Censorship and Propaganda

How communist states controlled what people could read, hear and say: censorship, propaganda, radio jamming, informers and the cult of the leader.

• The Securitate: Romania's Communist Secret Police

  How Romania's Securitate, built under Soviet advisers in 1948, ran arrests without trial, the Pitești tortures, a typewriter registry and plots abroad.

• Cuba's Healthcare: The Showcase and the Evidence

  Cuba's doctors and infant mortality figures are the regime's pride. What researchers, UNICEF and Human Rights Watch have found behind them.

• The Stasi: How East Germany Spied on Its Own People

  How East Germany's Stasi used 91,000 officers, 189,000 informants, secret prisons and 'quiet terror' to control a nation — and what its files revealed.

• Turkmenistan: How a Soviet Party Boss Became Turkmenbashi

  Turkmenistan's dictatorship was built by its last Communist Party chief. Today it scores 1 out of 100 for freedom and has passed power from father to son.

• Thought Control in Vietnam: The Party and Its Intellectuals

  From the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm purge to re-education camps and jailed lecturers: how Vietnam's Communist Party has policed scholars and writers.

• The Hundred Flowers Campaign: Mao's Invitation and Purge

  In 1957 Mao invited China's intellectuals to criticize the Party, then purged them: about 550,000 branded 'rightists'. He called it an 'overt scheme'.

• North Korea's Information Blockade: Propaganda and Punishment

  How North Korea keeps its people from the outside world: one state news source, registered radios and TVs, and prison for watching South Korean dramas.

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