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Censorship of art books in the Soviet Union and its effect on the arts and on art libraries1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Olga Sinitsyna
Olga Sinitsyna*
Affiliation:
Arts and Children’s Literature Department, M.I.Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature, Uljanovakaja 1 Moscow 109189, Russia
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Abstract

Although official censorship in the Soviet Union ceased over ten years ago, the effects in art and art libraries are still felt. Censored books were marked with a hexagon and relegated to closed stacks, which for many years were off limits to the public and library staff alike. Some of the banned material in the All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature is analysed here in an attempt to establish the reason why certain items were seen by the authorities as too harmful to be acceptable for general circulation. The fate of the second “enemy” perceived by the Soviet censors, the original works of art and architecture, is also described.

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , 1999 , pp. 4 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 1999

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References

Notes

2. It is also interesting to speculate why all this literature was kept at all. Why was it not sent back to wherever it came from? Indeed, why was it not destroyed? I think the reason was that the state authorities needed to be aware of what was happening in the real world outside the country, to “know the enemies’ faces”. I’m sure most of the censors were intelligent enough to realise that sometimes their hexagon marks were stamped on harmless publications, but the people who were working as censors were not supposed to oppose or protest. They might have their own opinion, but they couldn’t make it public.

There have been some severe periods in Soviet history (the last of this kind was 1982-83 during “the reign of Yuri Andropov”), when censorship became very strict and special secret orders were circulated among the keepers of the banned publications, telling them to destroy particular sections of the collections. For instance, in 1983 all books in Russian published abroad were destroyed because of such an order. Among these were prose and poetry books by famous Russian authors like Bulgakov, Tsvetajeva, Mandelstam, et al. At the international conference on censorship in Russia and the Soviet Union in 1993 many of the former censors confessed that they had wanted to save those books for future generations. Perhaps this is true.

3. Huygen, Wil. Gnomes, illustrated by Rien Poortvliet. London: Pan Books; New York: Abrams, 1979.

4. Modernizm: analiz i kritika osnovnyh napravlenij. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987.