Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society

By Ann Komaromi

Soviet Samizdat traces the emergence and development of samizdat, one of the most significant and distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet era, as an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. Based on extensive research of the underground journals, bulletins, art folios and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi analyzes the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens.

Dissidence has been dismissed as an elite phenomenon or as insignificant because it had little demonstrable impact on the Soviet regime. Komaromi challenges these views and demonstrates that the kind of imagination about self and community made possible by samizdat could be a powerful social force. She explains why participants in samizdat culture so often sought to divide "political" from "cultural" samizdat. Her study provides a controversial umbrella definition for all forms of samizdat in terms of truth-telling, arguing that the act is experienced as transformative by Soviet authors and readers. This argument will challenge scholars in the field to respond to contentions that go against the grain of both anthropological and postmodern accounts.

Komaromi's combination of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory makes sense of the phenomenon of samizdat for readers today. Soviet Samizdat shows that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime. Instead, samizdat fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501763601

Book preview

SOVIET SAMIZDAT

IMAGINING A NEW SOCIETY

ANN KOMAROMI

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Leonid, Josephine, and Isabelle Livak

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Samizdat and Underground Publics in the USSR

1. Samizdat and the Historical Self

2. Giving Voice to Truth in Samizdat

3. Imagining Time in Samizdat

4. Spaces of Samizdat Sociality

Conclusion: Samizdat and the Contradictions of Soviet Modernity

Appendix: Soviet Samizdat Periodicals, 1956–1986

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Samizdat and Underground Publics in the USSR

1. Samizdat and the Historical Self

2. Giving Voice to Truth in Samizdat

3. Imagining Time in Samizdat

4. Spaces of Samizdat Sociality

Conclusion: Samizdat and the Contradictions of Soviet Modernity

Appendix: Soviet Samizdat Periodicals, 1956–1986

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Series Page

Copyright

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Guide

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Start of Content

Conclusion: Samizdat and the Contradictions of Soviet Modernity

Appendix: Soviet Samizdat Periodicals, 1956–1986

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Series Page

Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Samizdat copy of The Gulag Archipelago ( Arkhipelag GULAG ) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

2. Cover of Chronicle of Current Events , no. 1, 1968

3. Natalʹia Gorbanevskaia, Moscow, March 1973

4. Aleksandr Ginzburg, Tarusa, 1976

5. Activists associated with the historical edition Memory : A. Roginskii, Iu. Shmidt, A. Danielʹ, L. Bogoraz, V. Sazhin, Ia. Nazarov, and B. Mitiashin, Leningrad, May–June 1976

6. Eviction of Mustafa Memedinov’s family after their return to Crimea, village of Beloye, Simferopol region, June 22, 1978

7. Star of the Nativity by Boris Pasternak, samizdat copy of verses from Doctor Zhivago

8. Evgeniia Ginzburg, [1960s?]

9. Women of the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives, Evangelical Christian Baptists, 1980

10. Viktor Krivulin, 1970s

11. Vladimir Vysotskii on the cover of Minstrel special issue, 1980

12. Iurii Galanskov, [Moscow?], 1960

13. Cover of Art of the Commune , no. 27 (December 22, 1962)

14. Drawing of people with UFO landing, from Our Personal Responsibility , no. 1 (1982)

15. Boris Konstriktor, Vladimir Erlʹ, and Sergei Sigei at Club-81, in Leningrad, 1981, from Transponans , no. 20 (1984)

16. Natalʹia Abalakova, Summa Archaelogiae: Collages: Black Hole, part of the project Exploration into the Essence of Art as Applied to Life and Art by Natalʹia Abalakova and Anatolii Zhigalov, in MANA , no. 4, 1982, envelope 1

17. Jews in the Contemporary World , no. 3, 1979

18. Fraternal Leaflet , no. 1 (1980), Baptist samizdat edition produced by printing press

19. Destroyed prayer tent of Evangelical Christian Baptists, Kishinev, 1978

20. Women activists: Tatʹiana Beliaeva, Natalʹia Malakhovskaia, Natalʹia Lazareva, Tatʹiana Goricheva, Natalʹia Diukova, Sofʹia Sokolova, Leningrad, no later than July 1980, when Goricheva emigrated

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The long years I have spent working on samizdat means I incurred many debts. I am pleased to acknowledge some of them here.

I owe much to the generous help over many years from colleagues at the International Memorial Society in Moscow, including Boris Belenkin, Aleksandr Danielʹ, Tatʹiana Khromova, Gennadii Kuzovkin, Aleksei Makarov, and the former director Arsenii Roginskii. All of them inspired me with their commitment and knowledge as they kindly helped enable my research. I am also grateful to the director Ian Rachinskii and the editor Larisa Eremina for supporting later stages of this work. Liudmila Petrakova provided excellent assistance with the samizdat periodicals data. I am also grateful to Irina Flige, director of Memorial, Saint Petersburg, for sharing her work and providing access to materials.

Gabrielʹ Superfin, formerly of the Institute for the Study of Eastern Europe at Bremen University, has been the expert of reference for all things samizdat—the impact of his knowledge, judgment, and generosity is hard to overstate. I am grateful to the former director of the Institute Wolfgang Eichwede for support in early stages. Support for collaboration from the director Susanne Schattenberg and the knowledge and assistance of the archivist Maria Klassen made it possible to realize the Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat (http://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca) and much of the work associated with it. I am very grateful for the opportunity to help bring attention to their outstanding collections.

In addition to the institutions already mentioned, the Sakharov Center provided photo documentation for this book. I am delighted to acknowledge the Sakharov Centre and the helpful assistance of collections curator Natalʹia Samover.

The archivist Olga Zaslavskaia at the Open Society Archives assisted in development of the initial Database of Soviet Samizdat and identified further sources for information on Belarusian samizdat. Birutė Burauskaitė at the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania kindly helped me with researching Lithuanian samizdat.

I have benefitted in many ways from discussions and collaboration with specialists in the art and literature of the Soviet Underground, including Olga M. Cooke, Yelena Kalinsky, Yasha Klots, Ilʹia Kukui, Ilya Kukulin, Mark Lipovetsky, Ainsley Morse, Mary A. Nicholas, Valentina Parisi, Claudia Pieralli, Rebekah Smith, Klavdia Smola, and Josephine von Zitzewitz, whose The Culture of Samizdat appeared after this book was written. While wrestling with these materials, I had recourse also to insights and tips from Catherine Ciepiela and Lazar Fleishman, whose expertise proved highly relevant.

I am grateful to colleagues in history and in comparative literature for their guidance and collaboration. Barbara Martin and Benjamin Nathans both modeled thoughtful scholarship devoted to Soviet dissidence that was rooted in substantial engagement with Russian colleagues. Benjamin Nathans and Kevin Platt did much to advance interdisciplinary research into dissidence and samizdat. This was true of Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov as well. Their work was particularly helpful to me.

I have taken lessons on being precise and working closely with community members on history that matters to them from historians of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union, including Mikhail Beizer and Yaacov Roʹi.

I owe a special debt to Polly Jones and to Kevin Platt for their helpful critique of this book in manuscript form.

At the University of Toronto, the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, along with Victoria College, afforded me wonderful possibilities for sharing my work in progress and for hosting colleagues working on the Soviet underground and related topics. Students in my classes on Late Soviet Culture and in my seminars on Public Reading provided great feedback and fresh ideas. Special thanks go to Ariel Leutheusser for prompting me to think harder about Michael Warner’s concepts and to Corinn Gerber for stimulating conversations about art and community publishing and the labor associated with it.

My processing of data related to Soviet Samizdat periodicals and development of this book benefited from the able assistance and helpful discussion provided by Anna Chukur, Maggie Gruszczynska, Tim Klähn, Anastasia Kostrioukova, Anastasia Lachine, Victoria Lyasota, Irina Sadovina, Roman Tashlitskyy, Brett Winestock, and others.

This book was greatly impacted by ideas and feedback from colleagues in the Book History and Print Culture program and from those involved with digital humanities at the University of Toronto, including Alexandra Bolintineanu, Alan Galey, Alexandra Gillespie, and Dan White.

The Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat would not have been possible without the wonderful support available at the University of Toronto Libraries from colleagues including Sian Miekle, Andrew Macalorum, Kelli Babcock, and Sunny Lee.

Awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and research funding from Victoria University supported the development of the Database of Soviet Samizdat Periodicals and the subsequent Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat.

The concepts and some material appearing in chapter 2, Giving Voice to Truth in Samizdat, were developed as part of my work on the article The Voices of Samizdat and Magnitizdat, slated to appear in the forthcoming Oxford Literature Handbooks: A Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture, edited by Mark Lipovetsky, Tomáš Glanc, Ilja Kukuj, Klavdia Smola, and Maria Engstrom. I appreciate their permission to use that material in this book.

An earlier version of chapter 3, Imagining Time in Samizdat, appeared as Literary Samizdat and Samizdat Publics, Enthymema 12 (2015) in the section Per i 25 anni dall’abolizione della censura nell’URSS, edited by Michail Talalay. I am grateful for permission to use parts of that article here.

The information provided in the appendix on Samizdat periodicals is a slightly modified version of the data published in A. Komaromi and G. Kuzovkin, Katalog periodiki Samizdata, 1956–1986 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Memorial, 2018).

As always, any omissions or mistakes are my own.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

Transliteration of Russian and other FSU-language words, names of people, and titles of works are provided according to modified Library of Congress guidelines. Original titles of samizdat periodicals are transliterated from non-Latin scripts. Personal names are rendered without diacritics above letters. City names are provided according to Soviet-era official (Russian) usage (Leningrad, not Saint Petersburg), reflecting standard spelling of those names as recorded in the GEOnet Names Server, https://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/.

Introduction

Samizdat and Underground Publics in the USSR

Samizdat (self-publishing) refers to the uncensored, grassroots system of self-publishing found in the USSR after Iosif Stalin and until perestroika: the spread of typewritten copies of uncensored works became one of the most distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet period. Under a regime that suppressed most street demonstrations and other manifestations of independent citizen initiatives, samizdat became the key form of alternative activity. The neologism samizdat entered various languages and inspired independent press movements in other Eastern bloc countries.¹ However, many political hopes for samizdat’s transformative potential proved unfounded. One of Svetlana Alexievich’s interviewees, Anna M., recalled with sadness in the post-Soviet era how much she believed in the power of sharing uncensored information: "People used to be put in jail for The Gulag Archipelago, they read it in secret, typed copies of it up on their typewriters, wrote it out by hand. I believed . . . that if thousands of people read it, everything would change. People would repent, tears would be shed."²

Anna M., like many of those interviewed by Alexievich, lamented the loss of belief associated with the Soviet era. During the late Soviet period, some Soviet citizens renewed their sense of passionate commitment by avidly producing, copying, and reading uncensored samizdat texts, just as they had earlier devoted themselves to building communism.³

Figure 1. A book with photographed pages of a Russian text, where the right page appears dimmer than the left. The amateur binding is partially torn, and the inside cover seen around the pages looks marbled. A thumb appears at the bottom, helping to hold the edition.

FIGURE 1. The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULAG) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One of the samizdat copies produced by Georgian dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Credit: Archive History of Dissidence in the USSR, International Memorial Society, f. 157.

The Soviet regime proved to be mostly impervious to the political demands of samizdat, although it was not invulnerable to the economic and intraparty forces that would eventually contribute to regime change in 1991.⁴ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s devastating account of the Stalin-era prison camps in The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULAG) had a major impact on readers in the USSR and abroad after it was published in 1973. However, the regime did not change because of it; authorities sent Solzhenitsyn into exile.⁵ They put another famous dissident, rights activist Andrei Sakharov, into internal exile, having prior to that sent the poet Iosif Brodskii, whom they called a parasite, to do hard labor. Repression of those outstanding individuals likely increased their stature as dissident heroes.⁶ However, the samizdat network ranged much more widely. The government imprisoned or expelled many other activists, including Baptist leader Georgii Vins, Hebrew teacher Iosif Begun, and feminist poet and activist Iuliia Voznesenskaia.⁷ Such actions demonstrated how easily the regime could deal with perceived enemies.

Samizdat was the lifeblood of alternative activity in the late Soviet period, but it cannot be credited with renewing civil society or causing the fall of the Soviet regime.⁸ As oral histories and memoirs make clear, Soviet citizens did not expect the end of the Soviet regime even during perestroika in the late 1980s. The overwhelming majority of samizdat writers and readers did not aim for such a goal. Nevertheless, a relatively broad cross section of the Soviet citizenry engaged actively with samizdat texts, which included a range of materials including repressed modernist literature, publications from abroad, bulletins documenting rights abuses, nonconformist literary and artistic works, and rock music zines. People devoted time to reading and typing such uncensored texts to pass them on to others. Although such activity could be risky, often it was not; the point for most people was not to challenge the regime so much as to participate in the development of knowledge and values among communities of readers. This activity helped them form new social networks and develop alternative views of the world and history. As a result, Soviet social imagination opened to new possibilities. Something did change.

That change cannot be adequately explained by a binary model of heroic dissident opposition to the Soviet regime. Instead, this book treats samizdat as an alternative textual culture that facilitated the formation of new public communities in the Soviet Union after Stalin. A powerful alternative to Soviet print, samizdat—described as pre-Gutenberg by Anna Akhmatova, and more flexibly dubbed extra-Gutenberg by the conceptualist poet Lev Rubinshtein—did not replace or displace the dominant order of official print production in the USSR. However, samizdat did facilitate alternative epistemologies and new ways of imagining one’s self and the world for its readers.⁹ Richly generative of original creative work in art and literature, the samizdat system also afforded new potentials for social poiesis or the construction of communities in the form of underground publics.¹⁰ We can begin to account for these potentials by reviewing the role of print culture in establishing the modern forms of social imagination. Samizdat, in retrospect, looks intriguingly like a low-tech predecessor of the current digital and global age of extra-Gutenberg textual production and circulation, which poses such challenges to established ideas about how publics function. This book begins with two broad points. First, Soviet samizdat should be understood primarily through its networks of readers rather than through its challenge to the Soviet regime. Second, the samizdat system and the late Soviet underground must be considered in relation to the official Soviet context that generated it and upon which it depended.¹¹ Soviet samizdat was thus bound to the late socialist context and can help illuminate it. In addition, the history of the late Soviet underground might provide a useful perspective for thinking about the transition from an era dominated by print to the more fluid textual condition we all now share.

What Is Samizdat?

The term samizdat, a neologism meaning self-published, comes from sam- (self) and -izdat, short for izdatel′stvo (publishing house). The Moscow poet Nikolai Glazkov coined Samsebiaizdat as a parody of official Soviet publishing houses (such as Gosizdat, State Publishing House; or Detizdat, Children’s Publishing House). Glazkov used the term as an imprint for the collections of poetry he produced at home beginning in the 1940s.¹² Samizdat came eventually to refer to a system of uncensored production and circulation of texts that began in the Soviet Union after Stalin.¹³ Historians and other researchers have commonly identified the beginning of the samizdat system with the circulation of Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, which he delivered on February 25, 1956, following the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In that speech to a closed session of party members, First Secretary Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality.¹⁴ This origin story demonstrates the crucial role of the Soviet state in generating its alternative public sphere. Party officials read the speech in special meetings held around the country, and copies of the text leaked out to the general populace. The text of Khrushchev’s speech also made its way to the New York Times, where it appeared on June 4, 1956.¹⁵ We should take note of the extraordinarily active morphing of the text of Khrushchev’s speech through various formats, from oral to written, from official but restricted publication to spontaneous unauthorized copies and, eventually, to publication in the West, in what came to be known as tamizdat. Such mutability of textual forms, driven by demand for hard-to-obtain material, came to characterize samizdat. Khrushchev’s speech affected the social and political context; it raised important questions about how to address the traumatic past of Soviet society without clearly indicating who might participate in deciding how it would be addressed.¹⁶ The powerful pressure to respond and the ambiguity about who was authorized to do so helped foster a range of responses, including a turn to uncensored production and circulation of texts as a newly viable channel for communicating with fellow citizens.

The resulting samizdat system developed in the 1960s and 1970s and through the early 1980s into an extensive and ramified network, with publics organized around a range of issues and interests. The end of the system came after 1986, when perestroika fundamentally changed the situation and made it possible for the much more voluminous informal press to appear in relatively permissive conditions.¹⁷ The OED defines samizdat in terms of clandestine or illegal literature; yet samizdat differed in significant ways from the prerevolutionary underground press. Samizdat authors and readers typically did not pursue political regime change.¹⁸ Moreover, the use of underground printing presses distinguished prerevolutionary clandestine production and circulation from late Soviet samizdat, which people rarely produced on actual presses.¹⁹ It was easier and supposedly safer to produce samizdat on typewriters, using carbon paper to make a few copies at a time—generally five, sometimes six or seven.²⁰ People also reproduced texts using photographic cameras—this method worked well for editions printed abroad and smuggled back to the USSR, although fewer people had the capacity to manage printing many photographs, and the product was relatively bulky. In both cases, the dispersed reproduction corresponded to the extra-Gutenberg nature of samizdat; the diffuse nature of the production and distribution of samizdat involved people throughout the network acting as authors and publishers as well as readers.

Peter Steiner noted that neither the content nor the formal qualities of a text could be considered determinative of samizdat status.²¹ The line between what was and what was not acceptable to Soviet authorities might blur or change over time. Examples of works that were or might have been acceptable, but which at some point became unacceptable, included an analysis of events in World War II by General Petro Grigorenko, a chapter of G. K. Chesterton’s book on St. Francis of Assisi, poems by Marina Tsvetaeva from 1920, and a review of a Deep Purple album; all of these texts appeared in samizdat. In addition, a work formerly allowed by the Soviet regime—such as Isaak Babel’s Wandering Stars (Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy), a film script originally published in Moscow in 1926—proved impossible to find in the postwar era until it was republished by a specialized tamizdat publisher Ardis Publishers in Ann Arbor, Michigan—and smuggled back into the USSR to be copied and passed around. Texts like this were also samizdat.²²

Aleksandr Daniel′ proposed treating samizdat as a mode of existence [of the text] (sposob bytovaniia [teksta]), which accommodates better the capacious corpus we find because it avoids discriminating between what counts as samizdat and what does not based on content.²³ This approach represents a departure from that of early surveys and analyses of samizdat, which sought to describe samizdat via ideological trends and contemporary sociopolitical issues. One early survey was written by the rights activist Liudmila Alekseeva, who first published her history of Soviet dissidence in 1984; her book remains an important source covering various national and religious groups as well as the movement for rights in the USSR. Alekseeva relied mainly on facts compiled in the sixty-five issues of the samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events (Khronika tekushchikh sobytii).

Figure 2. A copy of a typescript page in Russian with an all-caps title, a block epigraph, and a list of content items under the date.

FIGURE 2. Cover of Chronicle of Current Events, no. 1, 1968. Credit: Archive History of Dissidence in the USSR, International Memorial Society, f. 153.

Other early efforts were made by Radio Liberty, which had a mandate from the US government to cover Soviet dissent in the Cold War era, and where staff established a Samizdat Section in 1971 to collect, process, and make available samizdat texts for Western researchers. Radio Liberty also broadcast news and discussions based on those texts by short-wave radio for Soviet audiences.²⁴ Its publication series Collection of Samizdat Documents (Sobranie dokumentov samizdata, 1972–78) and Materials of Samizdat (Materialy samizdata, 1975–91) presented a wide range of uncensored texts. However, there were important and systematic lacunae, including literary and artistic texts, as well as writing about music and ethnic cultural editions, which lacked obvious relevance for policymakers. Therefore, studies that relied only on the Radio Liberty collection were, necessarily, incomplete. Numerous other sources have appeared since the 1990s. Combined with the Radio Liberty records and the holdings in other archival collections, these sources fill out the more complete picture considered here.²⁵

Because the production and circulation of samizdat texts—which were not printed books—was not institutionalized, the number of texts and readers varied widely and depended on actions taken by dispersed individuals throughout a circulation network. In most cases, we must rely on recollections by participants and records of information collected by people involved. In Anthology of Samizdat (Antologiia samizdata, 2005), for example, we find occasional information about print runs and circulation: the literary journal Avant-garde (Avangard, no. 1, 1965), which was edited in Moscow by the poet Leonid Gubanov, was reportedly reproduced in two sets of carbon copies on a typewriter to make about ten to fourteen copies, which circulated primarily among his group of friends. Although selected verses from the journal were republished later in the émigré journal Facets (Grani), the journal itself was not republished. No copies of it have surfaced in archives.²⁶

Similarly, information about nonpolitical samizdat editions in Leningrad came largely from personal archives and information furnished by editors and their friends and acquaintances.²⁷ We can supplement such information with other archived and published evidence, including copies of samizdat editions found in various repositories, as well as additional sources such as the handwritten record of samizdat journals recorded by Vladimir Erl′, and the pioneering early bibliography published by Aleksandr Suetnov in the 1990s.²⁸ Other records, including the capacious and idiosyncratic five-volume Blue Lagoon anthology, compiled by Konstantin Kuz′minskii and Grigorii Kovalev, further demonstrate the remarkably powerful impulse among samizdat writers and readers to chronicle and preserve the history of the uncensored texts they encountered and the groups producing and reading them.²⁹ This study of samizdat, highlighting its extra-Gutenberg status, accords special attention to the variety of sources that capture information about the texts and the voices and labor of the people involved.³⁰

From Dissidents to Underground Publics

Vladimir Kozlov described what he thought was problematic dissident-centrism among historians of the late Soviet era, who focused too much on intellectual activists in the capital cities. Kozlov aimed to draw attention to more popular and widespread examples of sedition (kramola), which he felt had not been taken seriously. In the introduction to the English edition of Kozlov’s book, Sheila Fitzpatrick claimed that popular sedition and intellectual dissidence apparently had almost no connection with each other.³¹ However, forms of dissidence and alternative publishing existed among evangelical Christian groups, as well as informal literary and rock music subcultures that challenge the characterization of alternative or dissident culture as a phenomenon limited to the capital cities and the intellectual elites. This book shows that uncensored samizdat publications ranged far beyond the capital cities and intellectual classes. However, this alternative activity needs to be contextualized within broader social shifts and challenges to official narratives and policies also occurring within the official culture. After all, the discussion of the Stalinist past was encouraged by the party and, according to Polly Jones, contesting the limits and terms of that discussion intensified even as the party tried to control, and ultimately to silence, the discussion of the Stalinism that it had done so much to unleash in the first place.³² This dynamic applied mutatis mutandis to other formerly taboo issues, questions of rights and the rule oflaw, and forms of cultural experimentation, which began to spill over from the official sphere into samizdat activity under Khrushchev, gradually taking root in the gray zones and the underground as officials reined in censored publications.

Many scholars considering the topic in the post-Soviet era have challenged reductive binaries separating official culture and opposition. In writing about samizdat, Serguei Oushakine argued that the discourse of rights activists mimicked official Soviet discourse.³³ Oushakine’s focus on political samizdat reflected a limited corpus, but his point about the influence of official culture on alternative, uncensored expression is important. Indeed, changes from the top—beginning with Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, but not limited to it—tended to stimulate citizen engagement both within and outside official institutions. This included, for example, revisionist scholars working for the leading Soviet history journal Questions of History (Voprosy istorii), as well as students and mentors working within the officially established literary associations (LITOs, Literaturnye ob″edineniia) in Leningrad.³⁴ Lines can be drawn between the official revisionist historians and unofficial historical investigation and writing for the samizdat thematic collection Memory (Pamiat′) discussed in chapter 1. In addition, the LITOs incubated authors who would later produce unofficial works.³⁵ In the well-known case of the Novyi mir journal, where Solzhenitsyn published before putting out his uncensored works, ground-breaking publications in the Thaw era provoked substantial reader reaction. Denis Kozlov, writing about Novyi mir, argued that close involvement in political life characterized not only dissidents but also a great many other citizens.³⁶ Natalia Roudakova also critiqued assumptions about a 180-degree shift from official propaganda to press freedom with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms. Soviet-era journalists and their readers also sought truth and justice, she pointed out, a quest modeled on that of prominent justice-seekers who inspired the Russian Revolution such as Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky.³⁷ In this, they shared much with rights activists working in samizdat.

These studies suggest we may qualify Alexei Yurchak’s observations about the disaffection members of the last Soviet generation felt. Yurchak’s influential account of the late Socialist era stressed the structural issues of a system whose discourse had come to seem hollow so that performative values predominated or even displaced belief in the constative truth of statements.³⁸ While skepticism to heroism, to dissidence, and to challenging the regime was commonly expressed even by those who engaged in underground or alternative activity, a commitment to finding and communicating some kind of truth motivated many at this time.³⁹ As Juliane Fürst put it of people engaged in forms of an alternative culture in the USSR and across the Eastern bloc: "the term in circulation was ‘truth.’ In the Soviet case this did not refer to the truth expressed in [the official newspaper] Pravda and in the Russian term pravda, but the deeper truth of the term istina that went beyond the meaning of merely being factually true."⁴⁰ Rights activists and others did search for truthful facts, but Fürst’s comment highlights the search for a deeper truth, which people sought in official publications before or even as they turned to alternative or underground communications in hopes it could be more freely expressed there.

Samizdat was more than a set of texts. Samizdat—particularly as it became a system in the later 1960s and beyond—reflected a practice of cultural production and circulation that generated and maintained an alternative social space within official Soviet culture. Methods from book history can help us understand this social space of samizdat communication circuits and their relation to the surrounding Soviet context. Gordon Johnston’s study of samizdat from 1999, while limited to the Radio Liberty corpus and earlier accounts, helped frame samizdat as a meaningful variation on book history. Johnston referenced Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, which traces the life cycle of a book from Author and Publisher to Readers.⁴¹ Johnston noted Darnton’s caution that reading remains the most difficult stage in the cycle to understand.⁴² Darnton commented on the difficulty of capturing people’s reading habits and ways of interpreting meaning. An informal system like samizdat implied extra complications in determining the numbers of readers—and even numbers of copies—for any given text.

Other consequences of the nonprint or extra-Gutenberg status of samizdat texts include the blurring of roles outlined by Darnton. Samizdat editor Natal′ia Gorbanevskaia typed seven copies of early issues of the Moscow samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events. As Mark W. Hopkins described the distribution, One [copy] went to a Western correspondent, another was saved in order to produce more copies, and the remaining five copies were given out. In the already established form for distributing samizdat, recipients were expected to reproduce further copies.⁴³ By the end of the 1960s, people in Soviet courts and abroad, like Soviet readers, recognized that samizdat was a system.⁴⁴ In December 1968, it was clear that the Chronicle was reaching many readers at home and abroad. Gorbanevskaia reflected on the role of the bulletin as a regular source of information in an anonymous editorial that month. There she also noted the role of the bulletin’s readers as its volunteer publishers.⁴⁵ In a subsequent issue, she exhorted readers acting in that capacity to be extremely careful: "A number of inaccuracies occur during the process of duplicating copies of the Chronicle. There are mistakes in names and surnames, in dates and numbers. The quantity of them grows as the Chronicle is retyped again and again, and they cannot be corrected according to the context, as can other misprints.⁴⁶ This mattered because the bulletin’s credibility as a source of information depended on accuracy. In addition, mistakes could be legally actionable. The article of law in the Russian republic designed to control samizdat was 190-1. It stated: The systematic dissemination by word of mouth of deliberately false statements derogatory to the Soviet state and social system, as also the preparation or dissemination of such statements in written, printed, or any other form, is punishable by three years of detention, or one year of corrective labor, or a fine up to one hundred rubles.⁴⁷ Errors might be construed as falsehoods. Samizdat could be and was seized and used as evidence against samizdat authors, editors, and readers. If being punished for the text drew readers closer to the status of the author" as defined by Michel Foucault, punishment (or the threat of it) was not necessary to motivate active engagement in samizdat.⁴⁸ People might derive authority from having or creating copies of rare and sought-after texts, such as poems by Leonid Aronzon, a book by Vladimir Nabokov, or an early émigré edition of Russian poetry.⁴⁹ At the same time, their investment of time and labor in the text helped validate and potentially increase its value. Of course, people could also pen their own compositions for samizdat: in this system, authorship depended on uptake by fellow citizen readers, not on KGB attention.

People resorted to a variety of spatial metaphors to talk about the alternative culture sustained by samizdat circulation. The word dissidence (dissidentstvo), widely applied in Western press coverage of activists in this period, contains that spatial implication within it, since it derives etymologically from Latin words meaning to sit apart (dis-sidere).⁵⁰ Soviet participants in alternative culture shunned the term, which was understandable, given the regular vilification of dissidents in the official Soviet press. Rights activists in Moscow referred to themselves as pravozashchitniki (rights defenders), although people from other groups often called them dissidents or democratic dissidents. Rights activists also embraced a term with Russian roots, inakomysliashchii, or one who thinks otherwise, seen as a less provocative term.⁵¹ This terminological shift was not lost on the KGB, where people were not buying the supposed legitimacy signaled by the Russian root. Iurii Andropov, speaking in 1977 as head of the KGB for the celebration of 100 years since Feliks Dzerzhinskii’s birth, talked about the term dissident, which, as he claimed: "amounts to a clever propagandistic invention designed to lead the public (obshchestvnnost′) astray. Translated, this word [dissident], as we know, means ‘one who thinks otherwise’ (inakomysliashchii). Having put this word into circulation, bourgeois propaganda calculates that it may portray the situation as though the Soviet order does not tolerate the independent thought of its citizens. . . . This picture has nothing in common with reality.⁵² In this speech Andropov also identified recalcitrant dissidents with criminals who needed to be disciplined and, when necessary, separated out of the good, unified body of Soviet citizens: we try to help those who lose their way, we try . . . to dispel their mistaken ideas. We must act differently in those cases where some of those whom we refer to as ‘thinking otherwise’ (inakomysliashchie) begin by their acts to violate Soviet laws. There is a tiny number of such people among us, as there are, unfortunately, of thieves and bribe-takers, speculators and other criminal transgressors. Those and the others harm our society and therefore should be punished in full accordance with the demands of Soviet law."⁵³

According to Andropov’s presentation of the situation, those who could not be convinced to bring their independent thinking (which was, in his view, actually foreign-influenced) into line with the conceptual-political unity of the Soviet people were criminals or incapable of proper thought. Such people should be subject to forceful forms of persuasion and isolation from the rest of society. At stake was what Andropov characterized as the Soviet Union’s greatest achievement—the conceptual and political unity of Soviet society.⁵⁴

Such unity, admitting of no difference between the party and the people or between government and civil society seemed totalitarian or at least undemocratic even to critics on the left.⁵⁵ In the USSR, those involved with samizdat and alternative activity sought a space apart, although many believed that acting with some remove from that party-led unity would be good for the whole society. This alternative sphere was not a space of total freedom and independence, but it was a place of difference, informed by values or perspectives not sufficiently accounted for in official print and statements by the leaders. Other terms for this space apart include unofficial culture or second culture. Such terms were used to refer to uncensored literary activity, which typically did not draw the same kind of scrutiny from authorities as rights activism but which did sustain a space apart for thinking, writing, and behaving differently.⁵⁶ Scholars have also embraced the term underground, which some in Leningrad borrowed from English to use in their own form (andegraund) for unofficial culture.⁵⁷ People