Model Soviet City of the Brezhnev Era: The Image of Kharkiv in Selected Propaganda Texts

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present the image of Kharkiv in propaganda materials from the period of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule addressed to foreign recipients. Three key threads repeated in narratives about Kharkiv were distinguished by the author: the relative “youth” of the city, its industrial character and the functioning of a strong academic center. The critical analysis of the propaganda discourse is based on the assumption that the language used was the carrier of ideology, i.e. it did not report reality, but its ideological vision. The image of Kharkiv emerging from the analysis is a vision of a city fulfilling the model Soviet standard: neither a communist ideal that Moscow was nearing, nor one with the exotic flair of the Caucasus or Central Asia. It was a Soviet model typicality: a large, modern industrial metropolis, ideologically correct, exemplifying the core, Slavic-European part of the USSR. Thus its promotion was in fact the promotion of the Soviet system as a whole.