Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 22 – Vladimir
Solodin, who worked as a senior censor in the USSR for the last 30 years of
power, says that he and his colleagues understood perfectly well that
censorship was needed in order to prevent the growth of instability in a
society at risk of that because of poverty, a conclusion Vladimir Putin has
reached as well for Russia today.
Solodin, who died in 1997, told
Yevgeniya Albats, now the chief editor of The New Times, in 1995 that
when censorship was disbanded the risks of destabilization increased and that
he favored the restoration of some limits on what journalists and writers can
publish lest that danger continue (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/205506).
She
recorded Solodin’s observations about Soviet censorship and recently found the
tapes. Now she has transcribed them and published them online, an example of
new sources on Soviet times that far too often do not attract the attention
they deserve both because of what they tell about Soviet life and because of
how the attitudes they reveal continue to affect Russia.
Solodin
did not intend to become a censor. He specialized on Chinese affairs but his
dissertation was not approved in 1961 because of deteriorating Soviet-Chinese
relations. He then underwent 18 months of training, first in classwork and then
under the supervision of senior censors before entering on his own career in
their ranks.
There
were some 450 people in the central censorship apparatus, and some 1500 across
the USSR, he says. They were charged with preventing the publication of
materials the government had classified or that threatened to “disinform public
opinion,” as far as the CPSU was concerned.
“Totalitarian
societies are not very interested in having their members be well informed,”
Solodin says. Instead, these regimes want people only to be informed as much
and in the ways the powers that be think are necessary. Soviet censorship
worked very well, he says. It only began to collapse at the time of Chernobyl.
Being
a censor was interesting as he or she was able to read many things ordinary
Soviet people could not, but it was a high-risk enterprise. Failure to block
something the regime wanted blocked could have very negative consequences, and
blocking something a prominent writer wanted it could get the censor in trouble
as well.
Solodin
also mentioned another interesting detail. Because things that were banned or
materials indicating what had been removed by the censor could not be put in
ordinary trash – someone might see what he or she shouldn’t – twice a week,
Glavlit sent such materials to a factory in the Moscow suburbs that made roofing.
Rank-and-file censors could not tell
authors that their work could be published if they changed this or that. Only
senior officials at Glavlit could. Instead, working-level censors could
indicate what could not be published but not specify what should go in its
place under rules in force after 1969.
Dealing
with prominent writers was a real challenge. On the one hand, many of them had
connections with senior party people. And on the other, in contrast to other
writers, such people so constructed their articles and books that removing a
particular paragraph could cause the entire enterprise to collapse.
Solodin says that he personally
favored allowing passages in a gray area to be published because the
consequences of not doing so were serious. But he reports that he got in
trouble for allowing Chingiz Aitmatov’s words about mankurts, people who
lost their memory as a result of repression, to be published.
And he adds that censorship often
got the country into trouble by suppressing discussions of issues until they
were resolved, often without a full airing. That was the case regarding
Siberian river diversion. Materials on that issue could be published only after
it became clear that there was no money for the project.
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