Glavlit-Soviet Censorship

6,000 censors-full employment!

Kontrol:

In Soviet times (1922-1991) Control was applied to pre-publication, post-publication and retroactively to works published in the past deemed politically harmful on account of their being in circulation.¹

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924) began to use the alias “Lenin” in 1901 and is generally referred to as Lenin.

The Bolsheviks quickly established a formal censorship apparatus after the revolution. On 27 October 1917, Lenin signed a decree on the press instituting a new censorship regime. This decree established temporary extraordinary measures against the bourgeois press, which, in the Bolsheviks’ minds, posed a grave threat to the new political order. It was commonly called Glavlit.²

Glavlit held responsibility for setting norms and implementing censorship, by which was meant the control of all printed production including literature, newspapers and other printed items such as pamphlets and forms. Glavlit was a fully-formed, centralised bureaucratic structure for the control of publication tasked with overseeing the publication of printed output and controlling foreign publications imported into the country; its remit covered pre-and post-publication censorship of almost all printed periodical and non-periodical publications including photographs, drawings and maps. ³

Censorship was a huge administrative task; In the late 1930s there were around 6,000 employees.

1. Poster Plakat. A Collection of Posters from the Soviet Union and its Satellite Nation.

2. Glavlit (Главлит).  Full title: Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR established 1922 under the name "Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs.”

3. Sherry, Samantha. (2015) “The Soviet Censorship System.” In Discourses of Regulation and Resistance. Edinburgh University Press, 2015. 45–64, 2015.