Censorship in the Soviet Union

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Confiscation of a forbidden book (poetry by Sergei Yesenin) in Gulag. Painting by Nikolai Getman, provided by Jamestown Foundation

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.

1 Destruction of printed matter
2 Censorship of images
3 Translations
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Destruction of printed matter

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.

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 those connected to it were 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.

[edit] Censorship of images

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.

Main article: Censorship of images in the Soviet Union

Repressed persons were routinely removed not only from texts, but also from photos, posters and paintings.

[edit] 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 the Molotov-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]