I understand that this question may be a little difficult to decipher. Basically, what I'm asking is if when a country released political propaganda, like at Stalingrad for example, whether the Soviet government actually called it propaganda. Was it such a derogatory word as it is now?
The Nazis had a so called "Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda", headed by Joseph Göbbels.
The Soviets called it "Department for Agitation and Propaganda".
The Chinese have the Central Propaganda Department but changed the name in the late eighties, at least the English name.
The North Koreans still use the word today, they have the Propaganda and Agitation Department.
In addition to the replies already offered here, I can add various examples from the British experience of the First World War.
The most notable would be the unambiguously named War Propaganda Bureau, founded at the war's outset on the orders of H.H. Asquith and David Lloyd George. The luckless Liberal statesman Charles F.G. Masterman was chosen to run it, and he chose his already-active offices at Wellington House in Buckingham Gate as the location for this new enterprise -- they were already the home of the National Insurance Commission, and so it would not be suspicious on a public level to see lots of clerks, government workers and so on coming and going from the place as the war went on.
The Bureau would become enfolded into a number of other state agencies and organizations as the war went on, usually with less explicit names -- into the Department of Information in 1917, for example, and then into the Ministry of same in 1918, with Lord Beaverbrook as the first-ever Minister of Information. Nevertheless, even by the time a Bureau of Propaganda had become a Ministry of Information, the activities and responsibilities of that ministry were still internally described as propaganda without even a trace of regret, shame or euphemism. The Ministry had a number of internal divisions, with the National War Aims Committee (for example) officially in charge of domestic propaganda and Lord Northcliffe's operation at Crewe House officially in charge of propaganda for enemy nations.
The awareness of all of this persisted in the war's aftermath as well. Sir Campbell Stuart, a Canadian ex-patriot who ended up becoming an English newspaper baron, had worked under Northcliffe as deputy director at Crewe House, and in 1920 brought out an essentially positive memoir of the experience -- describing the work undertaken as propaganda and not feeling it necessary to regret the choice of word. Reviews of the work are similarly unconcerned with any negative connotations the term might hold, with one in the Spectator being more concerned with the challenges facing the organization than any question of whether or not "propaganda" was something to be condemned, celebrated or otherwise.
The post-war 1922 supplement to the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was the first edition of that publication to include an actual entry for "Propaganda" -- you can read it here, and come to your own conclusions about the moral judgments it offers, if any. It is worth noting, though, that this entry was possibly written by the aforementioned Northcliffe; he was a great believer in the power of encyclopedias (and organized a set of them himself -- the Harmsworth Universal Encyclopedia, first brought out in 1921/22), and contributed a number of articles to Britannica. Still, whatever the article's provenance, it remains the case that it was meant for public consumption.
Another example (though more dubious where "authority" is concerned) can be found in the writings of H.G. Wells. Wells was one of the many British authors first approached by the War Propaganda Bureau at the war's outset to sign on to a long-term scheme of writings and speech-making in support of the war effort, and, though he had considerable reservations about the preservation of the world order as it then stood, he was still more convinced of the dangers of what he viewed as Prussian militarism. He would spend most of the war working for the Bureau, and then later for Crewe House, quitting his post only in 1918 after a clash with Northcliffe over one of his favourite assistants having been fired for the crime of having a German grand-parent.
One of his earliest volumes in support of the war effort was the popular essay collection, The War That Will End War (1914). At various points in the volume, he unambiguously and unapologetically refers to successful propaganda (by that very name) as one of the highest and most important works of those supporting the war effort. Indeed, he viewed the war, at that time, as being above all an intellectual enterprise, with propaganda (literally) as its highest aim and consequence:
And the real task before mankind is quite beyond the business of the fighting line, the simple awful business of discrediting and discouraging these stupidities by battleship, artillery, rifle and the blood and courage of seven million men. The real task of mankind is to get better sense into the heads of these Germans, and therewith and thereby into the heads of humanity generally, and to end not simply a war, but the idea of war. What printing and writing and talking have done, printing and writing and talking can undo. Let no man be fooled by bulk and matter. Rifles do but kill men, and fresh men are born to follow them. Our business is to kill ideas. The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the creation of others. It is to this propaganda that reasonable men must address themselves. [Emphasis mine; from Ch. 11, "The War of the Mind"]
Wells was not himself an authority or a statesman, but he answered to both in his capacity as a willing co-operant employee of the War Propaganda Bureau -- and they had no problem whatsoever organizing the publication of the material quoted above.
TL;DR: No, "propaganda" has not always been an irredeemably dirty word, and many of those involved in it were happy to call it by that name.
To add to everything that's already here, if you look up the etymology of the word you'll find that the original meaning was not pejorative. It could be taken as completely neutral, simply meaning the propagating of a specific view or set of information.
Edward Bernays referred to what he did as propaganda many times in his life. He argued for the manipulation of public opinion in books called Propaganda, This Business of Propoganda, and Verdict of public opinion on propaganda. He traded the term for public relations because the Germans had used it in WW1 and it now carried negative connotations, although using the term propaganda didn't seem to carry a stigma before WW1 in America. It is worth noting that he didn't work for the government exclusively and was very active in both the private and public sectors in the United States, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, so he may not have represented the norm within the government at the time.
The generally acknowledged origin for the term "propaganda" as we know it is from the phrase "Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide," the Catholic department for the propagation of the faith. So historically it doesn't have quite as harsh a root.
When I was studying propaganda in undergrad, one of the open questions that I never felt was properly resolved was whether nor not pretending something wasn't propaganda made it any more effective. Edward Bernays (see /u/TarmacATK's post) believed that hiding the intent of propaganda kept people from being as defensive about it (how appropriately Freudian of him). But when I was reading Screening Culture, Viewing Politics by Mankekar, many of her informants note that they know that Indian national television is propaganda, often nakedly so, yet they all seem to digest it and propagate it and believe in the messages they're supposed to, meaning that it still functions on people who know what's going on. It's possible that the American and British habit of pretending that propaganda isn't propaganda may just be a fashion trend within the culture of propagandists, that is continued because successful departments did it even if it did not meaningfully contribute to the sucess of such departments.
The famous "if you tolerate this then your children will be next" poster produced by the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War is labelled "Ministerio de Propaganda". (I haven't linked to the poster since some people might find it upsetting).