PROPAGANDA METHODS 1^9
them are subject to the same control and, if necessary, to the
same persecution, as those who come into contact with foreign
tourists and guests of honour. Further, any reports sent to the
papers abroad are subject to direct or indirect censorship and
also to an unrelaxed pressure. Pierre Berland writes as follows
on these methods as applied to the famine1: "The silence of
the press on this subject is one of the most astonishing pheno-
mena of present-day Russia. There is a kind of conspiracy of
silence on the food situation^ the disastrous nature of which is
an open secret. The official censorship dominates the telegraph
and remorselessly mutilates the despatches of foreign corre-
spondents, allowing only comparatively harmless expressions
like 'grave supply difficulties9 and so on to pass muster. These
expressions may perhaps mean something to those who know
Soviet Russia, but are pure euphemisms as applied to the real
position."
The pressure exerted goes so far that in cases where foreign
correspondents living in Moscow report something which
the authorities consider inadmissible, they are immediately
and mercilessly expelled. For material and other reasons, a
number of the journalists living in Moscow are anxious not
to lose their posts in that city. (Moscow is doubtless a very
good post for many of them from the material point of view.)
Among the foreign correspondents there are some who have
already been expelled once and who have had the greatest
trouble in getting the expulsion cancelled.
It is not that the reports of the Moscow correspondents are
untrue2; but they neglect, or at the most mention only in
passing, the unfavourable aspects of Soviet life—on the prin-
ciple "one step forward, two back." They never see any
occasion to give the undesirable phenomena the same attention
which they devote to Moscow's supreme achievements.
1 Temps, July 18,1933-
2 Cf. facts recorded in this connection by Malcolm Muggeridge in his
Winter in Russia (London) and by W. H. Chamberlin in his Russia's Iron
Age.