Dissertation Defense: Elisha Henry

Candidate: Elisha Henry

Major: History

Advisor: Michael David-Fox, Ph.D.

Beyond Disinformation: The Secret Police as a Propaganda Organism in the Soviet Information Ecosystem, 1950s-1970

In a word cloud of popular perceptions of the Soviet secret police in general and the KGB in particular, one might expect to find entries like terror, repressor, censor, intelligence, intrigue, and disinformation. In my reading of the files of the former KGB archives located in Vilnius and Kyiv, however, I noticed that another word should be added to the list—that of propagandist. Although memoirs of former Soviet intelligence operatives and histories that predate recent archival insights readily acknowledged this function, the story of the security organs’ contribution to Soviet propaganda at home and abroad is still to be told and the fragmentary insights that are available are scattered across a array of different historical lenses. More importantly, this is a story worth telling. If propaganda was an important type of information circulating within the “propaganda state,” and if information is indeed power, then study of the propaganda activity of the security organs should shed new insights into the current effort underway in the field to understand the roots of secret police power in Soviet society.

This dissertation offers the metaphor of an information ecosystem as a useful analytic model to think holistically about secret police activities as an organism in this environment, thereby overcoming traditional analytic stovepipes. Its case studies demonstrate the agility of this approach in the simultaneous evaluation of the propaganda organism’s own motivations in the ecosystem, its interactions with other organisms, as well as its role regulating the ecosystem’s interaction with other systems in the ecosphere. It finds that routine security and information functions crafted a distinct, privileged, and well-postured propaganda role for the organs of state security, one that was often hidden from public view but significant in the power it wielded over other propaganda organism, circulating narratives, and therefore Soviet life as a whole.