On the Freedom of Press in the USSR

The editorial office of the Ukrainian Information Space has decided to publish the full article of the journalist of the UPA O. Hornovyi «On the freedom of press in the USSR» for the first time in Ukraine. The author of the article is a member of the main unit of propaganda during the OUN. He died in 1950 at the age of 29 in a battle with the KGB department near one of the shelters in Lviv region. This unique, virtually unknown to researchers and quite consistent with the current Ukrainian realities, text has a dramatic fate. It was published in 1946 on the front pages of the Ukrainian Main Liberation Council (UMLC) magazine «Independence». It was the only number, and it has not survived to this day. The text of the article was distributed in self-publishing on the territory of the Soviet Ukraine. In 1949 it was published a separate brochure in one of the underground UIA printing houses with the initial data «Kyiv-Lviv». The only surviving copy of this brochure in the scanned form was published on the website of the Electronic Archive of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement. However, the original of the brochure itself is rather damaged: it lacks several pages, and individual pages lack whole sections of text. Later, the article was reprinted in one of the issues of the so-called miniature brochures from the massif of subversive anti-Soviet literature, which was published on behalf of the UMLC Foreign Office in London and was illegally transported to the territory of Soviet Ukraine. A copy of this booklet was discovered by Professor Mykola Tymoshyk in the archives of the Ukrainian Publishing Union in London during a recent research internship in the United Kingdom. This document is the subject of editorial preparation for this publication. It analyzes the Soviet press in the context of the notion of press freedom in a democratic and totalitarian society. By giving a number of examples from the central and local Soviet press, the author identifies three features of Soviet journalism: a) the press in the USSR belongs not to the people, but to the ruling party of Stalin's nobles; b) all the publications were standardized not only in content but also in the form of their submission; c) a very consistent application of the method of concealing of truth; c) a radical eversion and distortion of reality, if it did not conform to the communist-bolshevik ideology