Possession of even a single samizdat manuscript, such as a book by Andrei Sinyavsky, was a serious crime which involved "a visit from the KGB. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

As peasant uprisings defined pre- World War II Soviet censorship, nationalism defined the period during the war. In the 1932 book Russia Washed in Blood, a Bolshevik's harrowing account of Moscow's devastation from the October Revolution contained the description, "frozen rotten potatoes, dogs eaten by people, children dying out, hunger," but was promptly deleted.

All information related to radio jamming and usage of corresponding equipment was considered a state secret.

Books which met with official approval and favor, for example, the collected speeches of Leonid Brezhnev, were printed in vast quantities while less favored literary material was published in limited numbers and not distributed widely, or not published at all. While restrictions on film still pervaded during the "Khrushchev Thaw", they were significantly fewer than under Stalin. For anyone who values the fundamental freedoms which the west was founded on, CENSORED ought to be top-priority reading. More moderate cases were recorded, such as a picture by Ivan Pyryev, where Stalin only changed the title from Anka to The Party Card.Translations of foreign publications were often produced in a truncated form, accompanied with extensive corrective footnotes. Emmanuil Kazakevich's 1962 novel, Spring on the Oder, was posthumously injected in 1963 with descriptions of supposed American bigotry, selfishness, and racism, which was not in the novel originally.