Censorship Practices in Post Revolutionary Rusia

Loughran 1

Censorship Practices in Post Revolutionary Russia

by Steven Loughran

Prior to the October 1917 Revolution in what would become

the Soviet Union, Lenin and his followers, the Bolsheviks, faced

some significant difficulty getting essays, articles and other

written works circulated, not to mention published because of

censorship practices of the Tsarist regime. Though not the main

reason for their desire to stir up revolutionary fervor,

censorship of works critical of the tsar and his government was

part of Lenin’s reason for wanting regime change. As is often

the case, however, after one power structure is taken over by

another after a revolution, the new people in power,

intentionally, consciously or not find themselves engaging in

many of the same, or at least similar practices that motivated

them to rebel in the first place. This essay briefly explores the

somewhat confusing extent to which literary works were censored

after the Communists took power, particularly under Lenin’s

successor Stalin, remarks briefly on how the policies were

Loughran 2

carried out, and mentions some of the effects these policies had

on the writers of fiction in the Soviet Union.

In his well researched and in depth biography of Vladimir

Lenin, Christopher Read writes at length about the years prior to

the 1917 uprising and at one point discusses the frustration felt

on the part of those attempting to form a unified Revolutionary

Party. Read writes:

Essentially, the movement was composed only of loosely

related groups scattered

throughout Russia and western Europe. There was no

organizational framework, and

nor was there more than the flimsiest foundations of an

agreed theory. It was fighting

for its identity against other political movements. (48)

One of the major stumbling blocks toward the goal of forming a

unified party, and why it is relevent for our purposes lies in

the censorship practices of the time around 1903.

Those who have observed and commented on the recent

revolutionary activity in the Middle East have rightly pointed

out that modern communication apparatuses such as cell phones and

the internet were crucial in forming a coalition of revolutionary

Loughran 3

participants. Similarly, though a much more “primitive” resource

available to Lenin and his group to get the word out were the

party newspapers and pamphlets. However, Read also remarks on the

difficulty party organizers faced, due to policies in place at

the time to regulate publications such as those just mentioned,

and internal disagreements about how to handle the problem.

According to Read:

The major focus of dispute was control over the Party

newspaper. This follows from the

fact the real central intent and purpose of a party, given

that all overt political activity

was illegal [italics mine] in pre-1905 Russia, was to produce a

Party newspaper and

arrange for its clandestine distribution. (50)

He continues to describe several inventive ways of getting works

into Russia including the use of false-bottomed suitcases,

tossing packages of newspapers in watertight wrapping into the

Black Sea to be collected later by locals using small boats, and

the implementation of a rudimentary code system. This serves as

background information for what would become an ironic twist

Loughran 4

later when the Communist Party takes control of the newly formed

Soviet Union.

Certainly censorship practices are not exclusive to

authoritarian regimes. We in the United States speak about

freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, yet there is in

place an organization known as the Federal Communication

Commission whose purpose is to regulate and monitor communication

transmitted by television, radio, wire, satellite and cable.

Although the FCC would likely not say that what they do is censor

material, they do have guidelines as to what sort of language and

images can be broadcast over the air, and have the power to

charge fines for violators. Profanity and nudity are examples of

content prohibited by the FCC on network television, for

instance.

The difference, however, between monitoring of material by

an organization like the FCC and Russian censorship practices

somewhat depends on how the word censorship is used and defined. In

his article Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930’s,

author Jan Plamper says that, “[m]uch of the available literature

on European and especially Russian censorship has defined

Loughran 5

censorship as the repression of the inherently and essentially

free word,” yet also reminds us that “[c]ensorship can be seen as

one of the many ‘practices of cultural regulation,’ a broadly

defined rubric that is meant to accommodate market forces in the

capitalist West, too.”(526) Whereas the FCC in the United States

acts as a regulator of what they might consider decency with

regards to broadcasted content, they don’t necessarily censor

material in the way defined as repression of the free word. Even

under FCC guidelines, profanity and nudity are allowed to be

displayed on television under certain conditions, and they do not

regulate written literature. Censorship in the Soviet Union

under an organization that formed shortly after the Revolution

known as Glavnoe upravlenie po delum literatury I izdatel’stv or Glavlit, was

quit a bit stricter than the FCC, and in a different way.

Censorship of art and literature is, by its very nature, a

means by which a governing body attempts to control and normalize

what the population digests. In the case of the newly formed

Soviet Union of the late 1920s and early 1930s this meant, in the

words of Michael S. Fox, establishing a system “ involving myriad

party and state agencies, of which the Main Directorate on

Loughran 6

Literature and Presses…Glavlit…was only the most directly

involved,” and continues to remark that, “[t]he censorship

process, in a broad sense, was one of the most widespread and

certainly the most institutionalized form of party-state

involvement in cultural and intellectual affairs during the New

Economic Policy.”(1045)

What one finds interesting, while at the same time somewhat

confusing, are the rather vague, arbitrary, and at times

seemingly contradictory, policies put in place under Stalin with

regards to what was considered acceptable, publishable material

and what was not. For example, Russian history scholar Sheila

Fitzpatrick, in her detailed account of Soviet life, Everyday

Stalinism, writes at some length in the chapter titled “The Party is

Always Right” about criticism of Soviet bureaucracy, not only by

members of the press, but also by Soviet leaders themselves. She

writes:

The stupidity, rudeness, inefficiency, and venality of

Soviet bureaucrats constituted

the main satirical targets of the Soviet humorous journal,

Krokodil…They showed officials absent from their workplaces,

slacking off when present, refusing desperate citizens’

Loughran 7

pleas for precious “papers” that were necessary for even the

simplest operations in Soviet life like buying a railroad

ticket.(29)

It may strike one as counterintuitive that Soviet censorship

policies would allow the bureaucratic system to be satirized and

criticized so openly, when many in the West have always

understood, rightly or wrongly, the Soviet Union to be oppressive

and highly controlling. The fact that some leniency did indeed

exist in the area of political satire is perhaps due to the

possibility that Party leaders “had little confidence in their

own bureaucratic cadres, and constantly bemoaned their lack of

education, common sense, and work ethic.”(Fitzpatrick 29) One

might draw the conclusion that Party leaders, with Stalin being

the most influential, based some censorship on whether or not

they actually agreed with a writer’s observations, embarrassing

as they may have been.

Another possible way to explain this seeming incrongruity

would be to suggest that perhaps lighthearted satire and

criticism was not viewed as subversive, or dangerous, or what

would have been worse, anti-Soviet activity by even the

Loughran 8

staunchest of Party leaders’ standards. One example that

Fitzpatrick points out is a particular play which Stalin allowed

to be performed, “not because Stalin inclined to the ‘soft line,’

but rather because he preferred to avoid too close association

with hard-line policies that were likely to be unpopular with

domestic and foreign opinion.” (28) In other words, this would

suggest that one of the goals of Soviet censorship was to allow

for a favorable portrayal of the newly formed nation to

populations both inside and outside the developing Soviet Union.

It was not necessarily playwrites, journalists and

cartoonists that were the main concern for Lenin and Stalin, as

well as other members the new Soviet leadership with regards to

censorship policies. What caused the most unease in the minds of

early Party leaders was the possibility that highly educated

members of the intelligentsia might circulate counter-

revolutionary works. This resulted in one of the earliest, and

arguably the most severe censorship policy decisions: to round up

and expel certain intellectuals from the country. Stuart Finkel,

in his essay “Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922

Expulsions from Soviet Russia” addresses this idea at length. In

Loughran 9

the very first paragraph of the article, published in the journal

Russian Review, Finkel states:

In the early morning hours of 17 August 1922, Soviet

security operatives fanned across

Moscow and Petrograd on orders from the Politburo, jarring

hundreds of intellectuals and their families awake. The

chekisty [secret police] rifled through drawers looking for

incriminating evidence, after which convoys whisked away the

dazed scholars to the infamous Butyrka and Shpalernia Street

prisons…dozens of Russia’s best-known professors, writers

and scientists were imprisoned, questioned, and ordered to

leave the country, accused of “anti-Soviet” activities.

(589)

Cleary, this goes above and beyond our common perception of

censorship, by which I mean an authoritative body that looks at a

piece of written material and says something to the effect of,

“you may publish this article, but only if you remove this or

that from the text.” As an act of censorship, expelling those who

believed themselves to be legitimate, even harmless intellectuals

was extreme, but as Finkel notes, quoting one such victim of the

purge, an irony emerges saying:

Loughran 10

Russia’s rulers, despite their insolence, are cowardly

enough to be afraid of independently and honestly expressed

opinion and out of stupidity send us to where we will have

the full opportunity to say those truths which they hope to

hide from themselves and the whole world. (590)

The decision on the part of Lenin and the Bolshiviks to rid the

country of certain intellectuals during this phase was in large

part due to their being members of the “bourgeoisie,” and it is

well known that this class of people, along with the nobility,

were, in Lenin’s mind, enemies of the people (the proletariat),

which Finkel points out. In other words, one could argue that

ridding the country of a certain class of people is not

necessarily censorship, but something far more draconian.

However, one can understand these kinds of activities,

particularly within a time frame of only two or three years from

the Communist takeover in 1917, as a glimpse into the mindset

that eventually lead to censorship policy. For example, Finkel

describes the “deportations of 1922 [as] a critical step in

developing norms for intellectual public behavior…and to

eliminate perceived enemies of the new order and to warn

Loughran 11

remaining intellectuals of the limits of acceptable

activity.”(592) Put simply, part of the Soviet censorship system

included coercing writers and artists to censor themselves under

the ongoing threat of harsh consequences.

Despite a great deal of scholarly work done on the part of

both Western and former Soviet Union scholars, post-revolutionary

Russian censorship practices still remain complicated and

difficult to understand fully, partly due to their evolutionary

nature as the Soviet Union, under new rule by the Communist

party, worked out the kinks of running a large empire. Glavlit,

the censorship body referred to earlier was one more government

bureaucracy in a country drowning in bureaucracies most, if not

all, of which were highly criticized for their inefficiency.

Furthermore, Glavlit was only one of several censorship

organizations, and this again adds to the complexity and

confusion. One such other organization also charged with

monitoring the publishing of literary works was called

Goskomizdat, and nearly all sources regard these two bodies as

completely separate, yet they overlap in their function, the

latter being focused exclusively on literary fiction and poetry,

Loughran 12

while “Glavlit functionaries…were assigned to the sectors of

military, civilian, technical, radio, or literary

censorship.”(Plamper 529)

One of the reasons discussion on censorship policy in

general can be difficult, is because often times we think of the

practice as being one simply concerned with aesthetic standards.

Again using the FCC as an example; they will not allow certain

words to be spoken or images to be seen on radio and television

based on standards of decency (which many view as censorship),

yet open criticism of government and state officials is

permissible, even encouraged as it makes for endless hours of

entertainment. Contrast this with the role of Glavlit. In his

article “Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party Policy in

Cultural Affairs,” Michael S. Fox gives a much more detailed and

in depth analysis of Russian censorship policy under the

Communist regime than this essay can address, but does mention,

also, that the new Communist governing body, at the beginning,

adopted policies similar to those in place under the previous

regime, saying that the main function of Glavlit was “pre-

publication control and post-publication evaluation” of cultural

Loughran 13

works, the goal being to prevent blatantly anti-Soviet material.

He goes on to quote Max Hayward saying that in the early years

“[l]ike tsarist censorship, [Glavlit’s] functions were preventive

rather than prescriptive, and it did not interfere with basic

literary freedom in matters of form and content as long as the

political interests of the new regime were not adversely

affected” (1046). Apparently, writers were not restricted as to

word choice, and even to some extent imagery, as long as they

towed the party line regarding content.

The effect on the artist and writers under this system has

become better understood since the collapse of the Soviet Union

in the early 1990s, and one finds it interesting to note that in

spite of these rather difficult censorship circumstances for

writers to navigate around, they continued to produce works, and

get published. One could argue that, even in present day United

States, it is one thing to sit down and write something, quite

another to get it published. However, in the U.S. not getting a

work published has less to do with a government regime denying

publishing permission, and more to do with market forces and the

decision on the part of a publisher that a piece of work is

Loughran 14

simply not good enough to sell. In post-Revolutionary Russia

many authors whose works were denied publishing permission would

produce works that they then could get published outside the

Soviet Union or, if inside, only under the radar and with the

help of others of like mind. In his forward to Yevgeny

Zamyatin’s groundbreaking science fiction novel We, Bruce

Sterling illustrates one example of this common phenomena of the

early Soviet period.

Sterling points out that several of Zamyatin’s essays and a

short work of horror fiction about despondent post-revolutionary

Russians’ daily struggle for food titled “The Cave” did indeed

get published seemingly without incident, whereas his manuscript

for his novel We, written in 1921, was denied publishing

permission. However, the story did appear in print as Sterling

says, “thanks to the mischievous Czechs, and well out of reach of

the Soviet secret police,” the result being that “a predictable

all hell broke loose”(vii). According to Sterling, when the book

was discovered, it “was fiercely attacked by Stalinist party-line

critics. Zamyatin’s works were removed from Soviet libraries and

he was forbidden to publish”(ix). Sterling goes on to tell us that

Loughran 15

We was not allowed to be published in the Soviet Union until as

recently as 1988, seventy years after it was written.

This speaks to what was commented above regarding the

ambiguous nature of Soviet censorship practices. Satirical

cartoons, editorial criticism on the part of some journalists,

questionable plays and films could pass by censorship standards

at times, yet there was a line one could not or should not cross

which seems to not have been based on anything concrete; a line

in which writers could only discover by observing the

consequences that befell their colleagues when crossed. Natasha

Randall, one of the scholars involved with translating the novel

into English suggests that Zamyatin’s We did not get approved

for publishing because it was too dangerously satirical. The sad

conclusion to Zamyatin’s career as a Russian Soviet writer was

that Stalin finally allowed he and his wife to emigrate to Paris

where “he wasted away in silence and poverty, and died on March

10, 1937.” (Sterling, ix)

Without the ability to enter into the minds and hearts of

Soviet writers, one can only speculate on the psychological

effect these policies had on writers’ attitude toward their craft

Loughran 16

and their situation, though enough has been written to give a

reasonable understanding of how some did react. For example, in

his introduction to a story by Vera Inber, Robert Chandler

says that, “[l]ike all of her contemporaries, she was subject to

a variety of pressures to write what was acceptable to the

authorities,” but “complied partly because she was under constant

threat…and partly because she knew that literary conformity would

secure her the trips abroad”(217) which she so thoroughly

enjoyed. Furthermore, according to Chandler, another author,

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote pieces of which some were approved for

publishing, others that were not, and similar to Zamyatin, had

some that were initially given the okay, only to be pulled later.

Chandler writes:

During the late 1920’s several [of Bulgkov’s] plays were

performed in leading Moscow theatres, but they were removed

from the repertoire after official criticism. He then

applied for permission to emigrate; this led to a telephone

call from Stalin himself.

[He] was denied permission…(222)

Chandler goes on to say that after Bulgakov was denied permission

by Stalin to leave the Soviet Union, one of his plays “The Day’s

Loughran 17

of the Turbins,” which had previously been banned was brought

back into the Moscow Arts Theatre’s repertoire simply because it

was apparently one of Stalin’s personal favorite. This teeter-

totter element, and the constant uncertainty that one’s written

words, not only could be denied permission to be published, but

could, as was the case during the purging of intellectuals, get

one removed from ones home and imprisoned and exiled, must have

caused a great deal of anxiety. Indeed, Yevgeny Yevtushenko says

that “when the KGB confiscated the typescript of [Alexander]

Solzhenitsyn’s opus The Gulag Archipeglo, the distraught typist of

the manuscript hanged herself.” (xvi)

Lastly, another effect of the Soviet censorship policy was

that many works did eventually become available to readers but

only long after the writer had passed away. For example,

Bulgacov, who died in 1940 wrote two novels in the 1930s that,

according to Chandler, he was certain would not be published

while he was still alive. One of them, The Master and Margrita, in

censored form, was finally published in Moscow, but not until

1967. And as mentioned, Sterling says that although written, and

circulated illegally, and read outside of Russia during his

Loughran 18

lifetime, Zamyatin’s We wasn’t officially published in the Soviet

Union until as late as 1988, over fifty years after his death.

Andrey Platonov, author of The Foundation Pit, who died in 1951, also

wrote politically controversial articles which did not see

publication, at least not in the Soviet Union, until the late

1980s.

The purpose of this essay was to briefly look at the way

tsarist censorship styles were adopted by Lenin and the new

Communist regime after taking power following the 1917

Revolution, and to look at how the strict and unpredictable ways

in which the written word was regulated became part of a way of

life for all artists, but more specifically those who made a

career of producing the written word in Soviet Russia. There is a

vast array of material written on the subject, and as mentioned,

some of which has only been easier to access since the fall of

the Soviet system in Eastern Europe, and will continue to be

studied at length for some time.

Loughran 19

Works Cited

Loughran 20

Chandler, Robert. Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida. Penguin

Classics, 2005. Print.

Finkel, Stuart. “Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922

Expulsions from Soviet Russia.” Russian

Review. Vol. 62, No. 4. Blackwell Publishing. Oct 2003. JSTOR.

Web 2011.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinsm: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times-

Soviet Russia in

The 1930’s. Oxford University Press. 1999. Print.

---. The Russian Revolution. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press. 2008.

Print

Fox, Michael S.. “Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party

Policy in Cultural

Affairs, 1922-28.” Soviet Studies.Vol. 44, No. 6. Taylor and

Francis, Ltd. 1992.

JSTOR. Web.

Plamper, Jan. “Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices

in the 1930s.” Russian Review.

Vol.60, No 4. Blackwell Publishing. October 2001. JSTOR. Web.

Read, Christopher. Lenin. Routledge. 2005. Print.

Loughran 21

Sterling, Bruce. “Madmen, Hermits, Heretics, Dreamers, Rebels,

and Skeptics.” Foreward. We.

By Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translation by Natasha Randall. The

Modern Library. 2006. Print.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. Introduction. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

By Alexander

Solzhenitsyn. Translation by Ralph Parker. New American

Library. August 2009. Print