Censoring you for your own good: how censorship was justified in the first communist dictatorship

Left-wing campaigns to promote Internet censorship are nothing new. Communist dictatorships have already done it.

Lenin: numbers, data and images of the crimes of the first communist dictator
The 'Red October' of 1917: a coup d'état against a democracy, not against tsarism

As now, the tactic of these dictatorships was to impose censorship but without making it seem like censorship, invoking it as if it were a task for a noble ideal, something that was done for the benefit of the people and not to prevent dissent. Let us not forget that the communist dictatorship of East Germany (which cynically called itself a "democratic republic") justified the construction of the Berlin Wall, which turned that country into a huge prison in which you could be killed if you tried to escape, calling it the "Anti-Fascist Protection Wall".

The Bolsheviks imposed censorship two days after their coup d'état

The world's first socialist dictatorship, the one established in Russia after the Bolshevik coup d'état of November 1917, had among its first goals the curtailment of press freedom. Two days after the coup, on November 9 (October 27 according to the Julian calendar), the Bolsheviks issued a decree on censorship (the original Russian text can be read here), which was one of the first laws of the new Soviet state.

They identified freedom of the press with poison, filth and slander

The decree justified censorship by criticizing the "possessing classes" who have "taken over the greater part of the press, in order to poison the minds and darken the conscience of the masses without restraint."

The Bolshevik censorship decree added that "the bourgeois press is one of the most powerful weapons of the bourgeoisie" and stated that "it was impossible to leave this weapon entirely in the hands of the enemy, for at such times it is no less dangerous than bombs and machine guns. Therefore extraordinary and temporary measures were taken to stem the torrent of filth and slander in which the yellow and green press would be delighted to drown the recent victory of the people."

They said it was a temporary measure: it lasted 74 years

Knowing how unpopular such an attack on press freedom would be, the body that imposed this censorship, which gave itself the bombastic name of "Council of People's Commissars", promised the following:

"As soon as the new order is consolidated, all administrative pressure on the press will be ended and it will be granted full freedom within the limits of legal responsibility, in accordance with a law that will be the most comprehensive and progressive in this area."

This promise was a lie. Censorship continued until the end of that dictatorship 74 years later, and was applied not only to newspapers, but also to literature and all printed material (including translations of foreign books), to cinematographic works and even to foreign radio broadcasts, which were interfered with. The Soviet state exercised total control over society, preventing the exercise of freedom of the press and freedom of expression to brutal extremes, often punishing any form of dissent with imprisonment and even the death penalty, on the premise that to disagree with the communist dictatorship was a crime of treason.

History repeats itself and with very similar pretexts

So, when socialists or communists say they want to limit freedom of the press and freedom of expression, as they are now doing again with their campaign to control social media and to discredit critical media in Spain, claiming that they seek to fight against "disinformation" and other evils, do not forget that they already did the same in November 1917 in Russia, using the expression "filth and slander" to encompass any form of expression that was not to their liking and directly prohibiting it. Remember: forgetting history means running the risk of repeating it.

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Image: Screenshots of the text of the censorship decree passed by the Bolsheviks on November 9, 1917, two days after seizing power in a coup d'état in Russia.