Censorship during the Soviet Union

Description: Communist state that controlled the former Russian Empire from 1917 until its dissolution in the early 1990’s

Significance: Under the totalitarian leadership of the communist regime, censorship of all aspects of cultural and intellectual life thoroughly stifled creativity and freedom of expression

The totalitarian regime established in the Soviet Union in 1917 was an autocratic system which empowered the leadership to employ any methods necessary to create an ideologically driven movement, the purpose of which was the complete reconstruction of society. In such a political system every aspect of society was placed under absolute control. From the inception of the Soviet State, culture would be required to serve politics, to strengthen the dictatorial system, and to assist the masses in thinking and feeling “correctly.”

In the V. I. Lenin years, from 1917-1924, Soviet culture experienced little repression or censorship. The absence of an official policy relating to culture was the result of the chaos prevailing at that time, as the Bolshevik elites were struggling to establish their control. Therefore, a reasonably liberal atmosphere permeated the cultural arena.

Stalin Era

With the advent of the Joseph Stalin era, marked by the total consolidation of power in the hands of the dictator, a “revolution from above” was initiated. The inauguration of five-year plans, forced collectivization, and other restructuring of society began in 1929. Such transformations required tighter controls and censorship on intellectual activity. Independence of thought, individuality, creativity, criticism of Communist Party ideology, and nonconformity were no longer to be permitted.

Joseph Stalin’s principal target in achieving complete control over the minds of the Soviet peoples was the intelligentsia. They were compelled to serve the party by becoming “engineers of the human soul,” by spreading the Leninist-Stalinist dogma, and by encouraging blind obedience to the party and the state.

That he might assert absolute control over all aspects of literature, Stalin created a single writers’ union under the direction of the state. In 1934 the First Congress of Soviet Writers was convened. The delegates heard for the first time of the new obligatory style for literature, Socialist Realism. Soviet writers were required to nationalize literature, to swear an oath of loyalty to the party, state, and Stalin. A new age of party-oriented literature was born. All writers were to chant the glories of Stalin, to extol the successes of the five-year plans, to praise the loyalty and heroism of the peasants on the collective farms and the city workers whose fierce dedication and hard work were assisting in the preserving of Mother Russia. Soviet culture was to become a weapon used by party elites to propagandize, motivate, and stir the workers. Socialist Realism stifled true artistic and literary genius.

The era of the Great Purges, 1935-1938, decimated the intelligentsia. In excess of six hundred writers vanished during this period. Labeled as “enemies of the people,” denounced by friends as well as enemies, they lived in terror, awaiting arrest. One such victim was Osip Mandelstam, a poet of Jewish birth, who was considered one of the most brilliant authors of that era. Accused of “distorting reality” by decrying Stalin’s evils, he was arrested and later died in a labor camp.

Every form of communication in the Soviet Union fell under the auspices of party control. The war against nonconformity included all newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, journals, music, radio broadcasts, education, and the cinema. They were ordered to espouse the party line. Ideas and works from the West were likewise blacklisted as the Soviet Union became increasingly isolated from any infusion of new ideas.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party announced in its own newspaper, Culture & Life, that every aspect of cultural activity of the party and state was mandated to serve the communist education of the people. Typical of party censorship in the field of music was the case against an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. After viewing a performance, Stalin branded it “repulsive, obscene and raucous.” In the wake of that criticism, further works by the composer were also denounced, virtually destroying his career. His fate became an ominous warning to all other composers and artists that nonconformity could be dangerous and life-threatening.

Following World War II, the fear of Western “contamination” of Soviet subjects became an obsession of Stalin. That Western ideas and influences might be permeating the country was to be an excuse for a new ideological offensive. This campaign, under the leadership of Andrei Zhdanov was known as Zhdanovshchina. Two of the nation’s most prominent writers, Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, were singled out as “scum of the literary world.” The composers Sergei Prokofiev and Shostakovich had their music branded as “too bourgeois.” The Zhdanov era, typified by anti-intellectualism, was a major victory for Stalin and the party, destroying anyone with talent and creativity and forcing culture to serve the party.

Khrushchev Era

Soviet control and censorship in the post-Stalin regimes of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev vacillated between “thaws” and repression. However, Socialist Realism remained the policy as both leaders fought against dissidents. In what initially appeared to be a more liberal, open atmosphere in Khrushchev’s early years, Boris Pasternak submitted the novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) for publication in Moscow. Although published in the West, his book was not allowed to be printed in the Soviet Union.

In 1962 Khrushchev became embroiled in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sino-Soviet clash. Combined with mounting economic crises, these issues brought about a new policy of “ideological purity” which meant once again control and censorship.

Brezhnev Era

Upon Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, Brezhnev continued the party policy of complete cultural control and absolute inflexible conformity. In response, a counterculture gradually appeared. Samizdat, or self-publication, meant writings were being produced on personal typewriters and copying machines and circulated surreptitiously by hand. Tamizdat were writings published outside the Soviet Union and then sneaked back into the Soviet Union. By these methods, the intellectuals could cheat the censor, while becoming internationally renowned.

Not all were successful in evading detection even when using pseudonyms. Andrei Siniavski and Yuli Daniel, young writers and critics, were arrested in 1965 and accused under what would become the most frequently used section of the Criminal Code, article 70, for disseminating “slanderous” and “defamatory” lies regarding the Soviet Union. Both were sentenced to years of forced labor. Joseph Brodsky, a poet, was convicted as a “parasite,” or not being employed, a common allegation against writers.

Andrei Sakharov organized the Human Rights Movement in 1970 to fight against Party policies that contravened individual rights guaranteed not only by the Soviet constitution but also by covenants in international law to which the Soviet Union was a signatory. In the wake of protests by intellectuals spurred on by this movement, a major crackdown occurred. Sakharov was sent into internal exile in Gorky.

Yet dissent continued to grow as government repression and censorship increased. The Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat pamphlet publication, kept the Soviet public aware of arrests, exiles, imprisonments, and court proceedings.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of the Gulag Archipelago (1975), was arrested and sentenced for his works describing Soviet life in the labor camps. Once his books were published in the West, the party intensified its campaign against him. After being arrested and charged with treason in 1974, he was sent into involuntary exile to the West.

The Soviet Union’s 1961 penal code declared that “dissemination of fabrications discrediting the Soviet State” was to be treated as a crime. This law made it simpler to arrest dissidents as criminals. For those who represented the most serious threat to the system there was a new and more insidious punishment—the mental hospital. Soviet psychiatrists, under state control, diagnosed dissidents with a new disorder—“creeping schizophrenia.”

Bibliography

Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free Press, 1994), a biographical account of Lenin’s rise to power, includes new materials from the national archives. Studies of the Stalin era drawing on post-glasnost period evidence include Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Walter Laqueur, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990); and Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, ed. and trans. by George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). The last is by a Soviet Marxist. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), by the chairman of the Soviet archives, draws on documents from the Central Party, Supreme Court, Ministry of Defense, and Armed Forces General Staff. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) chronicles thousands of incidents and personal histories from the Soviet Gulag system. A comprehensive biography of Khrushchev’s public life written with the aid of numerous members of his family can be found in Roy Medvedev’s Khrushchev (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983). Mikhail Geller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power (New York: Summit Books, 1986) is a comprehensive survey of cultural and political trends throughout the history of the Soviet Union.