Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet-bloc; individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader, thus building a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s. This
grassrootsA grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it is natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
practice to evade officially imposed
censorshipCensorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.-Rationale:...
was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying
censoredCensorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.-Rationale:...
materials.
Vladimir BukovskyVladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a notable former Soviet political dissident, author and political activist.Bukovsky was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the Soviet Union...
defined it as follows: "I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it."
Techniques
Essentially, the samizdat copies of text, such as
Mikhail BulgakovMikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian contemporary novelist and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century...
's novel
The Master and MargaritaThe Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union...
or
Václav HavelVáclav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, former dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
's writing
The Power of the Powerless, were passed among friends. The techniques to reproduce the forbidden literature and periodicals varied from making several copies of the content using
carbon paperCarbon paper is paper coated on one side with a layer of a loosely bound dry ink or pigmented coating, usually bound with wax. It is used for making one or more copies simultaneous with the creation of an original document...
, either by hand or on a
typewriterA typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with a set of "keys" that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper...
, to printing on mainframe printers during night shifts, to printing the books on semi-professional
printing pressA printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a medium , thereby transferring an image. The mechanical systems involved were first assembled in Germany by the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, based on existing screw-presses used to press...
es in larger quantities. Before
glasnostwas the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of 1980s....
, the practice was dangerous, because copy machines, printing presses and even typewriters in offices were under control of the
First DepartmentThe First Department was in charge of secrecy and political security of the workplace of every enterprise or institution of the Soviet Union that dealt with any kind of technical or scientific information or had printing capabilities .Every branch of the Central Statistical Administration and its...
s (KGB outposts): reference printouts for all of them were stored for
identificationIdentification or Identify may refer to:* Body identification* Combat Identification* Eyewitness identification* Forensic identification* Gender identity* Hazard Identification...
purposes.
Terminology and related concepts
EtymologicallyEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
, the word "samizdat" is made out of "sam" and "izdat" , thus,
self published.
The term was coined as a
punA pun, or paronomasia, is a form of word play that deliberately exploits ambiguity between similar-sounding words for humorous or rhetorical effect...
by Russian poet Nikolai Glazkov in the 1940s, who typed copies of his poems indicating "Samsebyaizdat" (Самсебяиздат, "Myself by Myself Publishers") on the
front pageA front page is the first page of a newspaper or other publication lacking a front cover, typically the place where the most important content is placed, hence the metaphorical connotations of the term.Front Page can also refer to:...
in an analogy with the typical names of
publishing houses in the Soviet UnionPublishing houses in the Soviet Union, with the exception of the brief initial period and the period of perestroika before the collapse of the Soviet Union, were state enterprizes under strict ideological control and censorship for the compliance with the communist ideology under the guidelines of...
, such as
Politizdat.
MagnitizdatMagnitizdat is a term used to describe the process of re-copying and self distributing live audio tape recordings in the Soviet Union that were not available commercially...
is the passing on of taped sound recordings (
magnit- referring to
magnetic tapeMagnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording generally consisting of a thin magnetizable coating on a long and narrow strip of plastic. Nearly all recording tape is of this type, whether used for recording audio or video or for computer data storage. It was originally developed in Germany,...
), often of "underground" music groups,
bardsThe term bard came to be used in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and continues to be used in Russia today, to refer to singer-songwriters who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment. Because in bard music songwriters perform their own songs, the genre is also commonly referred to as...
or lectures.
Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad (там, tam, meaning "there"), often from smuggled manuscripts.
In the history of the
Polish underground pressPolish underground press has a long history of combatting censorship. In the 19th century in partitioned Poland, many underground newspapers existed; among the most prominent was Robotnik, published in over 1,000 copies from 1894.In the occupied Poland during World War II, there were thousands of...
, the usual term in the later years of Communism was
drugi obieg or "second circulation" (of publications), while the "first circulation" implied being legal and censored publications. The term
bibuła ("blotting-paper") is older, having been used even during the
partitions of PolandThe Partitions of Poland or Partitions of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth took place in the second half of the 18th century and ended the existence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The partitions were carried out by Prussia, Russia and Habsburg Austria dividing up the Commonwealth lands...
.
History
Self-published and self-distributed literature has a long history, but
samizdat is a unique phenomenon in the post-Stalin USSR and other countries with similar systems of tyranny. Under the grip of censorship of the
police stateThe term police state describes a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population...
, these societies used underground literature for self-analysis and self-expression.
At the outset of the
Khrushchev ThawThe Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinisation and...
in the mid-1950s USSR,
poetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
became very popular and writings of a wide variety of known, prohibited, repressed, as well as young and unknown poets circulated among Soviet
intelligentsiaThe intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
.
On June 29 1958, a monument to
Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...
was opened in the center of
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
. The official ceremony ended with impromptu public poetry readings. The Moscovites liked the atmosphere of relatively free speech so much that the readings became regular and came to be known as "Mayak" , with students being a majority of participants. However, it did not last long as the authorities began clamping down on the meetings. In the summer of 1961, several meeting regulars (among them
Eduard KuznetsovEduard Kuznetsov is a Soviet dissident, human rights activist, and writer.In 1961, Kuznetsov was arrested for the first time and served seven years in Soviet prisons for making overtly political speeches in poetry readings at Mayakovsky Square in the centre of Moscow and for publishing...
) were arrested and charged with "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" (Article 70 of the RSFSR
Penal CodeA penal code is a portion of a state's laws defining crimes and specifying the punishment. Other parts of the laws of a given state can define crimes and punishments, such as a traffic code or a building safety code, or laws addressing environmental resources by regulating hunting, fishing, or...
).
Editor and publisher of Moscow samizdat magazine "Синтаксис" (
Syntaxis)
Alexander GinzburgAlexander Ilyich Ginzburg , was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident....
was arrested in 1960.
Some legitimate publications in the state-controlled media, such as a novel
One Day in the Life of Ivan DenisovichOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir . The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov...
by
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynAleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his writings he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system — particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his two...
(who won the
Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
, 1970), first published in literary magazine
Novy MirNovy Mir is a Russian language literary magazine that has been published in Moscow since January 1925. It was supposed to be modelled on the popular pre-Soviet literary magazines Mir Bozhy , which was published from 1892 to 1906, and its follow-up, Sovremenny Mir , which was published 1906-1917...
in November 1962, were practically impossible to find in (and later taken out from) circulation and made their way into samizdat.
Not everything published in samizdat had political overtones.
In 1963,
Joseph BrodskyIosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Soviet-Russian-American poet, essayist, and Nobel Laureate in Literature. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1991.-Early years:...
(to become a Nobel laureate in 1987) was charged with "
social parasitismSocial parasite is a derogatory term denoting a group or class in society which is considered to be detrimental to others, by taking advantage of them in some way.-Introduction:...
" and convicted for being nothing but a poet.
In the mid-1960s, an underground literary group СМОГ ("Самое Молодое Общество Гениев", Samoye Molodoye Obshchestvo Geniyev, translated as
The Youngest Society of Geniuses) issued their literary
almanacAn almanac is an annual publication containing tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar...
"Сфинксы" (Sfinksy;
The Sphinxes) and collections of prose and poetry. Some of their writings were close to Russian avantgarde of the 1910s–1920s.
The 1965
show trialThe term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial. The term was first recorded in the 1930s. There is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant and that the actual trial has as its only goal to present the...
of writers
Yuli DanielYuli Markovich Daniel was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator, political prisoner and gulag survivor.He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak and Yu. Petrov ....
and
Andrei SinyavskyAndrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer, dissident, gulag survivor, emigrant, Professor of Sorbonne University, magazine founder and publisher...
(also charged with violating Article 70) and increased repressions marked the demise of the Thaw and harsher times for samizdat authors. The trial was carefully documented in
The White Book by
Yuri GalanskovYuri Timofeyevich Galanskov was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals ...
and
Alexander GinzburgAlexander Ilyich Ginzburg , was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident....
. Both writers were later arrested and sentenced to prison in what was known as The Trial of the Four.
Some of the samizdat content became more politicized and played an important role in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union.
From 1964 to 1970, historian
Roy MedvedevRoy Aleksandrovich Medvedev is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge, first published in English in 1972...
regularly published analytical materials that later appeared in the West under the title "Политический дневник" (Politicheskiy Dnevnik;
The Political Journal).
One of the longest-running and well-known samizdat publications was the information bulletin "Хроника текущих событий" (Khronika Tekushchikh Sobitiy;
Chronicle of Current Events), dedicated to the defense of
human rightsHuman rights refer to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the...
in the USSR. For 15 years from 1968 to 1983, a total of 63 issues were published. The anonymous authors encouraged the readers to utilize the same distribution channels in order to send feedback and local information to be published in the subsequent issues. The
Chronicle was known for its dry concise style; its regular rubrics were "Arrests, Searches, Interrogations", "Out of Court Repressions", "In Prisons and
CampsThe Gulag or GULAG was the government agency that administered the penal labor camps of the Soviet Union. The term is infamous for its association with remote places where prisoners were kept and sometimes disappeared...
", "News of Samizdat", "Persecution of Religion", "Persecution of
Crimean TatarsCrimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group originally residing in Crimea. They speak the Crimean Tatar language...
", "Repressions in
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
", "
LithuaniaLithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of...
n Events", and so on. The authors maintained that according to the Soviet Constitution, the
Chronicle was not an illegal publication, but the long list of people arrested in relation to it included
Natalya GorbanevskayaNatalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya is a Russian poet, translator of Polish literature and civil rights activist. She is also a citizen of Poland.- Life :...
, Yuri Shikhanovich, Pyotr Yakir, Victor Krasin,
Sergei KovalevSergei Adamovich Kovalev is a Russian human rights activist and politician and a former Soviet dissident and political prisoner.- Early career and arrest :...
, Alexander Lavut, Tatyana Velikanova, among others.
Another notable and long-running (about 20 issues in the period of 1972-1980) publication was the
refusenikRefusenik was an unofficial term for individuals, typically but not exclusively Soviet Jews, who were denied permission to emigrate abroad by the authorities of the former Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc...
political and literary magazine "Евреи в СССР" (Yevrei v SSSR,
Jews in the USSR), founded and edited by Alexander Voronel and after his release, by Mark Azbel and Alexander Luntz.
With increased proliferation of computer technologies, it became practically impossible for the government to control the copying and distribution of samizdat.
A well known samizdat comic character is the female superheroine Octobriana.
In June 2009 issue of the
Russian Life magazine
Oleg KashinOleg Kashin is a former seaman and a prominent Russian journalist.Kashin graduated from the Baltic State Fishing Fleet Academy with a degree in sea navigation in 2001. While studying, he wrote for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Kaliningrad where he expressed rather sharp views...
describes an antisemitic trend in samizdat of late 1970s: "
Russian party... was a very strange element of the political landscape of Brezhnev's era — feeling themselves practically dissidents, members of the
Russian party with rare exceptions took quite prestigeous official positions in writers or journalists medium."
Similar phenomena in other countries
After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was exiled by the Shah of
IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanid period and came into international use from 1935, before which the country was known internationally as Persia...
in 1964, his sermons were smuggled into Iran on cassette tapes and widely copied, increasing his popularity and leading, in part, to the
Iranian RevolutionThe Iranian Revolution of 1979 or 1979 Islamic Revolution refers to events involving the overthrow of Iran's monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and its replacement with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution...
. After the Iranian Revolution led to the establishment of an Islamic state, the situation reversed. Works like
Salman RushdieSir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children , which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent...
's
Satanic Verses (1988) would now appear inside the Religious Republic in illegal Samizdat editions.
A tradition of publishing hand written material existed in the
GermanGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
military during both the First and Second World War.
PolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe . Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and Lithuania have a
long history of underground pressPolish underground press has a long history of combatting censorship. In the 19th century in partitioned Poland, many underground newspapers existed; among the most prominent was Robotnik, published in over 1,000 copies from 1894.In the occupied Poland during World War II, there were thousands of...
.
After
Bell LabsBell Laboratories is the research and development organization of Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company .Bell Laboratories has had its headquarters at Murray Hill, New Jersey, and it has research and development facilities...
changed its
UNIXUnix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
license to make dissemination of the source code illegal, the
Lions BookLions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions book...
had to be withdrawn, but the technical data it contained was of such enormous value that illegal copies of it circulated for years. The act of copying the Lions book was often referred to as Samizdat. See
Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source CodeLions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions book...
for more information.
See also
- Faxlore
Faxlore is a sort of folklore: humorous texts, folk poetry, folk art, and urban legends that are circulated, not by word of mouth, but by fax machine...
- Freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak without censorship or limitation. The synonymous term freedom of expression is sometimes used to indicate not only freedom of verbal speech but any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...
- Freedom of the press
Freedom of the press consists ofconstitutional or statutory protections pertaining to the media and published materials.With respect to governmental information, any government distinguishes which materials are public or protected from disclosure to the public based on classification of information...
- Ghost publishing
Ghost Publishing is an anonymous publishing movement. The basic philosophy of the movement is in part derivative of the new criticism of the early part of the twentieth century. The new criticism held that a work should be treated as though it were contemporary and anonymous whether it was a text...
- Self publishing
- Velvet Revolution
The Velvet Revolution or Gentle Revolution was a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the Communist government. It is seen as one of the most important of the Revolutions of 1989.On November 17, 1989, a Friday, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration...
- Zine
A zine is most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images...
External links