The Red Pencil

This collection of essays and translated discussions concern censorship in the USSR. The book derives from a conference in 1983 whose participants were primarily exiles and emigrees from the USSR familiar with the Soviet system and the impact of censorship restrictions on the activities of Soviet artists and intellectuals. The definition of censorship and self-censorship was discussed in their areas as were their personal experiences of how they and their colleagues who are still in the Soviet Union cope with censorship intervention and still remain functioning authors, artists and intellectuals. Areas of intellectual and artistic endeavor included science, scholarship, publishing, creative writing, literary criticism, journalism, radio and television, cinema and theatre. What emerged, was a picture of great bureaucratic complexity, aggravated by a diversity of local conditions. Cultural and intellectual life in the USSR is seen to be controlled by a faceless, inconsistent and contradictory censorship.