Soviet censorship

Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.

Censorship was performed in two main directions:

The Soviet government implemented mass destruction of pre-revolutionary and foreign books and journals from libraries. Only "special collections" (spetskhran), accessible by special permit granted by the KGB, contained old and politically incorrect material. Towards the end of Soviet rule, perestroika led to loosened restrictions on information and publishing.

Soviet books and journals also disappeared from libraries according to changes in Soviet history. Often Soviet citizens preferred to destroy politically incorrect publications and photos, because those connected to them frequently suffered persecution.

After the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria in 1953, all subscribers to the second edition (1950-1958) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia obtained a page to replace the one containing the Lavrentiy Beria article; the new page extended information on George Berkeley.

Works of print such as the press, advertisements, product labels, and books were censored by Glavlit, an agency established on June—6, 1922, to safeguard top secret information from foreign entities. From 1932 until 1952, the promulgation of socialist realism was the target of Glavlit in bowdlerizing works of print, while Anti-Westernization and nationalism were common tropes for that goal. To limit peasant revolts over the Holodomor, themes involving shortages of food were expunged. In the 1932 book “Russia Washed in Blood,” a Bolshevik’s harrowing account of Moscow’s devastation from the October Revolution contained the description, “frozen rotten potatoes, dogs eaten by people, children dying out, hunger,” but was promptly deleted. Also, excisions in the 1941 novel “Cement” were made by eliminating Gleb’s spirited exclamation to English sailors: “Although we’re poverty-stricken and are eating people on account of hunger, all the same we have Lenin.”

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