Pitchmen of the Kremlin

In the dark days of the cold war, Soviet propaganda was predictably noisy and lurid. During Dictator Joseph Stalin's "Hate America" campaign of the early 1950s, for instance, Kremlin artists depicted U.S. soldiers as hideous, spider-like creatures, armed with spray guns and injection needles, demonically waging germ warfare. But the ad that filled three-quarters of a page in the New York Times last week was far more sophisticated. WHAT HOLDS BACK PROGRESS AT THE GENEVA TALKS? queried the headline. In four columns of dull gray type, paid for by the Soviet embassy in Washington, an editorial reprinted from Pravda accused the...