Although I could not speak for Islam or the communist countries, the era of the Holy Roman Empire involved a lot of this information control - the church was economically supported through unchallenged belief in its authorities. Improved access to holy texts created the foundations of the Protestant movement.
The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire [1] and easy access for the faithful to religious texts was considered so important that whole scripts were invented (the most famous by Cyril and Methodius [2]) in order to teach the faith.
The reason why people did not have ready access to books before the invention of the printing press was because books were expensive. The original printed bibles sold for approximately $4500 [3] ... and they were cheap by comparison to the hand-copied versions!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet - this became the basis for the Cyrillic alphabet.
[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=30+*+54+grains+Gold+in+USD
