1 This study was made possible by a grant from the Russian Institute of Columbia University. Financial and technical assistance was also obtained from the Russian Research Center of Harvard University, operating under a contract with the U. S. Air Force, AF (33)-038-12909. The author is indebted to Professor Ernest J. Simmons of Columbia and Dr. Alex Inkeles of Harvard for their encouragement of this project, and to Mr. John D. Rimberg for constant assistance in using the coded materials. Material related to the reading of books by foreign authors in Russian translation appeared in an article by this author in October 1954, The Russian Review.

2 Prof. Lester Asheim of the University of Chicago arrived at the same conclusion with regard to the American reading public (“Portrait of the Book Reader as Depicted in Current Research,” Mass Communications [Urbana, 1949]).

3 One respondent went as far as to assert that in the concentration camp, where he was an inmate, there was “sufficient literature.”

4 Many books which were actually banned from libraries and bookstores, were reported to have been obtained from private sources and second-hand bookdealers. Thus, five respondents read the Bible, and others were able to procure copies of forbidden political and philosophical works by Trotsky, Berdjaev, Jaroslavskij, Popov (the banned Party histories), Pokrovskij, Zinov'ev, Bukharin and others.

There were special libraries where authorized persons could read “forbidden” books. Two former Party members, for example, claimed reading in such libraries Leon Trotsky's Lessons of October and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

A very interesting story is told by a former Party member who was entrusted with the task of “purging” a library. Out of 40,000 volumes 300 were removed, most of them being the old editions of works by Lenin and Stalin; the first and second editions of Lenin were destroyed, as were the old issues of Pravda, Izvestija and other central newspapers.

A young collective farmer recalls that once in school a boy declared that Lenin did not consider Majakovskij to be a great poet. The student was then questioned by the school authorities who tried to find out the boy's source of information, which must have been an old, “illegal” edition of Lenin's works.

One is surprised, indeed, to discover three persons reporting reading in 1940 Henry Ford's My Life and Work; since the American industrial magnate's autobiography was first published in 1922, the translation must have been of Soviet origin. One respondent referred to reading works by Friedrich Nietzsche, inspite of the fact that the 1939 edition of the Bol'šaja sovetskaja ènciklopedija describes the ideology of the German philosopher as “misanthropic, cannibalistic, saturated with mysticism and obscurantism; ideas of Nietzsche are widely used by Fascism—this bloody terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital.” Both Ford and Nietzsche were mentioned together with the “legal” reading matter.

5 No attempt has been made to study in any detail the reading of the daily press, which will, no doubt, receive competent treatment in the overall analysis of the media of communications prepared by Dr. Raymond A. Bauer and Mr. David Gleicher of Harvard University's Russian Research Center. Limitations of space also prevent us from discussing in this article the problem of reading foreign literature in translation.

6 Sports periodicals which cater to the same audience were read only by three persons, all of them professional sports instructors.

7 Among the respondents who read books, magazines and other than general newspapers there were forty-four Ukrainians, thirteen Byelorussians, four Jews, two Armenians, two Azerbaidzhanians, one Tartar, one Mordvinian, one Avarec, one Cherkassian, one Pole, one Kalmyk, one Georgian, one Greek, and many people of mixed parentage. It is surprising therefore to find only two readers of periodicals in languages other than Russian; both of these were Ukrainians. This fact stands in sharp contrast to the official Soviet claims of fostering cultures “national in form and Socialist in content” and the statistics enumerating hundreds of periodical publications in the languages of the national minorities. As we shall see below, a similar state of affairs prevails in reading of books.

8 This also accounts for the wide reading of the many Soviet “thick” literary journals devoted mostly to serious criticism and also containing samples of the most recent works of fiction. Again, the audience consisted mostly of educated people of various vocations.

9 Those quoted once were the poets Ivan Nikitin, Alexis Kol'cov and Gavrila Deržavin; playwrights Denis Fonvizin and Alexander Griboedov; prose writers Alexander Kuprin, Vsevolod Krestovskij (Petersburg Slums, a sentimental novel, referred to as “banned“), Vsevolod Solovev (author of naive historical novels), and Nicholas Chernyshevsky (What Is to Be Done?, the well-known radical novel).

10 The age of the respondents is given as of 1950, while the data obtained refers to 1940.

11 It seems that in the case of Leo Tolstoy the figure is somewhat exaggerated, for it included some of the semi-literate respondents who quite obviously had never read Tolstoy's works, but tried to impress the interviewer with their kul'turnost'. On the other hand, two people reported rereading in 1940 the complete collected works of Tolstoy, which would amount to about fifty thick volumes.

12 A minor official, fifty-one, recalls seeing Anna Karenina in the Moscow Art Theater. Before the curtain was raised, a lecture was delivered in which it was pointed out that the play which is about to be shown depicts the slavery in which women lived in tsarist Russia and still live in the capitalist countries of the West.

13 Actually only one person had read Ostrovskij's plays; the others saw them in the theater and in the cinema (the films Guilty Without Guilt and Thunderstorm).

14 This might be explained in view of the fact that it was not until the war that the Soviets began to publish in large scale Leskov's works, most of which are permeated with a religious-patriotic spirit.

15 A fifty-six-year-old stenographer remarked: “Stalin likes Saltykov. I think that he cannot understand him if he likes him.” It is true that Scedrin was one of Stalin's favorite authors and that in his political speeches and writings Stalin made frequent use of Saltykov's heroes to brand his political enemies; there is even a book where all these instances are carefully collected. Satire, however, can be understood and interpreted in many ways. It was still Jonathan Swift who in the preface to his Battle of the Books remarked that satire is a sort of mirror where one sees everyone's caricature but one's own.

16 There was a widespread tendency to idealize the freedom of the press in tsarist Russia, which was contrasted with the regimentation of the arts in the Soviet Union. Only one respondent remembered to point out that even before the Revolution censorship limitations were imposed on the writers.

Some people remarked that the classics belied the Soviet assertion that life under the tsarist regime was all poverty and oppression; one person, however, came to the contrary conclusion as a result of reading the poetry of Nicholas Nekrasov which describes the ordeal of the old Russian peasantry. It is curious that the indiscriminate belief in the truthfulness of the classics was also extended to the Soviet films based on the classics which quite frequently deviate to a significant extent from the original literary works.

17 These are some topical pronouncements: “Soviet books were nonsense” (factory foreman, forty-one); “I did not like to read all that Soviet stuff” (music teacher, forty-six); “I have no knowledge of Soviet literature; I read only the old writers. I could not tolerate the new” (engineer, forty-nine); “I preferred [Leo] Tolstoy and Pushkin to Gorky and even to Šolokhov. I never read Šolokhov [sic!]. I was not interested” (office worker, thirty-three).

A movie cameraman, forty-three, at first insisted that he read “exclusively” non-Soviet literature, but then, forgetting his previous testimony, mentioned Solokhov's Silent Don and Ostrovskij's Born of the Storm among the books he read in his spare time.

18 More specifically he recommended a study of the changing sexual morality and family life, offering many titles of books from which this type of information could be obtained. By coincidence, this very topic was then already being investigated at the Russian Institute of Columbia University (see the article by Luke, Louise E., “Marxian Women: Soviet Variants,” Through the Glass of Soviet Literature, edited by Simmons, Ernest J. [New York, 1953])Google Scholar.

19 The following were mentioned but once: poets Anatolij Marienhof, Anna Akhmatova, Maximilian Vološin, Nicholas Tikhonov, Alexander Tvardovskij and Nicholas Kljuev. Dramatists: Michael Bulgakov, Alexander Afinogenev and Vasilij Škvarkin. Prose writers: Antonovskaja, Alexis Čapygin, Vikentij Veresaev, Valentin Kataev, Boris Lavrenev, Vsevolod Ivanov, Jurij Herman, Jurij Krymov, Victor Smirnov. Some wartime and post-war authors were also quoted: Vera Panova, Alexander Fadeev, Michael Bubennov, Boris Polevoj, Vasilij Ažaev, Emmanuel KazakeviČ.

20 Again, an instance of preference for literature about the past: “How Steel Was Tempered was true … because it was historical” (mechanic, thirty-nine).

21 The other historical novels quoted were those of Vjačeslav Šiškov (two respondents); Vasilij Jan's Genghiz-Khan (two respondents) and Alexander Stepanov's Port Arthur, which appeared in 1044.