“America is Sad”: Images of Crisis and Media Construction of an American Anti-utopia in Early Cold War Communist Propaganda
“America is Sad”: Images of Crisis and Media Construction of an American Anti-utopia in Early Cold War Communist Propaganda

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the construction of an American anti-utopia in the early Cold War Soviet media and in the satellite countries, such as Romania and Poland, a negative fiction of the U.S. based on a hostile imagery typical for the enemy making process. The text discusses the concept of anti-Americanism in relation to the early Cold War propaganda, approaching the specific political context (Rubin & Rubin, 2004) as “an age of anxiety” (Schlesinger, 1948) or as “dystopian times” (Kumar, 2000), which generated paranoid, media-constructed dystopias. The article also analyses the communist media projection of an American anti-utopia within the binary conceptual formula utopia/dystopia as well as its antagonism with both the socialist utopia and the myth of the “American dream”. The analysis deals with the media construction and discursive techniques employed by the Soviet propaganda in designing the American infernal space (with a focus on the images of crisis in the hostile imagery employed). The article concludes that, although minutely organised and controlled, in the absence of alternative discourses, this American anti-utopian projection failed to convince, not being able to fight the positive imagery associated in Eastern Europe with the U.S.

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