In March 1955, the Department of External affairs and CBC’s International Service launched a “radio propaganda operation” against the Soviet Union. To keep the project confidential, the operation was referred to only as “The Lobster Festival.”
The operation was driven by an enormously ambitious goal: to try and pull the Soviet Union away from Mao and the People’s Republic of China — to create a rift in the Sino-Soviet alliance.
A handful of documents in an Library and Archives Canada folder titled “Psychological Warfare” offer a remarkably detailed account of the ideas driving Canada’s Cold War propaganda effort.
From Second World War to Cold War
“The Lobster Festival” was hardly Canada’s first foray into propaganda and psychological warfare.
During the Second World War, the large number of enemy Prisoners of War held in Canada served up raw material for the wartime psychological warfare effort. (Note the phrase “psychological warfare” was used by External Affairs in both the Second World War and Cold War - this is not an anachronistic description).
German soldiers imprisoned in Canada were offered a chance to record a message of greeting and reassurance to loved ones at home. These messages were then broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) into Germany. As one Canadian later put, these messages were “bait” to encourage German citizens to tune into the BBC. And by tuning in, they would also hear BBC broadcasts designed to change how Germans viewed the war and the Nazi regime waging it.
In the 1950s, the United States and United Kingdom both used radio broadcasts as a weapon of the Cold War. Canadian officials responsible for psychological warfare, and who exchanged ideas with their American and British colleagues, saw an opportunity for Canada to wage its own operations.
The Canadians believed radio would allow them to reach Soviet officials and the Soviet intelligentsia. And if they could reach them, the Canadians believed they might change Soviet minds, and ultimately change Moscow’s policy towards its Chinese ally.
Kremlinology
Canadian diplomats, like their allies, had very little concrete information about political machinations in the Soviet Union. As a result, they looked to clues in Soviet speeches and newspapers to understand what - and who - made Soviet policy. The science and art of Soviet-watching came to be known as “Kremlinology.”
The particulars that informed The Lobster Festival are beyond esoteric, and I’ll only summarize them briefly below. They are laid out in detailed diplomatic cables sent to Canadian missions, and in a memorandum to Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson. (On the note informing Pearson of the operation, he made a large check mark in pencil and initialled the margin.)
The Kremlinological details, in essence are here:
After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, he was succeeded by Georgy Malenkov. By 1955, after a power struggle, Nikita Khrushchev came to power, replacing Malenkov.
Canada’s Soviet specialists were convinced that Malenkov had been trying to distance the Soviet Union from its close relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). They interpreted a number of Malenkov’s speeches as efforts to signal “Russia[’s …] European-ness and to struggle against too closely and exclusively aligning itself with China.” (Note that the Canadians, like the British, often used the word “Russian” and “Soviet” interchangeably, if inaccurately.)
As further evidence of the Sino-Soviet strains in the Malenkov era, Mao had written a note for the Soviet press organ, Pravda, with the slogan “Do not forget the East.”
When Khrushchev came to power, he seemed to undo Malenkov’s shift towards Europe (and away from China) and instead wished to rebuild, and perhaps deepen, relations with the PRC. The Canadians thought that Khrushchev’s victory in the power struggle “now tipped the scales in favour of closer Sino-Soviet ties against the rest of the Western world.”
This was not good news.
Canadian Cold War policy was premised on the idea that harsh and dangerous Soviet policies could moderate over time. Economic connections between Europe and the USSR should help establish links between Soviet citizens and those outside the USSR. This exposure to other ways of life, combined with a rising level of prosperity for Soviet citizens, would weaken the Kremlin’s control. But any Soviet turn to China would see increased economic aid from the USSR to the PRC. The provision of this economic aid to China would slow the USSR’s economic development and also limit its ability to connect with the west.
The Canadians also worried that a closer Soviet relationship with China would cause Moscow to return to a more severe Communist doctrine. Malenkov had abandoned the idea that the capitalist countries were seeking to surround and threaten the Soviet Union. But the Chinese still frequently emphasized this classic “capitalist encirclement” argument. The idea of a hostile threat from abroad helped Mao consolidate the revolution at home.
As one Canadian diplomat observed at the time, the “struggle in Moscow” between Malenkov and Khrushchev “was perhaps not only between Stalinism à la Khrushchev and reformism à la Malenkov but also between Asianism and Europeanism.”
For Canada, a Soviet Union that considered itself “European” was an essential ingredient for success in the Cold War.
At the end of the day, it seems the analysis of political infighting and doctrine laid out extensively in the planning documents may have matter little to the Canadians who launched the operation. As one official wrote:
“we are less concerned with its accuracy than with its plausibility as working hypothesis on which to base a propaganda operation.”
It seems that what mattered most to the Canadians who planned The Lobster Festival was the opportunity to launch an offensive psychological warfare operation — perhaps as a test case for more to come.
Radio Propaganda Operation
Malenkov had seemed intent on looking to the west. Khrushchev seemed intent on looking east. Perhaps, the Canadians calculated, they could undo this switch with The Lobster Festival.
“We assume that there are many in the ruling circles who remain unconvinced of the wisdom of this course and it is with the object of exploiting this division the we are launching, through CBC/IS, a propaganda operation pointing out the difficult and dangers of being too closely associated with China.”
In 1955, the CBC-IS already had Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Czechoslovakian broadcasts, and they agreed to increase the hours devoted to each.
The Department of External Affairs asked the CBC-IS to read the daily news and reports of Soviet radio. They were to look for any evidence of disagreement between the Soviet Union and China on any international issue, including at the UN, disagreements over Korea and Indochina, or economic issues.
Lobster Festival broadcasts could then emphasize the differences between the two states and suggest that it was better for the Soviet Union to be wary of the PRC.
Armed with any evidence of disagreement on these topics, CBC’s scriptwriters might “exploit” these possible themes:
“A. That China is now less advanced socially and industrially than Russia was in the comparable state of its Communist era so that China could be a drag for Russia, keeping it in a state of relative backwardness.
B. That China could dangerously delay the Soviet drive toward the achievement of Western levels of material prosperity.
C. That Russia has outgrown its state of isolation but that the weight of China will prolong it, or in other words, that Russia has outlived the need to resort to the myth of capitalist encirclement while China has an interest in maintaining it with potentially dangerous consequences for International [sic] relations.”
These CBC-IS’s “Lobster Scripts” would have two targets:
On the one hand would be those members of the Soviet elite who were out of power after Malenkov’s ouster. The broadcasts would keep alive the embers of those in Moscow who favoured closer connections to Europe rather than China.
On the other hand were those in power. The Canadians understood that Soviet leaders were not likely to tune in to the CBC,. But they assumed that the Soviets (like the Americans and British) monitored foreign radio broadcasts. Perhaps the monitoring reports would make their way up the chain of command, and the arguments in the broadcasts would impress the Soviet leadership.
In the memorandum from External Affairs to the CBC outlining the operation, the department suggested that the broadcasts should avoid “jeering” at the “Soviet predicament.” Instead, the idea was to “woo the listener away” from current policy. The tone was to be “dispassionate,” offering an “‘if-I-were-in-your-shoes’ attitude” and a “sort of fellow feeling leading to comradly [sic] advice.”
A Tase of Soviet Medicine
Intriguingly, The Lobster Festival goal of straining the Sino-Soviet alliance seems to have been inspired by Soviet efforts to break Western relationships. The 1950s saw real debate, amplified by Soviet propaganda, over the decision to re-arm West Germany and ultimately admit it into NATO.
The Soviets had argued that if NATO allowed the Federal Republic of Germany to rebuild its military power, “a rearmed Germany might control Western Europe rather than be controlled by it.”
The Canadians, perhaps optimistically, expected that Soviet listers would see a “clear parallel” to Germany: “The idea” behind the radio propaganda operation was “to impress on Soviet listeners the dangers of the Chinese tail wagging the Soviet dog.”
Even more fundamentally, the “object” of the The Lobster Festival was “to exploit Communist contradictions in the same way that Moscow tries to exploit capitalist contradictions.”
Failure?
Ultimately the Soviet-PRC alliance would collapse and the two former allies would become, at best, frenemies; at times, outright enemies.
But it is safe to say that the Lobster Festival did not lead to the Sino-Soviet split.
The records described above were declassified and made accessible in 1997, but the broader story has been public knowledge since Bernard J. Hibbitts’ excellent 1982 MA Thesis, “The CBC International Service as a Psychological Instrument of Canadian Foreign Policy in the Cold War, 1948-196,” which included a detailed description of The Lobster Festival.
Hibbitts employed a different file of DEA records (which seems to provide a fuller account of The Lobster Festival’s implementation), as well as oral history interviews. His account also offers the important broader context of the Canadian effort to harness CBC-IS broadcasts to Canadian foreign policy goals.
Lobster Scripts were aired in late March and on into April 1955. But as Hibbitts wrote more than 40 years ago, the DEA officer who envisioned the operation was disappointed with the broadcasts. He tended to blame the CBC-IS’s implementation of the operation for the operation’s failure. The project fizzled.
Were the DEA officials correct to think that such a radio propaganda operation, if carried out with better Lobster Scripts, might have been more successful? Or was it the ambitious goals of The Lobster Festival that made it unreasonably to expect success? How, indeed, would the success of such a propaganda operation be measured?
Beyond the success or failure of The Lobster Festival itself, the records illustrate an early Canadian understanding that a Sino-Soviet split was not only desirable but possible. Just as important, they reveal that Canada was willing to wage psychological warfare operations to try and make the split a reality.
It might be time for another graduate student to build on the work done by Hibbitts (and others) on the CBC-IS and Canadian psychological warfare, to seek a fuller understanding of Canadian ideas about how to win the Cold War.
There is now even an opportunity to determine what the Soviets made of specific radio propaganda operations. Moscow clearly believed such radio operations posed a significant threat.
There remain real questions to be asked, and answered, about whether and how Canada should work to change the minds of its international adversaries.
Consideration of this aspect of Canadian history might help us to consider the possibilities and limitations of “psychological warfare” today.
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Unless otherwise noted with a hyperlink, all of the information above comes from a handful of documents in “Psychological Warfare,” file 50182-40, part 11.2. This folder is in volume 5893, Record Group 25, Library and Archives Canada. The documents include four telegrams (External no. 246 and no. 247 to NATO Delegation and External no. 400 and 401 to London, all dates March 8, 1955); “Radio Propaganda Operation,” Memorandum for the Minister, March 9, 1955; “Radio Propaganda Operation,” Memoranda No. 1 and No. 2, both addressed to C.B.C./I.S., and “Agenda," all dated March 10, 1955.