On 3 December 2025, Vera Tolz delivered a guest lecture for the research seminar of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, USA. Her talk, ‘From Moscow to Cologne and Across the Atlantic: Newspaper Science and the Global Origins of Soviet Mass Communication,’ located early Soviet press studies, known as gazetovedenie, within a worldwide history of mass communication research. Contrary to the common view that Soviet media theory was always fully subordinate to agitational practice, Tolz showed that this dynamic only crystallised around 1930, when familiar Soviet orthodoxies on propaganda took hold. By reframing early Soviet scholarly work as part of a global intellectual exchange, she argued, we can rethink the origins of propaganda studies not as a product of Cold War divides but as a shared response to modernity, war, and the rise of mass politics.