Creating Chaos Online

Front matter

CREATING CHAOS ONLINE

Asta Zelenkauskaitė

Disinformation and Subverted Post-Publics

Index

Living in Media

Comments as Forms of News Deliberations

News Portals Comments as Information Warfare Zones Contexts That Situate Online Public Deliberation Discrediting Media as an Institution

Attack on Government Institutions

Roots of Russia’s Victim’s Playing

New Media and Information Warfare in Authoritarian Regimes

Roots of Russia’s (Information) Warfare

Information Warfare in Action by Russia

Victim-Playing Russian Trolls in the News Comments

Delegitimization Rhetoric

Deny and Conquer: Fears of Looking Like a

“Pussy State”

Implications of the Denialism Discourse regarding Russian Trolling

Psychology of Denialism

Denial and Conspiracy Theories

Denial Normalization Traps to Avoid

Now What?

Imperviousness to Chaos

What Solutions Are There for Russian Trolling?

Web as a Zero Institution

173 177 186 195 202 218

221 227 231 234 245 249

255 255 260 265

267 271 295

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12237294

Introduction

A Déjà Vu from the Silenced Generation

“Denial, a psychological defense mechanism, is an unconscious mental maneuver that cancels out or obscures painful reality. . . . We do not need to confront or change things that do not exist” (Milburn, 1998, p. 1)

Denial describes information operations that allow for the achieving of strategic goals. This book is set to expose efforts to justify Russian trolling. Specifically, this book documents patterns and frames of systematic denialism used to justify Russian trolling that circulated in two unrelated contexts and periods of time. This book not only uncovers justification arguments and the way they are constructed but also provides explanations of their origins and what led them to become so pervasive online. Furthermore, through the concept of post-publics, this book exemplifies how the public spheres are disrupted by employing discursive means of denialism, despite rational evidence grounded in facts.

I am compelled to examine the characteristics of Russian trolling across online platforms for a range of reasons. Russian trolling has been exposed as an ideological weapon employed to manipulate public opinion aided by disinformation (Berghel & Berleant, 2018). Manipulation was found to be adopting tactics typical for astroturfing trolling such as disruption and distrust (Berghel & Berleant, 2018), and deflection of attention to irrelevant issues (Zelenkauskaite & Niezgoda, 2017), thus creating chaos online.

This book is further driven by questions such as, What makes it so difficult to render Russian trolling visible despite unequivocal evidence? How does the justification of Russian trolling interference challenge democratic beliefs and institutions? Such questions have become critical after the initial warnings about Russian trolling that received mainstream press coverage, as exemplified by Adrian Chen’s story in the 2015 June 3 issue of the New York Times Magazine. The story exposed Russian trolling at work and its proliferation in online spaces to circulate propaganda on a global scale—how it sows the seeds of discord and blurs the lines between multiple constructions of reality. Chen’s (2015) report on a Russian trolling factory was breaking news that catalyzed a global chain reaction.

Global news outlets, led by those in the United States of America, continued to generate stories about Russian trolling that gained a lot of traction. On 2014 May 4, The Guardian published a news report about organized, topic-based targeting in the news comments section, which had attracted pro-Putin propaganda posts that looked to be an orchestrated pro-Kremlin campaign (Elliot, 2014). Similarly, in 2015, Lithuanian news outlets released purported exposés about specific Russian trolling techniques, including the pushing of pro-Kremlin agendas embedded in divisive political comments across new media platforms (Delfi.lt, Kremliaus “trolių irstva,” 2015).

Russian trolling efforts reemerged in a new geopolitical context—the 2016 US presidential election—that will be remembered for the Russian trolling allegations that proliferated at the time. In 2017, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the US National Security Agency (NSA) produced a report that detailed how Russia had spearheaded the disinformation campaign throughout the 2016 election. This campaign’s objectives, the US agencies claimed, were social division and online chaos (Kennedy, 2017). Yet, the denial of Russian interference continued to circulate online.

In the broadest sense, this book details how the public sphere can be disrupted by exploiting online spaces, even if they are set to serve public deliberation (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018). By specifically focusing on repeated Russian trolling justification arguments, this book contributes to the understanding of a phenomenon known as coordinated inauthentic behaviors (Keller et al., 2020). I first aim at introducing the main concepts used in this book: disinformation and how it differs from misinformation, its contextual meaning over time and my personal experience with it. Subsequently, I connect the concept of disinformation as used in the past to argue about the current social media landscape and its vulnerabilities, by then introducing the concept of trolling and Russian trolling. These concepts are set to contextualize Russian troll denialism frames which were identified in the systematic analysis of online portals comments and on Gab.com, a far-right social networking site.

While Russian trolling is central to exemplify denialism expressed through justification and deflection, denialism framework can be traced and extended to any contexts, especially during times of uncertainty. Russian trolling allegations keep resurfacing, but most importantly, the implications of denialism can be extended to any controversial topic or “cracks” in society that then are exploited to subvert the online public sphere (e.g., Ward, 2020). Furthermore, as worldwide news portals report, including in Lithuania, Russian trolling has become symptomatic of such vulnerabilities since it emerged as an online phenomenon in Europe (see, e.g., Vaisnys et al., 2017; Zelenkauskaite & Niezgoda, 2017) and surged as a rhetorical trope for foreign interference in 2016 US presidential elections and computational propaganda has been witnessed around the globe (Woolley & Howard, 2017).

Disinformation

Creating Chaos Online specifies the arguments that are typically used to generate disinformation. Disinformation here is described as chaos creation efforts. Disinformation has been eloquently explicated by Starbird et al. (2019) as a subtype of strategic information operations—where strategic information surges from Habermasian theory of communicative rationality—yet, it is used subvert online discourse to influence opinions. In other words, disinformation involves “deliberate (often orchestrated) attempts to confuse or manipulate” (Ireton & Posetti, 2018, p. 7). And disinformation is designed to disrupt public communication processes.

Creating Chaos Online challenges the preconception that fake news and false information are the greatest threats in the current media landscape by arguing that a more subtle, doubt-instilling, affective stream of repeated ideas can eventually render publics vulnerable to disinformation (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). In this book the concept of disinformation goes beyond the false facts and rational arguments. Rather, disinformation is conceptualized as the deployment of propaganda that involves affective, deflective, and misleading, rather than false information, and propaganda is conceptualized as the intentional use of communication means to influence attitudes and behaviors in target populations (Faris et al., 2017).

‘The act of misleading does not necessarily involve the provision of false information. Rather, its objective is to generate doubt and uncertainty. Propaganda, unlike persuasion, distinguishes itself by its malign character, as argued by Jowett and O’Donnell (2018). The propagandist’s interests drive the communication that leads to persuasion. Then persuasion is employed to serve such a malign intent and can deliberately introduce misinformation, even falsehood or deception. To achieve the goal of misinformation, communication is used to omit relevant information, not only distort it. Thus, while the mechanisms accompanying online misinformation and disinformation go hand in hand, they are distinct. Misinformation refers to the information that is factually inaccurate. In other words, it is “misleading information created or disseminated without manipulative or malicious intent” (Ireton & Posetti, 2018, p. 7). Such information is typically used from alternative sources that can be accessed and shared, especially online. Misinformation is often accompanied by disinformation—where individuals, groups, and organizations deliberately aim to create confusion and discord, as I argue in this book, by triggering an emotive response, that is, by employing affect.

This book also analyzes the role of affect in shaping disinformation by distinguishing disinformation from fake news. Instances of disinformation strategies that were found in online comments, and that this book analyzes, typically cannot be challenged on the grounds of the factuality of information—that is, apart from the instances where conspiracy theories are used to challenge the existence of Russian trolls. However, deflective counterarguments for the existence of Russian trolls contain scant contestable information. Such counterarguments remain compelling because disinformation can function without facts, depending instead on affect, or emotional persuasion. Disinformation circulated through affective strategies can create chaos because it operates on a more subtle, emotive level than fake news, which relies on factual accuracy that can be challenged on the rational grounds.

Therefore, this book discusses the affective public sphere that can be exploited for disinformation. While citing examples from established democracies, Papacharissi (2015) invoked affective publics to address how publics make sense of information in the public sphere. Even if it is driven by emotion, it does not disregard democratic premises of participation in public debate. However, affect has been found to be exploited in the current post-truth information age to harness hatred and division (Davis, 2020). ‘Therefore, disinformation that appeals to the affect is an effective strategy for what some scholars, such as Bennett and Livingstone (2021), called forms of disruptive communication and in this book is interpreted as generating online chaos. Furthermore, scholars of the affective propaganda argued that such emotions serve as the greatest currency in the current media landscape (Boler & Davis, 2020).

While disinformation can take different shapes, this book argues that the affect, instilled through conspiracy theories, can inflame existing social and political conflicts. It can manifest through attacks on scientific evidence and by the seeding of mistrust in institutions (see Bennett & Livingstone, 2021). Asmolov (2019), in addition, concluded that it is not too difficult to detect propaganda since it is produced to elicit emotions.

Why does it matter that the public sphere constitutes authentic people’s comments? In established democracies, expectations about how debates should be conducted include rationality and affective ways of debating with civility. One can argue, however, that authentic audience comments, at times, depart from the expectations of the ideal Habermasian public sphere. For example, while the public sphere has been portrayed as an ideal space where debates generate some form of consensus, the internet provides online spaces where users speak but do not necessarily listen. Similarly, the tone of such debates can be, at times, crude or spontaneous—in either case, they are frequently emotional. As such, inflammatory comments can be crude, and direct, with little elaboration. Additionally, comments can include shouting, speaking over others, crude humor—direct, and at times, poorly structured arguments. Clearly, public sphere, especially online, can resemble an unpolished public sphere rather than an idealistic one, as argued by scholars like Bakardjieva (2008). Yet, the premise of such a public sphere, even if tainted by instances of incivility, is that it is constituted by authentic publics and not orchestrated inauthentic actors.

Affect, has been found to be successfully exploited in disinformation by inauthentic users. “Neutrollization” has been coined as a term to describe pro-Kremlin efforts to generate neutralizing efforts that absolve Russia from being viewed as a societal security threat (Kurowska & Reshetnikov, 2018). In this book such techniques are contextualized as discursive manifestations of a form of denialism or discursive efforts to merely dismiss or justify Russian trolling efforts. These efforts, which can be explained through the lens of disinformation, that Bennett and Livingstone (2021) explained as “as intentional falsehoods or distortions, often spread as news, to advance political goals such as discrediting opponents, disrupting policy debates, influencing voters, inflaming existing social conflicts, or creating a general backdrop of confusion and informational paralysis” (p. 33). In such way, information paralysis becomes another key aspect through which chaos is created in online contexts. Similar to information paralysis, Benkler et al. (2018) referred to a concept of disorientation defined as a condition through which propaganda seeks to induce where the targeted population can no longer to identify what is true and what is not.

In addition, one of the key aspects of disinformation is that it may undermine epistemological basis for truth validation; instead, emotions, here referred to as affect, become the baseline for assessing the truthfulness of any information (Bjola & Papadakis, 2020). Disinformation, through affect and proliferation capacity, resembles rumors, which are particularly destabilizing and circulate most effectively in times of uncertainty—when public perception is most vulnerable to manipulation. Then, chaos spawns endless speculations, proving that the affective power of rumors exceeds that of merely factual information. In short, rumors become appealing when they are couched in the language of speculation (O’Leary, 2001). As O’Leary (2001) observed, rumors become dangerous when they enter mainstream discourses. When repeated sufficiently, rumors assume the guise of new realities. Attempts to debunk them by adopting a factual perspective do little to diminish their power to fascinate the public. Although rumors can originate in facts, they are ultimately difficult to verify. For instance, if the statement “Russian trolling could not have happened”—or claims during times of a pandemic that “vaccines are not safe”—are repeated multiple times in online spaces, its rapid proliferation is able to sow the seeds of doubt in the minds of some internet users and become “unspoken knowledge.” Thus, when disinformation functions as rumor, it can be deployed to generate online chaos.

This book contends that disinformation can proliferate easily in online spaces due to the sociotechnical structure of online platforms, including anonymity. Anonymity encourages users to assume masked or faceless identities to generate posts on news portals or social networking sites. Similarly, automation can foster the amplification and proliferation of the content, otherwise known as virality, where a certain idea or information can pave its way from the margins to the mainstream (Nahon & Hemsley, 2013). Moreover, such pseudonymous, or anonymous, messages can be easily replicated and reposted. Unlike fake news, disinformation does not purport to provide facts. Rather, it is a discursive tactic that strategically implants doubt in the minds of online news comment readers, or at least to some of them. Doubt is generated through the ambiguity of partial truths.

Like other traditional propaganda tactics, disinformation attempts to confuse online readers. Disinformation, as Geissler and Sprinkle (2019) noted, may combine prototypical and counterfactual elements. While prototypical elements refer to common techniques for propaganda dissemination, the term “counterfactual” is used to describe an approach that focuses on facts as evidence for propaganda. Unlike Geissler and Sprinkle (2019), who examined counterfactual propaganda to identify factual truth in conspiracy theories by focusing on factual sources, as in typical fake news studies, the objective here is to focus on the prototypical manifestation of chaos—that is, the techniques that are used to generate disinformation. The focus here

Introduction x is on the prototypical parts of manifestation of disinformation that can be propagated by anyone.

Typically, disinformation is analyzed through three facets: content, reception, and intent (Woolley, 2020). This book analyzes the construction of the messaging, actors, and the context in which it takes place. Blatant denial of an event that has already occurred, acknowledgment of that event within a self-victimizing rhetorical context meant to appeal to readerly sympathy and deflecting from the immediate issue of debate (e.g., Russian trolling)— these are three major argumentative strategies for generating disinformation. Another strategy specifically related to Russian trolling was found to involve critiques and degradation of institutions that allegedly investigated the phenomenon. And yet another strategy included generating ambiguity and chaos—for instance, when a user claims to be a Russian troll or accuses other users of being one. Arguments that deployed these rhetorical strategies frequently adopt a dismissive, ridiculing, mocking, and delegitimizing tone to defend the phenomenon of Russian trolling. This tone invites chaos when repeated content across multiple news sources, leveling partisan lines. All in all, such tactics for generating ambiguity differ from those for deploying false information or misinformation, in that disinformation involves affect rather than the factuality of the information.

Moreover, I advance the argument that within shifting contexts, misinformation or false information can evolve into disinformation beyond the actor-based approaches, as very much thoroughly detailed by Benkler et al. (2018). Instead, this book asks how the arguments of disinformation are constructed and who they intend to target rather than investigating who is behind it. Similarly, the effectiveness of disinformation does not depend on the factual accuracy of information. Rather, that information must be partial and sufficiently unverifiable. In other words, the deployment of disinformation underscores the contextual and socially constructed nature of realities, as already argued by some scholars of disinformation, such as Karlova and Fisher (2013). Consequently, disinformation spawns the uncertainty that is at the root of chaos, since it originates in the malicious intent to obscure rather than to clarify.

While anonymity and automation of information in online spaces can activate the disinformation warfare of ideas, otherwise known as computational propaganda (as referred by Woolley & Howard, 2018), this book positions disinformation through its discursive lens rather than merely as a technology-driven phenomenon. Davis (2021) defined cyberwar as a type of warfare that is in the shadows that works in pursuit of power and national interest. This book builds on the argument about the social construction of technology—where the responsibility lies within each of us who use and create and manage these systems, including online platforms that host online content, in addition, but not only the technological properties that surround this.

Furthermore, partisan politics in the United States reflected in media ecosystems and their vulnerability for influence, has been argumentatively critiqued by scholars like Benkler et al. (2018). Benkler and colleagues uncovered these social constructions through asymmetries in partisan perception of trust in media, tropes by partisan media content circulation, and institutional forces and actors involved in disinformation circulation. This book places more weight on the false sense of (new) media affordances in which comments and social media circulate specific tropes, here referred to as frames, while highlighting the need to understand the logics behind types of messaging that constitute disinformation.

While some might contend that Russian trolling justification lurking in news portals comments seem to be merely comments “in the margins,” scholarship attributes an increasing power of online user-generated content and the impact of social media in our lives. For example, Vaidhyanathan (2018) proposed a convincing argument that social media platforms like Facebook have penetrated in our lives not only as pleasure machines but more recently as politics machines. Thus, messages, exchanged through media that have been typically designed as interpersonal media, currently can be used to push agendas, with a range of mechanisms embedded in specific sociotechnical system—from targeted advertisement on social media to automated content dissemination and machine-learning techniques or other artificial intelligence tools to seed relevant content for contestation.

News comments, in particular, have been empirically found to have an effect on the credibility of a conveyed news story content (e.g., Naab et al., 2020). Furthermore, as in rumors, the distance from being in the underground to spreading virally into the mainstream can be unexpectedly short. For example, hatred after surging in the sporadic comments online starts to proliferate and circulate in a memetic way, as exposed through platforms such as 4chan (Zelenkauskaite et al., 2021). Thus, Russian troll justification in the news portals’ comments is not merely a matter of communication in the margins.

This book focuses on the sociotechnicality of disinformation and mechanisms used to create chaos through the proliferation and recirculation of arguments. This book presents evidence where Russian troll justification recirculation was found across media sources and geopolitical contexts. And the sociotechnicality of these media ecosystems, even if not designed for these purposes, can be used not only for public deliberation but also for computational propaganda to be employed in various online spaces, including comments, associated with news stories. It might be that the comments are propagating with the help of automated tools, such as algorithms or bots that dispatch content based on specific rules or news portals; the comments can be exploited to spread disinformation. Throughout this book, disinformation is treated as a form of information warfare that involves not only social media but also news comments written by general public users. And both of these platforms of information become subjects of disinformation, where disinformation adds to existing challenges of misinformation.

Soviet Propaganda in the Eyes of a Child

Interpretation of Russian trolling as a form of disinformation, embedded in online news portal comments, reflects the kind of propaganda that has already been circulated during World War II and more recently in authoritarian and totalitarian contexts. Such propaganda had been used to create chaos rather than to persuade the public to rally toward a single ideology. Thus, disinformation resembles a form of déja vu experienced in different times and spaces. It bridges past and present by bringing together mass media, such as television, newspapers, and radio; newer media forms that are enabled through online social networks; and user-generated content, such as social media posts and news portal comments.

My personal experience with disinformation is based on the dual reality that I had known in my formative years, when images of prosperity starkly contrasted with the lived realities of the Soviet era. Chaos had been fomenting by exposing the Soviet citizenry to this dual reality, even while it was being silenced through the prohibition of free speech or at least deterrence. Szulecki (2018) summarized this experience in these words “Communist ideology was, by the late 1970s, hollowed out, yet it performed a stabilizing and normalizing function in that peculiar system. It was, according to Havel, an asylum and an alibi—an alibi for not-thinking, not-acting, notcaring, and not-asking for the Truth. ‘Living a lie’ was to be the result of a more general, existentially and politically understood human condition— coupled with hollow, ritualized ideology” (p. 321).

Yet the current media landscape is unique in that chaos is created by shaping information, not necessarily to make false claims but to expose disputable ones. Current online spaces can be used strategically, where messages are crafted by state-aligned actors to manipulate public opinion. According to Karga and Rauchfleisch (2019), “These extrajurisdictional practices turn harassment into a relatively low-cost weapon for targeting the opposition, limiting freedom of speech through intimidation and pursuing a ‘silencing’ strategy” (p. 2). Silencing, a typical practice of authoritarian regimes, ensures government-dictated consensus. Therefore, silencing can become a weapon—one that is opposed to the processes of democratic deliberations and that is also a hallmark of propaganda.

I reference Soviet propaganda as a form of silencing to explain why Russian trolling as a phenomenon matters today. While the concept of trolling, popularly defined as “trolls post deliberately incendiary content to a discussion forum or other online community . . . for no other reason than to stir up chaos and outrage” (Dibbell, 2009, para. 9), has existed online since the Web 2.0 era, when the World Wide Web started to acquire socially interactive features, it has since become urgent to understand how rhetorical influence operates in online news and social media contexts. By invoking a personal account of persuasion, my goal is to contextualize Russian trolling as a by-product of postmodernism, or the polarity of arguments, that enables chaos to proliferate. The question is how to uncover such polarizing narratives that create chaos have emerged in response to Russian trolling across multiple online platforms and how they have proliferated in the online public sphere—across news portal comment spaces.

Raised in the former Soviet Union, my generation can be called the silenced generation. Silence reflects the absence of open debate, the possibility of public opposition to the status quo, or the overt endorsement of unpopular beliefs. Even if media scholars such as Chakars (2010) have extensively traced historical developments of the journalism in the post-Soviet era in the Baltics, or propaganda construction in media by scholars like Mažeikis (2010), I provide a personal account of those times to exemplify the realities of navigating the post-truth waters. The silenced generation collectively embodies the dichotomy of everyday life, or two versions of living: The version they are told to believe; and the actual, or “lived,” one. My generation learned to inhabit this duality.

We learned to identify the discrepancy between reality and its distortions—a phenomenon that had been validated by the media. Specifically, the Soviet media projected “official broadcast” messages of standardized reality that starkly contrasted with the actualities that could not be discussed openly. Yet we perceived them in our everyday lives. Such a dichotomously experienced reality can simply be equated with the Orwellian perception of life as the dystopic by-product of totalitarianism. Masha Gessen (2017), author of “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,”

acutely observed: “George Orwell’s (2009) book could not be published in a society that it described, so Soviet readers would not have access to it till 1989, when censorship constraints had loosened sufficiently” (p. 16).

As a child, I had been exposed to changes within contexts that Thomas Kuhn (2012) called “paradigms.” Kuhn (2012) claims that paradigms change very slowly, typically after the death of those who establish them. In other words, it is rare to see the paradigmatic change in one’s lifetime. Yet throughout my own lifetime, the major paradigmatic shift I had experienced was the move from disinformation to its absence. Paradigms are comparable to frameworks of thought—how one can make sense of “reality.” I lived through a uniquely radical paradigm change when I witnessed the collapse of the former Soviet Union’s communist regime—how the “right” ways of thinking changed overnight. That was also when reality itself had changed. Ideological changes did not eliminate the silenced generation, however, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we were finally allowed to speak up. But we still did not know how to talk—how to break out of the silence that had been imposed upon us. Thus, we had to learn quickly how to identify the vestiges of Soviet ideology that were no longer embedded in mass media and in other print forms. Yet at the same time, voicing the sudden change in circumstances has remained a remarkable obstacle that characterized my generation. The concept of a silenced generation remains prevalent in many parts of the world. For example, Chinas authoritarian regime continues to dictate the clear “red lines” of debate that cannot be crossed, and prohibited debate topics include the efficacy of communist rule or the possibility of endorsing an alternative political party (Van Dijk & Hacker, 2018).

Similarly, ideological persuasion and disinformation are no mere abstractions for me. Rather, they are lived experiences that urge me to try to make sense of new media landscapes. After all, I grew up in the Republic of Lithuania when it was part of the Soviet Union—a vast territory of culturally diverse countries whose center was Moscow. In fact, I grew up among multiple dualities that did not always make sense. The first of these derived from a dual-state affiliation that I experienced through language. The Soviet Republic of Lithuania was technically bilingual, its recognized national languages being Russian and Lithuanian. Although my birth certificate retains inscriptions in both languages, as a child, I was raised in a Lithuanianspeaking family. I did not know Russian; nor did I grow up with kids who spoke the language. I did not pick it up at playgrounds, as some of the other kids did, where the Russian-speaking population was larger. However, when I started my schooling, I already knew how to read and write in Lithuanian, a language that is transcribed in the Roman alphabet. Later on, in first grade,

I learned the Cyrillic alphabet together with Russian. Consequently, I lived in a de facto bilingual world—another curious duality that begged for sense.

Even so, being raised as a bilingual Lithuanian child was not the most defining aspect of my dual existence. What had been definitively unique, however, was that I had grown up amid the censorship that a totalitarian one-party regime exercised over the lives of its citizenry. Government censorship supplied my generation with a predefined sense of reality. Thus, we were told what reality should be. At the same time, we could not help witnessing actualities. Obviously, they differed radically from the projected realities we had been fed. Such idealized distortions of reality, oftentimes couched in the language of emotional appeal, had been presented to us primarily through radio and television, and they were validated by educational materials approved for school curricula. These distortions infiltrated our everyday lives through the textbooks that we read as kids and the summercamp rituals that we performed. Our textbooks paid tribute to Vladimir Lenin’s courage and detailed his challenging life’s journey, starting with his boyhood. We consumed images of the economic prosperity and the bright future that would be ours someday. And so we became involved in the ritualistic structures of ideology from early on by becoming little Octobrists, pioneers, and young communists, called upon to pave the pathway to communist party enlistment. Everyone's social role was defined by these ideological structures—mine, my parents’, my schoolmates’, my teachers —even if not all of us had enlisted in the Communist Party.

An additional duality that I encountered through my schooling was communism’s ideological framing, omnipresent in all media forms and in the educational system. It replicated the same ideological projection of communist prosperity—an ongoing narrative that allegedly paralleled the quinquennial progress, communism’s bright future, equality for all. Such propaganda was a staple of all officially circulating information to instill what Mazeikis (2010) described as normative ideology. School textbooks, cartoons, magazines, newspapers, and television news projected the world in two different ways. Propaganda was also infused in popular art forms. It was evident in statuary on bridges that depicted peasants and workers uniting toward a bright communist future. We read it in the poetry and in the other literary genres of those times. Although communist propaganda glorified a bright future for the working class and proclaimed the steady advancement of the quinquennial plan, it was clear that socioeconomic instability was the actual norm in our daily lives.