One thing that I like about the approach of communist countries to propaganda, is that they call it what it was. I.e. as far as I am aware, communism actually calls propaganda by its right name
As far as I am aware, the word пропаганда in Russian historically had a totally neutral connotation -- unlike the English word, which is nearly always a very negative term. (Which is to say, the terms are faux amis, and do not necessarily translate each other.)

So, it's a bit misleading to say that the Soviets "called propaganda what it was", as though they were being bluntly honest and transparent about their intents. Rather, they used the same neutral Russian word, пропапанда, whethern speaking about Soviet slogans or US government slogans, but in the latter case, the "propaganda" would be attributed to империалистические угнетатели (or some other clearly pejorative language would be attached to the neutral word пропаганда).

I'm not saying that the US government was inherently more honest -- in many cases, we would describe our own government's statements by some nice-sounding terms like "public service announcements" or "awareness programs" or "educational efforts", while similar statements from the Soviet government would be, well, "mere propaganda " (which doesn't really need to be modified by some phrase like "aggressively expansionist Communism", or whatever, because the word is already bad-sounding).

If you see a red banner with a slogan, you know what it is, right - and you can choose to think "Bullshit".
If telepathy really existed outside of science-fiction, do you imagine that Soviet citizens would have generally had the freedom to think "Bullshit"?