Censorship of images in the Soviet Union

Censorship of images in the Soviet Union was widespread in the USSR. Visual censorship was exploited in a political context, particularly during the political purges of Joseph Stalin, where the Soviet government attempted to erase some purged figures from Soviet history, and took measures which included altering images and destroying film. The USSR curtailed access to pornography, which was specifically prohibited by Soviet law.

Soviet law prohibited the creation and distribution of pornography under Article 228 of the criminal code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and analogous legislation adopted by other republics of the Soviet Union.

While nude shots appeared in a number of Soviet films before the glasnost reform of the 1980s, the 1988 film Little Vera was the first to include an explicit sex scene.

Pornographic images and videotapes were smuggled into the Soviet Union for illegal distribution. In addition to the anti-pornographic law, such smuggling was prohibited by legal provisions giving the Soviet state the exclusive right to conduct foreign economic trade.

This image taken by the Moscow Canal was taken when Nikolai Yezhov was water commissar. After he fell from power, he was arrested, shot, and had his image removed by the censors.

Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg on May 1, 1895, and from 1915 to 1917 Yezhov served in the Tsarist Russian army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917, in Vitebsk, a few months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War 1919–1921 he fought in the Red Army. After February 1922, he worked in the political system, rising in 1934 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party; in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939 he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control.

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