The Soviet Union’s active response to prominent American propaganda such as the Voice of America further demonstrated its influence on the public. The Voice of America was publicly denounced, discredited, and blocked many times in the Soviet Union to counteract its compelling influence. As the Voice of America started reaching through the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union jammed the radio frequencies used by the U.S. in an attempt to prevent anti-communist ideas from flooding its society. One of the first retaliations was the article written by Ilya Ehrenburg called “A False Voice” which appeared in the organ of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Culture and Life. Articles like Ehrenburg’s were “tone-setting.” They provided a certain characterization of the Voice of America. This characterization was utilized by other publicists to denounce the broadcast. The characterization presented by the Soviet Union sought to undermine the credibility of the radio program. A popular claim was that the Voice of America was, in truth, the“‘voice of Wall Street,’” denoting that it did not represent the people of the U.S. and that it was controlled by Wall Street seeking to expand its ideological imperialism. Another claim was that the Voice was a distraction to turn eyes from the imminent demise of capitalism. These active attempts at characterizations sought to convince the Soviet public that the Voice of America is spreading fallacy about the U.S. Therefore, even if the public is exposed to the Voice, they would disregard the information. However, despite these efforts, the Voice of America proved to be effective.

U.S. propaganda provided fertile ground for extreme anti-communist sentiments, contributing to and reflecting periods like the second Red Scare, a period from 1947 to 1954. It was hard to avoid anti-communist paranoia due to the abundance of propaganda continuously warning about communism and communist infiltration. Some political figures, such as Joseph McCarthy, took advantage of the paranoia actively. McCarthy, a senator, accused numerous individuals in the government of communist activities with little evidence. In 1950, he declared that there were “at least fifty-seven Communists in the State government.” The outward claim that the U.S. is already infiltrated by communists made by the senator had a profound impact on the American public. He continued to garner attention by making more accusations and provoking further paranoia. Although he did not yield considerable success in his cases, he was able to ruin people’s jobs and destroy their reputations for the sake of national security. The period of McCarthyism is a clear example of how anti-communism, provoked and reinforced by continuous propaganda, impacted American society during the Cold War. McCarthy hearings also laid the way for a significant change in American culture, conformism.

Influenced by the propaganda and the fear of communists instigated by them, the American public was confronted by increased conformism during the Cold War. A French writer called Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the U.S. had “become a nation of sheep” when she visited in 1947, expressing the severity of American conformism. The fear that anyone could be a communist spy was highlighted by the enforcement of conformism and strict normalcy. Again, the theme of communist infiltration reflects these notions and adds that one must always be wary of potential communists. The tensions were so high, that “neutrality was suspect, and so was a lack of enthusiasm for anti-communism.” Consequently, the fear of acquainting a communist spy or being perceived as one increased among the citizens. As a byproduct, a singular American Way of Life developed in popular media, regularly represented in propaganda. Make Mine Freedom, for example, presents the normal lifestyles of Americans in the beginning, listing typical days of families in the U.S. like mother and children at church on Saturday morning or a father enjoying golf. These ideas further stimulated the stigmatization of individuality, since presenting a view different from the popular opinion or displaying distinct behaviors may even suggest that one is a communist spy. Few dared to oppose public opinion through concealed political newsletters but were generally disregarded by the strongly anti-communist public. Since conforming to public opinion was normalized, disagreements were suppressed: the struggle for racial and sexual equality as well as the rights of laborers was ignored due to the stigmatization of liberalism. As illustrated, the impacts of conformism during this period lingered throughout history.

The civil rights movement became increasingly difficult as the term ‘communist’ started being attached to civil rights activists by their opposition. Activists were often investigated and even convicted after being accused of being communists. These accusations were mostly false; African Americans were generally uninterested in communism despite multiple attempts of recruitment by the Communist Party, and the NAACP was openly anti-communist. These accusations were as extreme as Martin Luther King Jr. being wiretapped for decades by the FBI attempting to uncover his communist inclinations — to no avail. Interestingly enough, segregationist beliefs and anti-communism started to converge in some areas of the U.S. Segregationists, under the name of anti-communism, harassed civil rights movements. Some simply “[exploited] exaggerated McCarthyite fears for the maintenance of white supremacy.” The continuous endorsement of anti-communism through propaganda is responsible for these unfortunate effects that lingered beyond the war itself.The collapse of the Soviet Union is the very example of the success of American propaganda. Superficially, the end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, was caused by other factors. The Soviet Union public abandoned communism for the appeals of Western affluence and pop culture. Western pop culture was far more influential in the Soviet Union than anti-communist propaganda broadcasted to it. Ironically, “Lenin’s most potent ideological foils were John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson.” As the people of the Soviet Union experienced growing economic failures, their trust in communism dwindled. Extended periods of centralized control had caused stagnation of their economy, while they observed their enemy continuously gaining wealth. Second, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, brought about reforms that dismantled communism and sought to improve their economy by doing so. He was influenced heavily by state elites with high exposure to Western culture, and his generation was far more familiar with it as well. However, propagandistic attacks were in part responsible for that exposure of Western culture. In addition, American propaganda’s popular themes of economic prosperity without a doubt affected the Soviet citizens struggling to make ends meet. At some point, the intense negative characterization of capitalism created by the Soviet Union lost its persuasion. With a level of intuition, American propaganda’s indirect influence can be identified in those causes. In the end, the dissolution of the Soviet Union is an example of the success of American propaganda as it aimed to boast about the economic triumph of capitalism and to collapse the Soviet Union, and it achieved its goal.