Question by MajorOrgan: How much did the American public know about the Stalin regime during the fact?
Say I am in America during the late 1930s and early 1940s. How much information is available to me about the actions of Stalin in the USSR?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Rusty Shackleford
The American public had little to no idea about how much was going on about Stalin until World War II ended, because up until the end of the war, the USSR was an ally of ours. America was an isolationist country after WW I, and seemed to worry more about its internal economic problems (the Great Depression). The Great Depression transitioned itself into the US involvement into World War II, but communism and socialism wasn’t the same threat as it played in the twenties or as it did in the fifties, then on.
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Spellbound says
The Soviet Union was a closed country under Stalin. That is very few people were allowed into the country, and journalists were restricted to official tours. The Soviet Union released information through its news agencies, ITAR-TASS and Novosti, but the news was very limited and all of it was censored.
Having said that, the Soviet Union did release details of the Show Trials, the trials of old Bolsheviks who had been accused of various plots against the Soviet Union, against Stalin or for spying for Britain, the US or Germany.
As to the severity of either the famine in Ukraine, or the extent of the the purges, very little information leaked out of the USSR about these events.
The US was deeply isolationist in the 1930s and was not particularly interested in what was going on in Europe at the time. By the 1940s it was allied to the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler so anything that was known was kept quiet for the war effort. After the war, as the cold war began, the US began to take note of what was happening there, but the lack of reliable information plagued academic and journalists attempts to uncover the scale of repression. Only after the fall of Communism were the archives opened and people were free to speak about what had happened – a lot of books about the USSR had to be revised in light of this new information – i.e. the number of deaths attributed to Stalin went from 60million down to 2 to 3 million.