The Propaganda Behind the Iran War Was Made in Moscow—Decades Ago

Today’s narratives rampant online and in social media about American imperialism, Zionist manipulation, and heroic “resistance” are hardly organic, rather they were developed by the Soviet Union—and continue to shape how the world sees Iran, Israel, and the West.

By Uri Pilichowsky

AI-generated illustration of Soviet propaganda shaping modern anti-Western narratives.

On July 15, Vice President JD Vance told Joe Rogan that elements within the Israeli government were conducting what he called a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to turn Americans against negotiations with Iran. He accused those involved of trying to manipulate American opinion to keep the war going indefinitely.

Vance was responding to a genuine controversy. Time had reported that Israel hired a firm led by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to conduct a digital campaign in the United States—an arrangement disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Israel, like every foreign government, should be subject to legitimate scrutiny over its attempts to shape American opinion.

But a registered public-diplomacy campaign is not evidence that Israel controls American foreign policy. And the controversy touched upon a much older and more dangerous narrative: Israel as the hidden force manipulating Washington and dragging the United States into wars that serve “Zionist” rather than American interests.

That idea was not born on Joe Rogan’s podcast. It did not originate with social media, the war with Iran, or even the Islamic Republic. It was made in Moscow decades ago.

Long before TikTok, X, and viral conspiracy theories, the Soviet Union constructed a global propaganda system that portrayed the United States as the engine of imperialism and Israel as both its colonial outpost and its secret master. Depending on the needs of the moment, Washington supposedly controlled Israel—or Israel controlled Washington. The contradiction did not matter. The objective was to fuse the two countries into a single conspiratorial enemy and persuade audiences that every conflict involving either was part of a wider campaign of Western and “Zionist” domination.

Today, as missiles again cross the Middle East and Iran presents its confrontation with the United States as a struggle against American-Zionist imperialism, Soviet vocabulary is everywhere. It can be heard in Tehran’s official messaging, Russian media, Western universities, activist movements, and increasingly within mainstream American politics.

Understanding Soviet propaganda is therefore not merely an exercise in Cold War history. It is essential to understanding the information war unfolding around us now.

Building the West as an Enemy

The Soviet Union’s propaganda machine was one of the most sophisticated and pervasive instruments of state power in the twentieth century. From the Bolshevik Revolution onward, the regime viewed the capitalist democracies—especially the United States and Britain—as its principal ideological enemies.

Anti-Western propaganda served two purposes. Domestically, it helped consolidate control by presenting the Soviet Union as a besieged workers’ paradise threatened by hostile foreign powers. Internationally, it sought to weaken Western societies through disinformation, front organizations, political infiltration, and what Soviet intelligence called “active measures.”

In the years following the 1917 revolution, Soviet propaganda emphasized class struggle and the supposedly inevitable collapse of capitalism. Posters, films, and newspapers depicted Western leaders as greedy plutocrats exploiting workers and colonized peoples.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Communist International coordinated parties and revolutionary movements around the world. The Great Depression provided especially fertile ground. Soviet outlets relentlessly highlighted American poverty, unemployment, and racial injustice while hiding Stalin’s purges, political repression, engineered famine, and forced-labor system.

The most effective propaganda was not entirely invented. It took real Western failures, removed their context, exaggerated them, and presented them as proof that the democratic system itself was illegitimate. At the same time, Soviet crimes were denied, concealed, or attributed to hostile foreign conspiracies. That basic method remains central to authoritarian propaganda today.

From Wartime Alliance to Active Measures

World War II temporarily softened overt Soviet hostility toward the West as Moscow allied with the United States and Britain against Nazi Germany. But the alliance was tactical.

With the onset of the Cold War, anti-Western propaganda returned at full strength. The Marshall Plan was portrayed not as an effort to rebuild a devastated Europe but as a project of American economic enslavement. NATO was presented as an aggressive imperialist alliance preparing to attack the peaceful Soviet Union.

The KGB institutionalized “active measures”: forged documents, planted news stories, front organizations, agents of influence, covert political funding, and conspiracy theories designed to deepen existing divisions within Western societies.

Soviet propaganda again succeeded by exploiting genuine tensions. American segregation, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, inequality, crime, and unemployment were presented as evidence of the inherent corruption of democratic capitalism.

Radio Moscow, TASS, communist newspapers, and Soviet-aligned organizations distributed these narratives internationally. Groups such as the World Peace Council organized ostensibly independent peace campaigns that closely reflected Soviet foreign-policy priorities. Soviet military actions were framed as defensive, while Western responses were treated as acts of aggression.

The goal was not always to persuade audiences that the Soviet Union was good. It was often enough to convince them that the West was equally corrupt—or worse. Sound familiar? Just wait. 

How Israel Became a Central Soviet Target

Israel initially occupied an uncertain place in Soviet strategy. Moscow supported the 1947 United Nations partition plan and quickly recognized Israel in 1948, partly because it believed the new state might become socialist and weaken British influence in the Middle East.

That calculation soon changed. Israel aligned increasingly with the West, while the Soviet Union built relationships with Arab nationalist regimes and armed Israel’s enemies. Stalin’s growing paranoia about Jewish loyalty also produced a wave of repression against Soviet Jewish intellectuals, religious leaders, and cultural institutions.

The decisive turning point came after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War over Soviet-backed Arab states. Humiliated by the defeat of its regional allies, Moscow launched an enormous international campaign to transform the image of Israel. Israel was no longer to be understood as a small state created in the shadow of the Holocaust and threatened by larger neighbors. It was recast as a racist, colonial, expansionist power serving Western imperialism.

The Soviet Union developed an entire pseudo-academic field sometimes called “Zionology”. Books, films, conferences, and newspaper articles portrayed Zionism as a form of fascism, racism, and global conspiracy. Soviet propagandists even accused Zionists of collaborating with Nazi Germany—a grotesque inversion that transferred the crimes committed against Jews onto the Jewish national movement itself.

Trofim Kichko’s 1963 book Judaism Without Embellishment, for example, repackaged classical antisemitic imagery and conspiracy theories in officially acceptable anti-Zionist language. The Soviet message insisted that it opposed Zionists rather than Jews, even while employing some of the oldest anti-Jewish tropes. This distinction allowed antisemitism to be presented not as prejudice, but as anti-racism.

“Zionism Is Racism”

The campaign achieved its greatest diplomatic victory in 1975, when the Soviet and Arab blocs helped secure passage of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The resolution gave international legitimacy to the Soviet assault on Israel. State-controlled media flooded the Soviet bloc and developing world with material portraying Israel as an apartheid state, a colonial outpost, and an enemy of national liberation.

The Soviet Union also used front organizations, sympathetic journalists, allied political parties, forged documents, and agents of influence to spread these ideas beyond communist societies. The objective was to turn opposition to Israel into a natural extension of the global struggle against colonialism and racism.

The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, established in 1983, enlisted prominent Soviet Jews to provide a façade of Jewish approval for the government’s campaign. It denied the persecution of Soviet Jews and claimed that those seeking to emigrate were victims of foreign Zionist manipulation.

Mahmoud Abbas’s (the so-called “moderate” president of the Palestinian Authority) Moscow dissertation, completed during this period and later published as a book, echoed the Soviet allegation of extensive Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. It demonstrated how deeply these ideas had penetrated the political culture of Soviet-aligned movements in the Middle East.

The message was simple and remarkably effective: America was the imperialist mastermind, Israel was its regional enforcer, and any movement fighting either of them represented legitimate “resistance.”

From Moscow to Tehran

The Islamic Republic of Iran did not invent this worldview. It absorbed, adapted, and Islamized it. Iran combined traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories with the Soviet language of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, national liberation, and revolutionary struggle. Israel became the “Little Satan,” America the “Great Satan,” and Iran’s network of armed proxies became an “Axis of Resistance.”

This framework allows Tehran to attack its neighbors, arm militias, threaten international shipping, repress its own population, and still present itself as the victim. Every Iranian escalation becomes “resistance.” Every American or Israeli response becomes “aggression.” Every regional government aligned with the West becomes a puppet.

The Soviet formula survives because it remains politically useful. It allows authoritarian regimes to redirect domestic anger toward foreign enemies. It gives violent movements the moral language of liberation. And it encourages Western audiences to see the actions of Israel and the United States not as policies that can be debated on their merits, but as evidence of an inherently evil system.

The Soviet Union’s Posthumous Victory over the West

Soviet propaganda did not create every criticism of Israel or the West. Nor does its history mean that criticism of Israeli or American policy is illegitimate. Democracies require scrutiny, debate, and accountability—including over foreign lobbying and influence campaigns.

But criticism becomes something different when Israel is portrayed as a uniquely sinister power controlling governments, manipulating the media, engineering wars, or operating behind every American decision. That is not serious policy analysis. It is the survival of a conspiratorial framework deliberately globalized by the Soviet Union.

The USSR collapsed in 1991, defeated by economic failure, political repression, and the loss of its own legitimacy. Yet many of its most effective narratives survived. They migrated into Middle Eastern media, Western universities, international organizations, activist movements, and now the digital ecosystem.

The platforms have changed. The language has barely changed at all. When Iran portrays itself as the innocent victim of American-Zionist aggression, when Israel is accused of secretly controlling Washington, or when Zionism is casually equated with racism, fascism, or Nazism, we are not hearing entirely new arguments. We are hearing updated versions of narratives designed in Soviet intelligence offices decades ago.

The Soviet Union lost the Cold War. But parts of its propaganda machine are still fighting—and, far too often, still winning.

Uri Pilichowsky is a senior lecturer, author, and commentator on Israel and antisemitism. He has written multiple books and published numerous articles in leading international publications.