The image of Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the Soviet English-language periodicals (On the material of newspapers The Moscow News and The Moscow Daily News)

The periodical press has always been a means of not only information, but also propaganda. Newspapers ideologically influenced the mass consciousness, which is very well traced in the example of the USSR. The Soviet press, without striving to show reality, presented idealized images of both the country and the most prominent politicians, military people, scientists, representatives of culture and art. Such images were created both for Soviet residents and for foreigners working there. Depending on changes in the political situation in the country, the construction of images in the Soviet press changed dramatically. With the collapse of the USSR, the ideological component of the press became less obvious, but did not leave it. There was a tendency to portray the Soviet past and its figures only in a negative light, creating many myths. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky became one of the controversial figures. The aim of the research is to trace the dynamics of the information about this figure by referring to The Moscow News and The Moscow Daily News, the main Soviet publications aimed at English-speaking specialists, which were published from 1930 to 2014. The argument for the choice of the research topic was the contradictory situation in the modern Russian historiography, related to the assessments of Tukhachevsky's personality. In order to achieve the aim of the study, it was necessary to solve the following tasks: (1) to identify references to Tukhachevsky in the analyzed sources; (2) to distinguish the differences in the images of Tukhachevsky created and transmitted to the mass consciousness by the mentioned editions during the analyzed period; (3) by comparing these newspapers with the central editions of the USSR, to establish the differences in the presentation of information about Tukhachevsky for the Soviet audience and for foreigners. The anthropological approach, content analysis, problem-chronological, statistical and historical-comparative methods became the theoretical basis of the research. This methodological combination allowed concluding that there was no single representation of the “Red Marshal”, but that there were four images of him, which corresponded with different historical periods of the sociopolitical life in the USSR and Russia. At the same time, information about Tukhachevsky intended for foreigners was not exclusive and represented a duplication of the Soviet Russian-language press. This publication may be of interest to specialists studying imagology, the politics of historical memory formation, the history of domestic journalism, Russian military history of the twentieth century, and Soviet repressive policies.

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