Thanks very much for linking to the CIA vids, Scott! I haven't had time to watch them all because of preparations for the big Thanksgiving dinner with the family, but (starting from the bottom of the list), I did watch "Soviet Media's Portrayal of America"...



...and "Soviet Internal Propaganda":



My first reaction is that the content is more balanced than many Americans might expect given that it was made by the CIA during the Reagan years of the Cold War -- it doesn't have the hysterical "The Reds Are Coming To Take Away Our Churches!" tone of some 1950s films made for American classrooms.

On the other hand, there's definite anti-Soviet spin: for example, they mention that Soviet children got a steady diet of pro-Lenin messages from kindergarten, but they don't mention that at least some of the "Lenin indoctrination" was rather innocuous or even positive, such as "Учись, учись, и учись!" ("Learn, learn, and learn!"). They also give a sample of the constant footage of impoverished inner-city American blacks shown on Soviet TV, but then they arguably use the very same propaganda technique by showing delapidated Soviet apartment blocks, rusty playground equipment, and so forth.

Perhaps the best moment of unintended hilarity comes at 8:34 in the "Soviet Media Portrayal of America" short, from a Soviet news commentator addressing the claim that media in the USSR gives a distorted, one-side view of American life:

"I think we are not distorting the news -- I would disagree; we are showing not only the unemployed; we show the millionaires, too, and high society!"


Suffice to say, it was precisely the high living standards of American middle-class workers that Soviet media found most threatening, and was most eager to hide from the Soviet people. But the fact that America had both yacht-owning millionaires and unemployed poor people was never a secret.