Coming in from the Cold: British Propaganda and Red Army Defectors, 1945–1952

Abstract

During i 948, as the Cold War settled over a divided Europe, the British government became alarmed by the increasing volume and ferocity of Soviet propaganda directed against the West, the Marshall Plan, and the political viability of those Western European democracies to which US aid would flow.1 The propaganda offensive seemed but one part of a concerted Soviet attack in that year: the takeover of the Prague government by the Czech Communist party in a well-engineered coup in February, followed by the tightening blockade against West Berlin, and signs of Soviet pressure on Finland and the Scandinavian powers. To counter the Soviet propaganda offensive, Great Britain created a peacetime covert propaganda agency known as the Information Research Department (IRD).2 The IRD, housed at the foreign office, was a true child of the hightension atmosphere of international politics into which it was born, and typified the serious attention given to the ideology of the Cold War within Whitehall. There was even a perceptible sense of mission at the onset of the propaganda war: a paper prepared for the cabinet in 1951, defending the value of British propaganda, did not hesitate to describe the Cold War as a 'struggle for men's minds ... a struggle to determine whether the mass of mankind shall look for hope towards the Soviet Union or towards