The Great Soviet Encyclopedia was a state-directed weapon designed to win the ideological war.

Art · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Published between 1926 and 1990, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was more than a reference work. It functioned as a government-mandated propaganda tool, with editors directly accountable to the Council of Ministers. Its mission was to provide the intellectual framework for the Soviet Union's global ideological offensive.

Initiated in 1923 by Otto Schmidt, the project aimed to create the first Marxist-Leninist general-purpose encyclopedia. The Soviet government treated the work as a strategic asset, explicitly ordering it to demonstrate the superiority of socialist culture over the capitalist world. By the time the second edition was commissioned in 1949, the editorial board was under strict instructions to provide party-aligned criticism of contemporary bourgeois science and technology. This political mandate meant that the encyclopedia was subject to constant revision to reflect the shifting party line.

The mechanism of this political control was starkly illustrated following the 1953 execution of Lavrentiy Beria. Subscribers were instructed to destroy the three-page entry on Beria and replace it with new pages covering unrelated topics like the Bering Sea and Bishop Berkeley. This practice of forced revision was common; biographical entries for political figures were frequently altered to match current leadership status. Despite this heavy bias, the encyclopedia remains a valuable source for understanding the Soviet perspective, offering comprehensive data on the USSR’s geography, ethnic diversity, and scientific achievements.

The third edition, published between 1969 and 1978, reached approximately 21 million words. It was translated into English in 31 volumes and into Greek, where local contributors expanded entries related to Greek history. While the original Soviet publication halted in 1991, the work was revived in 2002 by decree of Vladimir Putin. Overhauled to remove overt political bias and renamed the Great Russian Encyclopedia, the project was completed in 36 volumes by 2017. Today, the work serves as a testament to how knowledge can be systematically curated to serve the state.

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