Books banned in the Soviet Union
The Soviet state controlled all publishing, so a banned book was simply not printed. Books like Doctor Zhivago, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Gulag Archipelago circulated in smuggled copies or in samizdat, typed and passed hand to hand. Most were published officially only under glasnost, in 1988 and 1989.
Animal Farm
A fable in which farm animals overthrow their farmer and are betrayed by the pigs who lead them, written as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism.
Why it was banned: Turned down by several British publishers in 1944, while Britain was allied with the Soviet Union, and banned in the USSR and other Communist states.
Darkness at Noon
Koestler's novel of an old Bolshevik arrested, interrogated and brought to confess in a show trial, based on Stalin's purges.
Why it was banned: Banned in the Soviet Union, where it was not published until 1988.
Doctor Zhivago
Pasternak's novel of a physician and poet living through the Russian Revolution and civil war.
Why it was banned: Refused publication in the Soviet Union, it first appeared in Italy in 1957; Pasternak was forced to decline the 1958 Nobel Prize, and the novel was not published in the USSR until 1988.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's novel of a totalitarian state that watches its citizens and rewrites history; the source of 'Big Brother' and 'thoughtcrime'.
Why it was banned: Banned in the Soviet Union, where it circulated only in underground copies until it was published officially in 1988.
The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet forced-labour camp system, drawn from his own imprisonment and the testimony of hundreds of former prisoners.
Why it was banned: First published in Paris in 1973; Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the USSR in 1974, and the book was not published there until 1989.
The Master and Margarita
Bulgakov's satire in which the Devil visits 1930s Moscow, interwoven with a novel about Pontius Pilate; written between 1928 and 1940.
Why it was banned: Unpublishable in Bulgakov's lifetime; it first appeared, cut by the censors, in a Moscow magazine in 1966 and 1967, and the full text was published in the Soviet Union only in 1973.
We
Zamyatin's novel of a glass-walled future state where citizens are numbered and every hour is scheduled, written in 1920 and 1921; it influenced Huxley and Orwell.
Why it was banned: Refused publication in Soviet Russia, it first appeared in English in New York in 1924, and was not published in the USSR until 1988.