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The Russian government passed a new Internet censorship bill earlier this year drawing concern from advocacy groups. The bill President Vladimir Putin signed went into effect on November 1st creating a Internet blacklist that gives the government the authority to block websites containing state banned topics such as drugs, pornography and suicide. Also added to the blacklist are works considered extremist by Russian authorities. No complete blacklist is available but websites containing anti-clerical works by author Leo Tolstoy and other works of classic Russian literature are reported to be on the list blocked sites.

Tolstoy once criticized the Russian Orthodox church, writing: “I’ve come to the conclusion that in theory the teaching of the church is a perfidious and harmful lie, while in practice it is a collection of the crudest superstitions and sorcery, hiding completely the entire meaning of Christian teaching.” But he was also critical of the military and private property, causing Lenin to make him an icon of the Russian Revolution. Despite his influence on the Revolution, Tolstoy was a pacifist and his ideas on non-violence influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

As an author, Leo Tolstoy is perhaps best known for his epic, War and Peace, which was first published in 1869, considered to be one of the most important works of world literature. The novel details the Napoleon-led French army’s invasion of Russia through the eyes of a number of colorful characters in the Russian aristocracy.

Over 100 years after the publication of War and Peace, on December 6, 1970, more than 170 people read the novel in its entirety on Pacifica Radio station WBAI in New York. The ambitious broadcast concluded 5 days later, at the time the longest continuous broadcast in the history of radio. Readers included Tolstoy’s own daughter, Alexandra Tolstoy, actors Dustin Hoffman, Mel Brooks, and Ann Bancroft. New Yorkers were glued to the station over the course of the ground-breaking 5-day broadcast.

The reading of War and Peace is preserved in the Pacifica Radio Archives along with many other similar marathon readings of classic books done over the years at various Pacifica stations. Today, as part of our national broadcast celebrating and supporting the work of the Pacifica Radio Archives, we’re proud to debut a series of audiobooks that the Archives have put together for you, for your listening pleasure, and as a way for you to financially support the on-going preservation work of the Archives.

During this hour featured excerpts from War and Peace, as well as from Tolstoy’s other work, Anna Karenina which was read on KPFK in 1974.

To get a copy of the complete readings of both books, call 1800-735-0230 and pledge $300 to receive a USB memory stick loaded with over 200 hours of classic books and to send a copy of these same recordings on over 20 MP3-format compact discs to a college or school campus of your choice.