Decree on the State Publishing House - Copyright

Collection of legalizations and orders of the government for 1917-1918. Office of the Affairs of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR M. 1942, pp. 221-222.

Archive: Published in No. 2 of the Newspaper of the Provisional Worker and Peasant Government of January 4, 1918.

Article number 201.

Decree on the state publishing house.

(Adopted at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee on December 29, 1917).

Taking into account the acute unemployment of printers, created from various reasons, on the one hand, and the book famine in the country, on the other hand, the people's commission for education is entrusted through its literary and publishing department and with the assistance of out-of-school education departments, school departments, science and art departments, with the involvement of representatives from the Union of Printers and other interested societies, at the discretion of the commission and experts specially invited by it, immediately begin extensive publishing activities.

First of all, a cheap folk edition of Russian classics should be supplied. The works of those whose copyright has expired must be republished.

The works of all authors, passing in this way from the realm of private property into the realm of the public, may be for each writer a special decree of the State commission on education are declared a state monopoly, for a period, however, no longer than five years.

The Commission is obliged to use this right in relation to the luminaries of literature, whose creations will become the property of the people in accordance with this law.

The publication of their works should be organized in two ways.

A complete scientific publication, the editorship of which should be entrusted to the Department of the Russian Language and Literature at the Academy of Sciences (after its democratization in accordance with the new system of state and public life in Russia).

Abridged edition of selected works. Such collected works must constitute one compact volume. When choosing, the editors should be guided, among other considerations, by the degree of proximity of individual works to the working people for whom these popular publications are intended. Both the entire collection and individual especially significant works should be accompanied by prefaces by authoritative critics, literary historians, etc. To edit these popular publications, a special collegium should be created from representatives of pedagogical, literary, and scientific societies, specially invited experts, and delegates of labor organizations. This control and editorial commission must be submitted by the editors approved by it, publication plans and comments of all kinds.

Popular editions of the classics should be sold at cost, and if funds allow, then distributed at a reduced price, or even free of charge, through libraries serving labor democracy:

The state publishing house should then attend to the mass publication of textbooks. The verification and correction of old textbooks and the creation of new textbooks should go through a special commission on textbooks, consisting of delegates from pedagogical, scientific, and democratic organizations and specially invited experts.

The state publishing house is also given the right to subsidize publications, both periodicals and books, undertaken by societies or individuals and recognized as generally useful, so that these subsidies, if the publication is profitable, will be returned to the state in the first place.

For the immediate start of this important people's work, the Council of People's Commissars is invited to open the State. commission on education a loan of one and a half million rubles.

All printing orders must be distributed exclusively in the direction of the printers' union, which regulates their distribution through autonomous commissions of individual printers.

People's Commissar A. V. Lunacharsky .

Secretary D. P. Leshchenko .

Published in No. 2 of the Newspaper of the Provisional Worker and Peasant Government of January 4, 1918.