Paradise is just ahead: social rights in soviet propaganda to Brazil (1950-1964)

Figure 3 - Article 'Asн somos en Siberia' in the pages of La Mujer Soviйtica

Source: La Mujer Soviйtica, 1964, nє 11, pp. 22-25

The impression that remained in the narrative was of a microcosm that orbited the factory where all the material and spiritual needs of the workers were met. One had everything needed right there in the workplace. This social complex set up to improve the lives of workers was made effective through these technologies and social rights devices that appeared successively in this article, but also in many others. Allocating social rights devices in the workplace, according to such a narrative, had not only the meaning of improving the lives of workers, but also the productivity of labor, who used such devices to exercise their rights.

Indeed, even in Kolkhozian villages, social rights technologies are the product of social funds. In the article La Familia Vinokurov (The Vinokurov Family), the story was told of the ways of life of a typical family working in a Kolkhoz in Kranoyarsk, Siberia. It mentioned the construction of a park, a library, a cinema, a club, a school, kindergartens and nurseries. The story alternated between discussing the Vinokurov family home, its members, everyday habits, etc., and talking about the Kolkhozian village and its achievements in material terms of increased production and collective organization Serguei Danilin, “La Familia Vinokurov,” La Mujer Soviйtica, 1951, 32-34.. That is, the separation between the personal wellbeing and the common good, although linked, still existed.

Additionally, in this narrative, a legal appeal to social rights was absent, although the understanding that such 'things' built with social funds were for the common good was implicit. This seems to be a striking feature of MS with its design aimed at advertising the Soviet model abroad, while also producing content for the domestic public. If, on the one hand, the state itself constantly reaffirmed and repeated the superiority of the Soviet system for its own citizens, on the other hand, it transitioned to a more prosaic view of certain facts of Soviet life that had already became naturalized by its own people. This is demonstrated, for example, in a text entitled Los primero catorce dias (The first fourteen days), on the care of newborn babies in the February 1963 issue. After a detailed explanation of what care a mother should have for her newborns, a final paragraph draws attention when it states that `As the magazine Soviet Woman is sent to many countries, it is not superfluous to remember that all medical care, doctor and nurse consultations in the polyclinic and at home are free.' Liudmila Podkaminer, “Los Primeros Catorce Dias,” La Mujer Soviйtica, February 1963, 39. Thus, it is explicit that, in a certain way, what was considered a presupposition of Soviet life, gratuitous health services, had to be reaffirmed abroad insofar as this situation was not necessarily found in other countries and was considered as a distinctive mark of how Soviet society designed its means of guaranteeing social rights.

Here I understand technology through the Marxist lens. Karl Marx, while explaining his vision about the distinctive character of modern machinery demonstrates how a machine was the combination of a power source (steam, electromagnetic, combustion) and a modified version of the tools commonly handled by the worker in his artisan mode of production. Unlike the human body which is limited by its natural physical constitution, Marx says, the machine is able to handle and move multiple tools at the same time. In a footnote he even proposed a history of technology and alluded to Darwin for drawing attention to the history of nature technologies, “in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life.” Karl Marx, O Capital. Crнtica Da Economia Polнtica, vol. 2, 1 3 (Sгo Paulo: Editora Nova Cultural, 1996), 8. Of course, Marx was mainly interested in material technology that revolutionized the productive forces by combining tools, power sources, mechanisms and production techniques. According to him, the merit of the great industry and technology was `[…] resolving each process into its constituent movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of man, created the new modern science of technology. The varied, apparently unconnected, and petrified forms of the industrial processes now resolved themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects.' Marx, 2:114. Ernst Mandel Ernest Mandel, O Capitalismo Tardio (Sгo Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1982), 81-82., criticized the use of the terms first, second and third industrial revolutions, advocating instead, only one industrial revolution with subsequent technological revolutions that changed the main power sources as the driving force of the machinery. Steam, electrical and combustion engines were the divisive aspect of these different periods.

Following this thread, but avoiding forced analogies, we could say that the materialities described in the journal MS work narratively as a kind of social technology that combined legal principles and technics, instruments, methods and material devices in a new complex to achieve a certain objective: the realization of social rights in an efficient and integrated manner. In a way, since neither social rights nor the devices used to guarantee them were Soviet inventions, the discourse stands out precisely in the way these elements were decomposed, then reorganized and driven by a different force and with another social orientation. The discursive power source was undoubtedly the state, that sponsored and directed the use of the different devices. In other words, even if the USSR has not itself invented aviation, the Soviet system, incarnated in the form of its state, was thus the protagonist both of the scientific achievement capable of producing a rocket that puts man in space, and of the social technology that produces this very same man, molded as an emancipated being.

An evidence that the idea that a new social technology was portrayed in Soviet propaganda appeared in the mentions of the use of the palaces of the former aristocracy of St. Petersburg. In the article Relatos de Leningrado (Leningrad Stories), on the occasion of the city's 250th anniversary, the following statement can be found: “Relatos de Leningrado,” La Mujer Soviйtica, June 1956, 21.

The palaces that made Petersburg famous are still wonderful. The architects take care of them. But now they have a new owner. In the Winter Palace, the former residence of the Tsar, the artistic treasures of the Hermitage Museum are exhibited. In the Marble Palace there is a branch of the Lenin Museum, and in Anichkov, the Pioneers Palace... One of the palaces of the great princes is now called the Labor Palace and belongs to the trade unions; another has been handed over to the men of science, who have set up their club there. Museums, Houses of Culture, institutions useful to the people: that is what there is now in the palaces.

What can we extract from this passage? That there were two clear specific temporalities in the same space, but that narratively look like completely different places: Petersburg versus Leningrad. In the first, the palaces belonged to the aristocracy that used them for their personal purposes, already in Leningrad, the same palaces were then used for the people as useful institutions. Thus, it was the use of things, their social orientation that distinguished not only times, but also places: Leningrad was the place where palaces served the whole people. Another partial conclusion demonstrated here was that the Soviet order did not always built new things from scratch, or that it had to demolish the past to reconstruct something new. In this case, the new and the best are dictated mainly by their social orientation.

Social rights technology as civilizing tool

In this narrative, social rights were considered as a form of modernity that reached its peak through the Russian Revolution and the installation of Soviet power. Like any idea of modernity and civilization is based on existence in a non-modern otherness, in which for some reason the backwarded did not reach the same social stage. The modern `self' is entrusted with a civilizing mission to the non-modern 'they'. This same narrative was presented in history in different ways, whether in its religious, ideological, economic or political forms. In many cases, this civilizing mission took on violent contours. In the narrative presented here, the civilizing mission intends to bring social rights and social security to peoples without rights or protection.

It is worth recalling the great attention and prominence that MS gave, since its beginning, to the different Soviet nationalities, to the peoples of Central Asia that made up the USSR, to East Asia (Korea and China), and to the popular democracies of Eastern Europe. The diversity of nationalities crowded the magazine pages. Tobias Rupprecht, “Globalisation And Internationalism Beyond The North Atlantic: Soviet-Brazilian Encounters And Interactions During The Cold War,” in Internationalism, Imperialism And The Formation Of The Contemporary World (Cambridge and Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 330. It was possible to find many articles published by natives or by Russian correspondents visiting these places. In this sense, a typical “civilizationist” movement that went from the center to the periphery and that brought the peripherals to the center, was a noticeable feature.

Naturally, the integration effort was accompanied by a simultaneous movement of ethical-political exclusion of those who were not faithful to the current Soviet party line. Such was the case of Yugoslavia, Hungary and China. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the trend to integrate peoples who were previously under the colonial yoke continued, but with two fundamental differences: one that ties with these countries were no longer dependent on them to follow the Soviet primer to the letter; and geopolitically it was no longer limited to the outskirts of Soviet territory. This section is devoted to analyze the “civilizing” discourse, that appeared sometimes evidently and other times more implicitly in the Soviet messages contained in MS, and how the social rights and all the social technology embed on them became a tools to “lift” these people from the previous situation of servitude and impoverishment. .

The article Aqui se extendia la taiga (Here there was taiga) by a writer who visited the city of Beresnik in the krai of Perm, near the Ural Mountains, in the 1930s, explained this characteristic. When she returned her accounts on the transformations of the town were emblematic G. Selma, “Aqui Se Extendia La Taiga,” La Mujer Soviйtica, February 1963, 10.: `Thirty years later I go back to Beresniki. [...] The panorama of the city opens up before me and although I was predisposed to see it transformed, it surpassed all my suppositions. [...] It is a great modern city with important companies, high buildings, spacious squares and gardens.' There was evidently in this discourse a vision and image of modernity associated with infrastructure, with material production in opposition to the virgin nature of the taiga, which previously dominated the region. But this was just one aspect that has been extensively researched and analyzed from the most current views of modernity.

Figure 4 - Article 'Aquн se extendia la taiga' in the pager of La Mujer Soviйtica

Source: La Mujer Soviйtica, 1964, nє 11, pp. 10-11.

On other side of this modernity view was that of social rights and its particular form of technology implemented in order to modernize this site. She continued the article stating: Selma, 10. `Beresniki has three palaces of culture, sports palace, dramatic theater, numerous libraries. There are 90 kindergartens and nurseries, twenty middle schools and 8 schools of expertise. The number of shops and canteens approaches 200. They cross the called trolleybus lines, the traffic is very lively.' In this sense, modernity was also associated with the existence of social devices to promote rights materialized in schools, palaces of culture, gardens, etc. The reach of civilization to these spaces occurred discursively according to the degree of installation of these structures. A game of temporalities was explicit together with the relationship between humanity and nature. The people of Berezniki used to be mixed up with the taiga, so that even if there were human populations, they were only a mere continuation of the biome and its vegetation. Modernity appeared only when the separation between men and nature became evident and the institutions that make human beings unique social beings had flourished in the midst of the taiga through Soviet power.This idea, in some sense, appears to be close the the Marxist Lukacsian concept of sociality and the lowering of natural barriers. However, one can see how the concept behind this Soviet view was still very narrow in Marxist terms, because even suggesting that social apparatuses to increase the quality of life are a key part on increasing sociality, there was a clear negligence on the irreversable links between men and nature and the quality of this socialization. Gyцrgy Lukбcs, “As Bases Ontolуgicas Do Pensamento e Da Atividade Do Homem. [The Ontological Bases of Man's Thought and Activity],” in O Jovem Marx e Outros Escritos de Filosofia [The Young Marx and Other Philosophical Writings] (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ, 2009), 225-45. It is important to note, therefore, that the traditional separation between civilization and barbarism remained in the messages contained in MS. However, this separation occurred here between subjects with and without social rights, with and without social and legal protection. This protection appeared to have a different meaning, in a sense that one was protected to the extent that the state provided with what was necessary to live in the different scopes of human needs.

The establishment of this civilization was capable of crossing the Urals and reached Siberia and the Arctic, N. Sikov, “En El Grado de Latitude Norte,” La Mujer Soviйtica, December 1964. to the extent that Soviet social technologies were implemented. In a report called Asн somos en Siberia (That's how we are in Siberia) about life in Siberia that narrated several episodes and characters, some observations are remarkable. First, the author mentioned his visit to Siberia with a group of hikers in Bratsk. On the occasion, he met Alexei Marchuk, whose characteristics of a human multipurpose were evident. Marchuk was a worker, graduated in professional education and had an approved project on the closure of a riverbed; he defended his doctoral thesis on the economics in the construction of dams; he wrote good articles for the press; he was a poet, and still played the guitar very well. Vladimir Volodkin, “Asн Somos En Siberia,” La Mujer Soviйtica, December 1964, 24. The story continued when the author related his visit to two Siberian engineers he had already met on another occasion. In his apartment he admired the quantity of books on philosophy, with Plato, Descartes; brochures with illustrations by Van Gogh and Repin; poetry and literature by Whitman, Briusov, Tolstoy, Hemingway; records by Bach, Chopin, Massenet. Volodkin, 24. The individuals portrayed in this narrative appeared as carriers of a universal culture. Even if the local culture was not declared erased, it does not seem to be enough to translate the civilizational conquest that had arrived in Siberia. The Soviet messages seemed to preach a supposed omnidirectionality of the subjects described. The “New man” was a multipurpose man. war marxist diplomatic civilization

In addition, the definition of nationalities appears to be distinct in the reporting of a visit by Australian writer Frank Hardy who was conducting an ethnography in the region. Hardy allegedly asked a group of girls what their nationalities were: `- We are Siberians - they replied. It is a new ethnographic “category” that does not distinguish by the color of the skin nor because it has more or less oblique eyes, but by its works and its efforts.' And their efforts and works were precisely characterized in terms of material development, but also the implementation of social technologies. The author then quotes their achievements by listing the 16 urban schools in Bratsk, the TV station, the two clubs, a theatre project, the numerous shops and canteens. Again, the technology of social rights was not separated from the industrial technology pursued obstinately by the direction of the USSR: `The architects have designed a new type of modern industrial city, where the taiga, with its exuberant vegetation, and the seashore are used as extensive rest areas.' `[...] By 1970 there will already be twenty of these micro-districts, in these areas will be built a large warehouse with winter garden, many cafes and a modern cinema. Trolleybus lines will facilitate the movement inside the city.'

Volodkin, 25.

In the above mentioned 1964 issue of the magazine, with fourteen years of difference, the discourse was still coherent with another article of MS in the last edition of 1950. In it, the author claimed to the Soviet power the merit of having ended the supposedly scientific idea of the existence of superior and inferior races, criticizing the Tsarist treatment given to the so-called Indians of Central Asia who did not deserve to be educated, in the view of the Empire. The main theme revolved around the Alisher Novoi University in Uzbekistan, in which the construction of many educational institutions was cited. V. Galina, “La Universidad Alisher Navoi,” La Mujer Soviйtica, 1950, 25. In this article, Uzbekistan was characterized as a former Russian colony, in which 98% of the population was illiterate and then, with the establishment of Soviet power, this situation changed completely. After citing the implementation of various social rights devices, it concluded with a quotation of Stalin: `One of the most important results of the October Revolution - comrade Stalin teaches - is the fact of having demonstrated in practice that the non-European peoples liberated and attracted to the course of Soviet development are capable of promoting a truly advanced culture and a truly advanced civilization, not inferior in any way to that of the European peoples.' Galina, 26.

The new civilization, therefore, was that created by the liberated peoples and which followed the Soviet development pattern. This civilization was more authentic than the European one, precisely because it followed the civilizing march of the Soviet model. In this sense, if on the one hand this discourse legitimized the struggles for liberation of the peoples of the world, at that time when several European colonies still existed in Africa and Asia, mainly, on the other hand, it conditioned its recognition as a true civilization to its fidelity to the Soviet model.

Social backwardness was mostly denoted in political terms. In an Estonian kolkhoz in the village of Oisu, an article called La baroneza y el antiguo ordenanza (The baroness and the old order) reported the visit of a MS correspondent to the peasant August Matas. The whole article was a story of his life entangled with the story of his village. First, he mentioned points of rupture: the October revolution and the defeat of Soviet power in Estonia during the Civil War that would have resumed servitude, then the liberation of the Nazi occupation and the new moment of the Soviet power in Estonia. Tamara Guerisamova, “La Baroneza y La Antiga Ordenanza,” La Mujer Soviйtica, November 1964, 18.

In a narrative adorned with literary details mixed with the positive facts of his new life, she recounted his trajectory in a peculiar way. He supposedly was still in contact with the former German baroness whom he served in the past. She sent him a letter asking how life was going. His answer to the baroness was virtually transplanted to the article in question. August's voice was mixed with that of the journalist so that they were almost indistinguishable. The new political order was the start of a new time: `[...] how suddenly I ceased to be the baron's ordinance and became the owner, how the lives of our peasants have changed. [...] Now, Oisu, with all the surrounding villages, form an agricultural cooperative. The only witness of the past is the linden walk that goes from the road to the place where his old house was.' Tamara Guerisamova, 19.

The changes, although started from those who are in power did not stop there, it inaugurated the transformation of the lives of the peasants. In a very interesting way, he declared that the only witness of the past is the pavement that leads to the baron's old house. A material and inanimate thing, since people also transformed, was no longer witness of the past.

Figure 5 - Article 'La baroneza y el antiguo ordenanza'' in the pages of La Mujer Soviйtica

Source: La Mujer Soviйtica, 1964, nє 11, pp. 19-20.

The new social rights technology started to play its role when he declared that `The garden where the young lady played now occupies 10 hectares, and has become a garden for all the children. Our Kolkhozians do not live any worse than the old lords. On the sides of the promenade there are more than 20 new brick houses, built with the funds of the cooperative.' Tamara Guerisamova, 19. Besides the economic and technical aspect of their situation which was also narrated, the new place was defined by the opportunity to enjoy an improvement of life conditions. And this was only possible when the countryside, understood as a periphery of society, achieved the level of its center: `In a new building you will find the board of the cooperative and the club. In the construction of the building I took part with the other Kolkhozians. Before, we had no idea what a theatre was. Then we started to visit the theatres of Tallinn and Tartu. And now we no longer need to travel: the theatre companies come to our village.' Guerisamova, 20. Here the civilizing aspect of the social rights technology became crystal clear. The distinctive role of the social rights technology was to bring civilization materialized in the theatre that was not something which belonged anymore solely to the people of the city, but also to the inhabitants of rural areas. The social rights technology was a producer of civilization, fine arts connoisseurs.

To summarize the set of arguments presented here, it can be concluded that, according to this discourse, the notion of Soviet civilization is associated with the emergence of social rights, the protection of the state and the law and the corresponding technologies that need to materialize and implement these rights. The existence of public social rights devices was a sign of modernization and civilization, their lack was barbarism and backwardness. Individuals, as emancipated and multipurpose beings, bearers of a universal culture, were the direct product of this civilizing technology. The superiority of the “Soviet civilization” that was born in Soviet Russia was expressed not by racial or phenotypic terms, but by criteria of the quality of social achievements mediated by its protector and sponsor: the state.

2.6 Forms of textual and visual discourse: a catalogue of social rights

So far, I have sought to put under analytical scrutiny the main content of the propagandistic messages, that is, to organize in an intelligible narrative the main trends observable in Soviet discourse under the judgment of a contemporary and external spectator. In this brief section, I intend to present some observations of the formal dimension of propaganda, in the field of the written word and visual language. Many works on this historiographic field dedicated to visual analysis have this kind of approach as their main focus. The works of Katerina Romanenko, Katerina Romaneko, “The Visual Language of Soviet Illustrated Magazines in the 1930s: Rabotnitsa, Krestianka, and USSR in Construction” (PhD Thesis, New York, The City University of New York, 2012). Juliana de la Torres, Juliana de la Torres, “Imagens Das Mulheres Na Imprensa Comunista Brasileira (1945/1957),” Domнnios Da Imagem, no. 7 (November 2010): 77-96. and Anastasiia Utiuzh Utiuzh, “The Portrayal of Women in the Oldest Russian Women's Magazine `Rabotnitsa' From 1970-2017.” are clear examples of this. Although I have not developed a more sophisticated methodology for this kind of analysis because it is not the central problem, I believe it is possible to address these problems in a way that highlights some of the main characteristics of the forms of discourse present in Soviet propaganda.

Figures three, four, and five above in the previous sections of this work were what was called by the journal itself as photo-reportage. One of the most striking and immediately observable features is its large number of photos distributed throughout its pages. One or two larger photos and another portion of small photos, which displayed different scenes. An individual receiving medical attention, a group of small girls practicing ballet, people enjoying their leisure in parks, and workers skiing in vacation could be seen. Textually, this was represented through listing all sorts of devices and institutions that were serving the people, according to the narrative. Some sample texts of a clear quantification of social devices and institutions can be spotted in the previous sections. In this work I presented a few of these photo-reportage, but without any shadow of doubt, MS magazine was filled with other similar samples. I ask for the reader to hold this observation for now so that I can expose and discuss the parts before the whole appears in a more understandable way.

In the pages of the MS magazine in the early 1950s there was a very clear separation between literary and factual, between messages that, although still based on socialist realism, are embellished textually and visually, and the others in the form of reports or political manifestos. For instance, each issue of the magazine contained at least one tale or story, whether fictional or real, it had a literary setting but still loaded with meaning suitable for the purposes of Soviet propaganda. As discussed by Tolstikova, the fictionalized short stories were an important part of Rabonitsa popularity and were present since its very beginning before the revolution. It seems that this genre played an important role in Soviet Woman as well. Visually, the images that accompanied the tales were always drawn illustrations, as seen in the figure below.

Figure 6 - En el campo, Yuri Usichenko

Source: La Mujer Soviйtica, 1953, nє 04, p. 23

The use of photographs and illustrations in the early 1950s was still quite secondary. Photographs were, in general, just another element between blocks of text. They were placed in a very pragmatic and Cartesian way. With the exception of the images, usually the reproduction of a painting or a photograph, that marked the beginning or end of a report and therefore gained more prominence, most of the illustrations and photographs were squeezed between large blocks of text. Perhaps it is safe to say that in the early 1950s visual language was effectively subordinated to textual language. It was, in fact, only an extension and a mere adornment to the written word, which was the privileged mean of communication employed by the magazine editors. For further research, maybe it would be worthy to employ text-mining techniques to confirm this observation with more accurate data.

During the late 1950s, the relationship between the written word and visual language changed. The magazine started to use more systematically the photo-montage, a technique that had already gained artistic status in the 1930s. According to Katerina Romanenko, the editors of illustrated magazines saw photo-montage as a way of organizing the visual material and giving continuity to a narrative, while photography was still the most accurate way to portray reality. Romaneko, “The Visual Language of Soviet Illustrated Magazines in the 1930s: Rabotnitsa, Krestianka, and USSR in Construction,” 123. There was still a separation between literary and factual, considering that the fictional tales and romanticized records were still present in this later period, accompanied by their classical-drawn illustrations with a style that did not change much from the one observed in figure 6. However, in some ways, in the later period I noticed a change on how the narrative was shaped. The reportages were written with the inclusion of some embellishment details: long descriptions of how the interviewee was met, how the buildings and the landscape looked like during the authors visits, how the weather was during that day, etc. They were still very much attached to facts and data, but this was usually presented after some more literary paragraphs. In this sense, photo-series and photo-montage became more used as visual language and the use of photography also became more fluid. Take a look at these images from three different years and issues of the MS magazine:

Figure 7 - Comparison between years 1951, 1956 and 1964 of La Mujer Soviйtica

Source: La Mujer Soviйtica, 1951 nє 03, pp. 22-23, 1956 nє 12, pp. 06-07, 1964 nє 05, pp. 08-09.

All these reports had a similar purpose: to inform and convince the recipient of messages about the social and human achievements of the Soviet people. The first, from 1951, was dedicated to saluting the educational effect on children by learning different kinds of crafts in formal education; the second, from 1956, was about working women who were also athletes and celebrated their successes, talking about their lives and their plans; while the last, from 1964, addressed women scientists working in laboratories for the use of chemicals in agriculture. The genre was practically the same in terms of content, but different in terms of form. Soviet life was evidently more romanticized and “colorful” in later years. All the texts contained literary elements to embellish the data and the political statements, but in 1951's only the first paragraph was dedicated to describe the lives of the children in the Serpukhov village, while the others had proportionally bigger parts dedicated to adorning and inciting emotions.

There was a shift in quantity and character of the visual language employed by the editors comparing the early and later period of the magazine. More photos, more illustrations, and more reproduction of paintings were used. But also, more photo-montage and photo-series techniques were observable. Both in textual and visual language, literary elements and other forms of embellishment, gained more and more space.

Back to the issue of the use of color photography, some trends could also be noted in MS magazine. For example, in the early 1950s, the use of color pages was practically restricted to the reproduction of oil paintings. These paintings were used in different ways sometimes being part of an article about art, and other times figuring as an adornment and separator of the magazine's materials, covering a whole page. In the latter case, paintings with scenes from the revolutionary period or the Great Patriotic War and portraits of Lenin and Stalin, appeared frequently. Reproductions of oil paintings were widely used in the pages of MS magazine in the early 1950s. Representations and mentions of Stalin naturally reduced after 1953 and practically disappeared after 1956. Lenin became the face of the revolutionary past. Khrushchev appeared very often during his leadership and seemed to be replacing the cult image, but his appearance was always through photographs.

In his book, John Berger demonstrated how modern advertising not only mimicked aspects of the visual language of the European oil painting tradition, but in some cases used reproductions of the paintings themselves to sell products. According to Berger, John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporate and Penguin Books, 1972), 139-40. `Publicity is in essence nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. […] Publicity makes all history mythical, but to do so effectively it needs a visual language with historical dimension.'

Nostalgia played a big role in MS magazine. Many of the articles already mentioned above had representations of the past. The past was usually depicted through an epic narrative, in which the people was living in misery, women being oppressed and, most importantly, were depraved from their rights. Until the Great October Revolution came into scene, led by the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Stalin, which destroyed the old order and built the new positive life which everyone was living then. In some cases, the narrative starts a bit later, especially for the Popular Democracies: the people in these countries were oppressed and exploited by the fascists, when the Red Army liberated them and paved the way for their new life. In these narratives, history was basically complete. The Soviet version of socialism was the peak of History. History was glorified and mythicized textually and visually while combining these different languages. Lenin and Stalin were elevated to the Pantheon, praised as great leaders in a similar way that ancient heroes were consecrated.

However, this nostalgic epic tale was not used to sell the future, as Berger claimed to be the case of capitalist publicity, but to legitimize the present. The almost omnipresence references to a disgraceful past was observable during the whole period of the magazine here in analysis. In Soviet propaganda present in MS magazine, the future was now. The future was only an enlarged version of the present. The present was quantified. I invite the reader to revisit the first observation I made to the MS visual language at the beginning of this section. The photo-reportage format had one or two large photographs displaying a place or a person which was the main character, followed by a series of small or tiny photos portraying different scenes of the story. Not rarely, these scenes were people exercising their rights, in schools, having medical attention, or having leisure. Textually, it was frequent to find long lists of public services: houses, hospitals, clinics, sanatoriums, day care centers, schools, universities, theaters, cinemas, Palaces of Culture, libraries, galleries, parks, squares, canteens, subways, and buses. The essence of the future was then already given in the present: provision by the state to everyone and free access to these services for all. What was left to be done was simply to make more of what they already had. The only difference between the already heavenly present and the future was a distinction between quantities, since the main quality was already settled.

In addition, a transition in the use of photographs and images in general was visible. Instead of the faces of Lenin and Stalin every five pages, other faces began to appear more frequently. The faces of quasi-anonymous people, but with different forms, told the same epic story. Romanenko Romaneko, “The Visual Language of Soviet Illustrated Magazines in the 1930s: Rabotnitsa, Krestianka, and USSR in Construction,” 130. had already observed the transition in the 1930s from glorification of the masses to individuals, with the use of photo-montage to highlight everyday heroes, like the Stakhanovists. In the later period of the MS magazine the afore mentioned epic tale was told in a different way. The everyday heroes were used as samples of the general glory. As mentioned earlier, the photo-reportage was a very popular genre in MS magazine. They would usually tell a story about a person, a family, group of people, a place or an institution. They were the apparent protagonists and main actors of these stories. But the story was not really about them.

The nostalgia feature, altogether with the epic tale, appeared not in an official and accredited by Soviet historiography way, as in a history textbook, but through the supposed protagonists of the stories. The stories projected the history of Soviet Union through these different protagonists. The great changes in lives of some workers in Leningrad enjoying their vacations in some sanatorium, how wonderful and fulfilled life of women reconciling work and motherhood, or the enlightened peasants of some distant village in Siberia or Caucasus. And this was only possible because of the Great October Revolution and the foundation of the Soviet state. The Soviet propaganda would constantly repeat its autobiography using these people or places as pieces of it, as products of this big story. Such photo-reportages used mainly photo-montage and photo-series, putting the apparent protagonist in the spotlight and building an intelligible narrative to tell and retell the epic and autobiographical tale textually and visually.

The MS magazine, however, as stated above, faced the difficulty of being addressed to the Soviet and foreign public simultaneously. Soviet advertising was quite different from capitalist one, which displayed glamorous products and people that were regarded as enviable, but their status was achievable through a simple economic transaction. Soviet social rights were not available in an immediate dimension. They could not be achieved by a simple visit to the nearest mall. They needed to be earned in other ways. Instead of envy, therefore, Soviet propaganda sought to incite admiration, a sense of grandeur only available to people who had been through great trials and could call themselves sublime. That is not to say that there was no interest in provoking real changes in other societies, since, as mentioned, it transmitted an alternative but encompassing polity paradigm. Moreover, from the correspondence analyzed, the women of the SWC were always attentive and enthusiastic about social progress abroad. But before militants for social causes, Soviet propaganda sought to attract admirers, wanted to be the object of veneration, and sought the monopoly of social progress. In its pages, its followers were greeted, such as Cuba and the early years of popular China, but the deviants were demonized. To suit an international policy that Losurdo Domenico Losurdo, Fuga Da Histуria? A Revoluзгo Russa e a Revoluзгo Chinesa Vistas de Hoje [Escape from History? The Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution Seen from Today] (Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2004). classified as `aggressive internationalism,' the Soviet propaganda expressed in MS was evidently narcissistic.

At this point, it now seems reasonable to present the main argument of this dedicated one the forms of speech from the visual point of view. Again, it would be possible to write many other theses exclusively dedicated to this purpose, so that these few pages have no intention of exhausting this debate. The main point to which I refer is that the magazine La Mujer Soviйtica expresses in its form of propaganda a kind of catalogue. In this catalogue, there were not tactile things that could be acquired by the reader, but ideal projections of how life could be, expressed through supposedly real scenes of the present life in USSR, normativity. In this catalogue, social rights technology, its applications and products were announced. It acted as a mediation between the dissatisfied desire of its target audience and the real possibility of satisfying it. It was a meeting point between vague references and literary details that adorned stories blended with the will to present convincing facts about life in the USSR. Not exactly a model of socialism to be followed to the heart, but an alternative polity paradigm.

3. Between syncretism and orthodoxy: how the Brazilian audience received the soviet messages

As mentioned in the first chapter of this work, to achieve our goal of analyzing social rights in Soviet propaganda, it is not enough just to investigate the messages themselves and their authors, but to whom they were addressed and what their impact was on the target audience. Of course, even an idea propagated repeatedly and almost unisonally and cohesively by different political organizations cannot ensure a homogeneous effect on subjects who have their own visions and different origins even if they are united by a common cause. This chapter is therefore aimed at analyzing how the Soviet messages to Brazilian audience reached their destiny and how it was received in a diverse and plural manner. Naturally, it would be absurd to assume that MS magazine was the only source of information that Brazilians had in favor or against the Soviet Union.

I focused on this particular network of interlocutors that revolved around the magazine as a sample of those who had direct contact to the Soviet propaganda. To understand this, however, I did not employ a singular and subjectivist analysis of the particular apprehensions of each interlocutor, but rather a general view on the trends presented on their discourse relating it with the Brazilian context to understand how was the reception of Brazilians who were or not MS readers. Before going through the sources, a short piece of context might be helpful to those not familiar with Brazil's history. As Conrad Conrad, What Is Global History, 81. asserted, a piece of good Global History work should not limit its attention to the origin of the transfer of ideas -, or in our case, of a particular polity paradigm - but also it has to explore how can a concept be attractive to its recipients, what was the context behind this connections that made possible the circulation of these paradigm.

Brazilian historiography, which covers the period from 1946 to 1964, orbits around one key concept - populism - also diverging in its meaning or whether it is appropriate to use this word to designate state policies in this historical interlude. It is not by chance that this historical period is commonly called the “populist Republic”. The previous period, called Estado Novo (New State), comprised Getъlio Vargas' dictatorship that lasted from 1937 to 1946 and was characterized by a partial rupture with the republic of the state oligarchies and expanded the centralization of the state and the still small industrialization of the country. In this way, we are talking about a politically limited Even admitting for the first time the unrestricted vote for property and the vote of both sexes, the illiterate population, which was almost half, was prohibited from voting. To get an idea, in the 1955 elections, of a country with a population of almost 52 million, approximately 24 million were illiterate, 19 million of them living in rural areas. democratic regime, a backward country seeking paths to “development” and a historical period full of turbulence. Of the various presidents who have governed in the meantime, two have completed the mandate for which they were elected, one has committed suicide, one has resigned and the last has suffered a military coup.

In order to avoid confusion of political connotations with words, it is necessary to highlight some relevant information. The first of these is that nationalism in Brazil was not necessarily a right-wing political position. On the contrary, several political actors of the left cultivated nationalist positions that could range from the defense of independence and national sovereignty to an open anti-imperialism, generally aiming against the US and its ostensible influence and dominance on the American continent as a whole. What I call nationalism here in this work can range from conservatives, leftist Catholics (Liberation Theology), labor-wing to communists. They generally had a position that preached a stronger presence of the state in encouraging industrialization, including with nationalization of certain parts of the economy. They generally included in their program demands from workers and an independent international position from the USA.

Their antagonists, whom I call here the entreguist sector, were conservatives, tied to the big landowners, the oligarchies, the banks, the industrialists and most of the press. They wanted development, just like their opponents, but through greater foreign capital investment and public financing only for their private businesses, without attacking profits or private property. The right wing of the Catholic Church was also in that field which repudiated atheistic communism and everything it considered an attack on “Western Christian civilization”. Their international alignment was mainly with the US and they generally practiced a policy of automatic alignment. The tricky part is that both sides considered themselves patriots, one fighting American imperialism and other the Communist threat. Both sides had development, modernization and industrialization as goals, but through different means and with distinct meanings altogether.

Within this social and political universe, orthodoxy and syncretism were the two main ways in which the Brazilian public, mostly from the first group mentioned, received and passed on their views on the USSR and the propaganda for which it was subjected. Orthodoxy, was in the sense adhering, at least formally, to all the conceptions conveyed by the Soviet propaganda, including all its lexicon and typical forms of expression. In the other pole, although not disagreeing and maintaining sympathy for the USSR and its worldviews, another part of the Brazilian public mixed the messages received with its own religious, idyllic and romantic worldviews. Something that, therefore, I characterize as a syncretic line of the reception of Soviet propaganda. In the orthodox pole, agents who were communist militants predominated; in the syncretic, individuals sympathetic to the ideas of social justice, social rights, and equality, but who were not part of the communist movement and not in favor of a revolution and were sometimes engaged in the labor movement.

3.1 The Federation of Brazilian Women

In the first chapter of this work I mentioned that both the WIDF and the editor's policy of the MS magazine Peri, “New Soviet Woman: The Post-World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad,” 643., changed their guidelines and started to pay more attention sought to intervene in the events of the so-called “Third World” countries. An intense decolonization movement in Africa and Asia occurred simultaneously with a growing struggle for democratic reforms in the already politically and formally independent Latin American countries. In Brazil, the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) also took part in this movement and, among the different organizational fronts, dedicated efforts to also promote the women's movement.

Although with a different character, PCB already had experience in building women's movements in the past, when in 1933 the Working Women's Committee was created and in 1935 founded a women's section of the National Liberation Alliance (ANL), the Women's Union of Brazil. Monteiro and Barros, 28; Cecнlia M. B. Sardenberg and Ana Alice Costa, “Feminismos, Feministas e Movimentos Sociais,” in Mulher e Relaзхes de Gкnero (Sгo Paulo: Loyola, 1994), 101. But even before founding the Federation of Brazilian Women (FMB), a newspaper was created in Rio de Janeiro in 1947. Torres, “Imagens Das Mulheres Na Imprensa Comunista Brasileira (1945/1957),” 83. Entitled O Momento Feminino (The Feminine Moment), its pages dealt with a multitude of topics ranging from domestic issues such as cooking, sewing, child care, to political issues such as education, women's emancipation, and the plight of the economy. Tauana Olнvia Gomes Silva, “Mulheres Negras Nos Movimentos de Esquerda Durante a Ditadura No Brasil (1964-1985)” (PhD Thesis, Rennes, Universitй Rennes and Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2019), 55-56. Its slogan was 'The Feminine Moment: a newspaper for all women' or 'the newspaper for your home', and it was consistent with the analysis of other researchers as the newspaper is marked by an effort to reach a multiplicity of women, housewives, factory workers, farmers, intellectuals and the middle class. In its pages, besides the written word, illustrations that portrayed different scenarios of Brazilian women's lives in the mid-20th century were also used. Torres, “Imagens Das Mulheres Na Imprensa Comunista Brasileira (1945/1957),” 83-85.

Its main early leadership was Arcelina Mochel, a PCB activist who was a councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro between 1947 and 1951, when the party was made illegal and her term was revoked. Mochel as chief-editor of MF, also became one of the leaders of the Federation of Brazilian Women. In 1949, the Federation of Brazilian Women was founded and the newspaper MF became its main advertising medium. The FMB was founded, in a way, from top to bottom. There were already regional women's unions, especially in the large urban centres of the country. The entity was then first chaired by Mochel and Alice Tibiriзб, a well-known leader of suffragism and the Brazilian oil nationalization campaign that gave rise to the still existing company Petrobras. Monteiro and Barros, Mulher: Da Luta e Dos Direitos, 25; Sardenberg and Costa, “Feminismos, Feministas e Movimentos Sociais,” 101. While Mochel was member of the Communist Party, Tibiriзб was just not, which showed that the Federation was not strictly communist since its very beginning. Anita Leocadia Prestes, Anita Prestes interviewed by Giovanny Simon Machado. The creation came from the initiative of the Women's Association of the Federal District (then located in Rio de Janeiro) and other national associations initially covering eleven of the twenty-six federative units. Silva, “Mulheres Negras Nos Movimentos de Esquerda Durante a Ditadura No Brasil (1964-1985),” 366. Both the periodical and the FMB began to have a nationwide expression, becoming important entities in Brazilian political life.