WAS IT ALL PURE PROPAGANDA? JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES OF ‘SILENT RESISTANCE’ IN SOVIET ESTONIAN JOURNALISM

Abstract

This paper focuses on the journalistic strategies and practices that Estonian journalists and editors used for expressing both their dissent with the restrictions of the freedom of the press and opposition to the Soviet regime. As no underground dissident press existed in Estonia in the Soviet period (1940–1941 and 1944–1991), journalists developed various ways of ‘silent resistance’ within the official press. Our aim is to demonstrate and analyse journalistic practices – both discursive and editorial – that undermined the ideological purposes of Soviet journalism. At the discursive level, journalists often tried to diminish the official ideological discourse by enlarging the proportion of the apolitical journalistic discourse in the newspapers. Journalists also skilfully used various linguistic means to bypass the ‘party line’. On the editorial level, editors often passed, at their own risk, content that was not politically and ideologically ‘correct’. Censors often complained to Party headquarters about the editors who ‘tried to avoid the responsibility of editing’ and were ‘incompetent in applying the regulations and rules’.