Works of print such as the press, advertisements, product labels, and books were censored by Glavlit, an agency established on June 6, 1922, ostensibly to safeguard top secret information from foreign entities but in reality to remove material the Soviet authorities did not like. From 1932 until 1952, the promulgation of socialist realism was the target of Glavlit in bowdlerizing works of print, while anti-Westernization and nationalism were common tropes for that goal. To limit peasant revolts over collectivization, themes involving shortages of food were expunged. In the 1932 book Russia Washed in Blood, a Bolshevik's harrowing account of Moscow's devastation from the October Revolution contained the description, 'frozen rotten potatoes, dogs eaten by people, children dying out, hunger,' but was promptly deleted. Also, excisions in the 1941 novel Cement were made by eliminating Gleb's spirited exclamation to English sailors: 'Although we're poverty-stricken and are eating people on account of hunger, all the same we have Lenin.'
History of the Soviet Union
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