This chapter first outlines the history of imperial and Soviet censorship, before analysing the complex interactions of the multiple state and Party institutions, and individuals, that characterised censorship during Stalinism and post-Stalinism. The influence of Soviet censorship was profound, but somewhat unpredictable: not all elements of the censorship worked in harmony, and lines of authority were sometimes blurred. Censorship very often simply prohibited publication: as a result, many of the most talented authors of the twentieth century were appreciated only posthumously. Censorship could also, however, shape literary texts by generating complex textual strategies for concealing and revealing hidden meanings. Moreover, it could produce multiple versions of texts, either through continued rewriting to keep up with changing official requirements, or through the unpredictable reproductions that became common within the self-publishing network of samizdat. This meant that definitive versions of many important twentieth-century texts only appeared after 1991.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proclaimed its goal as the creation of ‘new people’: the transformation of human bodies and minds to correspond to the transformation of society. Literature became a space in which this new model of human life could be explored. This chapter traces the genealogy of the ‘new person’ from the nineteenth century to the figure of the ideal worker in Socialist Realist texts of the 1930s and beyond. The temporal focus of the chapter lies in the decade following 1917, when urgent but often contradictory political imperatives shaped the new person in literary texts. The chapter focusses on three key tensions: the relationship between the individual and collective; competing ideals of spontaneous energy and iron discipline; and the ideal of the transformation of body and mind. It shows how texts explore the relationship between abstract ideals of humanness and their lived reality.