Talk:Censorship in the Soviet Union

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[edit] NPOV

"Vladimir Lenin believed that literature and art could be exploited for ideological and political as well as educational purposes."

Exploited is a totally unsuitable word for a supposedly unbiased article. I have changed this to: "Vladimir Lenin believed that literature and art could be used for ideological and political as well as educational purposes." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.12.213.54 (talk • contribs) 01:15, 3 August 2006

I removed the entired paragraph. Besides being badly written (ie It mentions a "belief" held by V.I. Lenin, but gives no idea as to why this is important to the subject matter) it used as a single source a non-reliable/verifiable source (the Library of Congress).--Cerejota 18:58, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stub

This article, considering the importance of the subject matter, is in a surprisingly stubbish state. It doesn't mention several important things. For example:

• Officially, there was no censorship, and a public list of censored material was not available anywhere for this reason
• Strangely, a few works that were quite critical of the Soviet government were allowed to slip through, even during the worst periods of censorship. Whether this was to give the illusion that there was indeed no censorship or because some government officials somewhere just really liked the work I don't know (though doubtless someone has studied this). One example would be The Twelve Chairs.
• There was a short-lived but important decline of censorship during Khrushchev's reign, as well as during the late 1980s.
• The censorship did not apply so much to universities and the intelligentia - in general, censored material could be accessed, but there were simply not many copies of it and they were kept in one place (which was why it was claimed that there was no actual censorship - the government simply printed more copies of those books that were "good for people to read", especially anything written by Stalin or Lenin. The bookstores were always stocked-full of political theory books that nobody wanted to buy, and anything good that came in was bought up quickly).
• Precisely because of the point above, the government was very resistant to adopting photocopying machines - because this would allow copies of censored printed material to spread quite easily. They had to give in eventually because photocopying machines were so usefull for universities.
• Though unsuitable films were shelved or given very limited releases (as in the case of Adventures of a Dentist), the director was simply allowed to make another film (at least, this was the case after WW2). Perhaps this naturally played to every director's wish to have their work seen, and ensured that they'd try to get their film past the censor next time.

Not all of these points are necessarily accurate as I've heard most of them from hearsay (not academic sources), but I thought I'd put them out here anyway. Some of this stuff should be added to the article if references to back it up can be found. Esn 03:16, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your interest in the topic. I am afraid you are quite mistaken.

• First of all, it seems that you are assuming the word "censorship" in a quite narrow sense, at least when you say ""officially there was no censorship". Officially there was censorship. You probably meant political censorship. And here we have a typical doublespeak. It was both "officially absent" (for common knowledge) and "officially present" (as reflected in official CPSU and government documents).
• The phrase "decline in censorship" is bad phrasing. There was no "decline" in censorhip. Absolutely everything published was censored. One may say that somewhat more was alowed to be published.
• The Twelve Chairs was allowed satire of "certain drawbacks" it was in no way "critical of Soviet government". Indeed, something slipped thru, but each case is an individual occasion. In general, the threshold was quite high: you would be surprised with quite a few comical situations with overzealous Soviet censors from Glavlit.
• "Universities and intelligentsia": I am afraid you don't understand the place of intelligentsia in Soviet Union. Access to restricted literature was controlled by KGB. "Simply not many copies" is a naive interpretation of printing in USSR. If something was censored out, it was done for good.
• "Shelved": Talented direftors were asset, and of course he was told to do his job. But he might very well easly lose his job in state monopoly is shelved too many rolls.

So unfortunately nothing of these points can be added, although I agree that the topic is underdeveloped in wikipedia. The subject is quite well covered today. It simply looks like the topic is not very exciting to wikipedians. I will try tto add some more bare bones. `'mikkanarxi 04:01, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

• Горяева Т.М. Политическая цензура в СССР. 1917 - 1991. М.: РОССПЭН, 2002.
• Максименко Н. Записки бывшего цензора// Звезда (СПб.).- 1997.- №10.- С.139-148.
• Блюм А.В. Еврейский вопрос под советской цензурой. 1917-1991/ Отв. ред. Д.А.Эльяшевич; Петербург. евр. ун-т.- СПб., 1996.- 185 с.- (Петербургская иудаика. Т.I).
• Блюм А.В. Закат Главлита: Как разрушалась система советской цензуры: Документальная хроника 1985-1991 гг.// Книга: Исследования и материалы.- Сб. 71.- М.: ТЕРРА, 1995.- С.168-187.
• Из истории советской цензуры: Руководящий каталог по изъятию всех видов литературы из библиотек, читален и книжного рынка// Русский литературоведческий журнал (М.).- 1994.- №4.- С.251-277.
• Цензура в Советском Союзе. 1917-1991: Документы/ Сост. А.В.Блюм; комм. В.Г.Воловников.- М.: РОССПЭН, 2004.- 575 с.- (Культура и власть от Сталина до Горбачева. Документы).
• Блюм А.В. Советская цензура в эпоху тотального террора, 1929-1953

Google search "Censorship in the USSR" and "Censorship in the Soviet Union" gives several useful links as well, eg

• Censorship in the Soviet Union
• Soviet Taboo a case study of Soviet censorship: a review of the traslation of "History of the Second World War" by B. Liddell Hart, in: Soviet Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Oct., 1977), pp. 603-606

Etc. `'mikkanarxi 04:07, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, the article about censorship in the US is about 10 times longer than this one.Thepatriots 19:03, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, like I said above looks like no big fun beating a dead horse. `'Miikka 21:48, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Merge

I think that this page should be merged with Censorship of images in the Soviet Union, because that deal with the same subject and use the same pictures for emphasis. They are just separate views of the subject that would be better off supplementing each other than being separate articles. --69.94.169.40 (talk) 19:53, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

No merge Cnesorship of photo is a separate, well-defined subtopic of a general censorship theme, {which is poorly covered here} . 03:02, 20 November 2007 (UTC)