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  • Forbidden Topics: Early Soviet Censorship Directives
  • Arlen Viktorovich Blium (bio)
    Translated by Donna M. Farina

Never write about bureaucrats, Officers or soldiers, About strikes, political movements, Clergy, intellectual ferment, About peasants or ministries, Executions or Cossack atrocities, About police, arrests, Robberies or manifestos, But everything else— Must be exposed without fail! And when you write—make sure that you see “128” and “103” . . .

Thus wrote the poet and satirist V. V. Trofimov1 in his 1905 poem “What You Can Write About,” published in the Christmas issue of the journal Fallen Trees [Burelom]. The numbers refer to the “political articles” of that period’s criminal code. But nothing is new under the sun: at the end of the eighteenth century, the great Beaumarchais gave his character Figaro these words: “I’m told that during my retreat at public expense, there has been established in Madrid a system of free trade, which extends even to a free press, and that, provided I do not write about the government, or about religion, or politics, or ethics, or people in power or with influence, or the Opera, or other theaters, or about anybody connected with something, I can print whatever I choose under the supervision of two or three censors.”2

These “denouncers” of censorship could not have imagined in their worst nightmare the total control that the Soviet “Ministry of Truth”3 would exercise from the first days of its existence. After all, Trofimov was able to publish his attack on censorship; Beaumarchais was able (with a few difficulties) to put on his Marriage of Figaro—and in the Court Theater at that (in 1783). As we have seen,4 in the 1920s even timid efforts at criticism of the Glavlit agencies inspired the most severe reactions. To stop criticism definitively, a special directive for censors was published in 1925: “It is forbidden to publish any article, notice, or announcement calling attention to the work of agencies responsible for controlling material before and after publication.” This directive proved insufficient: from time to time, information on the work of these agencies did slip into print. So another, more threatening directive was released two years later:

Concerning material that discredits the work of the censoring agencies: the publication of any information (article, notice, etc.) discrediting the pre- and postpublication control of printed matter, or revealing the forms and methods of censors’ work, is prohibited.

(I-f. 31, op. 2, d. 32, l. 8; d. 52, l. 90)5 [End Page 271]

Directives such as this immediately became the most widespread and effective method of control. They were sent to all the local censorship branches and looked like this:

RSFSR6
People’s Commissariat of Education
Central Directorate for Literary and Publishing Activity (“Glavlit”)
24 October 1924

To all provincial [gublit] and regional [obllit] censorship agencies

To all political editors and representatives of Glavlit in printing offices, publishing houses, newspapers and magazines.

In conjunction with directive No. 828 dated 5 September of this year, Glavlit suggests that information about price policies or concrete steps taken in pricing should not be permitted in the press. This ban applies to policies for the whole Soviet Union and for individual regions; it covers information about prices paid not only by the grain-procuring organizations, but on the entire procurement market.

The head of Glavlit

(Lebedev-Polianskii)

These directives were all strictly classified. “Secret” (or “Strictly Secret”), “Urgent” invariably appears at the top of each one. They were “to be strictly executed.” Any failure to do so was investigated at the highest level and led to sanctions against the censors involved “along Party and administrative lines.”7 The huge apparatus of Glavlit agencies became larger with each passing year. They were strictly guided by instructions from above and by the Glavlit directives; they had to display their vigilance and class consciousness by purging from print everything that the hand of Glavlit had not yet touched. This had to be done quickly, even before the appearance of the corresponding Glavlit directive, by “considering the local situation,” in response to the latest news, with guidance from Party documents and materials from the newspapers.

From time to time, separate censorship directives were...

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