Censorship in the Soviet Union vs the US: is history repeating?
In the USSR, to maintain the various official government narratives, certain facts, news and entire persons had to be silenced at all cost. In fact, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, one of their first decisions was to limit free speech through censorship, of course all the while claiming they were promoting freedom. In the same year, the Soviet government signed the Degree on Press which effectively prohibited criticism of the Bolsheviks’ authority. Following this event you had 70 years of strangled freedom of expression, and severe punishments for those who dared to speak up. Undesirable people were removed from literature, and also from photos, posters and paintings. While image retouching is easier these days, outright redactions of images is now more difficult — or? Back in the USSR, complete censorship was possible because of centralization; because of the top-down structure. All media in the Soviet Union was controlled by the state — television and radio, newspapers, magazine, and book publishing. Today, all media is in the hands of just a handful of corporations — we have a different kind of top-down structure, and therefore, censorship is just as possible. More so, even, because we’re now in a digital world — you can control the flow of information with more precision, and on an individual basis, and you can influence what each individual sees, doesn’t see, or think they see. (You think you’re seeing a certain consensus; e.g. a majority supporting your favorite candidate/initiative/idea/etc, but what you’re just seeing is a squelched conversation; a curated flow of information). During the Soviet era, book manuscripts had to pass rigorous approvals processes, and state owned publishing house decided whether or not to publish and distribute a certain book. It wasn’t just political messaging that was throttled, the censorship affected novels and poetry as well. Doctor Zhivago was was banned, as it focused too much on individual characters, and presumably this style of storytelling was not conducive to fostering the collectivist Soviet culture. It was not a complete silencing of the dissenting voices though, but rather a selective bottlenecking of certain views and information. Some books which were accepted, for example, such as speeches by Leonid Brezhnev were printed up in huge quantities. Some of the less favored works might be published in limited numbers and just not distributed widely. This is what we would call shadow banning today. It was, and is so machiavellian in that it enables a facade of openness; it suggests that while there are dissenting views, they are few and insignificant (and by extension, if you share these views you are also part of the lunatic fringe). As more and more Soviet people got their own radio receivers and foreign radio broadcasts became available, this presented a problem for the Soviet apparatchiks, as they obviously couldn’t easily censor foreign broadcasts, let alone live foreign broadcasts. The solution was to install massive radio jamming stations. These were in effect, anti-radios. Of course, even these radio jamming stations were secret — so secret that they had to be redacted whenever they were visible in photographs. This type of jamming, we can see today. We see how unfavorable publications are being redacted from newsfeeds and search results, as well as the endless de-platforming efforts. This goes all the way to web hosting providers blocking certain undesirable websites. But back in the Soviet Union, the doctoring of photos and pulling books, etc. those are only examples of outright and overt official censorship in Soviet. There was also a secondary type of censorship that arises as a consequence. With enough force and repercussions, the secondary effect of censorship might be self-censorship; a certain self-control by authors themselves. There were of course, a minority of brave people opposing
