Small Government Book Fan Club discussion

Found this short article while browsing:

https://censorshipissues.wordpress.co...

"Lenin and Stalin both had ideas of how books should be used in the Soviet Union and these ideas are contrary to how we perceive the use of books today. The main use of books in the Soviet Union was to imbed “cultural products into the collective memory” of the people. Libraries were used as tools for Soviet party propaganda to promote “the spirit of the ideas of socialism and communism.” In the time of Lenin and Stalin the libraries in the Soviet Union were repeatedly purged of all books deemed “harmful” to society. These purges dramatically changed what books could be found at libraries and which ones were censored. This article will explain the history of the library purges and the ideas behind book censorship in the Soviet Union."

Appropriate reading for Banned Books Week, which has mostly turned into "Let's laugh at stupid right wingers for wanting to ban Dr. Seuss."

Another article:

A brief summary of the history of censorship in Russia in 19th and 20th century
http://www.beaconforfreedom.org/liste...

"After World War II, the Department of Special Storage began receiving foreign books and periodicals on a regular basis from Glavlit; foreign "Rossica-Sovietica", social-economic and military publications, and all literature by Russian emigrant authors, irrespective of subjects.
By 1988 when "perestroika" began, the Department of Special Storage was closed down. The collections then contained app. 27,000 Russian books, 250,000 foreign books, 572,000 issues of foreign magazines, app. 8,500 annual sets of foreign newspapers and 8,000 publications."

Masha wrote: "Appropriate reading for Banned Books Week, which has mostly turned into "Let's laugh at stupid right wingers for wanting to ban Dr. Seuss.""

Yeah. I'm trying to make a point of making Banned Books Week about books that were actually banned, rather than just loudly complained about. To that end last year I read some Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Heh. I remember reading Master and Margarita in Samizdat version :)

The Samizdat Remains the Same

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/02...

The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to con­centration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had im­mediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhe­nitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suf­fered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reaction­ary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)

Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton, Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major tele­vision networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educa­tional channels).

And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellec­tual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.

- Tom Wolfe, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America”