Index On Censorship - Founding History

Founding History

The original inspiration for Index on Censorship came from two prominent Soviet dissidents, Pavel Litvinov, grandson of the former Soviet Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinov, and Larisa Bogoraz, the former wife of the writer, Yuli Daniel, who had written to The Times in 1968 calling for international condemnation of the rigged trial of two young writers and their typists on charges of 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda'. (One of the writers, Yuri Galanskov, died in a camp in 1972).

Spender organised a telegram of support and sympathy from 16 British and US public intellectuals, including W.H. Auden, A.J. Ayer, Yehudi Menuhin, J. B. Priestley, Paul Scofield, Henry Moore, Bertrand Russell and Igor Stravinsky, among others. In reply Litvinov suggested, in a letter later published in Index’s first issue, for some form of publication "to provide information to world public opinion about the real state of affairs in the USSR".

Spender and his colleagues, Stuart Hampshire, David Astor, Edward Crankshaw and founding editor Michael Scammell sought to go further than this, wishing to cover then current censorship in right-wing dictatorships such as Greece, Portugal, and the military regimes of Latin America, as well as in the former Soviet Union and its satellites.

Describing the organisation's objectives Hampshire said ‘the tyrant’s concealments of oppression and of absolute cruelty should always be challenged. There should be noise of publicity outside every detention centre and concentration camp and a published record of every tyrannical denial of free expression.’

The magazine was originally to be called Index, as suggested by Scammell, a reference to the lists or Indexes of banned works that are central to the history of censorship, including the Roman Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books), the Soviet Union’s Censor’s Index and apartheid South Africa’s Jacobsens Index of Objectionable Literature.

Scammell later admitted that the line on Censorship was added as an afterthought after it was perceived that the reference was not clear to readers. “Panicking, we hastily added the words 'on censorship' as a subtitle,” wrote Scammell in the December 1981 issue of the magazine, “and this it has remained ever since, nagging me with its ungrammaticality (Index of Censorship, surely) and a standing apology for the opacity of its title.”