Office of the Historian

961.61/9–850

The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Kirk) to the Secretary of State 1

restricted
No. 79
Moscow, September 8, 1950.

The Inspiring Example of Soviet Man

The new “Soviet man” has been a favorite domestic Soviet propaganda theme for some years.2 Endowed with graces possessed not even in full measure by the twelve disciples, and in some respects strongly reminiscent of Little Lord Fauntleroy, this mythical creature has been extolled by Soviet writers as an example of the beneficent effects upon the human race of the Marxist system.

A column and a half article by L. Karasin, published in Moskovskaya Pravda of September 5, 1950, carries this concept into the orbital field. The writer makes the not unexpected point that “… the successes in the socialist industralization of the new Hungary became possible owing to the unselfish assistance of the Soviet Union”. He then goes on to eulogize Soviet Stakhanovites3 who “are conveying their experience to the Hungarian workers”, and points up the gratitude of a Hungarian peasant delegation recently returned from an apparently successful study-tour of “the most advanced socialist agriculture in the world”.

This article, then, tends to personalize, on a familiar level, the oft-repeated claim that the USSR is making possible unheard of progress in the satellite nations. Not only do the Vulko Chervenkovs4 absorb the true faith at the knees of the Great Continuator; humbler builders of a new society may benefit from the experience of the toiling masses of the Soviet Union.

For the Ambassador:
John Evarts Horner

First Secretary of Embassy
  1. The Department was requested to distribute this despatch to Budapest, Bucharest, Warsaw, and Praha.↩
  2. For earlier illustrations of the growing propaganda line of exuberant exaltation of the Soviet citizen and man, see Foreign Relations, 1946, vol. vi, pp. 814–816, and ibid., 1947, vol. iv, p. 575.↩
  3. Stakhanovites were workers who, emulating the example of the coal miner Alexey Grigoryevich Stakhanov in 1935, endeavored in their work to exceed the established norms to increase the productivity of labor often to an extraordinary degree.↩
  4. Vulko Vulev Chervenkov was Prime Minister of Bulgaria.↩