Censorship of images in the Soviet Union
Mass repression in the Soviet Union |
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Economic repression |
Political repression |
Ideological repression |
Ethnic repression |
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Censorship of images was widespread in the
Censorship of pornographic images
Soviet law prohibited the creation and distribution of pornography under Article 228 of the criminal code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and analogous legislation adopted by other republics of the Soviet Union.
While nude shots appeared in a number of Soviet films before the
Pornographic images and videotapes were smuggled into the Soviet Union for illegal distribution. In addition to the anti-pornographic law, such smuggling was prohibited by legal provisions giving the Soviet state the exclusive right to conduct foreign economic trade.
Censorship of historical photographs
Lenin's speech
On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground were Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky (
He became an enemy of the State and was erased from Soviet history after leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the head of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent who used an ice axe to fatally stab Trotsky.[A 1][2] Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism.
October Revolution celebration
On November 7, 1919, this image was snapped of the Soviet leadership celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution. After Trotsky and his allies fell from power, a number of figures were removed from the image, including Trotsky and two people over to Lenin's left, wearing glasses and giving a salute. Lev Kamenev, two men over on Lenin's right, was another of Stalin's opponents, and below the boy in front of Trotsky, another bearded figure, Artemic Khalatov, the one time head of the state publishing, was also edited out.
Lev Kamenev
Kamenev was born in
After
In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly
Postcard
On November 7, 1917,
During the
Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class
The Union for Struggle of the Liberation of the Working Class (Russian: Союз борьбы за освобождение рабочего класса), a St Petersburg-based organization, was founded by a number of Russian revolutionaries including Mikhail Kalinin and Lenin. They would eventually merge with other groups to lay the foundation for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP).[6] The RSDRP formed in 1898 in
This picture, taken in February 1897, records a meeting of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Shortly after the picture was taken the Okhrana arrested the whole group. The members received various punishments, with Lenin being arrested, held by authorities for fourteen months and then released and exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia, where he mingled with such notable Marxists as Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to Russia.
Standing at center is Alexander Malchenko. At the time of this picture he was an engineering student and his mother would let Lenin hide out at her house. After his arrest he spent some time in exile before returning in 1900 and abandoning the revolution. He moved to Moscow, where he worked as a senior engineer in various state departments before in 1929 being arrested, wrongfully accused of being a "
"Lost" cosmonaut
After cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died in a training accident in 1961, the Soviet government airbrushed him out of photographs of the first group of cosmonauts. As Bondarenko had already appeared in publicly available photographs, the deletions led to rumours of cosmonauts dying in failed launches.[7] Both Bondarenko's existence and the nature of his death were secret until 1986.[8]
Flag on the Reichstag
As Berlin fell in the closing days of the
After taking the symbolic photo, Khaldei quickly returned to Moscow. He further edited the image at the request of the editor-in-chief of the
The photo was published May 13, 1945, in the Ogonyok magazine.[12] While many photographers took pictures of flags on the roof, it was Khaldei's image that stuck.[12]
See also
- Censorship in the Soviet Union
- Damnatio memoriae
- Eastern Bloc information dissemination
- Newseum
- Printed media in the Soviet Union
- Propaganda in the Soviet Union
Annotations
Bibliography
- Notes
- ^ Lawton 1992, p. 97
- ^ Conquest 1991, p. 418
- ^ Lindemann 2000, p. 430
- ^ Lenin 1929, p. 353
- ^ "Communism and Propaganda". Newseum. 2007. Archived from the original on July 22, 2014. Retrieved October 21, 2007.
- Yale. 2007. Archived from the originalon February 4, 2011. Retrieved October 21, 2007.
- ^ Oberg, James, Uncovering Soviet Disasters, Chapter 10: "Dead Cosmonauts", pp 156-176, Random House, New York, 1988, retrieved January 8, 2008
- ^ Siddiqi, Asif A (2000). Challenge To Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974. NASA. p. 266.
- ^ Rare Historical Photos: The Soviet flag over the Reichstag, 1945. Retrieved November 26, 2017.
- ^ Sontheimer 2008.
- ^ a b Baumann 2010.
- ^ a b Sontheimer, Michael (July 5, 2008). "The Art of Soviet Propaganda: Iconic Red Army Reichstag Photo Faked". Der Spiegel. Retrieved October 23, 2008.
- References
- Adams, Simon (2008). The Eastern Front (2008 ed.). The Rosen Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-4042-1862-8.
- Antill, Peter; Dennis, Peter (October 10, 2005). Berlin 1945: end of the Thousand Year Reich (when ed.). ISBN 1-84176-915-0.
- Baumann, Von Doc (2010-01-03). "Dramatische Rauchwolcken" (in German). Der Spiegel. Retrieved 2011-06-03.
- Broekmeyer, M. J. (2004). Stalin, the Russians, and their war: 1941-1945 (2004 ed.). University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-19594-5.
- Conquest, Robert (1991). The great terror: a reassessment (1991 ed.). ISBN 0-19-507132-8.
- Dallas, Gregor (2006). 1945: The War That Never Ended (2006 ed.). ISBN 0-300-11988-7.
- Lawton, Anna (1992). Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time. ISBN 0-521-38117-7.
- ISBN 1-4179-1577-3.
- Lindemann, Albert S. (2000). Esau's tears: modern anti-semitism and the rise of the Jews (2000 ed.). ISBN 0-521-79538-9.
- Tissier, Tony Le (1999). Race for the Reichstag: the 1945 Battle for Berlin (1999 ed.). ISBN 0-7146-4929-5.
- Walkowitz, Daniel J.; Knauer, Lisa Maya (November 30, 2004). Memory and the impact of political transformation in public space Radical perspectives (when ed.). Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3364-3.
Further reading
- ISBN 978-0-8050-5294-7)
External links
- Media related to Altered Soviet photographs at Wikimedia Commons