It is estimated that during the peak of the Great Purge in the USSR some 680,000 to 1,200,000 people were killed by NKVD. An average investigator in Moscow had some 30-40 political cases per month. And sometimes they were bored.
I found this book in an old books department in the Russian city of Novorossiysk. This sample of Soviet samizdat was supposedly made in 1970s and is literally a photo copy of a 19th-century book.
Soviet era is known for its many bizarre instances of censorship. Vanishing of the commissars may be the most famous, and you can find more in the Wikipedia. However, that’s all about photographs, and I’d like to share with you a bookbinding-related story.
