Censorship in the Soviet Union
Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.
Censorship was performed in two main directions:
State secrets were handled by Main Administration for Safeguarding State Secrets in the Press (also known as Glavlit) was in charge of censoring all publications and broadcasting for state secrets- Censorship of "political correctness", in accordance with the official ideology and politics of the Communist Party was performed by several organizations:
- Goskomizdat censored all printed matter: fiction, poetry, etc.
- Goskino, in charge of cinema
- Gosteleradio, in charge of radio and television broadcasting
- The First Department in many agencies and institutions, such as the State Statistical Committee (Goskomstat), was responsible for assuring that state secrets and other sensitive information only reached authorized hands.
Destruction of old printed matters
Soviet government implemented mass destruction of pre-revolutionary and foreign books and journals from libraries. Only "special collections" (spetskhran), accessible by special permit from the KGB, contained old and politically incorrect material.
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| Nikolai Yezhov, the young man strolling with Stalin to his left, was shot in 1940. He was edited out from a photo by Soviet censors.[1] Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's reign. |
Soviet books and journals were also removed from libraries according to changes of Soviet history. Often Soviet citizens preferred to destroy politically incorrect publications and photos, because a connection frequently persecuted.
After the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria all subscribers of the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia obtained a page to replace the one with Lavrentiy Beria article, instead containing Vitus Bering articles.
Translations
Translations of foreign publications were often produced in a truncated form, accompanied with extensive corrective footnotes. E.g. in the Russian 1976 translation of Basil Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War pre-war purges of Red Army officers, secret protocol to theMolotov-Ribbentrop Pact, many details of the Winter War, occupation of Baltic states, Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Allied assistance to the Soviet Union during the war, many other Western Alles' efforts, the Soviet leadership's mistakes and failures, criticism of the Soviet Union and other content were censored out.[2]
References
- ^ The Commissar vanishes (The Newseum)
- ^ Lewis, B. E. (1977). Soviet Taboo. Review of Vtoraya Mirovaya Voina, History of the Second World War by B. Liddel Gart (Russian translation). Soviet Studies 29 (4), 603-606.
See also
External links
- Attacks on Intelligentsia: Censorship - from Library of Congress web site
- Censorship in the Soviet Union and its Cultural and Professional Results for Arts and Art Libraries
- Lewis, B. E. (1977). Soviet Taboo. Review of Vtoraya Mirovaya Voina, History of the Second World War by B. Liddel Gart (Russian translation). Soviet Studies 29 (4), 603-606.
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