Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.
Censorship was performed in two main directions: State secrets were handled by the General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (also known as Glavlit), which was in charge of censoring all publications and broadcasting for state secrets Censorship, in accordance with the official ideology and politics of the Communist Party was performed by several organizations: Goskomizdat censored all printed matter: fiction, poetry, etc. Goskino, in charge of cinema Gosteleradio, in charge of radio and television broadcasting The First Department in many agencies and institutions, such as the State Statistical Committee (Goskomstat), was responsible for assuring that state secrets and other sensitive information only reached authorized hands.
Destruction of printed matter
The Soviet government implemented mass destruction of pre-revolutionary and foreign books and journals from libraries. Only "special collections" (spetskhran), accessible by special permit granted by the KGB, contained old and "politically incorrect" material. Libraries were registered and an inspectorate set up to ensure compliance; items regarded as harmful were weeded from the collections. Towards the end of Soviet rule, perestroika led to loosened restrictions on publishing.
Soviet books and journals also disappeared from libraries according to changes in Soviet history. Often, Soviet citizens preferred to destroy politically incorrect publications and photos because those connected to them frequently suffered persecution, such as in the case of persecution of Christians.
After the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria in 1953, all subscribers to the second edition (1950–1958) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia obtained a page to replace the one containing the Lavrentiy Beria article; the new page extended information on George Berkeley.
Soviet censorship of literature
Works of print such as the press, advertisements, product labels, and books were censored by Glavlit, an agency established on June 6, 1922, ostensibly to safeguard top secret information from foreign entities but in reality to remove material the Soviet authorities did not like. From 1932 until 1952, the promulgation of socialist realism was the target of Glavlit in bowdlerizing works of print, while anti-Westernization and Soviet nationalism were common tropes for that goal. To limit peasant revolts over collectivization, themes involving shortages of food were expunged. In the 1932 book Russia Washed in Blood, a Bolshevik's harrowing account of Moscow's devastation from the October Revolution contained the description, "frozen rotten potatoes, dogs eaten by people, children dying out, hunger," but was promptly deleted. Also, excisions in the 1941 novel Cement were made by eliminating Gleb's spirited exclamation to English sailors: "Although we're poverty-stricken and are eating people on account of hunger, [still] we have Lenin."
As peasant uprisings defined pre-World War II Soviet censorship, nationalism defined the period during the war. Defeats of the Red Army in literature were forbidden, as were depictions of trepidation in Soviet military characters. Pressure from state-run Pravda prompted authors like Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev to redact a section in The Young Guard, where a child reads in the eyes of a dying Russian sailor the words "We are crushed." Since Joseph Stalin regularly read Pravda, which was itself censored by Glavlit, it was wise for an author to obey Pravdas advice.
With the start of the Cold War, a curse on anti-Westernization was proclaimed, mirroring the American Second Red Scare to some extent. For instance, in the 1950 edition of The Ordeal of Sevastopol, censors made over three hundred cuts, screening the book's references to Frenchmen as "a people of very lively imagination", and the chivalrous treatments which the French gave to Russian prisoners—such as eating in the passenger's lounge and being given a hundred francs per month—were extracted from the text. Historically, Russia has been technologically inferior to the West, which is demonstrated by Glavlit editing out a section of Sevastopol which enviously describes London's technological accomplishments in flattering detail. Religious intolerance and atheism was another goal of post-World War II censorship, and was an extension of anti-Westernization. In the children's novel Virgin Soil Upturned, references to God making mist out of tears shed by the poor and hungry were rescinded.