Glavlit, censorship and the problem of party policy in cultural affairs, 1922–28

Abstract

CENSORSHIP IN SOVIET RUSSIA as it was reorganised after the end of the civil war was not a simple process of striking out words or banning books. In the course of the 1920s it became an increasingly complex system of pre-publication control and post-publication evaluation, involving myriad party and state agencies, of which the Main Directorate on Literature and Presses (Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel'stv, or Glavlit), was only the most directly involved. The censorship process, in this broad sense, was one of the most widespread and certainly the most institutionalised form of party-state involvement in cultural and intellectual affairs during the New Economic Policy (NEP). An evaluation of the extent and organisation of censorship therefore cuts to the heart of party policy in cultural affairs; and like the peasantry's tax in kind or industry's khozraschet, a relatively non-interventionist or 'liberal' cultural policy has long been considered one of the cornerstones of NEP.' Censorship, as an inherently controversial act, put Glavlit at the centre of a political process in which party leaders and agencies clashed, intervened in Glavlit's affairs or attempted to impose their own version of proper party policy. Examining the politics of censorship in its everyday practice, as a result, illustrates differences of opinion in the party on censorship and the regulation of culture. Party policy was, needless to say, not simply shaped by the results of the heated Bolshevik debate in the 1920s; it was the product of the concrete actions taken by those institutions created to oversee cultural production, of which Glavlit was the most important. Issues connected to censorship and many other sensitive topics were rarely discussed in public or in print in the 1920s. The debate about policy that survived in published sources-mostly centred around the important but limited literary dispute between 'proletarian' writers and 'fellow-travellers'therefore became one of the major issues commanding scholarly attention. As a result, the complex issue of party policy has frequently been reduced to references to the celebrated 1925 Central Committee resolution on literature, itself often simplified to the statement that the party would not support any one group or faction but encourage diversity.2 The widespread notion that NEP was a time of liberal cultural policies, mild censorship and party neutrality in cultural politics persisted both because NEP was undeniably an intellectually dynamic period and because the comparison with what occurred next was so favourable. For those examining primarily the cultural achievements of the period, it became