Word: ussr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...there was much agitation for more cultural exchanges between East and West several years ago, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to exchange illustrated monthly magazines describing life in the two countries. The Russian language Amerika has been distributed in the Soviet Union, and the English language USSR has been circulated here. A number of other magazines from Communist nations are now available in the United States, all designed like USSR to give Americans some notion of what things are really like in these mysterious lands...
...notable examples are Poland and China, which define the limits of the continuum from excellence to garbage along which USSR shuttles from issue to issue. Each of the three periodicals has the problem of presenting propoganda to an essentially hostile audience without repelling its readers, and each has found a different solution. China, by far the least ingenious, tries to bury its bitter pills in a sugary mass of art reproductions, smiling faces, and photographs of tractors, hoping that the unwary victim will swallow the whole glop at once. But, alas, the medicine is not very well concealed...
...USSR, much more clever, attempts to sweeten the pill itself, by avoiding inflammatory statements and using a very soft-sell of the myriad delights in the Workers' Paradise. Unfortunately, subtlety is not the Russians' forte. USSR at its best is an informative, mildly interesting pictorial magazine; at its worst it is almost a self-parody of Communist propaganda. Finally, Poland, a truly fine publication, has merely set about producing a good magazine, in the hope that sympathy for Poland will develop among its readers as a matter of course...
...USSR wisely avoids open attacks on the West, but it is often no less blatant in its efforts to convince than China (which recently ran a picture of several smiling Tibetan women filling the water jugs of two Chinese soldiers over the title: "The Tibetan people love the Liberation Army.") Thus, in a USSR article on Soviet legislative method, one reads, "In the Soviet Union, where every citizen is a statesman and a legislator and participates in administering the government, it is the people who write the laws," which sounds as false as the line from China. And while there...
...appearance, USSR far surpasses China. It is glossy and slick, well laid out, and written in a style approximating that of the National Geographic. Photography (including color) is infinitely better than in China. Still, USSR is hardly the sort of magazine most people would want to receive every month. As with Pravda: you've read one, you've read...