Agitprop
Political propaganda in the arts and in street-level campaigning, from the Soviet Department of Agitation and Propaganda. Agitation moves many people with a few ideas; propaganda moves a few people with many. Agitprop did both, through posters, theater, film, and trains.
The compound comes from the Otdel agitatsii i propagandy, the department of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee set up in 1920 to coordinate both. The two halves were a distinction the party took seriously. In the formula Lenin quoted from Plekhanov, the propagandist presents many ideas to a few people and the agitator presents one or two ideas to a mass of people; the propagandist writes the pamphlet, the agitator gives the speech at the factory gate.
Agitprop as a practice meant the whole apparatus that put the formula to work in a largely illiterate country: the agit-trains and agit-boats painted with posters that traveled the rail network during the Civil War, the ROSTA windows that put stencilled cartoons in shop fronts, the street theater and the "living newspaper", and the poster art, by Mayakovsky, Moor, and others, that remains the most studied in the archive. Its techniques were mostly visual and emotional: Common Enemy, Dehumanization of the class enemy, Slogan, and Repetition.
The word crossed into English in the 1930s and widened to mean any art with an open political purpose, usually said with disapproval. In that sense it is still used of theater, murals, and protest graphics of every political color.
Sources
- Kenez, Peter. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0521313988
- Lenin, V. I. What Is to Be Done? 1902. In Collected Works, vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961.
- Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.