Reception of professional language and foreign pr technologies in the late soviet era

Abstract

In the USSR, there was an apparatus of ideological work and propaganda, which was mounted in all state and public institutions. Since the late 1950s, interest in foreign methods of working with public opinion, including man-agement, advertising and public relations (PR), had been growing, and a process of cultural transfer in pragmatic and ideological dimensions had been developing. The use of Western methods of influence (including advertising and PR) was necessary to advance the economic and political interests of the USSR in the capitalist and post-colonial countries. Western methods of influence became the object of analysis in the genre of quasi-academic criticism of bourgeois society, with the opportunity for the reader to understand the content of the main methods of influence (PR, commercial advertising, etc.). The article shows two areas of reception of Western PR language and technolo-gies. The selected publications of Soviet experts on the criticism of Western PR are analyzed. Examples from the practice of Soviet experts of international influence (Vneshtorgizdat and the “Novosti” Press Agency) who worked in those organizations abroad and later, in the 1990s, became well-known PR specialists, are presented. The purpose of the article is to show the selective permeability of the Soviet influence system for foreign PR methods and commercial advertising techniques.