agitprop

noun

ag·​it·​prop ˈa-jət-ˌpräp 

: propaganda

You may not think that some agitprop in your Facebook feed would really get under your skin. But that is exactly what smartly tuned postings … are designed to do …

—The Daily News of Los Angeles

especially : political propaganda promulgated chiefly in literature, drama, music, or art

Ample and gorgeous evidence … that all was not agitprop in Russia's postrevolutionary culture.

—Sada Fretz

… turning to studio heads to churn out the sort of rah-rah agitprop released during World War II …

—Graydon Carter

… [Joshua] Harmon reserves some of his powerful soliloquies for characters who probably oppose his private, personal opinions. That is the difference, of course, between art and agitprop.

—Samuel G. Freedman

agitprop adjective

agitprop theater

agitprop films/songs/posters

an agitprop campaign

Never has the Kremlin's agitprop mill cooed more seductively …

—Richard Poe

Examples of agitprop in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

It’s been read — and will continue to be after its release — as anti-Trump agitprop. —Daniel D'addario, Variety, 19 Sep. 2024

Although the organizers insist the exhibit is neither political theater nor agitprop, it was met with anti-Israel demonstrations in New York in June. —Stacy Perman, Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug. 2024

The Soviet Union could never have dreamed of reaching a mass audience in the United States for its agitprop such as the one Beijing reaches daily through the tools provided by Silicon Valley technology giants. —Matt Pottinger, Foreign Affairs, 23 Aug. 2021

Chahine films the story with uninhibited sympathy for the cause but without the inflated optimism of agitprop, and presents living history in all its complexity. —Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 19 Mar. 2024

Word History

Etymology

borrowed from Russian Agitprop, shortened from Agitacionnopropagandistskij otdel "Agitation-Propaganda Section (of the Central Committee, or a local committee, of the Communist Party)"; later used for the head of such a section, or in compound names of political education organs, as agitpropbrigada "agitation-propaganda brigade"

Note: Russian agitpróp was probably first used in the names of state organs, then generalized as a shortening of agitatsiya i propaganda "agitation and propaganda," though the chronology is uncertain. In the latter sense well-known in Russian at least from the time of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem Vo ves' golos (1928-30), containing the line "i mne agitprop v zubakh navyaz" ("and I was sick and tired of agitprop," literally, "and agitprop stuck in my teeth").

First Known Use

1925, in the meaning defined above