ABSTRACT
Looking back to nineteenth-century Russia, the generalisation is often made that, in the absence of any democratic forum for debating issues of national and international life, it was men of letters, such as Belinsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy or the émigré Herzen, who developed the political agenda. In view of that tradition it was to be expected that the Communist Party would, sooner or later, take control of printed literature, both internally and at the frontiers.
