Censorship of manuscripts
From the start, censorship was a leading component of Soviet policy in the field of information dissemination and publishing regulation. Its infrastructure was designed and implemented to ensure that readers received only the “right” texts. Censoring a book sometimes took up to a year. It had to go through every stage and undergo all corrections.
There were authors who attempted to deceive the censors. Poets of the Ukrainian SSR, for instance, often resorted to so-called “locomotives.” Ideologically charged poems were placed at the beginning of a poetry collection that “pulled” the rest of the poems through to publication. One can find such texts in “Amerykansky zoshyt” (American Notebook) by Ivan Drach, “Palmova vit” (Palm Branch) by Dmytro Pavlychko, “Tysha i hrim” (Silence and Thunder) by Vasyl Symonenko, and others.