Samizdat, that is, the production and circulation of texts without the involvement of the state publishing houses and the censor’s office, was a mass phenomenon in the later decades of the Soviet Union, during the years under Brezhnev commonly referred to as Stagnation (Zastoi). After Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Stalinist ‘personality cult’ at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, the repressions eased and the central bureaucracy released its grip on culture. The resulting resurgence of cultural activity was one of the major phenomena of the period that became known as the Thaw (Ottepel’). The state, however, retained its monopoly on publishing the written word. This brief spell of relative openness unleashed forces in society that proved impossible to suppress when the regime returned to a more restrictive stance.
There were many genres of samizdat, and their origins, as well as the driving forces behind them, were heterogeneous. However, it seems fair to say that these driving forces can be divided into three main categories. The first was a hunger for a greater variety of literary and other reading matter, as well as for information. This hunger affected a broad spectrum of educated society, and these people became readers of samizdat. The second was a hunger for platforms for creative self-expression that were not subject to the aesthetic and/or political proscriptions of the state. Those who experienced this hunger became samizdat authors. The third category concerned the awareness that the Soviet government had been violating, and continued to violate, human rights in contravention of its own legislation. Those who felt compelled to engage with this situation, for example by collecting and publicizing relevant information to their fellow citizens, became what we call dissidents. Dissidents made samizdat famous beyond the Soviet Union, but remained a minority among its practitioners. The three categories overlapped significantly; naturally, all of those who belong to the second and third category also form part of the first.
Samizdat was a system of informal networks which, as a bottom line, supplied reading material that could not be obtained through the official channels. This reading material ranged from pre-revolutionary poetry to religious texts; or, at the extreme end of the spectrum, yoga manuals and the Kama Sutra. And then there were political texts – often concerned with human rights issues – that could earn the reader a prison sentence if they were found in his or her possession. It is impossible to give a reliable figure for how many people were involved at every stage, from merely reading to creating and disseminating texts. Moreover, this figure varied widely depending on the decade. Overall estimates range from hundreds of thousands to several million people. And while samizdat activity was naturally highest in big cities, especially the capital city of Moscow, it was present across the entire territory of the USSR.
In the three decades since the end of the Soviet Union, much has been written on samizdat and its protagonists – whether texts or people. In the last decade, scholarship has become increasingly diverse in its approaches, involving researchers from a multitude of disciplines. This book studies neither innovative and/or scandalous texts nor courageous individuals and their ideas and struggles. It is not a history of samizdat or of one of its genres, and it uses cultural theory sparingly. It is a book about people. My focus is on the informal networks that gave birth to the samizdat phenomenon and become harder to research with each passing year. While testimonies about samizdat are many, very few focus on the practicalities of reading, producing and distributing texts and specifically on the structures that enabled these activities. Those witness accounts that do exist languish in archives or are published in specialist volumes or across various, often obscure, websites with no obvious link between them.
Samizdat networks, more or less clandestine and with informal structures and transient membership, were driven by personal acquaintance and mutual trust. De facto illegal, they left few if any records. While it is sometimes possible closely to analyse one particular group, especially if it pursued a dedicated aim, for example, the production of a journal, the phenomenon as a whole cannot be analysed systematically, much less quantitatively. All that is left of the multiple overlapping networks is a hole-ridden tapestry, impossible to restore. Human memory is irreplaceable when it comes to exploring the aspects of samizdat that depend on relationships. Memory is random and fallible, and yet eyewitness accounts have two invaluable benefits: they reflect the particular as opposed to the general, and they are narrative. And it is this type of information, if any, that enables those who remain outside the experience not only to accumulate knowledge, but to understand. Moreover, when many eyewitness accounts come together in one place, they achieve something greater than the sum of their parts: they recreate, as far as it is possible, an impression of the atmosphere in which the remembered phenomenon took place. One poignant example of the power of the eyewitness account is Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev’s testimony to the importance of poetry in the years after Stalin’s death. Over six pages, in informal and convoluted style and with the help of many examples and quotations, they explain how it came to be that ‘the flood of poetry was attractive in itself, made us happy and was understood by many as a phenomenon of the political spring’.1 A story such as theirs might enable a present-day reader to comprehend why a new poet such as Evgenii Evtushenko drew crowds large enough to fill a football stadium. Simply stating that, in the early 1960s, the public readings of certain poets attracted tens of thousands of people does not have the same effect.
This book explores thematic clusters while foregrounding the voices of individuals with personal experience of reading, reproducing, editing and circulating samizdat texts. Most of the testimonies have been collected especially for this study via an online survey and a series of narrative interviews. In addition, I have drawn on a number of published interviews and selected memoirs, as well as archival sources. Bringing these testimonies together in one volume fulfils three different functions: to preserve and publicize the newly collected testimonies; to promote rare published sources that are unknown or hard to access; and to provide a robust empirical base that allows us to conceptualize several different types of samizdat networks.
Chapter 1 conceptualizes the samizdat reader in as far as it is possible to define them. Particular attention is paid to the multiplicity of roles the reader fulfilled in a process that was devoid of the middlemen active in print culture, such as printing presses and editors. The chapter also outlines the challenges facing the researcher who sets out to study the samizdat reader, and introduces theoretical ideas about samizdat networks.
Chapter 2 evaluates the responses to an online survey for samizdat readers, gathered in the period 2017–2018. This survey allowed me to test several widespread hypotheses about samizdat, derived from ‘common knowledge’ and the testimony of a small number of well-known samizdat activists, against empirical data. It also throws into sharp relief the extraordinary role the figure of the reader played in the process of samizdat, this time from a practical angle.
The remaining four chapters investigate ever more specifically defined networks. Chapter 3 is dedicated to a lamentably under-researched group: the typists who produced samizdat on a larger scale. Their commitment was pivotal to the process, especially to the production of periodicals, which became common in the 1970s. This chapter is mainly based on a series of narrative interviews I collected in St Petersburg in 2015.
Throughout the 1970s, samizdat grew both more professional and more stratified. Distinct networks created institutions, such as libraries and journals, as well as literary criticism, conferences and prizes. These structures required a greater degree of organization and commitment; the roles of individuals became more specific.
Chapter 4 examines associations for the targeted exchange of samizdat texts; these associations effectively fulfilled the role of libraries. Their members copied and disseminated texts on a larger scale; some organizers left behind documentation and memoirs, thus providing the researcher with valuable case studies. This chapter is mainly based on published interviews and archival materials. The samizdat librarians studied for this chapter were committed to increasing the number of people who had access to alternative reading material; the libraries were squarely focused on the needs of the reader.
Chapters 5 and 6 are closely related. They comprise a series of case studies followed by a theoretical analysis of overlapping networks that effectively mimicked the regular institutions of print culture. The literary samizdat journals that emerged in Leningrad in the mid-1970s created communities that remained stable for a number of years. The texts published in these journals were devoid of the sensational appeal of a Solzhenitsyn novel, and they reflected a parallel world inside Soviet culture. Journal communities usually left ample documentation, first and foremost in the form of the journals themselves, but also in the memoirs and scholarly work subsequently undertaken by their editors. These chapters are based on narrative interviews with several journal editors, conducted in 2015, as well as a large number of published sources and scholarship. Perhaps the most surprising insight granted by these case studies is that the journals were orientated towards the needs of the unofficial writers rather than the readership. As such, they help us understand how samizdat networks came to create an alternative cultural sphere, fostering an environment in which authors outside the official cultural process could grow as artists. At the same time, the journals emerge as a structure built on, and ultimately specific to, the Soviet system. Studying their internal processes and their relationship to official culture affords a number of theoretical insights which are to some degree applicable to samizdat as a whole.