Last December, I was asked to address an international conference on internet security in Paris on a subject of my choice. Since my knowledge of internet security remains fairly basic, I chose to talk about censorship, of which, alas, I have a much better first-hand knowledge after 35 years of my first life in the USSR. (I’ve already shared some of it with Prospect readers in my December 2025 Second Life column.) My argument was simple: technologies evolve, but censorship as a state of mind remains the same: a kind of voluntary slavery, driven by fears and egocentrism.
There was a staff censor at the Moscow magazine where I worked in the 1980s. He was called Dmitri Anatol’yevich, and the set of proofs, intended for his eyes, used to be code-marked with his initials “DA”, which stands for “yes” in Russian, albeit “net” (no) would have been a much more appropriate code. Not a single page of article proofs could go to print without his rubber-stamped approval. Apart from that, Dmitri Anatol’yevich was a perfectly amicable rose-cheeked fellow, who greeted everyone warmly in the canteen, but shook hands with no one.
At the Paris conference, among other things, I raised the issue of “restroom censorship”—a term I invented recently at the sight of a seemingly innocuous “Reading Room” sign in the library of a small English town in Cumbria, where I was researching my latest book.
The sign prompted a flashback to the favourite Reading Room (“chitalnya” in Russian) of my Soviet childhood. It was in a quiet corner of the magnificent Public Park of Relaxation and Rest in my native city of Kharkiv in Soviet Ukraine. The chitalnya (Kharkiv was then predominantly Russian-speaking) was a flimsy wooden structure, resembling a large gazebo, or a roofed veranda. At the age of six or seven, I would go there often with my “old Bolshevik” granddad. And while he was studying the latest issue of the Pravda newspaper, I would get immersed in a dog-eared book by Arthur Conan Doyle or James Fenimore Cooper. One minor detail of that ramshackle, yet surprisingly cosy, Reading Room is firmly ingrained in my memory—a curt handwritten sign on top of a thick folder of old newspapers. “NEWSPAPERS ARE FOR READING!” it said peremptorily.
When I share that small recollection with my ex-Soviet compatriots, the mention of the sign inevitably (if not immediately) causes an outburst of laughter. To my western readers, not too familiar with the daily realities of the dystopian USSR, I am happy to give away a clue: the message of the strict and seemingly nonsensical (for a westerner) “NEWSPAPERS ARE FOR READING” sign was prohibitive rather than simply explanatory, and had to be considered in the context of chronic shortages of nearly all basic commodities in the Soviet Union, one of which was... toilet paper!
That paucity was particularly acute in a typical communal-flat toilet, shared by several (at times up to a dozen) tenant families. A characteristic feature of such a shared “facility” was an impressive display of toilet seats, each one belonging to a family, on the wall of the communal corridor. The loo seats were hanging there side by side, like oversized and thoroughly luckless horseshoes...
Due to the chronic toilet paper shortages, people had to find substitutes. I remember how several years after the official demotion of Stalin by Khrushchev in 1956, the multi-volume collection of Stalin’s articles ended up in the toilet of our communal flat. Due to the thick glossy paper they had been printed on, the collection was not fit for purpose. But we had no choice, as newspapers were “for reading” only, remember?
Significantly, several years later, the same fate befell the works of Khrushchev himself, demoted and exposed by Brezhnev. Then, in the mid-1980s, it was time for Brezhnev’s writings to head for the country’s uncomplaining loos after he was demoted by Gorbachev, under whose rule toilet paper shortages reached their all-time height (somewhat balanced by the near absence of any digestible foods in the shops). The sight of an overjoyed man or woman running in exaltation through the streets of Moscow with toilet paper rolls wound around their torsos like machine-gun-cartridge belts became common. “Where did you get it, buddy?” the envious passers-by would ask. “Just round the corner, in Prosperity Lane,” they would reply contentedly before adding: “But hurry up! They are about to run out!”
By the time it was Gorby’s turn to be demoted, the Soviet Socialist Utopia had come to an end, and a Wild West mafia-style capitalist dystopia came in its stead. Shortages of daily basics, including toilet paper, came to an end to be replaced by a general lack of decency and common sense. From what I hear, nowadays both book bans and scarcities of some consumer goods are back in Russia. So, who is going to become the next victim of restroom censorship is anyone’s guess!
