In this issue, Index reports on Andrei Sinyavsky’s new memoir which outlines his experiences as a writer and Russian dissident.
Andrei Sinyavsky: My life
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Xu Wenli: From a Chinese prison
In this issue, Index publishes excerpts from a 262-page manuscript Chinese editor, Xu Wenli, has managed to smuggle out of prison.
Argentina: Generals on trial
In this issue, Index explores the trial of nine former Argentine generals and the likely consequences.
Nunca Mas: Argentina’s 9,000 “disappeared” persons
In this issue, Index publishes excerpts from Nunca Mas, the report commissioned by Argentinian President Alfonsin on the 9,000 disappearances in Argentina.
False history? The distortion of Greek and African history
In this issue, Index reports the way history is distorted in Greece and Kenya, and on various aspects of African historiography.
Cambodia: How the S.21 killed 20,000 at Tuol Sleng
In this issue, Index reports on the arrest, torture, forced confessions and execution of 20,000 prisoners in Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng prison.
Mustafa Amin: My 50 years of press censorship
In this issue, Index interviews prominent publisher Mustafa Amin who gives his own account of the state of press freedom in Egypt.
Poland: Confession of a child of our time
In this issue, Index includes a short story by author and dissident Andrzej Szczypiorski which explores love and other intrigues of life in Poland.
Jaroslav Seifert
In this issue, Index takes a look at how the Czechoslovak media pretend that Jaroslav Seifert, Nobel Prize winner, has never been out of favour with the Prague regime.
Black voices in South Africa
In this issue, Index reports on what it’s like for black writers to live under South Africa’s Publications Act and Internal Security Act.
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.