Works of print such as the press, advertisements, product labels, and books were censored by Glavlit, an agency established on June6, 1922, to safeguard top secret information from foreign entities. From 1932 until 1952, the promulgation of socialist realism was the target of Glavlit in bowdlerizing works of print, while Anti-Westernization and nationalism were common tropes for that goal. To limit peasant revolts over the Holodomor, themes involving shortages of food were expunged. In the 1932 book Russia Washed in Blood, a Bolsheviks harrowing account of Moscows devastation from the October Revolution contained the description, frozen rotten potatoes, dogs eaten by people, children dying out, hunger, but was promptly deleted.[3] Also, excisions in the 1941 novel Cement were made by eliminating Glebs spirited exclamation to English sailors: Although were poverty-stricken and are eating people on account of hunger, all the same we have Lenin.[3]
As peasant uprisings defined pre-World War II Soviet censorship, nationalism defined the period during the war. Defeats of the Red Army in literature were forbidden, as were depictions of trepidation in Soviet military characters. Pressure from the Pravda prompted authors like Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev to redact a section in The Young Guard where a child reads in the eyes of a dying Russian sailor the words We are crushed.[4] Since Stalin regularly read Pravda, which was itself censored by Glavlit, it was wise for an author to obey Pravdas advice. Also, Joseph Stalin handpicked who received the Stalin Prize, further incentivizing an authors pandering to Stalins tastes, besides the obvious risks involved with disregarding them.
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