Censorship in The Soviet Union - Soviet Censorship of Literature

Soviet Censorship of Literature

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.”

As peasant uprisings defined pre-World War II Soviet censorship, nationalism defined the period during the war. Defeats of the Red Army in literature were forbidden, as were depictions of trepidation in Soviet military characters. Pressure from the Pravda prompted authors like Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev to redact a section in “The Young Guard” where a child reads in the eyes of a dying Russian sailor the words, “we are crushed.” Since Stalin regularly read Pravda, which was itself censored by Glavlit, it was wise for an author to obey Pravda’s advice. Also, Joseph Stalin handpicked who received the Stalin Prize, further incentivizing an author’s pandering to Stalin’s tastes, besides the obvious risks involved with disregarding them.

Censorship for the purposes of nationalism after World War II spread Anti-Westernization, smacking of Russia’s traditional xenophobia. For instance, in the 1950 edition of “The Order of Sevastopol,” censors screened the book’s references to Frenchmen as, “a people of very lively imagination,” and the chivalrous treatments which the French gave to Russian prisoners—such as eating in the passenger’s lounge and being given a hundred francs per month—were extracted from the text. Historically, Russia has been technologically inferior to the West, which is demonstrated by Glavlit editing out a section of “Sevastopol,” which enviously describes London’s technological accomplishments in flattering detail. Religious intolerance and atheism was another goal of post-WWII censorship, and was an extension of Anti-Westernization. In the children’s novel “Virgin Soil Upturned,” references to God making mist out of tears shed by the poor and hungry were rescinded.

The “Khrushchev Thaw" beginning in 1953 with Stalin's death brought liberation of previously banned literature, and greater liberty to the authors writing during this time. Glavlit’s authority to censor literature decreased after they became attached to the USSR Council of Ministers in 1953. The nascence of de-Stalinization—the government's remission of Stalin’s policies—is evident by censors replacing his name in “For the Power of the Soviets,” with words like “the party,” or “the Supreme Commander.” Anti-Westernization was also suppressed, and in 1958 “Sevastopol,” became divested of cuts meant to hide the West’s technological advancement and Russia’s backwardness. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” a novel about a prisoner’s brutal experience in the Gulag, was released to the public in 1962, it was clear that socialist realism was disappearing. However, censorship was not completely absent from this era. Emmanuil Kazakevich’s 1962 novel, “Spring on the Oder,” was posthumously injected in 1963 with descriptions of American bigotry, selfishness, and racism which was not in the novel originally. These examples of Anti-Westernization indicate that works were still expurgated for propaganda, but censorship declined with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization.