The Thinking Reed

Censorship is introduced by those who fear public opinion, but the very existence of censorship is a sign that oppositional thought is alive and cannot be eradicated — that alongside the ruling bureaucratic ‘party’ there is also a de facto democratic party.

It must be remembered that Russian culture has always been subject to censorship. Nevertheless, the system established by the statocracy was extraordinarily refined even by Russian standards. One can distinguish three levels of censorship. The first of these is, of course, the political level. The authorities are concerned to ensure that nothing ‘hostile’ shall appear in print, on television, on the cinema screen, on the stage or on an artist’s canvas — that is, anything which goes beyond the limits of ‘reasonable criticism’. These limits are, of course, constantly widening. Under Stalin it was risky to say even that there were bad people among us, but in the sixties and seventies many highly critical works were published. However, it is the very existence of these limits that is of most decisive importance. Legal culture is allowed to develop only within frontiers laid down beforehand. It is constrained by the limits of the censorship.

The political censorship influences the development of culture in its own way. The works that suffer from it most of all, of course, are not works of fiction but theoretical writings in the social sciences. ‘The censor’s sway is felt most acutely in the social sciences,’ wrote Nekrich,

especially in the sphere of history. Soviet censorship begins in the head of the historian. When preparing to research some topic he must imagine not only the difficulties he will face because of a shortage or primary sources, and because he is unlikely to be able to work in foreign archives, etc., but he must also assess the ‘acceptability’ of his topic from the point of view of the censor. There are themes which to this day remain taboo for a historian whose field is Soviet society — for example, the history of working-class and peasant parties other than the Bolshevik Party. Even the real history of the CPSU is impossible to research because the ban on the works of Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, the ‘Bulletins of the Opposition’, the ‘Socialist Herald’ and many other sources,106 dooms any such attempt to complete failure. This is why it is something of a heroic feat when a Soviet historian manages to ‘drag out’ a new document under some pretext or other.107

As a result Soviet sociologists, historians and political scientists have developed a special sort of associative thinking. They study the actual problems of their own country, but to discuss — or sometimes even to mention — these problems is forbidden. All that remains is to examine similar problems on the basis of the material of other countries and other periods. However, this does not mean in the least that, for example, G. Vodolazov (about whom I shall have more to say later), when dealing with problems of the history of the Russian socialist movement in the nineteenth century, is really writing about present-day ideas or political processes. It is all both more complicated and simpler. Take, let us say, the studies of statocracy mentioned earlier. M. Cheshkov’s task was not to analyse Soviet reality under the guise of discussing the ‘Third World’: he did not attempt that. But, using ‘Third-World’ material, he constructed a model which is applicable also to our understanding of Soviet society. This was felt by the censorship, too, and for a long time they obstructed publication of his article.