A literary magazine, or a ‘thick journal’, was a unique element of Soviet literary culture. Modelled on pre- revolutionary literary magazines that published the writings of authors belonging to a certain creative movement, or works of a certain genre, in the Soviet time thick journals turned into a voice of the authorities, promoting the ‘ideologically correct’ literature of the new age. After all the writers’ organizations in the USSR had been disbanded in 1932 and the Soviet Writers’ Congress called shortly thereafter to set the standards of socialist realism, the new function of thick journals became clear: they were to operate as propaganda organs for socialist realist art, their journalistic sections actively and directly promoting the Soviet ideology. Evolving together with state policy, by the end of the 1930s the Soviet thick journals turned into an imperial institution. Though published in Russian and dealing supposedly with Russian literature only, they also introduced the readers to literary works from non- Russian parts of the Soviet empire, frequently featuring translations of texts of some length (mostly novels) originally written in either Ukrainian or Belorussian. Translations of shorter writings (poetry or short stories, excerpts from epic poems) from other languages of the USSR were printed with less frequency, but they, too, saw light at regular intervals. As the territory of the Soviet empire grew, so did the number of literary cultures of the newly ‘liberated nations’ covered by the thick journals. Thus, for instance, Issue 9 of Novyi Mir for 1940 opened with poems by Liudas Gira and Johannes Barbarus, translated from Lithuanian and Estonian, respectively. The issue did not feature anything by a Latvian poet, but this was compensated for by Gira's first poem, devoted to the ever- lasting friendship between the Letts and the Lithuanians. M. Zenkevich's article ‘The Poetry of New Soviet Republics (On the Poems by Johannes Barbarus and Liudas Gira)’ was the first piece in the bibliographical section of the same issue. The appearance of the translations signalled the official inclusion of the poetry of the Baltic states into the new literature of the Soviet Union.

In the post- war period the imperial trends of Soviet ideology became stronger.