SOURCE: Stelmakh, Valeria D. “Reading in the Context of Censorship in the Soviet Union.” Libraries & Culture 36, no. 1 (winter 2001): 143-51.

In the following essay, the full version of which was published in Solanus 10 (1996), Stelmakh presents an overview of literary censorship in the Soviet Union in the period of the 1960s to the 1980s, noting the rise of samizdat literature and of the spetskhran, or the library of forbidden literature.

The period preceding the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and the collapse of the Soviet regime (from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s) had a number of distinctive features that are important for the analysis of reading. Clear signs of decline characterized it. On the one hand, modernizing tendencies were gathering speed, accompanied by a change in the social structure—a sharp increase in the percentage of the population living in towns and a growth in...