Functional and Pragmatic Features of Slogans and Appeals of the Soviet Era: Semantic, Semiotic and Psycholinguistic Aspects

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problems of organizing the information space using propaganda slogans and appeals that were typical of the Soviet era between the 1970s and 1990s. All totalitarian systems exploit ideologemes in an exaggerated version, as well as various types of appeals. These information messages are one of the key tools of totalitarian myth-making. And, as historical experience has shown, their operation is very effective. Since the twenty-first century is not free from totalitarian regimes, as well as trends, in those countries that have discarded old regimes and have embarked on the path of democratic development, totalitarian propaganda methods are seen as a ballast, yet they are present and affect the information landscape. They also promote destructive tendencies in the humanitarian sphere in general and interfere with the process of objective coverage of the past and present. This area requires in-depth and systematic research, which is currently in in­fancy.The article explores one of the facets of the problem.In the process of describing the complex of propaganda appeals, the author relies on the methods of analysis, synthesis, end-to-end sampling, and differentiation based on pragmatic features. As a result, more than 150 slogans and appeals of the communist era were selected, which are among the universal and most used and distributed in terms of the headings, and their main suggestive functions were analysed. At this stage of the study, key theses were formulated that highlight the artificiality and inconsistency of the programme statements of the era of stagnation, as well as their destructive function in relation to the socio-mental and communicative axiological picture of the world.