Censorship in the Russian Empire
In the Russian Empire, government agencies exerted varying levels of control over the content and dissemination of books, periodicals, music, theatrical productions, works of art, and motion pictures.
[1] Censorship first attained a kind of official status in the period of the Tsardom (1547–1721): it was encoded in law in the Stoglav and was directed against heresies, schisms, and other alleged deviations from religious dogmas and sacred texts.
[7] Many classics of Russian literature were affected by censorship, and the censor was regularly represented as a grotesque figure and made the target of satire.
The first known list of banned books is found in the Izbornik of 1073, when much of what is now European Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus was governed by a polity known as Rus', centered in Kiev.
The historian D. Bulanin M. notes that this work was so popular in Rus' that "rarely did a book or original medieval composition not contain excerpts from the Pandects or the Taktikon".
They became especially popular in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the writers of the time (Joseph Volotsky, Vassian Patrikeyev, Maximus the Greek, Zinovy Otensky, etc.)
[9] The first native Slavic list of banned books is thought to be the index included in the Pogodinsky Nomokanon, dated to the fourteenth century.
Up until the early sixteenth century the number of indices of prohibited books steadily increased, but they were not able to hold back a massive influx of literature from Byzantium and the south Slavic countries.
Kobyak argues that the expansion of the lists of books reflected the same sentiments found in the teachings of Joseph Volotsky against "unwholesome stories" and of Nilus of Sora against "ungodly" writings.
[1] According to G. V. Zhirkov, "official" censorship of book publishers began in the Tsardom of Russia in the mid-sixteenth century, when the Stoglavy Sobor was convened to strengthen the position of the church against heretical movements.
[10] The collection of decisions taken by the council, called the Stoglav, consisted mainly of questions posed by the tsar and detailed answers given by the church officials.
It was a reaction to the development of literacy and the emergence of an increasing number of literary works, the content of which did not always fit with church and state doctrine.
The pioneering printers Ivan Fyodorov and Pyotr Mstislavets also fled to Lithuania, fearing persecution by the Josephite-dominated church leadership.
[13] With the invention of the printing press, the priest-scribes who had previously dominated the book industry saw their incomes decline and erupted in protest, and as a result, Fyodorov and Mstislavets were accused of heresy.
Many Russian clergymen believed that the Catechism contained heretical statements and in February 1627 Zizany publicly debated the matter with the editors in the Moscow Print Yard.
In 1683, however, Patriarch Joachim managed to close the uncontrolled printing house, and after the fall of the regent Sophia Alekseyevna, the printer Sylvester Medvedev was put to death.
[18] Another act of censorship punishment occurred in October 1689 in Moscow, when German mystic Quirinus Kuhlmann and his successor Conrad Norderman, who were burnt alive and whose writings were labelled heretical and confiscated.
At the same time the Petrine government set penalties for trafficking in printed materials from other foreign printers and introduced the requirement that the books had to be published "for the glory of the great sovereign" and were not to include any "abasement of our Imperial Majesty [...] and our state".
[22] As part of Peter's ecclesiastical reforms, he introduced legislative changes that limited the power of the church in the field of book censorship.
In the same year Peter created a new censorship body, the Izugrafskaya Palata, as a countermeasure against those who were trading "pages with various images without permission and without supervision" on the Bridge of the Savior in Moscow.
[31] The state also strengthened its control of the import of literature from abroad; before publications in foreign languages could be sold in the Empire, they had to undergo a review, in case they mentioned undesirable persons.
[5] Emperor Paul I continued the work of Catherine, developing and supporting her censorship initiatives; moreover, he greatly expanded the areas that were subject to state control.
[32] In 1913, according to Reifman, 372 fees were imposed on the press, for a total of 140 thousand rubles, 216 issues were confiscated, 63 editors were arrested, and 20 newspapers were closed down.
[33] Zhirkov, however, calls this time "the flowering of Russian journalism", characterized by expanding discussions about freedom of speech and growing discontent with the repressive interior ministry MIA among publishers and journalists.
Subsequently, in response to the crisis of the July Days, the government gave the minister of war the right to close publications that called for military rebellion and disobedience on the front, which led to the repression of Bolshevik newspapers.
