Goscomisdat is coming!

Goscomisdat: the Gosudarstvennyi Comitet po delam izdatelstva, poligraphii i knizhnoi torgovli, the Soviet Union’s State Committee for Publishing, Printing and the Book Trade. Goskino and Glavlit carried out similar functions in various branches of arts, except Glavlit also guarded state military secrets. All of them together were state censorship bodies of the USSR, responsible for ideological control of the media.

So it has come to this—we are on the verge of introducing state censorship. The thought sends a shiver down my spine. Unlike many Australians, I have actually lived with state censorship, until I migrated to the West at the age of twenty-eight after being stripped of my Soviet citizenship, and becoming a refugee. In the USSR, political correctness was everything and everywhere. It was in the classroom, in the student auditorium, in the movie theatre, in the library, in the newspaper—censorship was all-pervasive. Everyone knew exactly what could be said and what could…