, which an American diplomat here has termed the “bums-on-grates” school of journalism.

Soviet citizens, accustomed to reading between the lines, realize that even a slight shift in emphasis in articles about the United States does not occur by chance. Information is carefully controlled by the authorities. Western publications are unavailable to ordinary people here, and the Russian-language broadcasts of American, British and West German short-wave stations have been jammed for years.

America’s Flaws and Foibles

The news about the United States that does appear in the major newspapers, or on Vremya, the main evening TV news program, which is watched by an estimated 100 million people, usually focuses on America’s flaws and foibles.

“Vremya is a showcase for America’s downtrodden and hopeless people,” according to an American who watches the program regularly.

Similarly, Soviet newspapers present a bleak picture of the United States. An article in the Teacher’s Gazette, for example, reported on the brisk sale of toy guns and other weapons during the last Christmas season.

“Production of toys in the United States is being quickly militarized,” the article said. “The inventory of an ordinary American toy shop would be sufficient to wage a few regional wars.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda, the organ of the Young Communist League, reported the slaying of a banker by a debt-ridden Iowa farmer who then killed his family and himself.

“An economic tornado is raging in the farm belt,” the newspaper commented. “. . . Debt is annihilating family farmers in America.”

The American Dream

A correspondent for Pravda, the official newspaper of the Party’s Central Committee, reflected:

“Hypocrisy, multiplied by cruelty, is the chief component of the American dream. The strong trample upon the weak . . . and the rules of the game say the weak must at the same time believe they have ‘equal opportunities’ and ‘inalienable’ rights.”

Amid these routine indictments of U.S. society, however, the Soviet media have begun to sound another note as well.

A recent Pravda article said that Gorbachev has been getting a flood of mail from Americans who said they will welcome his planned visit in the United States this year for a second summit with Reagan.

“The family of Robert S. Gould of Wellesley, Mass., invited the Soviet leader to visit their town,” Pravda said with a touch of pride.

It quoted Sydney Tessler of New York City as telling the Soviet leader, “Just as many other Americans, I believe that we can and must live as good neighbors, in durable peace.”

The publication of even such friendly remarks as these fits the classic Leninist doctrine that ordinary people are peace-loving but are manipulated by war-mongering “ruling circles.”

That is still the basic thrust since the summit of Kremlin propaganda, despite its muted tone, as far as Reagan is concerned. Reagan is sometimes pictured as either a puppet or a dupe of belligerent advisers who prefer confrontation to conciliation.

In part, this reflects a deeply ingrained mistrust of American intentions. Even when a Soviet boxing team defeated an American team by winning all 12 bouts, Pravda suggested that the U.S. losses might be a ploy to make the Soviet boxers overconfident in future matches.

A film currently showing in Moscow, “Flight 222,” depicts U.S. government officials as heartlessly holding a Soviet airliner on the tarmac for 48 hours while they try to persuade an ice skater to defect. Even in this film, however, individual Americans are portrayed as friendly and helpful despite the government’s conduct.

In a new play entitled “Burden of Decision,” the late President John F. Kennedy is almost eulogized for preventing nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But the drama suggests strongly that Kennedy was assassinated by right-wing forces that felt that in the confrontation over the missiles, he was too soft on communism.

Such articles also are designed to reflect credit on Gorbachev, whose recent proposal to bar all nuclear weapons within 15 years was said to have had a stunning effect in the United States.

“The news shook the American capital . . . from the highest echelons of power to people in the street,” Pravda said.

Another article, directed at intellectuals who read the Literary Gazette, sounded some of the same notes about the possibilities of reaching an arms control agreement with the United States.

In contrast to the party line in the past, the writers of the articles in Soviet Russia and the Literary Gazette said that there are some reasonable people who are in a struggle against anti-Soviet superhawks.

Vitaly Kobysh, a political commentator, noted that there has been no major change since Geneva in the American position on space-based missiles but he added: “It is still possible to count on a degree of constructive approach in their positions in future.”

What Reagan says still gets relatively little notice on the TV news, even when compared to the attention paid to other Western leaders, for example, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

As a result of censorship and omissions, the Soviet view of contemporary American life and government policy is distorted and piecemeal, like watching a baseball game through a knothole in the fence.

At times, Soviet newspapers seem to Western observers to find a mirror image of their own society in reports on the United States. The military newspaper Red Star, for example, in reviewing a movie about the possibility of a fascist dictatorship in the United States, commented:

“The viewer sees the frightening picture of the total surveillance to which the country’s citizens are subjected. They cannot speak freely on the telephone or hide from the all-seeing eye of the FBI’s cameras. . . . (It is) a cautionary film that shows not an imaginary America but the one that really exists today, with all its flaws, political power struggles, corruption and demagoguery.”

In light of this sort of thing, American experts on the Soviet Union doubt that the more favorable comments heard since the summit conference will bring about any permanent major change in the U.S. image here.