He did not support the Bolshevik coup, but sympathized with the White movement and even wanted to volunteer for their army.

Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days (written in 1918-1920, published in the USSR in 1988)īunin lived in Moscow when the 1917 Revolution took place. Here are some of the books that were published just before the collapse of the USSR. Also, authors who emigrated from Soviet Russia were never published - they were considered to be state enemies and traitors to the Fatherland.

According to the censors, books might be critical of the Soviet system (even in an allegorical or veiled form), or perhaps were not patriotic enough, or did not reflect the values of the Soviet people.įurthermore, books were not supposed to portray religion in a positive light, or offer an un-Soviet interpretation of various historical events. There were many reasons why books were not published. In the 1960s, the arbitrariness of the censors reached the point of absurdity, and in this regard, for many people that era was even more frightening, driving authors to despair. In the opinion of many authors, however, under Stalin it was easier to comprehend where writers stood, and in extreme cases the tyrant himself became a critic of a controversial author. In the days of Stalin a literary work that may have been published accidentally could be recognized as criminal retroactively, and the author and censor could get into serious trouble. This role was carried out by the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs (Glavlit), a kind of Orwellian Ministry of Truth. All publishing houses in the USSR were state-owned, and every text had to get past the censor before appearing in print.

Us zamyatin