This study has thrown light on an underestimated and under-investigated aspect of samizdat: its social significance. Samizdat depended on networks, and it created and sustained networks in turn. All the specific groups I investigated for this study underlined the absolute centrality of personal relationships to their samizdat activity: those who filled in the reader survey confirmed that their reading was defined by whom they knew – the anecdotal lonely bibliophile would have found it difficult to source significant amounts of samizdat. None of the typists I interviewed would have accepted a commission from a stranger. Samizdat libraries, which needed to vet potential readers carefully to avoid persecution, worked on the principle that ‘librarians’ would distribute texts to their own acquaintances. Literary journals, deprived of the promotion channels available to official publications, depended on personal networks for sourcing texts and distributing the finished product.
It follows that, far from being concerned merely with the production and circulation of textual material, samizdat networks were important social spaces, straddling the private and public spheres in a unique way. Originating in domestic environments, they allowed people to interact around topics deemed inappropriate or unimportant by an environment that advocated collectivism and a single, tightly regulated cultural space, thus forming alternative publics. Moreover, samizdat networks were open to outsiders vetted through personal acquaintance, and they distributed information beyond their immediate circle through a ‘snowball’ system according to which each participant involved their respective acquaintances outside the immediate network. Thus, the contribution of samizdat to the ever-increasing stratification of Soviet society in the last decades of the Soviet Union’s existence should be assessed in social as well as informational or political terms.
Studying samizdat with an emphasis on social aspects yields arguments in favour of the influential thesis put forward by Harvard sociologist Harrison White to the effect that human beings are defined relationally: that is, by who they associate with, for example colleagues and friends, rather than by their attributes, for example a particular political stance. According to this thesis, society should be understood not as an aggregate of individuals but as defined by networks.1 The data analysed for this volume convincingly demonstrate that it was not necessarily a person’s political opinion, or their taste in reading material, that determined whether they read samizdat or how much and what kind of samizdat they read. Rather, their exposure and access to samizdat depended on whom they knew and interacted with: that is, the social circles in which they moved. Samizdat emerged from personal relationships and fostered new contacts at the same time. In other words, an individual’s belonging to the intellectual underground was defined by the company they kept, rather than any one attribute such as political or aesthetic opposition to the Soviet system. This finding runs against prevailing assumptions, especially with regard to dissidents, and might be one of the reasons why samizdat and dissidence are so often conflated.
As we have seen, only a minority of reading networks grew into and/or overlapped with groups that openly expressed some form of protest against the practices of the Soviet government. The fact that some samizdat was deemed explicitly ‘anti-Soviet’ does not stop us from concluding that the phenomenon itself was perfectly ‘Soviet’. Much of late Soviet society used informal channels to satisfy various needs rather than rely on official institutions that were widely deemed inefficient. The best-known system of this kind is probably blat, the elaborate system of mutual favours; the black-market economy is another example of a widely used unofficial channel. And samizdat constitutes yet another such system, or cluster of systems. The networks that produced samizdat provided reading material, satisfying some of the hunger for information in an effectively closed society. They also created publishing platforms that provided a marginalized generation of creative individuals with some opportunities for writerly fulfilment. With an often extraordinary degree of commitment and creativity, the participants in samizdat managed to overcome adverse conditions and compensate for a chronic lack of resources by mobilizing others who desired the same objects, activities or spaces. In this respect, samizdat is a very Soviet phenomenon. Moreover, as a reading culture, late Soviet samizdat was fuelled to no small degree by a specifically Soviet bibliocentrism – worship of the written word – combined with a social sphere in which informal networks played an ever-increasing role. In the field of samizdat, the evolution of informal networks was driving a process of professionalization that resulted in the emergence of alternative institutions such as libraries of samizdat and samizdat periodicals.
I would argue that samizdat’s gradual disappearance – or absorption into ‘ordinary’ culture – during Perestroika is a further indicator of its ‘Soviet’ nature. When official culture began to admit plurality of opinion and privately owned printing outlets, the binary opposition between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ culture that had characterized the late Soviet period was undermined, and ultimately obliterated altogether. With Perestroika, the heterogeneous community around samizdat lost the framework that had defined it. Without the quasi-illegal situation, and the concomitant scarcity of material resources and the need for discretion, there was no longer any need for self-referential groups that tended to admit only those who were already to some degree insiders. This process can be seen particularly clearly in the example of the literary journals discussed in this volume. At first they furnished an alternative to official literary culture, as its obverse or shadow side, providing writers not published in the official press with an outlet. In the 1980s, official and unofficial culture began a process of ever-accelerating rapprochement, when Gorbachev’s government relaxed censorship as part of its reform policies. As a result, previously forbidden texts began to appear in official editions and the ban on publishing without state control was lifted. The proliferation during these years of small presses and journals that were very similar to still-existing samizdat periodicals suggests two conclusions: samizdat practice had prepared a significant group of people for action as independent writers, journalists and publishers. The second conclusion is more narrowly based on my observations regarding the literary journals in Leningrad: once this became possible, samizdat-type journals and the collectives around them found their way into official culture so easily precisely because they had been modelled on the familiar forms of official culture all along. Perhaps paradoxically, then, the moment the journals had achieved their purported goal – to bring new literature to a larger readership – their existence became superfluous.
This study has also shown that existing sociological models are of limited use for describing all of samizdat (reading). Differentiated theoretical conclusions can only ever apply to one particular network, or to groups that share closely defined characteristics. An example of a network cluster that can be studied effectively with the help of a theoretical model is, once again, the literary periodicals. The groups that produced and read these journals share enough characteristics to enable us to conceptualize them as communities of practice. But this model, and all others, loses plausibility when applied to samizdat as a whole. This is because the phenomenon was heterogeneous, not only with regard to the material being read but also the origin and motivation of those involved and the level of involvement itself, which ranged from occasional reading to authorship, dissemination and conspiracy to running an illegal library. Even simply ‘reading’ is not a satisfactory common denominator. It is true that, on the most basic level, different kinds of people felt an attraction to samizdat because it satisfied a desire for information that was not otherwise available due to censorship and cultural isolation. In this sense, samizdat meets the definition of a reading community, or a cluster of related reading communities. Broadly defined, a reading community is formed by a social process based on shared reading. Moreover, as DeNel Rehberg Sedo points out, ‘reading communities of the past often exposed their members to learning opportunities that were not available within the institutionalized education system’.2 The social aspect, combined with the emphasis on education in the broadest sense, applies to samizdat as a whole, and the attentive researcher will certainly find individual groups/networks that can be classified exclusively as reading communities. However, samizdat explodes the theoretical framework of the reading community; at least, as long as we do not find a way to expand this framework to encompass production and distribution of texts.
Let us now return to the social aspect of samizdat. As we have seen, reading and other activities centred on samizdat texts brought people together and created community. However, samizdat readers shared these activities not just with a local circle of friends that were known by name. Often, samizdat provided readers with a sense of belonging to a bigger, imagined community. Samizdat was essentially what sociologist Boris Dubin has called ‘literature as information and initiation’, the latter term emphasizing the way in which reading samizdat functioned as a token of belonging to a particular cultural sphere.3 Anatolii Vershik, co-editor of the samizdat review journal Summa, describes this community when he says that ‘any person of our mindset would have chosen the same books’.4 The books Vershik is referring to are the iconic titles of samizdat. It is no accident that reading preferences were the bottom line of community belonging. One Russian idiom that can be used to describe a like-minded person is: ‘We have read the same books’ (my chitali te zhe knigi). Effectively, samizdat created an ‘imagined community’: a ‘mass-mediated collectivity where members may not all know each other but where each shares the idea of a common belonging’.5 This quotation has been lifted from its context, but it fits the phenomenon of samizdat; the capacity of samizdat to create a feeling of belonging is a persuasive argument in favour of its power as a medium.