Under Stalin, nothing— fiction or nonfiction, written works, poetry, music, dance, film— could be seen by the public without first being submitted to communist party committees for approval. All art had to “serve the people” (the state) & be purged of political incorrectness. Writers & poets were routinely imprisoned & shot.
Hence the emergence of the “samizdat”— a flourishing literary underground. Works were surreptitiously copied & distributed by hand. Getting caught could be fatal.
It amazes me that so many in academia, the arts, & Hollywood support the very system that would steal their freedom & silence them.
As part of my prepper activities, I’ve amassed a pretty good sized library, focusing on books likely to be suppressed in the event of a communist takeover of the U.S.
Thousands of seminal works of western civilization, downloadable to kindle, can be found at The Gutenberg Project.
See my post # 30 in this thread.