Fear

…virtually no one had access to the sort of literature that the censors could read. Take For Whom the Bell Tolls and tally up the reasons it could not have been allowed: the author was ideologically unreliable – neither a Soviet sympathizer nor safely dead, which meant he could make a comment about the Soviet Union at any moment; the book showed the Spanish communists as terrorists; the book included questioning of acceptable violence against the class enemy; the book contained sex scenes. Any one of these factors was sufficient to put the book on the banned list.

The books available to the general Soviet public were a literature of elisions, and in a sense this was as it should be: literature reflected life. The central feature of Soviet life was unspoken. This feature was fear. For Ruzya’s generation fear turned into a habit. Before they finished high school, Ruzya’s gang had learned to shout praise for the Soviet Union into the ceiling vent – a gesture that was probably of little practical use but helped stave off the fear. As soon as telephones were installed in their apartments, they developed the habit of placing pillows over them to disable them as bugging devices…

Masha Gessen: Ester and Ruzya (2004)