REGIONAL PRESS AND CENSORSHIP IN THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY PERIOD (SARATOV, SAMARA REGIONS, AND THE GERMAN AUTONOMY)

The censorship process during the New Economic Policy Period was rather unbalanced due to the human factor. Up until 1928, certain stages of censoring the manuscript that started with initial reading and resulted in the approving mark on the typographical card, could be omitted, as the case of Saratov author L.A. Slovokhotov illustrates. The study of the archives shows that the attitude to the media in foreign languages issued by national minorities was more lenient than the attitude to religious media in the Russian language. The 1926 editorial of the leading newspaper of the German minorities of the Volga region had no reference to either the October Revolution or Vladimir Lenin. The German Autonomy published Catholic literature that beat the circulation of the proletarian literature. Censors approved the publication of a religious calendar in German and banned the same type of calendar in Russian. These facts demonstrate that we should examine typographical cards more carefully than hitherto practiced.