I heard from somebody that the Communist Manifesto was a banned book in the Soviet Union. Is this true or is it just a rumor designed to make the Soviets look like hypocrites?
Which ‘Communist Manifesto’? If you mean the Marx/Engels manifesto of 1847 I offer this link, which claims that it was published in Moscow in 1969. That would be odd if it was forbidden.
Yes, I mean that Manifesto. I think the reason for banning it was because Marxism differed sharply with Leninism/Stalinism, and the Bolsheviks didn’t want the people to be reading about non-Bolshevik political philosophy, or something like that.
The Communist Manifesto was emphatically not banned in the Soviet Union. It’s a moot point whether they followed it very closely, however.
Certainly interpretation of the Manifesto can be said to have been the sole privilege of the Communist Party.
The Communist Manifesto has, of course, been banned at various times in many American schools. This probably the main reason why non-academics bother to read it at all…
Anecdotal evidence against:
In 1995 I received a nine-volume set of selected works by Marx and Engels as a gift while in St. Petersburg. The books were published in 1987. The Communist Manifesto is included therein.
This fact does not surprise me much. If it ever was banned in the Soviet Union, it probably would have been in the more repressive times of Stalin and/or Brezhnev, rather than the late era of the nation in which suppressive tendencies were partly lightened.
True that. However, the same could have been said for the Khrushchev era - in an effort to stimulate the intellectual and political climate coming out of the Stalinist era, banned books could have been “rehabilitated”. Then the question of what happens to such books in the reaction of the Brezhnev era. Does it go under again? Too bloody complicated.
However, since Stalin professed to be the upholder of the Leninist tradition, and since Lenin quoted Marx warmly and approvingly throughout his political career, it would make no sense to claim that the founding political document of the tradition was completely at odds with the tradition itself.
I also looked the subject up on Snopes and came up blank; seems to me they would have jumped on this one if they’d ever heard about it.