Voidly · Verboten · Soviet Union
Banned and restricted books in Soviet Union
26 titles have been banned or restricted in Soviet Union, recorded across 26 dated, source-cited events, most often for political content.
Titles
26
Ban events
26
Top reason
Political content
Decades active
6
Most-restricted titles
| Title | Author | Year | Events |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animal Farm | George Orwell | 1945 | 1 |
| Doctor Zhivago | Boris Pasternak | 1957 | 1 |
| The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 1967 | 1 |
| The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1973 | 1 |
| One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1962 | 1 |
| Darkness at Noon | Arthur Koestler | 1940 | 1 |
| 1984 | George Orwell | 1949 | 1 |
| We | Yevgeny Zamyatin | 1924 | 1 |
| Cancer Ward | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1966 | 1 |
| Life and Fate | Vasily Grossman | 1980 | 1 |
| Heart of a Dog | Mikhail Bulgakov | 1968 | 1 |
| The White Guard | Mikhail Bulgakov | 1925 | 1 |
| The First Circle | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1968 | 1 |
| Requiem | Anna Akhmatova | 1963 | 1 |
| The Tintin series | Hergé | 1929 | 1 |
| Everything Flows | Vasily Grossman | 1970 | 1 |
| The Foundation Pit | Andrei Platonov | 1930 | 1 |
| Midnight in the Century | Victor Serge | 1939 | 1 |
| Kolyma Tales | Varlam Shalamov | 1978 | 1 |
| The Mushroom-Picker | Zinovy Zinik | 1987 | 1 |
| Stalingrad | Vasily Grossman | 1952 | 1 |
| The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosiński | 1965 | 1 |
| The Jungle | Upton Sinclair | 1906 | 1 |
| The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka | 1915 | 1 |
| Death of a Salesman | Arthur Miller | 1949 | 1 |
| Works (Friedrich Nietzsche) | Friedrich Nietzsche | — | 1 |
Stated reasons
- Political content
- 26
- Religious / blasphemy
- 1
By decade
1920s5
1930s2
1940s3
1950s7
1960s6
1970s3
Documented bans
All 26 recorded events, most severe and most recent first.
The Mushroom-Picker1975
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich1974
The Gulag Archipelago1973
The First Circle1968
Cancer Ward1966
The Painted Bird1965
Requiem1963
Everything Flows1961
Life and Fate1960
Doctor Zhivago1957
The Jungle1956
Stalingrad1952
Kolyma Tales1951
19841950
The Metamorphosis1950
Death of a Salesman1950
Animal Farm1945
Darkness at Noon1941
The Master and Margarita1940
Midnight in the Century1934
The Foundation Pit1930
The White Guard1929
The Tintin series1929
Heart of a Dog1925
Works (Friedrich Nietzsche)1923
We1921
Source: Verboten, built on the banned-books.org Open Censorship Core (CC BY 4.0). Verboten compilation CC BY 4.0.