Herman Ermolaev
Censorship in Soviet Literature: 1917-1991
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Pp. 323. US $48.50 $26.95
Reviewed by Allan Reid

A systematic history of Soviet Russian literature is still waiting to be written. However, when it does appear, Herman Ermolaev’s study of Soviet (Russian) censorship will be a key companion to it. He has produced a detailed overview of this complex phenomenon, added a range of important examples, and documented it all very capably. The result is a readable and usable guide to a very nasty business.

The book consists of six chapters and a conclusion. The chapters follow Ermolaev’s periodization of the history of Soviet censorship which stays close to standard practice, although one might bicker about the need for smaller periods, for example breaking off the years of World War II from the preceding period. This highlights an interesting tension-which merits consideration on some theoretical level-about the difference between the history of literature and the history of (literary) censorship. This tension permeates the work while not necessarily disturbing it, so long as the reader brings sufficient background knowledge to the text. Each period chapter follows a standard format of useful subheadings, with the only deviations being under the major subheading of “Political Censorship,” which, interestingly, reveals the shifting political positions of the Party, something Ermolaev cannily distinguishes from “ideology.” Importantly, in his schema he distinguishes two main types of censorship: political and puritanical. Again, this could be theoretically problematic, but remains practically very useful. Some of the other important subheadings include nationalism, children’s literature, and Russia and the West, and these are helpful in completing his picture.

Ermolaev identifies his purpose as comprehensiveness with an emphasis on textual examination. Depending on one’s definition thereof, he can claim to have achieved comprehensiveness, although it is highly schematized. A work of twice this size would be much more comprehensive, and more useful for scholars, but it would be far less accessible to a reader in pursuit of the general outlines of the problem.

While it is almost trite to state that “history” requires contextualization, some introductory remarks on the history of censorship in Imperial Russia would not have been wasted. Instead, the book begins rather suddenly in March 1917 with the Provisional Government’s abolition of censorship. Ermolaev then flashes forward nine months to the Bolsheviks’ immediate re-introduction of it “on the first day of the October Revolution” (1). Given the long and important history of censorship in pre-Bolshevik Russia, an articulation of the “context” would have enriched the study and surely taxed neither the author nor the reader.

Similarly, Ermolaev’s schematization and limited objectives lead to distortions of the literary history which, although its narration may not be his goal, is surely meant to be enlightened by this study. For example, there are several passages around works by M.A. Bulgakov. There is a discussion (37-40) of the difficulties he experienced in having two of his plays prepared and accepted for the stage. One of these, Days of the Turbins, is an adaptation of The White Guard (Belaia Gvardiia) for which Ermolaev gives publication dates of 1925 and 1929. Those dates actually refer to incomplete and foreign publications. Unfortunately, there is no indication that The White Guard was, in fact, never published in the Soviet Union until 1973 and in a volume that contained the first complete-or at least uncensored-versions of it as well as of two other novels by Bulgakov, namely The Master and Margarita and Theatrical Novel. In the case of The Master and Margarita, Ermolaev notes its censored Soviet publication in serial form in 1966/67 (185), while omitting mention of the 1973 three-novel volume which was a literary (and, arguably, a political) sensation, a publication that clearly needs to be mentioned in a discussion of the vagaries of censorship during this period. There are numerous examples of this sort of “omission,” including important details pertaining to Zamiatin and Aksenov, to name but two salient ones.

These shortcomings, however, do not override the value of this study. The volume closes with useful notes and a bibliography, and will definitely prove valuable to students and scholars of Russian and Soviet Literature.