Please join us as we welcome Vera Tolz to the Slavic and Eurasian Studies Colloquium! Tolz' talk will situate early Soviet studies of the press, a specific academic field called gazetovedenie, within the global history of mass communication research. While scholarship often portrays Soviet media theory as entirely subordinate to agitational practice, this situation only became established by 1930, when well-known Soviet orthodoxies on the nature and role of propaganda fully solidified. In the 1920s, Soviet press scholars actively engaged with contemporary global debates about the press’s role in mass society, how propaganda functioned, and why it often failed. Far from working in isolation, they drew upon thinkers such as Bücher, Hyde, and Lippmann, while developing distinctive approaches, including applying Formalist methods to media texts, that resonated internationally. Viewing this intellectual activity as part of a global exchange redefines the origins of propaganda studies, not as a Cold War divide, but as a shared response to modernity, war, and mass politics. This talk is sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clark Kempf Memorial Fund.
Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on various aspects of Russian nationalism, media politics, and the relationship between intellectuals and the state in the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Her recent books include Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order: RT as Populist Pariah (co-authored with Stephen Hutchings, Precious Chatterje-Doody, Rhys Crilley and Marie Gillespie); Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference (with Stephen Hutchings); ‘Russia’s Own Orient’: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods; and Russia: Inventing the Nation. She is currently pursuing a collaborative project, ‘(Mis)Translating Deceit after the Cold War: Disinformation as a Translingual, Discursive Dynamic,’ funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (https://www.mis-translating-deceit.com/). She is elected Fellow of the UK's Academy of Social Sciences.
