The period after the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia saw the rise of censorship studies in the former republics, which was prompted by the fall of the communist regime. A social historian of books, Aleksandar Stipčević (1930–2015) was among very few Croatian scholars who approached the topic of censorship from the scholarly standpoint. He wrote several books about it, both theoretical-historical as well as biographical, in which he related… read more
The period after the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia saw the rise of censorship studies in the former republics, which was prompted by the fall of the communist regime. A social historian of books, Aleksandar Stipčević (1930–2015) was among very few Croatian scholars who approached the topic of censorship from the scholarly standpoint. He wrote several books about it, both theoretical-historical as well as biographical, in which he related his own experience of censorship during the Yugoslav socialist period (e.g. Censorship in Libraries, 1992; On the Perfect Censor, 1994; The Story of the Croatian Biographical Lexicon, 1997).
His personal collection, consisting of 66 archival boxes when handed over by his widow to the Croatian State Archives in 2015, , reflects this interest, because the materials in 17 boxes are devoted to the topic of the “general history of censorship.” Stipčević initially began to study library sciences because his job was at the Library of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and later at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in 1989. As a librarian, he became particularly interested in different forms of censorship, and, as a hobby, began taking clippings from different types of journals and periodicals, both national and international. Eventually, this passion for collecting information enabled him to write several books on the topic of censorship: "The collected materials kept piling up and he put it in file folders, organising their contents. When a file folder was big enough, he would write a book. Topics just imposed themselves," Mrs Stipčević said (Interview with Stipčević, Anđelka).
This collection is still significant to the general public especially in an educational sense, since its content sheds light on the almost invisible channels of thought control under the communist regime. Although Yugoslav laws did contain formal censorship provisions, the material from this collection shows that the opposite was true. Moreover, in Stipčević's view, the period of communist censorship was the worst in the Croatian history: "The end of the war and the establishment of the communist regime meant the beginning of a new and, undoubtedly, the worst phase in the whole history of censorship in the Croatian lands. All censorship procedures that had been implemented in the Croatian lands in past centuries found their place in communist censorship, but not necessarily in the laws that had been enacted during their rule. Some procedures were not codified on purpose in order to more smoothly apply "ideological" criteria for the assessment of the degree of the threat posed by somebody's writings..." (Stipčević 2008, 503).
The collection is completely accessible for research.
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