“How significant was the role of censorship in sustaining the Soviet regime in the years 1953-85?”

Question 1

“How significant was the role of censorship in sustaining the Soviet regime in the years 1953-85?” The Use of the Secret Police

Answer 1

• Yuri Andropov’s role was much smaller than those who came before him, however he was tasked with controlling the tiny minority of citizens who refused to conform to the expectations of the regime. His strategy was to achieve maximum control through minimum of violence.
• High profile dissidents with an international reputation were allowed to emigrate. The policy was later extended and over 100,000 dissidents were allowed to leave the USSR. Less well known dissidents could be sent to psychiatric institutions for compulsory psychiatric treatments.
• Psychiatric records were private; therefore it was easier for the government to hide its repression. This practice was used against Protestant Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses who were considered heretics by Russian Orthodox Christians.
• From 1972, the KGB adopted the policy of official warnings. This was designed to stop dissent activity without creating the publicity of a trial. Dissidents could also be demoted or sacked from their jobs, sent to psychiatric institutions for ‘treatment’, exiled or sent to prison.
• Andropov was also prepared to use show trials, such as the 1972 trial of dissidents Pyotr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, who ran the samizdat human rights magazine ‘Chronicle of Current Events’

Question 2

“How significant was the role of censorship in sustaining the Soviet regime in the years 1953-85?”
Censorship of Arts and Culture

Answer 2

• Following the initial thaw in 1953-54, Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago led to cultural restrictions. It was critical of Lenin’s period as a leader and therefore unacceptable to Khrushchev’s regime. Equally, after the final thaw Khrushchev was horrified by an exhibition of Moscow artists. He reacted to the show with anger shouting loudly that the abstract art was “dog shit”.
• Khrushchev’s ‘thaws’ did not allow all Soviet artists to publish their work through official government-owned publishing houses. From the late 1950s, writers produced samizdat magazines and books Alexander Ginzburg is the best-known figure in the underground samizdat movement.
• Artists who refused to submit to government control were sent to psychiatric institutions in order to be cured. Josef Brodsky, for example, was sent to the Serbsky Institute where he was confined with people who suffered from mental illnesses that made them violent. Some artists were forcibly medicated as part of their ‘treatment’.
• Following 1968, there was increasing pressure on artists to conform. Solzhenitsyn found it increasingly difficult to publish in the Soviet Union following 1968.

Question 3

“How significant was the role of censorship in sustaining the Soviet regime in the years 1953-85?” Censorship of media dissidents

Answer 3

• Television also took off in Khrushchev’s last years. Between 1960 and 1964 Soviet television was broadly successful in supporting the regime. First, it played a major role in celebrating the Soviet Union’s triumphs in the space race. In 1961 millions of viewers watched a five-hour programme celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s space flight.
• Also in 1961, Soviet television broadcast the nation’s first television news show, Estafeta Novosteo (News and Mail). The programme contained regular features about model workers on farms and in factories as part of Khrushchev’s drive to increase labour productivity.
• Brezhnev attempted to use television to his advantage. In some ways this was successful. For example, the Soviet Government was able to keep tight control of the footage of the war in Afghanistan, and in so doing could keep the truth about the scale and horrors of the war hidden.
• Soviet officials also ensured that Brezhnev’s speeches were transmitted in full, and that he was at the centre of a great deal of domestic media coverage.

Question 4

“How significant was the role of censorship in sustaining the Soviet regime in the years 1953-85?”
Repression of competing ideologies

Answer 4

• Khrushchev’s government realised that church attendance was a form of resistance. This awareness was heightened by the fact that from the mid-1950s certain Protestant Churches began to prophesy that the Soviet regime would end within a generation.
• Khrushchev’s major anti-religious campaign started in 1958. It included the following measures:
• Churches reopened during and after the Second World War were closed. Anti-religious propaganda was reintroduced. Anti-religious magazines were reintroduced, for example Science and Religion was published regularly from 1960. Roman Catholic monasteries were closed in 1959.
• The KGB successfully closed thousands of churches, reducing the number of Orthodox Church buildings from 8000 in 1958 to 5000 in 1964.
• However, he failed to win the battle for the ‘soul of the Soviet people’. Women organised their own campaigns to protect their religious freedoms. Some marched, others circulated pamphlets defending Christianity or Islam, while others took their children out of schools in order to counter the anti-religious propaganda.