Journal of Modern European History

The article examines the relationship between informal communication and domination at the court of Stalin. For this purpose, two types of communicative situations – distance and proximity – are distinguished and analysed with respect to their operating modes and the informal communication's impacts of domination. In both cases, the impacts of domination of the informal communication's mechanisms were based on identical factors. There were complex interactions between the impacts of domination of informal communication and the emergence of Stalin's sole reign. On the one hand, rumours allowed Stalin to subdue his rivals and to keep them at bay; on the other hand, the disciplinary power of informal communication increased to the same extent as Stalin's personal power grew. The chosen approach allows to illustrate key aspects of Stalin's exercise of power and to identify the actors’ scopes as well as the rules that they had to obey. In doing so, the approach serves to illustrate some key aspects of the Stalinist practice of power and demonstrates how actors dispose leeway and under what rules they had to obey.

Soviet state and party leaders claiming the opinion leadership and the monopoly of the press had an extremely ambivalent attitude towards all alternative media facilitating any kind of public opinion shaping. However, within a state where news could not be spread by independent press institutions, rumours unavoidably assumed the function of substitute media. The Bolsheviks’ single-party state, always cautious not to lose news control, was therefore also forever producing new rumours.

Using the example of the resurgence of religious practices and widespread religious interpretations of the German invasion in the time after 1941, the author analyses this ambivalence. Because of its manoeuvering and its religious policies during the war, the regime slid into a very delicate situation. Two factors opened the door to oral interpretations and rumours concerning the framework, duration and reasons for the new church policy: on the one hand, the government tried to use the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument for its own purposes; on the other, there were only a few guidelines that ruled religious life. As a result, it was precisely this ambivalent framework that offered much more scope for popular religiousness. Especially in the religious sphere, the Bolshevist state did not succeed in breaking the power of rumours.

Prior to and at the height of the peaceful revolution in the GDR, rumours fulfilled the following function: they made it possible for local communities to coordinate their collective protest behaviour in a communicative process. In the hermetically structured public space of the GDR, oppositional groups seized the opportunity for mass mobilisation: they generated a counter-public sphere by countering state intimidation with continuous politicisation. Comparing the protest in both of the provincial centres of Halle and Magdeburg in the autumn of 1989, we are able to outline the influence of state-made fear scenarios and the impact of counter-rumours spread by those active in the East German citizens’ movement. Since September 1989, the citizens’ movement showed solidarity with the protest in Leipzig. Rather unexpectedly, the new instrument of mobilisation became more and more important in October: repetitive demonstrations even conquered the inner cities of Halle and Magdeburg. Following the same ideal of freedom, the revolutionists rallied in a kind of American civil rights movement. Mass mobilisation, which was influenced by the translocal flow of information was moreover caused more by confidence in intangible collective types of communication than by strategic planning, particularly because it led to unusual forms of protest in familiar places like city centres.

The following article discusses the role of media and civilian organisations in downplaying the role of rumour propagation in the Chilean dictatorship. After outright repression failed to control popular unrest during the national protests that took place between 1983 and 1984, the military regime attempted to keep people inside their homes by playing on their fears and prejudices. We focus here on an episode that occurred in September 1983, when residents of a working class neighbourhood were led to believe that they would be attacked by the populace of the surrounding area. After the protest was over, the actions of state agents and unknown civilians in propagating the rumour were publicised through the opposition press and widely condemned by relevant national figures. In the end, the effectiveness of this sort of social control by the military government was greatly jeopardised by the existence of relatively strong independent media and civil organisations with considerable resources for gathering and verifying information. In this article, we not only discuss how the rumour was propagated and why it worked, but also consider the question why rumour placement as a policing strategy finally failed to produce its intended effects in the late dictatorial period.

Using the example of the military, the article examines the question of the mediation of power in the Austrian Netherlands during the 18th century. Referring to the requests of subjects to join foreign armies, the article shows, on the one hand, how the prohibition to join and the therefore compulsory duty to obtain dispensation helped the Habsburg monarchy to consolidate its supremacy and to control local elites in the southern Netherlands. On the other hand, the analysis reveals clearly how a systematic inclusion of the elites from the southern Netherlands into the Habsburg domain failed despite the attempts to underpin their claim to power through a prohibition to join foreign armies. The latter turned out to be a general norm which was flexibly treated in practice and which enabled the elites from the southern Netherlands to carry on choosing between different armies.