Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Title page of the 3rd ed. (in Russian), 1st vol.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Russian: Большая советская энциклопедия, or БСЭ; transliterated Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya) is one of the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedias in Russian, issued by the Soviet state from 1926 to 1990.

Editions

There were three editions. The first edition of 65 volumes (65,000 entries, plus a supplementary volume about the Soviet Union) was published during 1926–1947, the chief editor being Otto Schmidt (until 1941). The second edition of 50 volumes (100,000 entries, plus a supplementary volume) was published in 1950–1958; chief editors: Sergei Vavilov (until 1951) and Boris Vvedensky (until 1969); two index volumes to this edition were published in 1960. The third edition of 1969–1978 contains 30 volumes (100,000 entries, plus an index volume issued in 1981. Volume 24 is in two books, one of them being a full-sized book about the USSR) – all with about 21 million words^[1], and the chief editor being Alexander Prokhorov (since 1969).

From 1957–1990 each year the Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was released, with up-to-date articles about the Soviet Union and all countries of the world.

The first online edition, an exact replica of text and graphics of the third (so-called Red) edition, was published by Rubricon.com in 2000.

Editors

Editors and contributors to the GSE included a number of leading Soviet scientists and politicians: Viktor Ambartsumian, Nikolai Baibakov, Mykola Bazhan, Maia Berzina, Nikolay Bogolyubov, Andrei Bubnov, Nikolai Bukharin, Nikolai Burdenko, Mikhail Frunze, Victor Glushkov, Igor Grabar, Veniamin Kagan, Ivan Knunyants, Andrei Kolmogorov, Valerian Kuybyshev, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Obruchev, Aleksandr Oparin, Yuri Prokhorov, Karl Radek, Nikolai Semashko, and Kliment Voroshilov.

Role and purpose in Soviet society

The foreword to the first volume of the GSE (2nd ed.) states "The Soviet Union has become the center of the civilized world."^[2]

The GSE, along with all other books and other media and communications with the public, was directed toward the "furtherance of the aims of the party and the state."^[2]

The 1949 decree issued for the production of the second edition of the GSE proclaimed:

The second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia should elucidate widely the world-historical victories of socialism in our country, which have been attained in the U.S.S.R. in the provinces of economics, science, culture, and art. ... With exhaustive completeness it must show the superiority of socialist culture over the culture of the capitalist world. Operating on Marxist-Leninist theory, the encyclopedia should give a party criticism of contemporary bourgeois tendencies in various provinces of science and technics.^[2]

In support of that mission, the GSE described as the role of education:

To develop in children's minds the Communist morality, ideology, and Soviet patriotism; to inspire unshakable love toward the Soviet fatherland, the Communist party, and its leaders; to propagate Bolshevik vigilance; to put and emphasis on atheist and internationalist education; to strengthen Bolshevik willpower and character, as well as courage, capacity for resisting adversity and conquering obstacles; to develop self-discipline; and to encourage physical and aesthetic culture.^[2]

Based on his extensive talks with the editors of the GSE, William Benton, publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica, wrote the following in observation of the GSE's chief editor stating their compliance with the 1949 decree of the Council of Ministers:

It is just this simple for the Soviet board of editors. They are working under a government directive that orders them to orient their encyclopedia as sharply as a political tract. The encyclopedia was thus planned to provide the intellectual underpinning for the Soviet world offensive in the duel for men's minds. The Soviet government ordered it as a fighting propaganda weapon. And the government attaches such importance to its political role that its board of editors is chosen by and is responsible only to the high Council of Ministers itself.^[2]

Translations

English

The third edition was translated and published into English in 31 volumes between 1974 and 1983 by Macmillan Publishers. Each volume was translated separately, requiring use of the index found at the front of each volume to locate specific items; knowledge of Russian can be helpful to find the right volume the first time. Not all entries were translated into English; these are indicated in the index. Overall, some entries indicate an anti-American bias,^{[citation needed]} reflecting the international tensions and ideological conflict between the United States and the USSR at the time.

Greek

The third edition has also been translated and published into Greek in 34 volumes between 1977 and 1983. All articles that were related to Greece or Greek history, culture and society were expanded and hundreds of new ones were written especially for the Greek edition. Thus the encyclopaedia contains, for example, both the Russian entry on Greece as well as a much larger one prepared by Greek contributors.

Finally, a supplementary volume covering the 1980s was published in 1989. It contains translated and original Greek articles which, sometimes, do not exist in the 34-volume set.

Other Soviet Encyclopedias

Reliability of information

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia had a strong pro-communist bias, which "is apparent on almost every subject consulted".^[3][4]

As with all published works in the Soviet Union,^[5] the GSE was subject to censorship by the Chief Directorate for the Preservation of State Secrets in Publishing (Glavlit), a branch of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In the Soviet sphere, however, censorship was advocated as being constructive. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (2nd ed.) stated:

The Great October Socialist Revolution put an end to both tsarist and bourgeois censorship... Censorship in the USSR is of a totally different character than censorship in bourgeois states. It is an organ of the socialist state, and its purpose is to prevent military and state secrets from appearing in print and to prevent the publication of materials liable to damage the interests of the working people.^[5]

Damnatio memoriae

Following the arrest and punishment of Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD, in 1953 the encyclopedia—ostensibly in response to overwhelming public demand—mailed subscribers to the second edition a letter from the editor^[6] instructing them to cut out and destroy the three-page article on Beria and paste in its place enclosed replacement pages expanding the adjacent articles on F. W. Bergholz (an eighteenth-century courtier), the Bering Sea, and Bishop Berkeley.^[7] By April of 1954, the Library of the University of California had received this “replacement.”^[8]

This was not the only case of political influence. Encyclopedia subscribers received missives to replace articles in the fashion of the Beria article frequently.^[9] Content of others changed significantly, to reflect not the scientific knowledge but the current party line. An article affected in such a fashion was the one on Bukharin, whose evolution of descriptions went through several versions.^[10]

Great Russian Encyclopedia

Publication of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was suspended in 1990 and halted in 1991, but in 2002 it was reinstituted by decree of Vladimir Putin. In 2003 and 2004 a team of editors overhauled the old encyclopedia by updating facts, removing most examples of bias, and changing its name to the Great Russian Encyclopedia. Many outdated articles were entirely rewritten.

In 2004, the first volume of the newly overhauled Great Russian Encyclopedia was published. As of 2009, the first complete (30-volume) edition since 1990 is about to be published.

Publication of the Great Russian Encyclopedia is overseen by the Russian Academy of Sciences, and funded by the Government of the Russian Federation. The encyclopedia is now found in libraries and schools throughout the CIS. ^[11]

See also

• Damnatio memoriae

References

Sources

• Great Soviet encyclopedia, ed. A. M. Prokhorov (New York: Macmillan, London: Collier Macmillan, 1974–1983) 31 volumes, three volumes of indexes. Translation of third Russian edition of Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya
• Kister, Kenneth. Kister's Best Encyclopedias. 2nd ed. (1994)

External links

• (Russian) Great Soviet Encyclopedia online