Organizational formation of information and propaganda institutions of the Provisional Siberian Government (end of May - beginning of November 1918)

The article is about the initial (end of May - beginning of November, 1918) stage of the development of the government information and political propaganda institutions of white Siberia. The SRs, who played the key role in forming the power structures in Siberia at that time and also had a great experience in propaganda work, actively began the ideological mobilization of society to fight the Bolsheviks. That mobilization provided some adjustments of political attitudes of the population. In the first half of June 1918 first institutions were created, whose tasks were to inform the government and conduct political propaganda. They were: the Government Information Bureau and the Department of the Formation of the Voluntary National Army. Later the formation of information institutions in the Siberian army began. The object of the study is to reveal the basic tendencies of formation and development of government staff of information and political propaganda in this period. Organizing the government information service, the political leaders of white Siberia considered it as "a kind of a resonator which tells the news radially both up and down". The main structural elements of that scheme were the Government Information Bureau which, on the one hand, informed people about the government activity and, on the other, supplied the government, concerned ministries and agencies with the information about the local situation, and the Telegraph Agency. The first widespread use of oral anti-Bolshevik propaganda refers to that time, when several hundreds of government and zemstvo instructors, sent to the country people, were agitating in support of the Provisional Siberian Government, the Constituent Assembly and the formation of the voluntary national army. The government institutions achieved certain results in organizing "right" information: a network of correspondents of the Siberian Telegraph Agency was formed in the cities of eastern Russia (from Yekaterinburg to Yakutsk and Vladivostok), and the publication of Sibirsliy vestnik [Siberian Bulletin] began. The Information Bureau collected and analyzed the periodical press materials, supplied concerned ministries and departments with information about the local situation. However, the impact of this information on the making of decisions was minimal. In general, information agencies of white Siberia acted on their own and did not represent a uniform system, the scale of their propaganda work was small, and the influence on the local level was rather limited.

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