Presented below is a pre-publication excerpt from the PBS series companion book, RED FILES: Secrets from the Russian Archives, written by George Feifer, published by TV Books, distributed by HarperCollins.

Soviet Propaganda Machine

"How's it going with you these days?" one old classmate asks another when they meet in a line for milk.
"Really great!"
"Got any time to read the papers?"
"Sure! How else would I know?"

"Comrades!" a Party boss addresses the workers. "For the sake of your radiant Communist tomorrow, the Party suggests cutting your wages in half. Anyone against? No one? Unanimously approved."
One week later: "Comrades, to faster reach the Communist future, the Party recommends cutting your wages entirely. No one against? Unanimously approved!"
Two weeks after that: "Dear Comrades, for the sake of international Communist happiness, the Party proposes you all hang yourselves tomorrow. All agreed? Any questions?"
From the crowd: "Yes, should we scrounge for rope or will the powers supply it?"

In 1898, a 28-year-old native of Simbirsk, a provincial town on the Volga, was in Siberian exile for inciting workers to demand greater rights. The scarcely-known would-be revolutionary used his time there - and his remarkable luxury compared to what was coming for the Soviet Gulag's millions - to plan the goals of a socialist party he'd soon capture. It's cardinal tasks would include conducting propaganda in favor of the doctrines of scientific Socialism, in spreading among the workers a proper understanding of the present social and economic system...[and] of the various classes in Russian society...of the struggle between those classes, of the role of the working class in that struggle...of the historical task of international Social-Democracy and of the Russian working class. Inseparably connected with propaganda is agitation among the workers...

The fervent exile was Vladimir Ilich Lenin, né Ulyanov. (Simbirsk would be renamed "Ulyanovsk" after his death.) Two years later, while further refining the fundamentals of his soon-to-be Bolshevik Party, he scolded that "Belittling socialist ideology in any way, turning away from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology." Soviet jokes actually belittled persistently, although they seem less witty now than when they were told in the trenches of daily life, where the pleasure of mocking absurdities and official misrepresentations spiked the laughter and buoyed the spirits of almost every private gathering, at least in the major cities. George Orwell's "Every joke is a tiny revolution" probably exaggerates, but the Soviet ones gave a dimension to native society that was hard to see from abroad. Those about propaganda, which swelled the treasury more than any other subject, prompted the quickest mirth, aroused the sharpest derision, and provided insight into real attitudes. Many posed questions to a mythical "Radio Armenia," whose origins are obscure.

Question: "Is there a way to insure your refrigerator will always be full?"
Radio Armenia: "Yes! Plug it into Radio Moscow."

Three years after Lenin warned about belittling, he formed the party that would seize power in St. Petersburg 14 years later, after many splits and twists in between. By the time the Bolsheviks installed their control throughout Russia, propaganda was so inherent in and central to their thinking that imagining Soviet rule without it would be like baking bread without yeast. Or perhaps flour; that's how essential it became to state designs and how ubiquitous in daily life.

From the very start of Soviet rule, when domestic enemies made its future precarious, the leaders placed great faith in it. Even before the Red Army was founded, rolling stock that might have been used to supply hard-pressed Bolshevik detachments on various Civil War fronts was assembled into propaganda trains. Stirred by Lenin's identification of propaganda as the revolution's main weapon, the mostly young enthusiasts distributed "Red" pamphlets by the millions. Their teams of agitators roused support among the workers and peasants by expounding about the White evil and the Bolshevik promise. None of that would have been done, of course - nor would the speeches have been made, the meetings held, the faith placed in the importance of the party's newspapers - without profound conviction that it would do the vital job of broadcasting the socialist message. White military forces were clearly more powerful than Red. The dire circumstances added made getting the truth (pravda) to the masses seem utterly essential.

What truth did they mean? None that would fit a western definition. Sixty years later, near the end of Soviet rule, their successors were churning out even more of it, revved by a sense that now the system was seriously ailing. In the early 1980s, the love-thy-Party outpouring - "THE PEOPLE AND THE PARTY ARE ONE!" "MERGE YOURSELF EVEN MORE TIGHTLY WITH THE PARTY OF YOUR ROOTS!" "COMMUNISM: THE SHINING FUTURE OF ALL MANKIND!" - approaches the limit of frequency and volume. Films and videos; printed and broadcast materials; posters, banners and paintings festooning the streets, skies and barns...My favorite was the swollen editions of Party leaders' tortuously boring speeches - by the slurring, shambling Leonid Brezhnev, for example, who had trouble reading a paragraph without mistakes. The groans of bookshop shelves under their weight echoed those of the old, exploited Volga boatmen, and neighboring sections spilled over with accounts of the leaders' lives that made American campaign biographies a model of political honesty by comparison. (The huge printings were ordered while books people yearned to buy were unobtainable because the land of unimaginable timber resources had a perpetual paper shortage.) By that time, the fat volumes of exhausted clichés wouldn't sell to anyone even if they'd come with an alcoholic gift. The hackneyed message now spawned more jokes - yes, even more - than interest in, let alone respect for, Party explications.