The study of Soviet book publishing

In any international comparison, Soviet book publishing stands out on several counts. The first is scale: not only the scale of book copies published, but administrative scale. Soviet publishing, printing and book distribution, with a combined personnel of well over 300 000, are administered in many respects as a single undertaking. The organisational structures and techniques of control used in this administration are vastly more elaborate than those applied to Western publishing.

This great accretion of centralised administrative power is the product of persistent efforts by the Communist Party and the Soviet government to place the processes of book production and dissemination under a considerable degree of supervision – a degree which is, again, prominent in international comparisons. This commitment to effective supervision reflects the importance attributed to the role of publishing in a socialist society, and to the need for books produced under such supervision to be made readily accessible.

Most Western studies of Soviet publishing since the Second World War have devoted their chief attention to the restrictive control mechanisms (primarily censorship), to the effect of such restrictions on the variety of literature published, and to the phenomenon of samizdat, or the unauthorised private production and dissemination of material, to which the restrictions contributed. Book publishing has been omitted, or dealt with very briefly, in Western works on the Soviet mass media as a whole.