The Worth of War (16 page)

The Stalinist regime hardly became the kingdom of heaven and, until Stalin's death in 1953, continued its murderous efforts to intimidate potential critics and opponents. During the war years, however,
the regime learned to make fuller use of persuasion—a program to which it returned in the postwar era. Beginning in 1942, Soviet propaganda shifted from socialist to nationalist themes in an effort to mobilize Russian patriotism. Russia and the Motherland replaced the USSR and Communism as the values to be defended.
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A new national anthem was written and played in place of the “Communist Internationale.” Russian Orthodox churches were reopened. The war was presented in the press, motion pictures, and lectures to the troops by their commissars and
politruks
(political workers) as a fight to prevent the Russian motherland from being defiled by German beasts.
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According to most observers, these propaganda themes were extremely effective in building morale among the troops and maintaining the spirit of the hard-pressed civilian population.
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Within the army, the politruks not only enforced discipline but also lectured the troops on their duties to the motherland and the bestiality of the Germans. During the first eight months of the war, more than 130,000 political workers were mobilized and assigned to combat units.
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These efforts were generally thought to have played an important role in stiffening the will of Soviet soldiers to fight against terrible odds in the early months of the war.
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In terms of more general forms of persuasion, the Soviet film and media apparatus was organized to exhort the frightened and exhausted citizenry to fight the Germans. Sergei Eisenstein's film
Alexander Nevsky
, the story of a Muscovite prince who defeated the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, had been produced in 1938 but withdrawn in 1939 after the Nazi–Soviet pact. In 1942, it became required viewing.
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Mikhail Romm's
Girl No. 217
showed Russian audiences the brutal treatment of a Russian girl held as a slave by a German family.
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Mark Donskoy's
How the Steel Was Tempered
was a story of Ukrainian resistance to the Germans in 1918.
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Donskoy's
The Rainbow
was about a woman partisan, Olena, who is brutally tortured by the Germans but refuses to betray her comrades.
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These and hundreds of films like them were shown throughout the war to fan feelings of Russian nationalism and hatred for the Germans.

Equally important were the press accounts in
Pravda
and the official army newspaper,
Red Star
. These accounts emphasized the heroism of Soviet troops and the bestiality of the Germans and were often accompanied by commentary from Ilya Ehrenburg, a writer who became one of the most famous newspaper correspondents in all the Soviet Union during the war years. Ehrenburg's accounts from the front lines, published in
Red Star
, called upon every Soviet citizen to kill the Germans. “If you have killed one German,” he wrote, “kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.”
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Ehrenburg's articles were read by every literate soldier in the Red Army as well as by millions of civilians and helped to crystallize popular feelings and hatreds—particularly in 1941 and 1942 when all seemed to be lost. Ehrenburg's articles helped inspire the hundreds of thousands of popular militiamen and women, or
opolchenie
, who turned out to dig trenches, build fortifications, and fight to defend Soviet cities.

At the end of the war, Stalin, increasingly paranoid and violent, had little further interest in seeking popular cooperation and turned to a policy of fierce reprisal against those nationality groups he deemed to have been disloyal during the war. Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Volga Germans, and others to camps in remote regions of the USSR. Jewish officials and military officers, who had made a major contribution to the war effort, were purged, arrested, and murdered. Millions of ordinary citizens were arrested for petty crimes, and the population of Soviet labor camps increased sharply. After Stalin's death, however, the new Soviet leadership recalled the lesson of the war years, reduced its level of internal repression—even emptying and closing the main Soviet penal camps—and stepped up its internal propaganda efforts, seeking to persuade more than force citizens to obey.

THE CARROT AND THE STICK

Every regime seeks to elicit popular cooperation through a mix of coercion and persuasion—carrots and sticks. In wartime, regimes often learn the effectiveness of carrots, and begin to sharpen their instruments of persuasion. Opinion management becomes the norm, and when it is done effectively, ordinary citizens are hardly aware of the manipulation. Many Americans are aware that since the New Deal, thousands of press releases written by government agencies are seamlessly incorporated into news stories every week. Indeed, more than half the news stories appearing in America's daily newspapers are actually based on press releases—many from government agencies. Some local television “news” stories are actually “video press releases.”

The video release is a taped report, usually about ninety seconds long, the typical length of a television news story, designed to look and sound like any other broadcast news segment. In exchange for airing material that serves the interests of some advocate, the television station airing the video release is relieved of the considerable expense and bother of identifying and filming its own news story. The audience is usually unaware that the “news” it is watching is actually someone's canned publicity footage.

One recent example of a video news release that caused some controversy was a pair of ninety-second segments funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2004. After Congress enacted legislation adding a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program, HHS sent a video release designed to look like a news report to local TV stations around the nation. Forty television stations aired the report without indicating that it came from the government. The segment was introduced by local news anchors reading from a government-suggested script. The anchor read, “Reporter Karen Ryan helps sort through the details,” of the new Medicare law. Then, against the backdrop of film showing President Bush signing the law and the reactions of apparently grateful senior citizens, an unseen narrator, speaking like a reporter, presented the new law in a positive light.
“The new law, say officials, will simply offer people with Medicare more ways to make their health coverage more affordable.” The segment concluded with the sign-off, “In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting.” Viewers were not told that the entire “news” story was distributed by the government. Nor were viewers informed that Karen Ryan was not a reporter at all. She was an employee of the ad agency hired by the government to create the video release.
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In response to criticism, an HHS spokesperson pointed out that the same sort of video news release had often been used by other administrations and were commonly used by other government agencies, private firms, and interest groups. “The use of video news releases is a common, routine practice in government and the private sector,” the spokesperson said. “Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools.
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We could be offended or upset by this use of propaganda and manipulation—or recall the testimony of Chester Bowles cited above. If not for its tools of persuasion, the government would hire more police and prosecutors and use “police state tactics,” as Bowles said, to enforce its regulations. If that is the choice, and it often may be, we might well prefer the happy voice of Karen Ryan to the angry yells of the police agent.

Warfare and Welfare

War has not only taught governments the uses of propaganda; it has also shown them how to fashion another type of “carrot” designed to elicit popular support and obviate the need for coercion. This second carrot consists of national social welfare systems. War, preparation for war, and military rivalry were important factors, though not the only factors, leading to the development of the welfare state. As historian Bruce Porter has observed, “The historical linkages between war and the welfare state are too close and too extensive to dismiss as mere coincidences of chronology. The experience of total war on the ‘home fronts' of Europe greatly facilitated the emergence of welfare states all across the continent…”
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Of course, America's first national welfare program, the post–Civil War pension system, was created in the aftermath of the struggle in order to provide assistance to Union Army veterans and their survivors. In Great Britain, the First World War saw the creation of the Welfare and Health Section of the Munitions Ministry, established to look after the health of the many women undertaking defense work in government and private factories. The motive of this effort was by no means altruistic. Illness and injuries among women workers would deprive the British war effort of badly needed workers. The needs of women workers also played a role in the expansion of child welfare services and the extension of free public education to all children under the age of fourteen. The impetus for the creation of a Ministry of Housing began during the war, as Britain's first public housing program was promoted under label, “homes fit for heroes.”
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World War I also played an important role in bringing about the development of new welfare programs in France. To encourage worker productivity in the defense industry, the French Ministry of Munitions introduced a number of new safety and health regulations, including such benefits as maternity leave, job guarantees, medical care, and housing. These new benefits became a model for French industry The government also intervened to defer rent payments, require minimum wages, and otherwise gain the support of working-class citizens for the war effort.

Similar patterns manifested themselves during World War II. Germany, of course, already had a well-established welfare state built in the aftermath of the Franco–Prussian War and German unification. During the Second World War, it rewarded its citizens for their service with plunder taken from the nations conquered by German troops. Trainloads of captured goods arrived in Germany until reverses at the front ended the flow of this wartime booty.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the British government established the Interdepartmental Committee, chaired by Sir William Beveridge, to consider reforms in the realm of social insurance and worker's compensation. The Beveridge report, entitled “Social Insurance
and Allied Services,” was published in 1942. The report declared that, “Each individual citizen is more likely to concentrate upon his war effort if he feels that his Government will be ready in time with plans for a better world.”
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The Beveridge report gave rise to the enactment of some legislation during the war, including the Butler Education Act of 1944 establishing a Ministry of Education and a system of government-funded secondary education for all students. Immediately after the war, Britain created its National Health Service and built a comprehensive social insurance program as outlined in the report.

In a similar vein, the Japanese welfare system was also built in response to World War II. The Japanese program included national health insurance, old-age pensions, and housing assistance for the families of workers and soldiers. Why did Japan introduce a comprehensive welfare system during the war? According to East Asia scholar Gregory Kasza, the reasons included the importance of maintaining a healthy workforce and military recruitment base and the importance of inducing all members of Japanese society to work, fight, and sacrifice to the utmost to ensure the nation's survival.
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In other words, the construction of a welfare system was tied to the government's desire to maintain popular support for the war effort.

In the United States, the 1944 GI Bill promised returning soldiers a variety of benefits, including low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans to start businesses, a year of unemployment compensation, and education subsidies that sent more than two million veterans to America's colleges and universities.

In all these nations, what governments learned in wartime was remembered after the war. Welfare benefits were not rescinded, welfare states continued to grow, and governments relied more on persuasion and less on coercion.

War and Voting Rights

And finally there was the right to vote. Nineteenth-century proponents of suffrage expansion believed that the franchise would give subjects
a sense of ownership of the state and inspire them to fight for their country. A Swedish slogan of that period captured the idea. It was: “one man, one vote, one gun.” The slogan's more contemporary echo seems to have dropped the last part of the trio. Modern warfare transformed politically voiceless subjects into citizens. World War I was associated with a great wave of suffrage expansion in Europe and North America as governments sought to mobilize support for the war effort.
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In both Canada and Britain, under the Wartime Elections Act women with relatives serving in the armed services were given the right to vote for the duration of the war. The government apparently believed that a woman with a vote would have reason to urge her husband, son, or brother to make whatever sacrifice was needed for victory.
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Of course, war and voting rights had been closely connected in the United States long before the First World War. During the American Revolution, the property and freehold requirements that restricted the right to vote came under severe attack. Men of military age demanded the right to vote as a condition for accepting the risks and hardships of military service. The issue of suffrage reform was therefore linked to the more general question of independence. Advocates of independence supported extension of the right to vote because they recognized that soldiers with voting rights would have a personal stake in the success of the revolution. Politicians with pro-British sympathies opposed the elimination of the various property restrictions that limited voting rights.
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For its part, the Continental Congress sought to encourage the martial spirit and loyalty of state militiamen by recommending that all non-commissioned militia officers be elected by their men.