Censorship in the Soviet Union

Censorship was performed in two main directions: The Soviet government implemented mass destruction of pre-revolutionary and foreign books and journals from libraries.

Works of print such as the press, advertisements, product labels, and books were censored by Glavlit, an agency established on June 6, 1922, ostensibly to safeguard top secret information from foreign entities but in reality to remove material the Soviet authorities did not like.

[4] From 1932 until 1952, the promulgation of socialist realism was the target of Glavlit in bowdlerizing works of print, while anti-Westernization and Soviet nationalism were common tropes for that goal.

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.

[5] 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, [still] we have Lenin.

Pressure from state-run 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.

[9] The "Khrushchev Thaw", beginning in 1953 with Stalin's death, brought some liberalization of censorship laws, and greater liberty to the authors writing during this time.

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."

When 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.

Elements of anti-Westernization included censoring religion and technological superiority, while signs of weakness in the Soviet military, like lost battles or frightened soldiers, were expurgated to further nationalistic goals.

This picture's screenplay was written during the time of a national campaign to renew individual party cards, and losing one amounted to a serious lack of Soviet discipline.

Socialist realism is promoted since, at the end of the movie, her loyalty to the party takes precedence over her romantic feelings; therefore, Stalin approved its production.

One example is the 1940 film, The Law of Life, which was retracted from cinemas after ten days because it negatively portrayed a Komsomol leader by depicting him as hypocritical and abusing his power.

Stalin organized a military tribunal which castigated the scenarist Aleksandr Avdeenko, accusing him of inaccurate representations of Soviet reality.

After her movie was removed from cinemas, Barskaia either committed suicide on 23 July 1939 following a meeting where she was excommunicated from the film-making profession,[13] or was arrested and died in a gulag camp.

Khrushchev succeeded Stalin as the USSR's ruler, and articulated de-Stalinization in his secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[18] All media in the Soviet Union throughout its history was controlled by the state, including television and radio broadcasting, newspaper, magazine, and book publishing.

Censorship was also utilized in cases where performances did not meet with the favor of the Soviet leadership, with newspaper campaigns against offending material and sanctions applied through party-controlled professional organizations.

[19] Possession and use of copying machines was tightly controlled in order to hinder production and distribution of samizdat, i.e. self-published books and magazines that were banned by the Soviet state.

Retrospectively, Lenin's primary associates such as Zinoviev, Trotsky, Radek and Bukharin were presented as "vacillating", "opportunists" and "foreign spies" whereas Stalin is depicted as the chief discipline during this revolution.

[22] In his book, The Stalin School of Falsification, Leon Trotsky cited a range of historical documents such as party speeches, meeting minutes, and suppressed texts such as Lenin's Testament.

[23] He argued that the Stalinist faction routinely distorted political events, forged a theoretical basis for irreconcilable concepts such as the notion of "Socialism in One Country" and misrepresented the views of opponents through an array of employed historians alongside economists to justify policy manoeuvering and safeguarding its own set of material interests.

In this manner, a movie named The Diamond Arm was saved after the director, Leonid Gaidai, intentionally included a nuclear explosion at the end of the film.