In his monumental study of the Bolshevik Revolution, E. H. Carr claimed that “The initiative of introducing propaganda as a regular instrument of international relations must be credited to the Soviet Government.” More than ten years later Frederick C. Barghoorn began his classic study of Soviet Foreign Propaganda by stating: “Words and pictures have played a more continuous, and perhaps a more vital role than bullets or rubles in Moscow's struggle to undermine the social order of capitalism and to reconstruct society on ‘Marxist–Leninist’ foundations.” As these authors – and many others who have been concerned with detailing the record of Soviet propaganda activities – have demonstrated, propaganda of all sorts has been an important instrument in the efforts of Soviet leaders to accomplish their foreign objectives ever since the creation of the Soviet state. During the two decades since Barghoorn published his study the foreign propaganda activities of the Soviet Union have expanded significantly and now extend across the entire world.

According to estimates of the US Central Intelligence Agency, the Soviet leadership spent more than $3 billion per year at the end of the 1970s on various forms of foreign propaganda; by 1982 the estimated cost of foreign propaganda had risen to more than $4 billion. Soviet propaganda is conducted through a broad array of activities. In 1982, for example, the Soviets published books in 68 foreign languages, primarily for distribution abroad. In English alone almost 1,200 books and pamphlets were published in more than 24 million copies.