On official hypocrisy and how quickly times change

Browsing in the basement antiquarian section of my favorite neighborhood bookstore the other day, I noticed on the periodicals shelf a journal with a samizdat-looking cover:



The typewritten title reads "Katorga i Ssylka" ("Penal Labor and Exile"), 1927, book 36. Thinking this was some sort of underground chronicle of Soviet prisons (not that there are any secrets about them any more), I looked for publishing data in the usual places, half expecting to see inside that the whole thing was typed in the manner of the cover label.

Much to my surprise, and proving yet again that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I found this publishing imprint on the back:



Rough translation: Publishing House of the All-Union Society of Political Prisoners and Internal Exiles. Apparently this was a publishing house that put out this journal about the experiences of the Tsar's political prisoners in pre-Revolutionary Russia. For example, the issue I found contained an article - under a rubric celebrating the 10th anniversary of the 1917 revolution - by Alexandra Kollontai about life "In Kerensky's Prison," presumably discussing political imprisonment during the brief rule of the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky.

It is hard to believe such a publication would have been imaginable 10 years after this 1927 issue came out, although tales of time spent in exile remained important parts of the official, myth-making biographies of Lenin and Stalin even as the Soviet government sent more people into forced labor and internal exile than the Tsars ever dreamed of. In fact, Google helped me to ascertain that this journal was published from 1921 to 1935, which confirms (if anyone doubted it) the profound hypocrisy of the Soviet government at the time - a government which sent millions to the GULag system of prison camps while still supporting the publication of "Katorga i Ssylka," the pages of which were a venue for old revolutionaries to rehash the unpleasantness of Tsarist Russia's system of forced labor - some of them, no doubt, would later have the chance to see firsthand how the Soviet version compared.

Real reason I took the time to write this post: I am a sucker for old publishing house imprints and thought this one was especially interesting, but wanted to put it in some historical context. Now back to our regular programming.