North Caucasian regional press as an actor of the Bolshevik totalitarian regime

Abstract

The establishment of Soviet power in the North Caucasus was largely due to the support of national movements. Journalism was used by the authorities as an instrument of socio-political management of society and as a means of shaping authoritarian-totalitarian thinking. Soviet historical science developed a concept which argued that the Bolshevik authoritarian system, with its characteristic practice of mass repression and restrictions of freedom of speech, emerged in the 1930s in the process of consolidation of the Stalinist regime under the slogan of "intensifying the class struggle as one moves toward socialism". There are still many proponents of this concept in Russia today. Some politicians and scholars are still trying to rehabilitate communist theory under the banner of Leninism, without connecting it to Stalin's "bloody terror. An objective assessment of the role of local media in the ideological support of mass repressions in the North Caucasus has not yet been given. The author has made an attempt to revise some of the assertions and theses of studies carried out in the era of communist authoritarianism, which allows us to demonstrate the invalidity of the myth of mass support in the region for the ideological guidelines of the Bolshevik partyocracy. The work aims to identify the main trends in the transformation of the system of journalism of the peoples of the Northern Caucasus into a mouthpiece of Bolshevik power, to show the place of the press in the ideological context of Soviet totalitarianism. The article is a continuation of the author's works, devoted to the formation of the periodical press in the North Caucasus during the years of socialist modernization in 1917–1930.The methodology of the study is based on the principle of historicism, which reveals the interconnection and interdependence of social processes and the functioning of the press in specific historical conditions, as well as content analysis of periodicals.