The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (GSE; , BSE) is one of the largest Russian-language encyclopedias, published in the Soviet Union from 1926 to 1990. After 2002, the encyclopedia's data was partially included into the later Great Russian Encyclopedia in an updated and revised form. The GSE claimed to be "the first Marxist–Leninist general-purpose encyclopedia".

Origins

The idea of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia emerged in 1923 on the initiative of Otto Schmidt, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In early 1924 Schmidt worked with a group which included Mikhail Pokrovsky, (rector of the Institute of Red Professors), Nikolai Meshcheryakov (Former head of the Glavit, the State Administration of Publishing Affairs), Valery Bryusov (poet), Veniamin Kagan (mathematician) and Konstantin Kuzminsky to draw up a proposal which was agreed to in April 1924. Also involved was Anatoly Lunacharsky, People's Commissar of Education (Narkompros), who had previously been involved with a proposal by Alexander Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky to produce a Workers' Encyclopedia.

Editions

260 px|thumb|The first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, from 1927

There were three editions. The first edition of 65 volumes (65,000 entries, plus a supplementary volume about the Soviet Union) was published during 1926–1947, with the release of the initial volume being announced by the Soviet government on March 23, 1926, with a projection of all 30 volumes to be available within six years. The chief editor was Otto Schmidt (until 1941). The second edition of 50 volumes (100,000 entries, plus a supplementary volume) was published in 1950–1958; chief editors: Sergei Vavilov (until 1951) and Boris Vvedensky (until 1969); two index volumes to this edition were published in 1960. The third edition of 1969–1978 contains 30 volumes (100,000 entries, plus an index volume issued in 1981). Volume 24 is in two books, one being a full-sized book about the USSR, all with about 21 million words, and the chief editor being Alexander Prokhorov (since 1969). In the third edition, much attention was paid to the philosophical problems of natural sciences, physical and chemical sciences, and mathematical methods in various branches of knowledge.

From 1957 to 1990, the Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was released annually with up-to-date articles about the Soviet Union and all countries of the world.

The first online edition, an exact replica of text and graphics of the third (so-called Red) edition, was published by Rubricon.com in 2000.

Editors

Editors and contributors to the GSE included a number of leading Soviet scientists and politicians:

  • Georgy Aleksandrov (author of article on materialism, first edition)
  • Hamid Alimjan
  • Victor Ambartsumian
  • Valentin Asmus (author of articles on metaphysics, Plato, Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Chernyshevsky and Spengler, first edition)
  • Nikolai Baibakov
  • Mykola Bazhan
  • Walter Benjamin (author of article on Goethe, first edition)
  • Maia Berzina
  • Nikolay Bogolyubov
  • Andrei Bubnov (executed in 1938)
  • Nikolai Bukharin (executed in 1938)
  • Nikolai Burdenko
  • Abram Deborin (author of article on Hegel, first edition)
  • Mikhail Frunze
  • Victor Glushkov
  • Igor Grabar
  • Mikhail Grushevsky (author of article on Galicia (Eastern Europe), first edition)
  • Hugo Huppert (author of article on Heinrich von Kleist, first edition)
  • Veniamin Kagan
  • Lev Kamenev (author of article on Herzen, first edition)
  • Ivan Knunyants
  • Andrei Kolmogorov
  • Gleb Krzhizhanovsky
  • Nikolay Kun
  • Valerian Kuybyshev
  • Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii
  • Solomon Lozovsky (author of article on Popular Front, first edition)
  • György Lukács (author of articles on Nietzsche and novel, first edition)
  • Anatoly Lunacharsky (author of articles on Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Belinsky, Hamann, Hasenclever, Bohemianism, Bab, Garibaldi, Hausenstein, first edition)
  • Nikolai Meshcheryakov (author of articles on Bolsheviks, Etienne Cabet and Gleb Uspensky, first edition)
  • Mark Borisovich Mitin (author of article on dialectical materialism, first edition)
  • Vladimir Obruchev
  • Aleksandr Oparin
  • Valerian Pereverzev (author of article on Gogol, first edition)
  • Wilhelm Pieck (author of articles on Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Liebknecht, first edition)
  • Mikhail Pokrovsky (author of articles on bureaucratism, Julius Caesar, Entente and the biographies of most Tsars, first edition)
  • Yuri Prokhorov
  • Karl Radek (executed in 1939, author of articles on Victor Adler, Africa, Bavarian Soviet Republic, Berlin–Baghdad railway, Otto Bauer, August Bebel, Belgium, Conference of the Three Internationals, Eduard Bernstein, Otto von Bismarck, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Emperor Wilhelm II, Germany during World War I, German Revolution of 1918–1919, Rudolf Hilferding and Paul von Hindenburg, first edition)
  • Otto Schmidt
  • Nikolai Semashko
  • Alexander Sergeevich Serebrovsky (co-author of article on genetics, first edition)
  • Sergei Skazkin (author of articles on History of Germany, first edition, and Catholicism, third edition)
  • Ivan Sollertinsky (author of article on drama, first edition)
  • Pēteris Stučka (author of article on democracy, first edition)
  • Nikolai Vavilov (author of articles on genetics and eugenics, first edition)
  • Kliment Voroshilov
  • David Zaslavsky (author of article on Shchedrin, first edition)
  • Grigory Zinoviev (author of article on the Moscow uprising of 1905, first edition)

Role and purpose in Soviet society

The foreword to the first volume of the GSE (2nd ed.) proclaims "The Soviet Union has become the center of the civilized world." The 1949 decree issued for the production of the second edition of the GSE directed: