Yevgeny Zamyatin
In 1905, Yevgeny Zamyatin was arrested along with 30 other Bolsheviks by the Russian Empire’s secret police. He began writing in exile and at the beginning of the Revolution returned to St. Petersburg to work on literary projects and committees under Maxim Gorky. But as the Communist Party became more brutally totalitarian, he criticized them in satires and essays, and would again be hounded by the new secret police.

As soon as it was formed, the Soviet Union began its control over all literary groups and writers were expected to acquiesce to the new regime. In 1932, under Stalin, it disbanded and replaced all groups with the Union of Soviet Writers. It forced writers to join and they had to write only positive literature to advance the party or be blacklisted and have no means of living. Or worse, they can be deemed enemies of the state and sent to the labor camps. Faced with these grim alternatives, many rewrote their works in praise of the Communist Party.

In the Soviet Union, all books had to be approved prior to publication. In 1921, We became the first book banned by Glavlit, the newly-formed book censorship committee. Zamyatin arranged for a manuscript to be smuggled to the US. Its successful English publication encouraged him to allow the Russian original to be published in Czechoslovakia. That edition found its way back to the Soviet Union and copies were passed hand to hand.

Zamyatin was then blacklisted. He lost his editorial jobs and none of his works or plays could be published or shown. His friends were forced to turn against him. He resigned from the writers’ union and asked Stalin for permission to emigrate. With Gorky’s help, it was granted. He moved to Paris where he died lonely in poverty and in exile.

We – a futuristic novel where an authoritarian-ruled state is cut off from the rest of the world, where citizens are named by numbers, live in glass houses, and can only have state-sanctioned sex – would inspire a future of dystopias, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano.

Boris Pasternak
But the Party’s ostracism of Zamyatin scared writers from sending their works abroad. Only in 1957 would another dare to do so. When Boris Pasternak submitted Dr. Zhivago to a local literary journal, it was rejected for its subtle criticism of life under Stalin. So he sent the manuscript to Milan and despite attempts by the Union of Soviet Writers to stifle publication, it was published in several languages.

Pasternak went on to be awarded the Literature Nobel the following year, but had to decline it amidst threats from the KGB. He was denounced and almost exiled.

In 1988, 28 years after his death, Dr. Zhivago was finally serialized in the pages of Novy Mir, the journal that had first rejected it. Since 2003, it has even become part of the school curriculum in Russia.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Another writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would also be awarded the Literature Nobel. Even while fighting in the Red Army and awarded a Red Star for his service, Solzhenitsyn was nonetheless arrested for comments he made privately to a friend regarding Stalin’s and the army’s conduct in the war.

He was taken to the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow (where many writers were dragged in along sacks of their manuscripts) and sentenced to 8 years of hard labor and a lifetime exile. In the gulags, he began to compose prose and poetry by memory.

In a gulag in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. This experience became the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Under Khrushchev, he was exonerated in 1956. He then worked as a secondary school teacher during the day and wrote in secret at night, all the while believing he would never see a single word of his published.

But in 1962, Khrushchev approved the publication of One Day. It was the first piece of literature in the Soviet Union that represented free speech. This and his other stories were even studied in school until Khrushchev was removed from power.

Solzhenitsyn continued to write for publication in other countries. The Gulag Archipelago so enraged Soviet authorities, he was stripped of his citizenship and flown to West Germany in 1974. It was then that he was able to receive the Nobel Prize he was awarded in 1970.

Because his work has been so widely read in and out of the Soviet Union, the KGB made several attempts to discredit him, publishing disparaging accounts, having spies work for him, and even trying to poison him.

Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship was restored and he returned to Moscow where he died in 2008. Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin helped lay him to rest in honor.

Mikhail Bulgakov
A masterpiece among masterpieces, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was not published until 27 years after his death.

He had developed a passion for Russian and European literature from the age of 10. He finished his studies as a medical doctor but fell ill while serving in the Ukrainian army and afterwards devoted his full time to writing.

Though many of his plays were banned, Stalin loved The Days of the Turbins so much he watched it 15 times. And when a theater director once criticized Bulgakov, Stalin defended him, saying “a writer of Bulgakov’s quality was above party words like left and right,” and found work for him at a Moscow theater.

But by 1929, government censors banned his work. Stalin’s favor kept him from arrest and execution, but he could not have any of his work published. In the last year of his life, he gave a secret private reading of The Master and Margarita, a critique of the destruction of literature under Soviet rule that stunned his friends.

But it is this book that is considered the masterpiece in Soviet era writing, its revolutionary spirit inspiring Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Vasily Grossman
Another book that criticized life under Stalin and would not be published until long after the author’s death is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. As a journalist who covered the battle of Stalingrad and the Treblinka extermination camp, this fictional account is told with startling realism.

When he submitted it to a magazine in 1960, the KGB raided his apartment and all copies and typewriter ribbons were seized. It was not until 1974, 10 years after Grossman’s death, that a copy was smuggled out and published in Switzerland.

Upon the fall of the Soviet Union, over 27,000 books that were banned were hidden in the state library in Moscow. These were the works that survived. It is heartbreaking to imagine the books and the writers who didn’t.