Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930s

After reading Andrei Platonov's 1929 story Usomzivshiisia Makar, Joseph Stalin reportedly reacted by calling it "an ambiguous work" (dvusmyslennoeprolzvedenie). Leopold Averbakh later wrote about Platonov's story: "There is ambiguity (dvusznyslennost') in it. ... But our era does not tolerate any ambiguity."' Both reactions point to an obsession with reducing signs to a single meaning, an undercurrent of Soviet culture in the 1930s.2 Censorship practices offer a rare glimpse at how the Soviet regime attempted to achieve "onemeaningness" (odnoznachnost'). While it is true that throughout the Soviet era censorship was primarily concerned with excising what was deemed heretical, during the 1930s, with outright heresy effectively effaced from public discourse, the abolition of ambiguity became an important secondary mode. Much of the available literature on European and especially Russian censorship has defined censorship as the repression of the inherently and essentially free word.3 The binary pairing of censorship and cultural production has generated further binaries of writers vs. censors and is ultimately embedded in a dichotomy of state vs. society. While the state/ society dichotomy has been questioned in other areas of historical research, the binary