GOSIZDAT

// ГОСИЗДАТ // Государственное издательство // Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo // State Publishing House

Established in 1919 as the State Publishing House to provide a centralized plan for the myriad of private book publishers and printers that existed after the Russian Revolution.  Gosizdat absorbed the Soviet publishing houses of Krasnaya nov, Priboi, Zemlya i fabrika, and others.

Gosizdat began as a contract-printer but it also printed its own titles. These were chiefly dedicated to agitation and the military.  Posters were printed and published by Gosizdat, and in 1920 it printed 3.2 million copies of seventy-five separate posters. It served as the supervisory administration of work produced by independent, local publishing houses in the post-revolution period while controlling access to materials and enforcing political censorship of the printed word. When decentralization was permitted during the New Economic Policy (from 1921 to 1928), Gosizdat increased its output to include fiction, children's literature, scientific texts, propaganda, Russian literature and school texts. Gosizdat was the foundation of a centralized publishing monopoly, the Association of State Publishing Houses, or OGIZ. It was abolished as a state publishing house in 1930 after reorganization. See OGIZ, for more information.