From Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 “Decree on the Press,” which prohibited publishing any “bourgeois” articles criticizing the Bolsheviks, to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1962 decision to allow the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other indictments of Stalinism, to Leonid Brezhnev’s strangling of political discourse and expulsion of Solzhenitsyn, and on to Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”), the USSR’s censorship policies were mercurial and in many cases arbitrary.
