SOURCE: Stelmakh, Valeria D. “Reading in the Context of Censorship in the Soviet Union.” Libraries & Culture 36, no. 1 (winter 2001): 143-51.

[In the following essay, the full version of which was published in Solanus 10 (1996), Stelmakh presents an overview of literary censorship in the Soviet Union in the period of the 1960s to the 1980s, noting the rise of samizdat literature and of the spetskhran, or the library of forbidden literature.]

The period preceding the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and the collapse of the Soviet regime (from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s) had a number of distinctive features that are important for the analysis of reading. Clear signs of decline characterized it. On the one hand, modernizing tendencies were gathering speed, accompanied by a change in the social structure—a sharp increase in the percentage of the population living in towns and a growth in the number of well-educated people—the cultural pressure from below that undermined the foundation of power and its ideology. The process of eroding the regime and discrediting Soviet norms and values was a distinctive feature of these years.

On the other hand, the regime's attempts to forestall the impending collapse and to stabilize the situation included strengthening censorship and other repressive measures. At this time, the society had been living under an almost complete blockade on information, combined with a sophisticated system of misinformation and total censorship. The censorship of the Soviet period as distinguished from, for example, that of czarist Russia had a number of specific features. First, it was not restrained by any provisions of law and hence was arbitrary and not accountable to anyone; second, it was carried out, for the most part, before publication; and lastly, it was performed in secret and anonymously.

By the beginning of Gorbachev's Perestroika, or economic restructuring, the range of the forbidden literature gradually grew wider and was eventually virtually all—embracing. The special restricted access collection, known as the spetskhran, had become an independent system within libraries to which were consigned not only publications openly hostile to the regime but also completely innocent works. Thus, by 1985 the spetskhran of the Lenin State Library of the U.S.S.R.—one of the largest in the country—contained more than 1 million items. About 30,000 to 35,000 items were added to its stock each year.

The problem of reading in such conditions is often understood as open or secret resistance—on the one hand, a controlling and punitive regime, on the other, a suppressed and downtrodden people. However, there was no uniformity in the attitudes of different social groups to life under censorship—open struggle, secret dissidence, open support and approval, trusting acceptance, and many other attitudes. Censorship was able to become an all-pervasive, total system, rather like a cancerous cell infecting the whole body, only because of the interaction between state bodies and the various social groups due to self-censorship within the society. People working with the written word—directors of publishing houses, editors, authors, librarians, and booksellers—narrowed still further the areas of openness. They interpreted any wish of the regime, official or unofficial, as an absolute prohibition. Regardless of the instructions from the chief organ of state censorship (Glavlit), the publishing houses published a number of books with their own marking: “Not for sale,” “For in-house use,” “On the right of manuscript,” and so on, thus narrowing the sphere of their distribution.

The librarians who carried out checks and purges of library stocks often demonstrated even greater vigilance than required by the Glavlit orders. In the 1970s among the staff members of the service department of the Lenin State Library of the U.S.S.R. there were specially appointed persons—“politcontrollers”—who, apart from their regular professional functions, had to perform additional control over the literature lent from the general stocks (not from the restricted access collections), thus exercising censorship over percolation of the avant-garde aesthetics to the reader, the aesthetics that introduced new ways of thinking and a new outlook on life and social behavior.

The writers union and other creative unions such as the cultural groups acted as bearers of the recognized aspect of the socialist culture. To the outside world this appeared to be a conflict between literary groups and tendencies. Finally, the readers themselves would quite often suggest to the library's authorities that this or that publication should be transferred from the general stock to the spetskhran collection. One of such letters concerned, for example, the three-volume edition of The History of the Communist Party of France, published in Paris in 1964.

Thus, when analyzing the problem of reading in the context of censorship, one should not discuss the activity of a specific state body but rather the complex social mechanism that controls the very possibility of texts going into circulation. Control over readers is possible only where the state has a complete monopoly of book publishing and distribution. In the 1970s and 1980s such a system, typical of a totalitarian state, was finally in position, and state publishing comprised over 80 percent of all printed output. The essence of the state's book strategy consisted of forcing the public to read what was prescribed for it, not allowing people any space outside state control. The obligatory literary selection should be the only one accessible to the whole of the country's population. Here are several aspects of this policy:

1. A consistent reduction of the range of the published titles. In the mid-1980s, in spite of broadening readers' demands and new cultural contingents coming along, the number of the published titles was almost the same as in the 1960s: in 1985 it was only 100.6 percent of the 1970 figure and 104 percent of that for 1980.

2. An unrestrained growth in the print runs of the literature that was permitted and approved of by the state authorities. This was mostly mass ideological literature intended for the lesser educated and middle-brow groups. The total print run of the books and brochures in 1985 was 164.2 percent of the 1970 figure.

3. A consistent reduction in the production of journals and other serials, which are the most innovative sort of publication. In 1970 there were 5,968 titles, in 1985, 5,180.

4. A particularly harsh prepublication censorship of foreign literature, primarily in the humanities and socioeconomic disciplines. Books on politics, international relations, sociology, philosophy, cybernetics, semiotics, linguistics, and so on were hardly ever published, and those that did enter the country were immediately sent to spetskhran. In the mid-1980s foreign publications made up 80 percent of the stocks of the spetskhran of the Lenin State Library of the U.S.S.R.

5. Extraction from the library collections and the book trade network of the published titles in accordance with Glavlit lists and directives.

There was discrimination against all groups of readers, but it was directed primarily at the best-educated part of the society: the literary, social, and scientific elite. It was this particular group that, despite its constant growth, was deprived of the possibility of publishing its work and having free access to information. The natural reaction of the reading public was the urge to escape the boundaries of what was permitted. A characteristic feature of this period was the development of “shadow,” parallel forms of cultural life. One of these was the black market in books. In the 1970s and 1980s the black market was an active part of society. Buying books directly from other people was how 35 percent of Soviet adults acquired books for their own homes, and 68 percent of families living in major cities bought books only on the black market.

A special study of the range of books on the black market carried out by the Sector for the Sociology of Reading and Librarianship of the Russian State Library in 1988 showed that the titles on sale on the black market constituted 21 percent of the published lot. On the black market, the most expensive categories of books were: 1. Russian literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Russian Soviet literature by authors such as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Igor' Severianin, Aleksei Remisov, Fedor Sologub, and others; 2. the best examples of twentieth-century foreign literature that had rarely been published in the U.S.S.R. such as Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others; 3. tamizdat, or works by prohibited Russian and Soviet authors in editions published abroad such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and others (those who traded in such books dealt with a very limited group of trusted people); 4. religious books such as the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud as well as the works of Russian religious philosophers; 5. books on foreign philosophy, psychology, and ethics published within the U.S.S.R. in very small editions and books in limited editions marked “For academic libraries”; 6. books by Russian and foreign literary scholars, especially in structuralism and semiotics, such as Yuri Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Boris Eikhenbaum. Thus, the black market was directed toward readers' actual requirements, and it restored to society, albeit only partially, that which the system had taken away.

A unique phenomenon in scale and in its role in the society was samizdat. Samizdat, in this case, would be everything that was reproduced and distributed without the official permission of the authorities. This term appears regularly in works describing the social and cultural situation in the U.S.S.R. from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Samizdat appeared right after the October coup, when the revolutionary censorship had been introduced. Still, during the Stalin period samizdat as a serious segment of the unofficial culture did not exist. Those separate cases of reading the illegal texts were just a marginal phenomenon. This can be accounted for with a number of reasons. The process of stratification of the society and erosion of the regime from the 1930s to the 1950s had not yet acquired the evident and widespread character as in the subsequent decades. Moreover, as a result of the Second World War the society became more consolidated, and the authority of the state power was strengthened. Also, the repressive measures that were used for eradication of the slightest manifestation of dissidence maintained the atmosphere of fear in the country.

Samizdat of the 1960s through the 1980s was no longer just separate “subversive” books or literary schools in opposition but already a system of the creation and distribution of unofficial “information” uncontrolled by the state. The people involved in the distribution and reading of samizdat were no longer separate heroes or tiny separate groups but whole social strata in whose orientation the illegal literature became the antipode to the official ideology and culture. Samizdat was a form of opposition to the regime and an assertion of the right of the individual for “one's own” reading. Its distribution could not be stopped by any punitive sanctions of the authorities.

There are no statistical and sociological data on the reading of samizdat. Not only its collection but the mere stating of separate cases was impermissible from the point of researchers' ethics. That is why we can use only the experts' opinions, the recollections of contemporaries, and our own personal experience. When defining the boundaries of distribution and reading of samizdat its present researchers use, as a rule, such metaphors as “the entire country,” “the whole people,” and “the entire society.” Nevertheless, samizdat was a characteristic of a special segment of the society, specifically, of the intelligentsia, by whom we mean not simply the well-educated part of the society but its comparatively small group—the social and cultural avant-garde who could find their own way to culture.

A. Suetnov, the researcher and bibliographer of samizdat, notes that the starting number of copies of an illegal book was about fifteen to twenty. The final number would not exceed two hundred; the monthly spontaneous run could be about 50,000. From this A. Suetnov considers that the one-time samizdat audience was about 200,000 readers. Still, in spite of its small number, this was the group of cultural leaders who opposed state power and its repressive machinery, thus preserving the cultural and moral potential of the society.

There was a marked change in the nature and composition of the documents distributed through samizdat. In the sixties and early seventies, samizdat was primarily literature, such as brilliant unpublished books (e.g., Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, the novels of Solzhenitsyn, and Bunin's diary), the poetry of poets who had been prohibited, repressed, or never published (such as Osip Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Iosif Brodskii). There were copies of Russian translations of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orwell's 1984, and Djilas's New Class. Expert assessment suggests that over three hundred works were in circulation in samizdat then. This was the initial phase of rethinking our past and appropriating the cultural heritage that had been hidden from society.

In the subsequent decade, it was primarily political samizdat that was produced and read. There were philosophical works, bulletins, and chronicles of the human rights movement, foreign emigre journals (e.g., Kontinent), and also literary works from the new wave of émigré writers such as Maksimov, Kopelev, Aksenov, and others. These changes in the repertory were evidence of a new phase in the development of society. The growth of independent public opinion and the formation of groups that began to oppose the regime actively brought it about. It was these groups that took on the production and distribution of samizdat. The emergence of these groups facilitated the self-realization of unofficial culture and its institutionalization. Its significant features included the creation of original texts, which had been rare in the samizdat of the 1960s; the appearance of homemade, uncensored political journalism, which testified to consolidation and simultaneously to clearer differentiation of samizdat readership; the widening range of documents and greater opportunities for their reproduction, especially setting up channels through which manuscripts could be sent to the West to be published and sent back to the U.S.S.R. (tamizdat); the setting up of stable avenues of distribution within the U.S.S.R.; improvements in technology for the reproduction of texts within the U.S.S.R., including the acquisition of printing capability and the beginning of the practice of reprinting texts for a fee.

As a result, samizdat was distributed far more widely. The pressure of the censor grew correspondingly, and repressive measures from the authorities and the KGB became tougher. But they were unable to terminate samizdat. This, by the mid-1980s the readership of samizdat was clearly differentiated. Its creators and the top layer of distributors merged with human rights activists and were engaged in open opposition to the regime. For the other groups, reading samizdat was a form of symbolic identification with the opposition. Such reading did not help well-educated readers to lift up their heads and start to take action. The intelligentsia took part in official Soviet life and publicly approved the actions of the authorities while making up for it by reading forbidden texts at home.

Nevertheless, in reading and thinking through “their own” literature the intelligentsia worked out alternative models of social behavior and culture. Reading illegal texts was a demarcation line dividing the intellectual avant-garde from the general reader. Beyond these islands of freedom was a different reality where another sort of literature ruled and where—as Orwell predicted—ignorance was strength.

In the mid-1980s, the general reading public comprised about 161.2 million people, about 40-50 million of whom could be called active readers, in the opinion of experts. This enormous audience of readers lacked the cultural depth required to find their own way in literature and had no access to the channels through which unofficial texts were distributed. The mass reader had to be content with the selection offered by the state publishers. As was shown above, this comprised only a limited range of books and a restricted choice of authors, the so-called books for the general public. For these readers, the censorship and the whole ideological apparatus constructed an artificial cultural universe, regulated, well-ordered, and confined.

Surveys of readers and the analysis of demands from mass library users that we carried out in the 1970s and 1980s show that fiction was the most popular. The most popular authors were modern Soviet writers. In the 1960s and 1970s, the range of authors read was reasonably broad. In the last decade of Soviet power, a small group of officially approved authors emerged, the so-called literary generals. These authors, who were published in massive editions every year, blocked readers' access to other literature.

However, because of the narrow range of the published titles, the general public was not satisfied. Only 40 percent of reader demand was satisfied. This group particularly felt keenly the book shortage in mass literature. This is not to say that mass culture did not exist in the U.S.S.R. It did, but in a specific variation with its own ideological features. Its goal was not entertainment and relaxation but brainwashing intended to inculcate Soviet ideology into the public's mind. It was heavily politicized, using ideological symbols—“us and them,” “friends and enemies,” “socialism and capitalism,” and so on. It lauded the cult of work in the name of the state and derided rest and relaxation. In this sense Soviet literature did not fit the formula of mass culture and was simply bad literature, but it was issued in huge print-runs. A whole range of standard genres was absent from Soviet mass literature—women's fiction, melodrama, comics, and so on. There were severe limitations on detective stories, science fiction, and adventure stories. One could buy these books only on the black market, where they cost the equivalent of the average monthly wage.

It was not only “high” literature that was subject to censorship. Mass literature was dismissed as “false propaganda for a hostile ideology and the bourgeois way of life.” Some elements of the unofficial culture created by the educated elite did filter down to the wider public, such as political jokes or tapes of the songs of Vysotskii and Okudzhava. But basically the behavior of the general reading public under censorship and ideological restriction was different from that of the avant-garde. These readers did not know and could not know what they were missing. The general reading public accepted and believed the official line on their superiority over the other countries and times, expressed in slogans such as “The Soviet people are the best-read people on earth” and “The U.S.S.R. is a great book power.” In this sense, the Soviet reader constructed by the slogans was not merely a slogan but did exist—it came to coincide with readers' own assessment of themselves.

CONCLUSION

Right after the fall of the Soviet empire public opinion was manipulated, if not with the aim of justifying Soviet censorship, then at the very least in order to downplay its fatal role in society for more than seven decades. Thus numerous researchers suggest that the regulatory function of censorship had a positive result in encouraging the illegal distribution of texts on a large scale.

As soon as library special collections were opened, two ideas began to circulate in the library profession. One stressed the positive role of the closed collections in saving the nation's cultural heritage from destruction. The other argued that their existence did not entail any infringement of readers' rights, as anyone who really needed access could get it. Also, the claims are made that it was the constant struggle against the censor that helped our culture develop its unique traits (implication, our ability to read between the lines, etc.).

All these and similar arguments are myths created and circulated by those groups that were involved in the activities of the censorship and ideological authorities. In Soviet totalitarian society, censorship could not be anything but a mighty hindrance to social, cultural, and economic development. The battle against censorship was a great tragedy for our literature and its readers. The intellectual potential of the nation was diverted from its proper purpose into overcoming prohibitions rather than creating spiritual treasures. In this struggle talent degenerated, gifts were wasted, and projects turned to dust.