Russian to CNN: Country’s Propaganda Even More Hysterical than in Soviet Era

Russian to CNN: Country’s Propaganda Even More Hysterical Than in Soviet Era (Washington Free Beacon)

Leon Aron, the director of Russian Studies for the American Enterprise Institute, said Wednesday on CNN’s The Lead that the sheer hysteria of today’s anti-Western propaganda out of Russia exceeds anything he saw from the Soviet era.

One recent example from Forbes.com demonstrated the absurd lengths to which state TV will go. Three Russian TV channels showed the same interviewbut portrayed the man in it differently each time, calling him in turn a  German spy, a repentant extremist and a pediatric surgeon beaten by neo-Nazis.

“I was there in 1968, a teenager in Moscow, and I don’t recall the level of propaganda reaching this amount of frenzy and brazenness and hysteria,” Aron said. “For example, nobody used a term for forced sexual intercourse to describe U.S. policies. [Vladimir] Putin did in his speech on March 18.”