History Of Censorship Research Articles

Russian Book Business of the 19th — Early 20th Century on 23rd Pavlenkov Readings

The review of the All-Russian scientifi c conference “23rd Pavlenkov Readings. Book business in Russia in the 19th — early 20th century”, held in the Russian National Library on 17—19 October 2023, presents the reports delivered at the plenary session and four sections: “Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov (1823—1886) — publisher, publicist, poet: to the 200th anniversary of his birth”, “History of publishing”, “History of book collections” and “History of censorship”. The participants of the readings were researchers from St Petersburg, Moscow, Moscow region, Nizhny Novgorod, Orel, Samara, Khabarovsk. The speakers represented various scientifi c institutions: libraries, universities, museums. Among them there were both experienced book historians and novice researchers who touched upon various aspects of the history of the book in their reports.

Introduction of Censorship by Foreign Internet Platforms

Internet platforms have considerable power over information flows on a global scale in the conditions of mass digitalization of modern life. Currently, Internet platforms can control the ability of self-expression of billions of Internet users, including Russian ones. The concentration of the most popular platforms in the United States, where there is a vacuum of legal regulation of Internet platforms that enjoy legal protection as distributors of information along with the press and other types of media, has led to the fact that Internet platforms are actively creating a system of censorship of information, carefully masking such censorship and giving it the appearance of conscientious moderation aimed at combating extremism, false information, aggression, and other illegal phenomena. Censorship in its digital incarnation is fundamentally different from censorship that existed in the past. If earlier censorship used to be based on normative regulation and was regulated in detail, now it is hidden and it uses new technical opportunities. Being a product of the American political system, Internet platforms censorship is based on the political preferences of their leadership. Using historical and legal analysis, including analysis of the history of censorship since its appearance and transformation into the state institution, the author concludes that Internet platforms censorship represents a new phenomenon that has not been described in detail before, requiring reflection in legislation in order to ensure protection of the constitutional rights of users. Effective protection of the constitutional rights of Internet users is impossible without legislative prohibition of Internet platforms censorship and international cooperation aimed at combating this phenomenon.

"Pleasure to Burn": A Comprehensive Look into the History of Censoring Literature in School Environments

The literature review below was done to investigate the history of censorship, specifically book burning and how it relates to the modern-day censorship that is seen in our country today. Using scholarly articles and books, news articles, professional organization websites, video documentaries, and data from prominent anti-censorship organizations, this article strives to tell the full story of the world’s complicated history with the censorship of knowledge. This review of literature makes clear that contemporary and historical censorship is an attempt to gain power and suppress the voice of those under authority. As educators, students, and community members, it is vital to use this knowledge to protect students' right to read.

История одной несостоявшейся публикации: о рукописи «Дополнения к переписке с друзьями»

The article is devoted to certain aspects of the censorship history of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” related to the preparation for the publication of “Works by Gogol” in 1855–1856. At that time, an attempt was made to publish the text of “Selected Passages…” without censorship exceptions, and the Moscow Censorship Committee received the manuscript “Additions to Correspondence with Friends,” which included the texts of chapters that were not allowed for publication in 1846. The paper presents the circumstances of its censorship consideration. It also establishes that one of the handwritten copies of the prohibited chapters of “Selected Passages…” stored in the Manuscript Department of the Russian State Library is a part of this manuscript, although it now has a different name. Comparison of this handwritten copy with other censorship materials showed that the edits in it fully correspond to those described in one of the documents of 1856; the page numbers with pencil marks coincide with those indicated in the censor’s report; the sequence of chapters is the same as in the manuscript submitted to the Moscow Censorship Committee; and finally, there are edits made by P.A. Vyazemsky, who, as is known, read the “Additions to the Correspondence…” and planned to discuss the necessary changes with the publisher. At the same time, there are still a lot of questions related to both the history of the creation of this manuscript and its future fate.

Eric Berkowitz: Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News

Eric Berkowitz: Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News

Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot in the 19th Century Dramatizations: The History of Censorship and Theatre Productions

A staged version by V. Krylov and G. Sutugin of Dostoevskys novel The Idiot (1899) is the only staging of this novel in the XIX century that was approved by censors and directed in two theaters: the Maly Theater and the Alexandrinsky Theater. Other adapations were banned for scene as a result of low quality and of impropriety of the novel and Dostoevsky in general on the stage. Dostoevskys work seemed too realistic and pessimistic for stage and mass performances: lack of virtue and chastity in the characters and their actions gave rise to censorship assertions that Dostoevsky was absolutely not a stage author. However, intriguingly, Krylovs play differed little in quality from the previous ones: it was also a compilation of the chapters of the novel, concentrated on the love triangle between Nastasya Filippovna, Rogozhin and Myshkin. But the ending of Krylovs text (it is believed that it was Krylov who took the main part in its creation) was full of moralizations and was completely invented by the authors. Perhaps it was this fact that influenced the positive decision of the censors. In this article, we will consider censorial acts and try to puzzle out key to success by Krylov and Sutugin.

Сборник «Цензура в России: история и современность» (к двадцатилетию издания)

Since 2001 The Russian National Library, together with the Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is working on the publication of a collection of scientific papers «Censorship in Russia: History and Modernity. Along with research on the history of censorship in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Soviet Union, the collection presents work on topical issues of today, including the restriction of freedom of speech in the electronic environment, on the problems of the «information society». Along with research articles, documents, bibliographic and reference materials, and reviews are published. The materials of the collection cover more than two centuries of Russian history. The publication unites researchers whose interests are related to the study of the history of censorship in Russia and the Soviet Union. Its typological and thematic features are a multidimensional reflection of the research topic, a wide source base, a variety of genres of published materials, the participation of specialists from domestic and foreign scientific institutions.

Воспоминания Е.А. Гиляровой о работе цензором и редактором

The study of the history of censorship in the USSR attracts a large number of researchers, but publications of censors’ memoirs are not so common. The memoirs of E.A. Gilyarova represent one of the most interesting periods of the Soviet press, i. e. the 1930s. The introductory article to the publication examines the significance of the censors’ memoirs for the history of literature. A brief biographical note is given about Gilyarova, who, being a prominent Bolshevik, an employee of the People’s Commissariat of Education, was repressed in the 1930s. Subsequently, she contributed to the study of the Bolshevik movement’s history by publishing her memoirs and compiling several collections about the participants of the Revolution and the Civil War. In the being publishing memoirs, Gilyarova describes the internal routine of work in Gorlit, (the General Directorate for Literature and Publishing which carried out censorship in USSR), direct interactions with writers. The above episode with the B.A. Lavrenev’novel “The World in a Piece of Glass” shows how censorship changed the text: subsequently it was reproduced without the final author’s conclusion. Also, Gilyarova remembers how she took off an obscene poem from Nekrasov’s poetry collection. In the narrative about her work at the GIHL, Gilyarova pays the greatest attention to the figure of K.I. Chukovsky. She describes the editorial work on his book about N.A. Nekrasov, tells about the prohibition of Chukovsky’s works at the turn of the 1920s — 1930s. The present text allows us to form a more comprehensive picture of the pre-War development of Soviet literature, to make conclusions about the influence of censorship and editorial interference factors on it and to show this influence on concrete examples.

Notes of Italian Censors of the XVI-XVII Centuries in Manuscripts from the Book Collection of the Ginzburg Barons

The article is devoted to the censors’ notes in the Jewish books that existed in the second half of the XVI - early XVII century on the territory of modern Italy. The material for the study was the family collection of the Ginzburg barons (the Russian State Library), in which about 500 manuscripts of the that period were preserved. The purpose of the article is to introduce into scientific circulation data on the censors of Jewish books on the basis of one of the largest collections of Judaica in the world. The main task of the study was to collect information about the censors from the notes they made in the manuscripts of the collection, and analyze them. There were 27 names of censors, including Domenico of Jerusalem, Giovanni Domenico Caretto, Camillo Yagel, Luigi da Bologna and Renato da Modena, who owned the vast majority of notes with names and information about their lives. The author comes to the conclusion that although the history of censorship of Jewish books has been studied enough, but research on this topic on the basis of rich collections of Judaism in Russia remains a matter of the future.

Film Censorship and Identity in Kenya

The postcolonial government in Kenya has embarked on a sustained war against identity by banning locally and internationally produced motion pictures that depict LGBTQ themes in the ongoing national discourse on gender identity. In 2014 and 2018, the government effectively banned two films by local directors (The Stories of Our Lives and Rafiki) for including the LGBTQ community in this discourse. Within the same period, officials banned The Wolf of Wall Street and Fifty Shades of Grey, both by international directors, for their explicit sexual content. The bans attracted public attention and triggered a debate over the country’s censorship laws in particular and gender identity in general. However, while paying specific attention to postcolonial censorship laws that aimed to retain the status quo, the debaters failed to ground their arguments in their proper historical context. To better understand censorship in Kenya, we must first understand its history during the colonial period (1895-1963), a period that saw the colonizer attempt to construct for the colonized a morally acceptable identity. This construction saw the British colonial government shield African cinema audiences from films that they thought would teach them undesirable behaviors. To achieve this goal, censorship officials censored films with “questionable” scenes. This study connects the present and the past, broadens present censorship and gender debates by deepening our collective imagination of real and imagined laws, and incentivizes the debaters to think broadly about continuity without change in Kenya. It vacates rigid chronologies and does not purport to provide a definitive history of censorship and identity during the two historical periods, even if such a history were possible to produce. Broadly, the study situates censorship within a long history of framing and re-framing identities and, consequently, contributes to a more complex understanding of the chaotic interplay among power, art, and identity.

Lights, Camera, Action!

This article captures the legal history of censorship in film. In an effort to prevent an American governmental body from regulating the movie industry, Hollywood created their own agencies to police film production companies. While this moral and ethical policing may be considered censorship, this article will explain why the industry’s approach made perfect sense. Although production companies had to abide by a code, it was only for America’s three most modest decades in the 1900s. If the government created legislation about film content requirements, it would be an incredibly difficult process to modernize the requirements with the times. This article will explain how the movie industry’s censorship evolved from the production code to the rating system, ultimately proving that America is better off for Hollywood’s creation of malleable content expectations.

Gratis & Libre: Wikipedia’s role in free and open history production and dissemination

ABSTRACT Wikipedia is by definition an encyclopedia, and the universal scope and availability it promises are ideals-in the pursuit of worldwide access to information. The history of literary production is equally the history of censorship, knowledge suppression, preservation, and material circulation. While widely accessed online sources might appear to have moved beyond these issues, they are in fact part of this complex balance between freedom and restriction. Therefore, it is useful to consider Wikipedia in terms other than as a website-as a library, as a dictionary, as an archive, as a book. In this light, we see that Wikipedia has many precedents in the history of knowledge dissemination and preservation, precedents as diverse as the Library of Alexandria, the Oxford English Dictionary or the Bible. Wikipedia is so different from what has gone before in any one field but so similar to what has happened in different aspects of many fields. This paper discusses how the idea of “free” is related to the production and dissemination of knowledge by looking at methods by which knowledge has historically been curtailed-through copyright; censorship; destruction; price; and language. Wikipedia is the latest in a long line of defenders of the ideal of free knowledge.

Modernity and Its Discontents: Newspapers, Censorship, and the Press Law in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Iran

The ratification of the Press Law in February 1908 marked a significant development in the history of censorship in Iran. However, in the little that has been written on this subject, the Press Law has been explained primarily in terms of constitutional politics, and the pressure that the first majles was put under by royalist forces who had been upset at the critical and anti-royalist tone of constitutional newspapers. This article takes a different approach; it contextualizes the Press Law and evaluates it in light of the attempts at control that had been put into effect by the state in the pre-constitutional years. To this end, this article considers the largely untold story of censorship in Qājār Iran. How did the understanding of what censorship should entail evolve through the years? How was censorship exercised, and what challenges did censorship pose for both the authorities and the subjects in the Nāseri and Mozaffari eras, culminating in the Press Law in February 1908?

Polish Censorship during the Late Stalinist Period

The aim of the study is to present selected aspects of the history of censorship in Poland during the Stalinist period (1948−1956). The article presents the circumstances of the establishment of the censorship office in Poland — the Central Office for the Control of Press, Publications and Events (GUKPPiW) — which was set up in January 1945 and operated throughout the period of the Polish People’s Republic, until April 1990. The article also gives an answer to the question about the role of the so-called Soviet advisers who came to Lublin in December 1944 and took full control of the process of creating state censorship. The employees of the Soviet censorship sent from Moscow were tasked with creating an institution that would control the media and operate according to the mechanisms established in the USSR. In the process of organizing the censorship apparatus, the Polish communists played a marginal and servant role towards the Soviet military (including General N. Bulganin) and advisers who came from Moscow. The most important decisions were made by the employees of Glavlit, whose recommendations were treated by the management of the Polish Workers’ Party as orders. Glavlit officers, who arrived in Lublin in December 1944, recruited censorship employees, developed instructions for them, rules for publishing and issuing printed works and drafted a decree on the control of the press, publications and performances, a draft order of the minister of public security regarding the introduction of censorship. The work also describes the process of recruiting censors, as well as the reasons and scope of censorship interventions.

A History of Censorship in the United States

Censorship is a centuries-old issue for the United States. The importance of intellectual freedom and the freedom of speech is particularly evident in libraries, organizations dedicated to the access and spread of information. Issues regarding censorship and intellectual freedom have even reached the US Supreme Court. The following essay serves as a history of censorship in the United States, particularly in its libraries, and how the same issues of censorship have now transitioned into the digital age.

Abortion’s Coded Visibility

Censor Joseph Breen took issue with Ellen Berent, the lead character in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), terminating her pregnancy by dramatically throwing herself down a flight of stairs, even though the Production Code would not explicitly forbid on-screen abortions until 1951. Yet the abortion ultimately made it into the final print because, by Breen’s logic, an abortion is unrecognizable as such so long as it is not named. However, archival research suggests that Breen was wrong on both counts. Considering a wide array of archival records—Production Code Administration files and correspondence, early script drafts, audience preview screening responses, reviews, and more—this article argues that the discrepancies between Leave Her to Heaven’s censorship history and its reception illustrate popular morality eclipsing prescribed morality. The film was both a catalyst of the 1951 Code amendment banning abortion and an early harbinger of the dissolution of the PCA’s stranglehold over abortion as taboo.

National Socialist Medical Literature and the Censorship Practices in the Soviet Occupation Zone and Early East German State.

This study examines how medical discourse and culture were affected by the denazification policies of the Soviet occupation authorities in East Germany. Examining medical textbooks in particular, it reveals how the production and dissemination of medical knowledge was subject to a complex process of negotiation among authors, publishers, and censorship officials. Drawing on primary-source material produced by censorship authorities that has not been rigorously examined to date, it reveals how knowledge production processes were structured by broader ideological and political imperatives. It thus sheds new light on a unique chapter in the history of censorship.

“Towards the Formation of Literary Scholarship”: an Unrealized Publishing Project of the 1920s

The article reconstructs the history of the creation and unsuccessful publication attempt of the book “Towards the Formation of Literary Scholarship”. The book’s editor-in-chief was well-known Ukrainian literary critic, ethnographer, and popularizer of Potebnia’s ideas in Ukraine, Oleksii Vetukhov. He was the author of the the book’s key article, “Literature In the Process of Its Recognition and Marking the Way to Its Own Path,” part of which was first published in the Appendix. There are two more articles in the book. The first article, “The Formal Method in Literature,” by Agapii Shamrai, was published in “Chervonyi shliakh” (The Red Path) with notes and corrections (important discrepancies and its censorship history are provided in the Appendix). The second article, “Economic and Social Analysis in Historical Poetics,” by Andrii Kovalivskyi, remained unpublished, according to our data. The collection was intended as a textbook for teachers and self-study. The manuscript was submitted to the State Publishing House of Ukraine not later than November 1925.

INTRA MUROS. ZUR GESCHICHTE DES (ERZWUNGENEN) SCHWEIGENS DER LITERATUR

In the article, an attempt has been made to analyze the systems of control of social communication based on the history of censorship in Germany. Apart from the historical context, reference has been made to the relationship of systems of censorship to modernization processes. In addition, the crucial role of legal awareness in society has been indicated. Within the scope of the present analysis, important methodological issues concerning research on forms, manifestations and effects of censorship related to the XXth century German literature have been considered.

“Moscow Telegraph”, “Literary Gazette” and the Third Section: Covert Mechanism of Patronage and Punishment

The article deals with the circumstances of censorship and closure of two arguing periodicals, A. A. Delvig's “Literary Gazette” and N. A. Polevoy's magazine “Moscow Telegraph” in a new light. The practice of patronage and punishment carried out in respect of these periodicals by the Third Department and their censorship history are presented in general as a prelude to the struggle of the “German” and “Russian parties”, which spread over the government circles in the 1830s. The covert competition between the Third Department, which advocated the interests of the “German party”, and the Ministry of National Education headed by S. S. Uvarov who put forward the slogan “Orthodoxy. Autocracy. Nationality”, is an example of this struggle. The Third Department and Uvarov's Ministry used in their interests periodicals and censorship bodies of both of them. Their rivalry is mostly explicit in the struggle unfolded between magazines and newspapers in the second half of the 1830s and in the 1840s. By the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the narrative of “Orthodoxy. Autocracy. Nationality” had not been yet formulated and Uvarov could not consolidate any periodicals, while the press supported by the “German party” was already active. The chief of the Third Department Benckendorff worked for its interest, managed to deprive Delvig of the rights to edit “Literary Gazette”, and brought to his side Polevoy (who previously counted on A. S. Shishkov's support). Benckendorff patronised “Moscow Telegraph”, supporting its anti-nobiliary and pro-western policy, and indulging its veiled propaganda of revolution. However, Uvarov managed to have the magazine closed in 1834.