ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the condition of censorship from the rise of Bolshevik power to Gorbachev's admission in 1988 that the Soviet Union practiced censorship. It argues that the government's concerns, while stated in a different lexicon, were the same as they had been under the tsars, namely, to protect societal mores and thus preserve social order. The chapter also argues that the intelligentsiia lent its support to the means of these attacks, as it had done under the tsars. Lenin and the Russian Communist Party were early and vocal opponents of censorship, and even passed a resolution in 1903 at their Second Congress in favor of free speech. Lenin's pre-revolutionary condemnation of censorship was natural because he was a victim of it. After the Revolution, the tables had turned. Early Soviet censorship was not particularly concerned with morality. In fact, little application of moral censorship appears to have been exercised at first.
