The international copyright relations of Russia were virtually non-existent for much of the Imperial era continuing into the history of the Soviet Union until the Cold War.
After the October Revolution, the Soviet Union had no international copyright relations until 1967, when a first treaty with Hungary was concluded.
More bilateral treaties followed, including two with Western countries (Austria in 1981 and Sweden in 1986), until the government announced its intention to join the Berne Convention in 1989.
Both treaties provided for reciprocal copyright protection, but were limited to literature only; translation rights were not covered, and censorship was explicitly allowed.
[9] Tsarist Russia even planned to join the Berne Convention in the early 20th century, but that was, according to Stoyanovitch, prevented by the outbreak of World War I.
[11] During the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the Soviet regime unsuccessfully tried to conclude new bilateral copyright treaties with Great Britain, Germany, and Italy.
[13][14] On February 27, 1973, the Soviet Union deposited with the UNESCO its declaration of accession to the Geneva version of 1952 of the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC).
[15] Three months later, on May 27, 1973, the UCC entered in force with respect to the USSR, establishing copyright relations with Western countries.
The USSR would then have been forced to implement the somewhat stronger provisions of the 1971 Paris version, which in particular explicitly recognized an author's exclusive rights to reproduction, performance, and broadcast of a work.
Evidently, the Soviet authorities considered the measures provided by its other laws—in particular articles 70 and 190(1) of the RSFSR Criminal Code on anti-Soviet agitation[20]—sufficient to deal with dissidents without needing to resort to actions based on the copyright law.
Furthermore, such actions would have badly damaged the prestige of the USSR abroad, and it was doubtful whether foreign countries would have honored such nationalizations.
New treaties with the German Democratic Republic (effective November 21, 1973), Poland (October 4, 1974), and Czechoslovakia (March 18, 1975) were concluded.
[31] On October 20, 1988, the USSR acceded to the Brussels Convention about measures against the unauthorized (re-)distribution of satellite transmissions.
[33] Also in 1989, the Soviet government announced its intention to join the Berne Convention, but the USSR was dissolved before that plan could be realized.
[31] The changing economy in the Soviet Union led to the conclusion of a trade treaty between the USSR and the United States, signed by presidents Gorbachev and Bush on June 1, 1990.
In this treaty, the U.S. imposed a number of measures in the field of intellectual property in exchange for granting the USSR most-favoured-nation status.
[35][37] When the Soviet Union was dissolved, Russia as the largest successor state adopted all international obligations of the former USSR, including its membership to the UCC.
[38] Consequently, Russia was henceforth considered a member of the UCC (in the 1952 Geneva text) since the date of the adherence of the USSR to that treaty, i.e., since May 27, 1973.
The intent of the Moscow agreement was to avoid that older Soviet works became copyrighted in only some of the successor states, but would become part of the public domain in some of the others.
[46] Because the ratification of this treaty was delayed as it had to be ratified by all EU members, an interim agreement containing only the provisions on intellectual property and the most-favoured-nation status was signed on July 17, 1995.
[47] On November 3, 1994, the Russian government announced that the country would join three international treaties in the field of copyrights: the 1971 Paris version of the UCC including its annexes, the Geneva Phonograms Convention on unauthorized duplication and parallel import of phonograms, and the Berne Convention.
[49] The Geneva Convention entered in force with respect to Russia on March 13, 1995 and was not retroactive: it covered only phonograms recorded after that date.
Russian scholars, however, repeatedly (and, in the opinion of Elst, rightly[52]) pointed out that there had been a very prominent precedent:[57] in 1989, when the U.S. had joined the Berne Convention, they also had denied the retroactivity of the treaty.
[61] The U.S. faced harsh critique for its unilateral denouncement of the retroactivity of the Berne Convention defined in article 18(1) BC.
[64] Maggs and Sergeyev, for instance, pointed out in 2000 that the reservation was inadmissible under article 30(1) of the Berne Convention;[65] Podshibikhin and Leontiev agreed in 2002.
[64] According to the Russian representative at the negotiations on Russia's accession to the WTO, law 72-FL indeed was intended to rescind the non-retroactivity reservation, thereby restoring copyrights on pre-1973 foreign works.
[72] Russia chose to apply the criteria of nationality and publication, declaring the criterion of fixation as inapplicable in its adherence to the treaty.
[84] One well-known case concerned the actions of the four Soviet composers Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Prokofiev, and Myaskovsky against the movie company 20th Century Fox.
This practice, known as tamizdat in the Soviet Union, could result in serious repercussions for the authors in the USSR, but was still employed as one of the few ways the governmental censorship could be bypassed.
Maxim Gorky and Sergei Prokofiev, for instance, both had lived for some time abroad and published works in other countries that were members of the Berne Convention.