Listening to comrade Stalin: multimodality and code-switching in public response to the leaders’ speeches in the twentieth century

Abstract

It is customary to associate the twentieth century communication with extraordinary high informational content setting it apart from interaction in the earlier, less technologically and socially 'advanced' periods of history. Departing from systems theory, this article disputes the maximization of efficiency in informational exchanges within the societies in question (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and 'New Deal'-USA), noting in particular the vulnerability of highly unstable totalitarian regimes to informational and social explosions. After discussing general mechanisms or reducing communicative complexity (from linguistic redundancy to ritualistic behaviour), the article briefly summarizes the extended use of these techniques in interactions between 'totalitarian' leaders and their followers, and offers statistical data contrasting low informational content of followers' feedback to the speeches of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler to the corresponding data on the 'democratic' president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Flattery, Fake News and Conspiracy: Three Scenarios of Pathological Complexity Reduction

“…The attempted remedy against possible explosion is containment, i.e., the reduction in informational exchanges within societies to a manageable level. The typical measures (common for other natural and social sign systems) are the code and channel redundancy, the tolerance of semantic inflation, and the reduction of communicative complexity-for instance, the elimination of the differences between information, messages and messengers [8][9][10][11][12]. This state of affairs could be illustrated by a page from the leading Bolshevik Party newspaper, filled with multiple stereotypical greetings to Joseph Stalin on his 70th birthday [13,14].…”