Censorship Of Censorship In Russia

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Even before the creation of the Soviet Union, Russian empire had an on and off policies dealing with censorship particularly with books and writings . Before the 1900’s, during the reign of Tsar Alexander he had views and expressions about censorship. From years 1855 to 1865 was actually a decade of non censorship in Russia. “Censorship reforms began in Russian in a single decade of tolerance (1855-1865) during the reign of Tsar Alexander II” (Newth, 2002). Many people such as the media enjoy freedom of censorship up until censorship was restored. When the Russian revolution happened and the temporary government won, censorship bans were taken off. However, this did not last long as the Bolsheviks revolted and led to the creation of the USSR.
Russian people enjoyed the liberty to express their views in the decade of 1855 to 1865. “The press then enjoyed greater freedom” (Newth, 2002). As the years passed by of non-censorship, the image of the Russian government and leader of Tsar Alexander at first was extremely favorable (Downs, 2014). Still, soon things started to go down in later years. In 1865, the censorship came back with Russian government and Alexander wanted to keep Russian image positive. The people of Russia soon started to lose their small freedom they had with free voice. Still, there was some sort of freedom of media, but it was not entirely true. “Although freedom of the press nominally existed in the Soviet Union, the government reserved the right to prevent the publication of certain materials.” (Kassof, 2004).

When the Russian revolution happened and the new temporary government won, they took out several key rules of the Old Russian government like censorship. Things did not last long as group (Bolsheviks) ...

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... but also Krupskia, whom was Lenin’s wife who took a ban on several books. “It was this same year that Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) started a book purge” (Rogers, 1974). With many purges of books happening to Soviet libraries, it would soon create a bad thing for the government. Suddenly, by around the 1930’s, the Soviets were soon facing a storage problem and had to take care of the situation.
The soviets created a new rather in fact big volume on what cannot go into publications along with books. The large volume would go later to become to have known as List of information Not Suitable for Publication in Open Sources (Gitelman, 2010). Topics included statistics of crime, disasters mad-made, incomes, natural disasters, identities of officials and their spouses. Publications of all sorts had to go through the soviet government in order for the material to he okay

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