The Molotov echo of the 1946 ideological campaign: the local media expose Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova

The essay analyses the participation of regional (Molotov) media in the 1946 political campaign initiated by the decision of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) "On the journals "Zvezda" and "Leningrad". Regional campaigns started after the report made by Zhdanov. The mechanism of the campaign assumed certain course of events: publications in major newspapers of the country, republication in local newspapers, discussions at the meetings of party activists and in all organizations, seeking for similar cases in regions which could lead to arrests. The author reveals the role of the regional press in the implementation of the 1946 political campaign. The media usually play the role of a "collective propagandist", "collective agitator" and "collective organizer" and people often believe the media more than actual events and their life experience. The process of forming a new power discourse on literature is analyzed according to the material of newspaper articles. The Molotov newspapers borrowed the rhetoric of the campaign: regional newspaper "The Star" reprinted the editorial article from "The Truth", calling for self-criticism but in general local newspapers joined the campaign separately and with different intensity of publications. The newspapers did not name any of the local artists who could be claimed as the local "Zoschenko". The campaign was unsystematic and was weakly governed from the centre. The initiators of the campaign were not interested in expanding the circle of victims, but pursued the ideological goals: to bring a new pathetic and authoritarian discourse of power, which in fact was a new version of the Soviet identity, to the collective consciousness of the Soviet intelligentsia. Local authorities closed their territory from unwanted consequences of Moscow's beginnings. They limited political effect of the national campaign rhetoric's mechanical duplication.