From Moscow to Cologne and across the Atlantic: <i>Newspaper science</i> and the global origins of Soviet mass communication

Abstract This article situates early Soviet studies of the press, a specific academic field called gazetovedenie , within the global history of mass communication research. While scholarship often portrays Soviet media theory as entirely subordinate to agitational practice, this situation only became established by 1930, when well-known Soviet orthodoxies on the nature and role of propaganda fully solidified. In the 1920s, Soviet press scholars actively engaged with contemporary global debates about the press’s role in mass society, how propaganda functioned, and why it often failed. Far from working in isolation, they drew upon thinkers such as Karl Bücher, Grant Hyde, and Walter Lippmann, while developing distinctive approaches, including applying Formalist methods to media texts, that resonated internationally. Viewing this intellectual activity as part of a global exchange redefines the origins of propaganda studies, not as a Cold War divide, but as diverging, yet deeply entangled, responses to modernity, war, and mass politics.