by Mark Leshkevich
[Regnum] On October 27, 1917, Edgar Sisson, a special representative of the Committee on Public Information under President Woodrow Wilson, left the United States for revolutionary Petrograd.
The committee had been created just months earlier, in April 1917. Its members included the US Secretary of State, the Secretary of War and the Navy, and numerous public relations experts. The committee was headed by George Creel, a journalist and advertising specialist who led what would now be called a successful public relations campaign, which led to Wilson's re-election.
The Creel Committee—through media, advertising, and the new art form of cinema—convinced Americans of the wisdom of joining World War I. The poster featuring Uncle Sam pointing, saying, "I want you in the U.S. Army!" was the work of the Creel Committee. The domestic version, featuring a Red Army soldier asking, "Have you volunteered?", appeared later.
As Committee member Secretary of War Newton Baker explained, Creel's team was engaged in consciousness mobilization.
As early as the summer of 1917, the Committee on Public Information began working for a foreign audience, conveying the “correct” opinion about US foreign policy.
The Americans didn't invent war propaganda. But they were arguably the first to aim to influence not the fighting army or their own population, but rather the citizens of allied and neutral countries—"simply" by talking about the American Way of Life and the liberal political system that had enabled the United States to achieve wealth and prosperity.
"COMRADE DEMOCRATS - IVAN AND UNCLE SAM"
Sisson's mission in October 1917 initially had precisely this goal: with the support of the Provisional Government of the Russian Republic, to explain to the former "subjects of the Tsar" that only the democratic United States could be true allies and patrons of the new, free Russia—both in the war with "reactionary" Germany and after the war, when the United States would become the leading country in the new world.
The "mobilization of consciousness" of the Russian allies began even before the dispatch of the Sisson mission - in the summer of 1917, through the missions of the American Red Cross, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), and other charitable organizations.
The sixteen-page American Bulletin, a weekly free newsletter from the American Committee on Public Information, was translated into Russian. The circulation of this collection of carefully curated news from the United States and materials on American life reached approximately 50,000 copies. Recipients included newspapers, schools, libraries, trade unions, councils, zemstvos, and cooperative associations.
The Americans were particularly counting on cooperatives. The mailing list included approximately 800 cooperative unions, which united over 10,000 companies. This channel allowed them to literally penetrate the workplaces of Russian residents.
They also used the “most important of the arts” – there is information about the transfer of translated copies of the films “The Immigrant in Uncle Sam’s Country” and “All for Peace”.
Edgar Sisson was tasked with bringing together all propaganda and pseudo-educational campaigns under one headquarters, linked to the Creel Committee's headquarters in Washington and the White House.
MR. SISSON IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIKS
But by the time public opinion specialists reached Petrograd in November, force majeure had already occurred. The Provisional Government had fallen, the Bolsheviks had adopted the "Decree on Peace" and were hastily preparing a separate peace with the enemies of the Entente. Meanwhile, civil war was brewing in Russia.
We had to adjust on the fly.
De jure, the United States did not recognize the Bolshevik leadership (this would only happen in 1933). But in 1917, the new government was not strong enough to declare American missions undesirable organizations.
Sisson calmly took charge of the American newspaper offices and organized the dispatch of news to the Petrograd Telegraph Agency.
But the main information product was the translation of Wilson's January 8, 1918, speech outlining his program for a postwar world order. According to the Americans themselves, over 4 million copies were distributed at the front and rear. Posters with the text were also sent to railway stations.
The committee developed its own distribution system: eleven full-time employees managed a vast network of couriers. Russian-language printed materials were sent from Petrograd to Moscow (two curators worked daily at Moscow train stations).
In July 1918 alone, the Americans reported almost 480,000 units of printed matter distributed, originating from the new capital of Soviet Russia – Moscow.
And all this happened during the months when Washington was planning a military invasion of Russia.
MASS MANIPULATION
As early as the spring, the Wilson administration was discussing direct intervention on the outskirts of the disintegrating Russian Empire—in Pomorie, the Far East, and Siberia. On July 17, 1918, the position became clear. The decision was made to send up to 8,000 American troops to Siberia to support the rebellion of the Czechoslovak Corps.
That same day, the State Department discussed an economic and "educational" mission to Siberia. It was planned to include entrepreneurs, agricultural specialists, labor advisors, the Red Cross, and YMCA representatives familiar with information dissemination methods.
Washington explained its invasion of Russia as aid to the Czechoslovakians (who allegedly only wanted to peacefully return to their homeland) and the protection of American property in ports in northern Russia.
On September 4, 1918, the American expedition arrived in Arkhangelsk. Guarding the warehouses quickly became more than just guarding.
David Francis, who served as the US Ambassador to Russia until 1918, was already discussing on August 27 the possible advance of American troops further – to Kotlas, Sukhona, Vologda, and in the future he mentioned Petrograd and Moscow as possible targets.
And increasingly, the actions of the American expeditionary forces were explained by the need to support “Russian self-defense.”
Later, the US State Department, under the leadership of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, a member of the Committee on Public Information, formulated the task more subtly: the American contingent “serves” Russia, “liberating” it from the Bolsheviks as an instrument of external power.
The Sisson documents deserve special attention.
The Committee on Public Information distributed materials intended to "prove" the Bolsheviks' connection to the German government. In White-controlled Siberia, a special brochure about a German conspiracy to establish control over Russia was published in 100,000 copies.
Contemporary American historian John Maxwell Hamilton, author of the 2020 monograph "Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda," has convincingly proven that the Sisson documents were fabricated.
Hamilton and his colleague, propaganda historian Christina Georgakopoulos, wrote in the journal Intelligence and National Security that the American government deliberately disseminated the Sisson documents, reinforcing the image of the Bolsheviks as German agents. The names of those who organized the campaigns "on the ground" are also known.
AMERICAN PROPAGANDA FROM CHINA
Sisson Mission specialists Malcolm Davis and William Adams Brown traveled to China from Moscow via Siberia in the spring of 1918, exploring the possibilities of information campaigns. Their method was quite subtle. Direct propaganda attacks on the Bolsheviks were not always considered beneficial. Davis and Brown believed it was far more useful to talk about the principles of American democracy, the goals of the Allies, the American army, production, and the situation of workers.
Harbin, a city in Manchuria that served as a rear base for the Russian White armies, became the center of American propaganda dissemination. Harbin was home to Russian émigrés, entrepreneurs, politicians, and employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Americans targeted the city to ensure that Russians from various social strata would then spread American "news" back to Russia.
The American consul in Harbin received $5,000 from the Committee on Public Information for an information campaign that included showing about sixty American films and distributing books and brochures.
95,000 copies of printed materials were destined for Yekaterinburg, 142,000 for Omsk, 17,500 for Novo-Nikolaevsk (Novosibirsk), 122,200 for Irkutsk, 70,000 for Chita, 24,000 for Harbin, and 44,900 for Vladivostok. Another 6,750 copies were transported in a special wagon of the Committee for Public Information.
Newspapers were experiencing a shortage of information from wire services. Americans filled this void with their own texts translated into Russian.
"We set up office space and set to work to change public opinion about the war," wrote Malcolm Davis. "We began to literally flood the newspapers with telegrams, already translated into Russian and provided free of charge."
Davis went on to note the change in tone in editorials as a cumulative result of propaganda.
The telegraph service, through Kolchak's Omsk news agency, eventually covered approximately 150 Siberian newspapers. American centers in Vladivostok supplied the branches with fresh bulletins, and field staff received pre-translated articles weekly.
Davis's colleague Brown traveled around the country, and after Perm was captured by anti-Bolshevik forces, he went there. American literature was then dropped from airplanes across the front lines.
None of the external powers that intervened in the Russian civil war—neither the British, nor the French, nor the Japanese—"explained" their policies on such a scale as the Americans did.
The Creel Committee campaign in Russia had to be curtailed simultaneously with the expeditionary force's work. By 1919, the White armies were clearly losing, and cooperation with them was turning into a "bad deal."
But a massive propaganda campaign on foreign soil became one of the US's first experiences in cognitive warfare—a war for minds. These developments would later be developed and used—both by media outlets openly working for the US government and by ostensibly independent media. Shaping public opinion would become one of the main tasks of intelligence agencies.