Introduction

1Samizdat, that is, the publication 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. It is impossible to give a reliable figure of how many people were involved on all levels, from merely reading to creating and disseminating texts. Moreover, this figure varied widely depending on the decade we consider. Overall estimates range from hundreds of thousands to several million people. And while samizdat activity was naturally highest in big cities, especially the capital, it was present on the entire territory of the USSR. As the government retained a monopoly on publishing the written word, samizdat was de-facto illegal under Soviet law.

2In this chapter I will discuss samizdat as a reading culture with the help of research that targets the ordinary samizdat reader, in as far as it is possible to define him or her. The main body of data used for this piece was gathered during 2017 with the help of an online survey. This allows me to test several widespread hypotheses about samizdat, derived from ‘common knowledge’ and the personal experience of individuals, against empirical data. It also throws into sharp relief the extraordinary role the figure of the reader played in the process of samizdat. The results of the survey-questionnaire are discussed in detail in the second part of the chapter.

1. What We Know About Samizdat and Samizdat Reading

1.1. What was Samizdat?

3Samizdat emerged in the second half of the 1950s on the crest of the poetry boom that saw emerging poets such as Evgenii Evtushenko fill entire stadiums. Enthusiasm for poetry inspired cultural initiatives that were organised by interested citizens rather than any official structure, such as the weekly gatherings on Mayakovsky Square from 1958 onwards, where large groups of young people would read poetry out loud. For the centrally organised Soviet cultural sphere that had just emerged from Stalinism, such spontaneous initiatives were a novelty.

4New poets such as Evtushenko, Andrei Voznesenskii, Bella Akhmadulina and others constitute one group that enthralled the reading public. The other group was the Silver Age poets, i.e. writers who were famous before the 1917 revolution and whose work was frequently not re-published. Some poets, notably Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandel’shtam, produced a significant body of work after the revolution, which was never published, or published in tiny print runs. These texts re-emerged slowly during the 1950s and 1960s¹ and had a huge influence on reading tastes and ultimately on the writing techniques of new poets. Readers who had access to Silver Age poetry, often through pre-revolutionary editions, would copy poems out, frequently by hand, and share them with their acquaintances. Samizdat was born.

5This process is described in many first-hand accounts and the respondents to our questionnaire confirm its mechanics: “my first texts were my mum’s ‘lists’ of Esenin’s poetry (respondent #22, *1976)”.² One respondent dutifully recorded the characteristic mixture of old and new poetry: “A lot of poetry was circulating. People were copying, by hand, Tsvetaeva from the books published in the 1920s in tiny print runs, and Gumilev, but also [Naum] Korzhavin and [Iosif] Brodskii. I myself copied little, but provided many texts for people to copy.” (#64, *1956).³

6The term ‘samizdat’ became attached to this phenomenon in the 1960s, but it pre-dates the mass practice of circulating texts in this way. Its origin is commonly attributed to Nikolai Glazkov who, during the 1940s, gave self-bound typescripts of his prose miniatures to his friends, adorned with the word ‘samsebiaizdat’ (self-publishing house), a pun on state publishing houses such as ‘Litizdat’ (Literature Publishing House) or ‘Gosizdat’ (State Publishing House) in the place where you would expect to find the name of the publishing house.⁴ Thus samizdat was, from the very beginning, also an outlet for contemporary writers who could not, or did not try to, publish their texts in the official press. Some of the best-known Russian writers of the late twentieth century owe all or most of their reputation to samizdat. Among them are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), whose Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULAG, published in Paris in 1973) eclipsed the fame of the earlier, officially published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha, 1962) and the poet Iosif Brodskii (1940-1996). Both of them are Nobel Prize winners. Others include Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990), Elena Shvarts (1948-2010) and Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940-2007).

7From the mid-1960s onwards, samizdat began to include material relating to history, religion, politics, public affairs and other topics; it was also increasingly supplemented by texts published abroad and smuggled back into the Soviet Union (‘tamizdat’). The texts circulated in samizdat have been scrupulously collected and, in many cases, reproduced in print form. Iconic texts, such as Solzhenitsyn’s novels and Brodskii’s poetry, were published abroad, often decades before the first Soviet or Russian editions. By now, lesser-known literary texts and political writings have been collected, too. The following overview of sources is indicative, but does not make a claim to completeness.

8Two major sources exist in both book form and online: Viacheslav Igrunov’s Anthology of Samizdat (Antologiia samizdata) is divided into sections for poetry, prose and social journalism (publitsistika).⁵ The section on unofficial poetry collected in Samizdat of the Century (Samizdat veka) has been incorporated into the Russian Virtual Library (Russkaia virtual’naia biblioteka).⁶ The archives and records of Radio Liberty, which broadcast samizdat back to the Soviet Union, are in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, with additional material held in the Open Society Archive at the Central European University in Budapest; many of the samizdat broadcasts were made accessible online in 2016.⁷ Different branches of the Memorial Society hold extensive samizdat archives, many of them from private collections.⁸ The archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa) holds a sizeable samizdat collection, sourced from private archives, and possibly the largest collection of samizdat periodicals.⁹ The University of Toronto’s Project for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence attempts to make part of the process visible with the help of timelines and digital reproductions, in particular of samizdat periodicals, part of which have been made fully searchable.¹⁰ The Keston Center at Baylor University, Texas, now holds the archives of Keston College/the Keston Institute, an organisation founded in the UK in 1969 with the aim of researching religion in communist societies; the Institute amassed a large amount of religious samizdat.¹¹ The Andrei Belyi Centre in St. Petersburg is continuing to expand its digital archive of literary samizdat.¹² The ImWerden project, which set itself the ambitions goal of becoming the online library of the RuNet, the Russian internet, maintains a special section for ‘Second Literature’, i.e. texts not officially published in the Soviet Union; the collection is large and texts are downloadable.¹³ The International Samizdat Research Association has a slightly outdated website that nevertheless publishes a useful list of archives holding samizdat collections.¹⁴

9Thus if we consider samizdat to be merely a body of texts the scholar or interested layperson will find plenty of sources. However, this is a reductive interpretation. Indeed, the question ‘What was samizdat?’ is hotly debated. A roundtable at the Memorial Society in 2014 asked researchers to consider precisely this question—“What is samizdat?”¹⁵ In the introduction to the essay collection Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond, editors Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov invite their contributors to ponder whether samizdat was a publishing practice, a reading practice, a set of texts, or a state of mind.¹⁶ Aleksandr Daniel calls samizdat a “mode of existence of the text,”¹⁷ while Elena Strukova discusses its importance as a “memorial to book culture in the late twentieth century.”¹⁸ The Canadian researcher Ann Komaromi, who initiated and runs the Project for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence, asks whether samizdat was a medium, a genre, a corpus of texts, or a textual culture,¹⁹ and the Italian scholar Valentina Parisi has produced a volume focusing on the samizdat reader and the paratextual aspects of samizdat periodicals.²⁰ I myself have considered the periodicals in the context of reading communities.²¹

10Moreover, there are several dedicated outlets and discussion forums for questions relating to samizdat: The Memorial Society publishes a biannual almanac, Acta Samizdatica: Notes on Samizdat (Acta Samizdatica: Zapiski o Samizdate), which includes new research alongside archival publications. There are several bespoke Facebook groups facilitating the exchange of information.²² Thus plenty of material is available on the content transmitted by samizdat, as well as on the material medium and the process itself. Yet surprisingly, there is very little specifically on reading, and even less on the samizdat reader. Or perhaps this should not come as a surprise, because the largest group involved in samizdat is notoriously difficult to research.

1.2. Samizdat as a reading culture

11The literature, and public opinion too, commonly understand samizdat as a function of ‘dissidence,’ i.e. the many forms in which different groups or individuals either protested against the Soviet regime’s practices and/or created their alternative social and communication networks. This is true in one direction only: all dissidents were involved in samizdat, and indeed reading samizdat was often the first step towards dissidence. To put it differently, reading uncensored texts inspired ‘uncensored,’ independent thought. For a significant minority, the next logical step was the writing and circulation of their own texts and/or various forms of activism, from the dissemination of texts to the creation of entire samizdat periodicals. Some actions were more or less political, such as the letters intellectuals wrote to protest against the arrest, in 1965, of Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel for publishing abroad,²³ the demonstration on Red Square on 25 August 1968, by eight people, against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968,²⁴ or the foundation of the Moscow Helsinki group, the oldest human rights group still operating in Russia, in 1977.²⁵

12An example of how reading a (forbidden) literary text led to a critical reassessment of Soviet ideology and gradually, many years later, to active dissidence that culminated in arrest and a prison camp sentence is the story of Sergei Khodorovich who, in 1977, became one of the managers of the (unofficial) Public Foundation for Political Prisoners and their Families.²⁶ The art historian Igor Golomshtok, who did not consider himself an active dissident, remembers his own disagreement with the regime in the 1960s as likewise inspired by literature:

13We did not protest against the regime, but against the regime’s lies [...] This we learned from the songs of Galich and Okudzhava, the poems of Brodskii, the stories and later, the novels of Voinovich, not to mention the Russian classics from Pushkin to Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva and Platonov.²⁷

14Much of Soviet dissent was even more restrained and often did not directly engage with the regime at all. The poet Olga Sedakova remembers the mature cultural underground of the 1970s as follows:

15For us, culture in its broadest historical aspect was that very freedom and height of the spirit denied to us by the Soviet system. [...] We all emerged from some kind of protest movement, which was not so much political as aesthetic or spiritual resistance.²⁸

16The degree to which samizdat was persecuted depended on the nature of the texts circulated. Naturally, texts engaging with the political situation and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union past or present, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and the human rights bulletin The Chronicle of Current Events (Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, 1968-1983), were more likely to lead to reprisals than ‘purely’ literary texts.²⁹

17Samizdat texts and the channels by which it was circulated were instrumental to the functioning of informal networks, including those that readers both Russian and Western have in mind when they say ‘dissidents’, i.e. “all those who actively protested against the regime in one way or another: by signing protest letters, participating in demonstrations, serving a camp sentence or exile.”³⁰ Most often, dissidents are equated with the Soviet human rights activists (pravozashchitniki). It is in this function, as an information channel for dissidents, that veteran human rights activist Liudmila Alekseeva describes samizdat in her seminal survey The History of Dissent in the USSR (Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR). Characteristically, the section “The Birth of Samizdat” is embedded into the chapter on Human Rights activists, although Alekseeva dutifully mentions the origins of samizdat through the circulation of poetry in the 1950s.³¹ The English version differs in structure and carries additional information; here, the phenomenon of samizdat is described as “The Core of the Movement” in a chapter dedicated to “The Communication Network of Dissent.”³² The tendency to treat samizdat as a function of dissidence can be observed in contemporary research, too: in 2017, the literary scholar and editor Gleb Morev published a book with 20 narrative interviews with Soviet dissidents, who all talk about samizdat as a matter of fact, but reduce samizdat reading practices to a footnote.³³ The University of Toronto’s Project for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence, which offers a database of Soviet samizdat periodicals, illustrated timelines of dissident movements, and interviews with activists, implicitly identifies dissent and samizdat in its very title.³⁴ However, while all dissidents read samizdat, by no means all readers of samizdat were active dissidents. The dissidents numbered in the hundreds, the readers of samizdat at least in the hundreds of thousands.

1.3. How to study the Samizdat reader

18Samizdat was irrepressible. And it owes much of its vitality to the fact that it lacked any kind of central organisation. But now this very guarantor of success constitutes a serious impediment to any attempt at reconstructing how people actually read samizdat, and who these people were.

19For the researcher, the biggest challenge is that samizdat culture resists being recorded with our usual tools. For a start, the only element of this culture that is easily accessible is the text itself, preserved in a private or public archive. But this text is intriguingly and frustratingly silent. If we are lucky, a preserved archival copy gives away two names, namely that of the author and that of the final reader. Even if other sources confirm that both these people participated in the samizdat chain—and that is not always the case—the preserved fragments are too few and far between to make it possible to reconstruct the journey and readership of a given individual text. Samizdat’s informal nature is one reason why this journey is hard to reconstruct. The fact that samizdat was de-facto illegal compounds the problem, as those involved often concealed their identity. It is indeed impossible to imagine a samizdat text being accompanied by something like a borrowing sheet listing its readers. Only very few people marked their samizdat texts with their name—after all, such an inscription could become incriminating evidence. Moreover, none of the statistics usually used by book historians, such as print run, editions, sales figures, reviews and translations, are available. While printed books and journals feature information about editors, publishers and print runs, and libraries have borrowing registers, no such records exist for samizdat.

20The general process of how samizdat worked is well-known. One of the most succinct accounts is given by Liudmila Alekseeva in her History of Soviet Dissent:

21The mechanism of samizdat was like this: the author would print their text in the way that was most accessible to a private individual under Soviet conditions, i.e. on the typewriter, in a few copies, and give these copies to his acquaintances. If one of them considered the text interesting, they’d make copies from the copy they had got and give them to their acquaintances, and so on. The more successful a work the more quickly and widely it would be disseminated.³⁵

22Apart from the fact that this is a generic story lacking individual detail, its focus is—and this is typical—on the process of textual production at the expense of the process of reading. It is of course an exaggeration to say that the reading of samizdat left no traces at all. We find such traces, for example, in private diaries held in archives and in published memoirs.³⁶ As a rule, these reminiscences make no attempt at establishing or analyzing the way reading networks function. In some cases, networks are documented, out of necessity, but their use for researchers is limited. In his (unpublished) memoir, Iurii Avrutskii, a collector and organiser of a reading circle for samizdat, describes how he decided to begin a register of texts and readers but encrypted the entries for fear of compromising his friends should the register be found.³⁷ Whether or not a person was able to read (much) samizdat depended on the people they knew and the circles of which they were part; the exchange of samizdat texts was based on mutual sympathy and trust. This also means that samizdat texts became a kind of currency in social networks while generating new such networks at the same time.³⁸ It is these network structures that cannot be traced any more, for the reasons described above.

23Sources that focus explicitly on samizdat reading exist but are limited in scope for various reasons. One of them is the series of interviews conducted by Raisa Orlova, wife of the well-known dissident Lev Kopelev, in Germany and other Western European countries in the early 1980s. In collaboration with the newly funded Centre for the Study of Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen, Orlova interviewed recent émigrés from the Soviet Union about their experience with samizdat. Her sample was small though, and it was limited to people who had left the USSR, often as a result of persecution. Many of those were active dissenters or prominent writers and thus above average involved in samizdat. What is more, they naturally protected their acquaintances who had remained in the Soviet Union by not giving names. Over the space of three years, Orlova managed to conduct just over 50 such interviews. At the moment, they are held in a specialist archive, not available to the general public.³⁹ Similar restrictions hold true for contemporary initiatives, such as the Memorial Society’s annual roundtables on samizdat⁴⁰ and the interviews with samizdat activists published on the website of the Project for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence.⁴¹ A number of people have published memoirs relating specifically to samizdat.⁴² Yet once again, these are individual accounts that tell us little about the general characteristics of the networks within which samizdat flourished, and often nothing about readers other than the author themselves.

24The 1960s-1970s, when the phenomenon was at its height, can still be considered recent history. Many middle-aged and elderly Russians alive today have had some exposure to samizdat. While most members of the founding generation, which included names such as Lev Kopelev (1912-1997), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Andrei Siniavskii (1925-1997) and Larisa Bogoraz (1929-2004), have now passed away, the historical proximity still offers unique opportunities for research. We can still gather empirical, first-hand data and thus try to improve an imbalance that affects available first-hand accounts and research alike: whenever we read about samizdat, the same dozen or so names, including those given above, feature again and again. These figures, many of them active dissidents, have become the accepted ‘leaders’ and spokespeople of the subculture that was samizdat; researchers keep turning to them even today.⁴³ But as a reading culture, samizdat was a mass movement. And the ‘ordinary’ members of this movement—those who primarily read and passed on texts and stayed away from more visible activity—have more often than not ceded the right to remembrance to the ‘leaders’ who have become the accepted historiographers of the movement.⁴⁴

25If we want to study how samizdat functioned as a reading culture we must research the ‘mass’ reader. But how are we to gather data from a group that is so large, so heterogeneous and so geographically dispersed? These are not the only factors that render the traditional methods of oral history, in particular the in-depth narrative interview, unsuitable for this kind of research. More importantly, we do not know our research subject—the ‘ordinary samizdat reader’—by name. Thus, rather than actively approach a limited number of previously known respondents, our aim must be to persuade as many samizdat readers as possible to approach us and share their experience. This is only possible with the help of the internet and social media. The internet reaches all generations and compensates for the geographical dispersion of people from the former Soviet Union, including the emigration of large numbers of intellectuals to Western Europe, Israel or the USA. There are a large number of active social media accounts belonging to people who witnessed the era of samizdat as young adults or adults.

26In this place I need to address the often-invoked parallel between samizdat and the internet, if only to rule it out as irrelevant to the present project. It has become popular to compare samizdat to the World Wide Web, particularly to social media.⁴⁵ Eugene Gorny, the director of the Russian Virtual Library (www.rvb.ru) describes samizdat as one of the main metaphors used to describe the Russian section of the internet.⁴⁶ Sharon Balazs has drawn up a useful table for comparing historic samizdat and the internet.⁴⁷ Such a comparison usually hinges on the fact that both phenomena allow for the spontaneous generation of texts at grassroots level, without the interference of either editors or censors.⁴⁸ And indeed, both samizdat and social media are network-based and rely on users not also generating but, crucially, sharing content and manipulating existing texts. Yet there are serious limits to this comparison, and, as Henrike Schmidt has noted, it is only valid only if we think of ‘samizdat’ as a metaphor for describing a space where debate is relatively spontaneous, easily accessible and largely free of commercial interests. Beyond this basic parallel, many factors reveal social media and samizdat to be different in nature. It is not my objective here to discuss these factors individually. Important for my purpose is the fact that samizdat conceals any direct links between text and readers, while the internet, and social media in particular, render these links transparent. Online, the processes of reading and distribution become visible in the literal sense of the word. This is precisely the process hidden from the researcher of samizdat.

27Thus Gennadii Kuzovkin, a historian and archivist and the director of the programme “The History of Dissent in the USSR”⁴⁹ at the Memorial Society in Moscow, and I designed an online questionnaire aimed at inhabitants of the former USSR with experience of reading Samizdat. We were fortunate in that we could draw on the generous support of a group of Russian sociologists.⁵⁰ The questionnaire, hosted by the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge, went live on 14 March 2017 and was promoted via social media and selected Russian online media.⁵¹ In 2018, it found a permanent home as part of the ongoing Project for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence at the University of Toronto.⁵² 122 replies were gathered between 14 March 2017 and 26 June 2018, the majority before December 2017. To our knowledge, this survey constitutes the first attempt to collect empirical data about (and from) the ‘ordinary’ reader of samizdat.

28The questionnaire has two main purposes. The first of them is the preservation of as many individual accounts of reading samizdat as possible. Secondly, we aim to create a broader knowledge base by explicitly inviting the testimony of those who were not in any way ‘spokespeople’ of the subculture. Of course we do not discourage well-known samizdat activists from participating in the survey, and indeed some of them replied. But the threshold for participation is very low, and the survey explicitly permits anonymous submissions. In this chapter all respondents are referred to by a unique number. Where names have been given they are known to the researchers.

29However, before the discussion of the survey results, there are some theoretical issues to consider.

1.4. Samizdat as literary process: theoretical issues

30For technical reasons, I will refer to samizdat as a literary process here, without distinguishing between literary and political samizdat or, within literary samizdat, between new literature and pre-existing texts that were circulated. This is solely for the purpose of illustrating the mechanism of text production, multiplication and distribution. A literary process requires writers, ‘middlemen,’ and readers. Moreover, for a text to remain accessible to new readers—in print or circulation—it depends on the endorsement by earlier readers. In this respect samizdat was no exception. However, the externalities of textual production, distribution and, ultimately, reading itself, differ significantly from the ones we study when researching ‘traditional’ printed texts or even manuscripts. Looking at these differences will afford us a shortcut to the understanding of why it is so crucial to research the reader.

31We might want to begin by assessing the position of samizdat within Soviet textual culture and in particular its relation to print culture.⁵³ Samizdat existed precisely because the state had monopolised printing. Yet it was not completely different from print. Rather, it was a hybrid genre⁵⁴ in technical, organisational and even material terms, already because it was situated within a highly developed print culture, partly overlapping with it and partly replacing it. As the name ‘samizdat’ (versus ‘gosizdat’) already intimates, samizdat was an alternative rather than separate phenomenon altogether.

32In technical terms, samizdat was a hybrid because it was, for the most part, produced with the help of a typewriter. A typewriter is itself a hybrid, fit for private use but producing a limited number of absolutely identical copies in a standardised font. Moreover, samizdat was a hybrid in organisational terms because parts of it were clearly modelled on the official literary process, minus the censorship. This is particularly apparent when we consider the literary journals of the 1970s with their editorial procedures, subscription schemes and publication schedules.⁵⁵ Samizdat was a hybrid in material terms because a significant proportion of the literature that circulated in samizdat existed in print and was merely reproduced and disseminated in samizdat because no new print editions were available. This concerned above all pre-revolutionary literature and contemporary texts produced in small print runs such as the writings of the Strugatskii brothers. Finally, we should not forget that many samizdat writers had been published in official print. It is sufficient to remember the sensational publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,⁵⁶ the officially published poetry collections of Varlam Shalamov, the author of the Kolyma Tales that circulated only in samizdat,⁵⁷ or the fact that most of the poets who defined Leningrad unofficial culture in the 1970s, had published officially at some point.⁵⁸

33A further complicating factor was tamizdat, the publication abroad of texts that had no chance of publication in the Soviet Union. Tamizdat was often realised through émigré publishing houses or specialised Russian language publishers.⁵⁹ Prominent examples include Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (Doktor Zhivago) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Copies inevitably made their way back into the USSR where they would be typed up or reproduced by other means, turning ‘back’ into samizdat. From the mid-1970s tamizdat gradually became the most important medium for accessing literature that was not officially sanctioned.⁶⁰ Samizdat and print culture were thus very tightly entwined, depended on each other, and comparing them is appropriate for this discussion.

34A tool that illustrates and will help us understand the magnitude of the technical differences between them is the ‘communications circuit’ diagram devised by Robert Darnton.⁶¹

‘Communications circuit’ diagram devised by Robert Darnton

35The diagram goes to illustrate just how many intermediaries and influencing factors are habitually involved in a literary process. In this respect, neither Soviet official culture nor samizdat were exceptional. Yet in both processes the roles of intermediaries and external factors were distorted beyond recognition.

36Let us briefly look at official culture first, because samizdat emerged from this culture and reacted against it. The framework of Soviet official culture distorted in particular the three circles in the middle of the diagram. The fact that all texts had to be assessed by Glavlit, the censor’s office, to ensure their conformity with the ideological and aesthetic guidelines set by the communist party, as well as the central role of the Writers’ Union, show that political sanctions played a disproportionally large role. They did not merely dwarf intellectual considerations, but were superimposed on them. By contrast, market pressures as they are known in the West were subdued. While Soviet publishing houses were in theory supposed to support themselves financially, the concern to meet ideological and/or educational requirements usually overrode concerns for profit; readers were seen as receivers of culture rather than consumers of books.⁶²

37One could say that samizdat reacted to this imbalance by abolishing political (and legal) considerations altogether. The texts circulating in samizdat included anything proscribed by official culture, from erotica such as the Kamasutra to poetry judged aesthetically deficient, religious texts and material explicitly criticising Soviet policy. Indeed, one of the definitions of samizdat literature is “nepodtsenzurnaia literatura,” uncensored literature, literally, “literature not under censorship”; this is confirmed by our respondents who used the term 15 times to define samizdat.⁶³

38Market pressures were virtually absent. Commercial samizdat was rare, although it became more common as time went on,⁶⁴ and indeed 25 of our respondents remember buying or selling samizdat, while 48 respondents report knowing about samizdat being sold or produced for sale. A symptom of slowly increasing commercialisation—in itself a sign of an increasingly professional literary process—was the fact that typists started working for money; some people hired professional typists rather than typing themselves.⁶⁵ At the same time, intellectual/aesthetic considerations were everything: if the reader did not like the text, they would not pass it on or reproduce it (this process is discussed in greater detail in section 2.8 below). The absence of institutions such as libraries and bookshops, where a potential reader can familiarise themselves with a given text, means that in order to gain even one additional reader, a Samizdat text had to find favour with its initial reader enough for the latter to pass the text on to a friend and/or to copy it out.

39The factors described above already indicate the importance of the reader and their taste above everything else. However, samizdat’s greatest distortion of the communications circuit becomes apparent when we consider the outer circle of the diagram and the roles described in each individual square. Whether it was the decision to publish, printing, shipping/distributing, selling, binding and stocking, and preserving for posterity—all these functions were carried out by the reader. Incidentally, this reader might also be the author of a text, in which case they would be responsible for the entire circle; cf. veteran dissident Vladimir Bukovskii’s statement “I write it myself, I edit it myself, I censor it myself, I publish it myself, I circulate it myself and I myself serve the prison sentence for it.”⁶⁶ The typewriter as a method of production and the absence of an editorial process (unless we are talking about journals) means that the threshold for becoming a ‘published’ author was low, and indeed 22 of our respondents report being samizdat authors.

40The readers were responsible for circulating a very limited number of physical copies to the largest possible circle of readers. Many of them produced further physical copies, either solely for their own use or for passing on to others; the typewriter made it possible to do both things at once.⁶⁷ The reader thus acted as both publisher and printer. Such secondary copies were produced in great haste, as readers often kept texts for a day or a night only and during this short time typed up all or part of it. This approach naturally had a great impact on the state of the text as a physical object.

41Different copies of one and the same text often display an astonishing degree of variation beyond obvious typos or accidental omissions. It is clear that the way in which texts were reproduced—informally, by hand, by the readers themselves—changed the attitude towards the text as an inviolable whole. Readers took liberties with texts, making decisions that normally are the prerogative of authors or editors.⁶⁸ Sometimes, people would copy out only part of a text or collection of poetry, to save time or for aesthetic reasons, and then circulate it, leading to a new version becoming established. #120 (*1949) reports cherishing a handwritten copy of Akhmatova’s Requiem, a text which circulated in samizdat for a long time and was also passed on orally, and then discovering it didn’t correspond to the version that finally made it into print: “Akhmatova’s Requiem—I typed it myself and I still remember manuscript versions that didn’t always correspond to the final published text.”⁶⁹ In other cases, samizdat authors, translators or typists purposefully reproduced only part of a text. Natalia Trauberg, who translated, among other things, religious and philosophical texts from the English for samizdat circulation (Chesterton, C.S. Lewis) details how she would leave out large chunks of text she deemed inaccessible to her potential readers because they lacked the theological knowledge necessary to appreciate the text.⁷⁰Respondent #6 (*1977) reports that samizdat texts were indeed rarely complete:

Samizdat is a printed text created by an underground press rather than an official one. As a rule, texts that were banned on the territory of the Soviet Union were published in this way. The texts were printed with the help of a typewriter on poor-quality paper. Books weren’t always complete, it happened that you would get part of a book and needed to wait for the next bit.⁷¹

42Samizdat periodicals were no exception. These periodicals were closely modelled on print culture; many editors worked hard to achieve a professional ‘product’.⁷² However, unlike printed texts, typescripts could and regularly were corrected by hand, for example when words in Latin script had to be added. This practice blurs the distinction between manuscript and typescript and indicates the distance between typescript and professional print. At the same time, it marks each copy of a given journal as an individual document. A practical example: the first issue of the Leningrad periodical 37 (1976-1981) features an article on Max Scheler and naturalism, written by editor Tatiana Goricheva. In the copy held in the archive at Bremen University,⁷³ this article carries multiple references. However, the text of the footnotes is missing. It is not usually possible to type footnotes on a typewriter; these would need to be inserted by hand. Asked whether she could explain the absence of the notes, Tatiana Goricheva stated that this must be a copy she did not see, otherwise she would have supplied the notes herself.⁷⁴ Here is another example where readers did not take care to reproduce a journal copy in its entirety: the copy of Chasy (The Clock) No 12 that is held in the archive of the Research and Information Centre Memorial in St. Petersburg⁷⁵ features a report about a session of the Religious-Philosophical Seminar.⁷⁶ In the copy in the archive of the Centre of East European Studies in Bremen this report is not only absent, but not even mentioned in the table of contents.

43Naturally, samizdat knew no copyright; indeed copyright would have been counterproductive to the movement’s mission. Not only does this remove all control from the author the moment the text is submitted for publication, it also means that it is very difficult to establish the authoritative version of a given text. As a consequence, and in addition to the reasons cited above, specific physical copies of a given journal and their digital reproduction should be treated like archival relics rather than copies of an authoritative text; digital reproductions should indicate which archive or collection holds the particular copy that is being reproduced.⁷⁷ The handmade, improvised and almost deliberately shabby appearance of samizdat texts has become their trademark sign and is now being studied extensively.⁷⁸

44At the same time there can be no doubt that the fluidity of samizdat texts was an accidental consequence of their material reality rather than the result of any deliberate action. Authors and editors strove actively towards more durable, i.e. printed formats. Tamizdat via émigré publishing houses is one such example. For this reason, people with contacts to the West played an importantly role. They ensured copies were smuggled abroad for publication in émigré journals and publishing houses, and for safekeeping in archives; this version would often become authoritative.⁷⁹ On the receiving side, the ‘third wave’ of emigration in the 1970s-1980s supported this process: Andrei Siniavskii, who emigrated to Paris in 1973, founded the almanac Sintaksis (Syntax, 1978-2001). Vladimir Maramzin, arrested in 1974 for compiling a five-volume samizdat edition of Brodskii’s poems, also emigrated to Paris, where he co-edited the literary journal Ekho (Echo, 1978-1986); Ekho is still a Russian-language publishing house today. Tatiana Goricheva, one of the ‘hubs’ of Leningrad samizdat in the 1970s and editor of three journals, 37, Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia) and Maria, emigrated in 1980 and founded the publishing house Beseda in Paris. Beseda published both a literary journal, Beseda (Conversation, 1983-1993), and monographs. Many poets of the Leningrad cultural underground published their first significant collections with Beseda.⁸⁰ Tamizdat copies were often re-converted into samizdat by means of photography and later, copying machines (see section 2. 6) below). Journal editors, too, began to use copying machines as soon as it became possible. The editors of both Chasy and Mitin zhurnal (Mitya’s Journal) remember this practice;⁸¹ Mitin zhurnal was later produced on a printing press and is now an online publication and part of Dmitrii Volchek’s Kolonna Publications.⁸² The turn to copy and print formats was likely motivated by the desire to make the process less labour-intensive and ensure wider circulation. A side-effect was the emergence of authoritative versions of texts and the loss of the individual samizdat manuscript as a unique artefact.

45The processes described and examples given above demonstrate clearly the degree to which Samizdat depended on the reader’s approval for its very existence in the most direct, physical sense. On the other hand, readers can fulfil these tasks only to a limited degree, and the result, including the material available to the researcher, looks very different from the picture we know from mainstream literary culture.

2. ‘A Few Questions About Samizdat’: The Reader Survey

2.1. Who are our respondents?

46The point in time at which we started our research means that we surveyed the second and third generations of samizdat—the typical ‘mass readers’ rather than the pioneers and most important authors. Our oldest respondent was born in 1931, and the vast majority of those we surveyed were born in the 1950s and 1960s. 28 respondents either did not give their name or asked us not to publish any personal information.

47By the time those born in the 1970s (the youngest participant was born in 1977) had grown into conscious readers, the political processes around Perestroika meant that samizdat—and official culture were on the way to merging. This process was begun when Gorbachev announced the policy of glasnost’ in 1986, which lead to a gradual relaxation of censorship, and culminated in the adoption of the Law on Print in 1990, which abolished censorship altogether.⁸³

48Here are a few basic statistics:

49Neither the prevalence of Moscow—which is the place where most people lived when reading samizdat—nor the fact most respondents were university educated should surprise. Samizdat thrived in university circles, perhaps not surprising given that universities are an ideal environment for socialising with like-minded peers. Soviet university students typically lived in halls of residence (obshchezhitie) and shared their rooms. Here are a few typical stories how the university environment fostered people’s acquaintance with samizdat.

#9 (*1965): During my studies at the Faculty of Philology I came across samizdat all the time. We would swap books, giving them to each other overnight to read and then pass on to the next person. Several of these books are still in my private library.⁸⁴

#45 (*1947) I was a student at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. I started there in 1966; that means that the first time somebody gave me samizdat to read overnight happened no later than 1968. It was [Pasternak’s] Doctor Zhivago.⁸⁵

#13 (*1967) Somebody gave me a samizdat book at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University where I was a student. A book of poems by Nikolai Gumilev. Later I was given unpublished poems by Mandel’shtam. I also remember receiving some Galich, I think.⁸⁶

2.2. Getting to know the reader

50Since the focus of our questionnaire is on the collection of the maximum of information there are no dedicated research questions we hope to answer with the help of the material gathered. The questionnaire consists of 63 questions, the majority of which require the respondent to check a box or choose from a list of possible answers. Such questions might ask in which decade the respondent first came across the word ‘samizdat,’ whether they ever read tamizdat (98 respondents out of 122) or listened to samizdat broadcast via foreign radio stations (67 respondents). Such questions, which elicit comparable statistical data, are always followed by open-ended questions which encourage the respondents to share what they remember about texts and people. To give an example, the question about reading tamizdat (No 32) is followed by questions asking about dates and titles and then by an invitation to tell freely: “How did you manage to receive tamizdat?” (No 32.4). This setup means that the data we received is very uneven, because our respondents provided vastly different amounts of information. We deliberately refrained from making any of the questions compulsory. As a result, some people only answered the tick-the-box and multiple-choice questions, ignoring the invitation to reminisce. Others left out individual questions or blocks of questions. Yet others wrote way above average amounts of free text.

51The statistical data gathered from such a small sample can only ever give an indication. The limited use of a small self-selecting sample in strictly statistical terms makes it all the more clear that every statistic consists of a tapestry of personal stories that cannot easily be translated into numbers. Each of these stories is unique, and they are what we risk losing—stories of how a significant minority circumvented a literature-centric society’s prescriptive print culture with the help of informal networks and hand-made artefacts. Yet even this small sample confirms several widely believed hypotheses about samizdat reading that are founded on the personal testimony of the ‘opinion makers’ of the samizdat movement. Here is a brief taster of the stories we gathered.

52One respondent gave us a rough sequence of the phenomenon, without attaching a timeline, from the origin in poetry lists to the time when entire volumes of prose or history were available, often through tamizdat:

As far as I remember, first there was poetry by Gumilev and Akhmatova (Requiem) and fairly neutral texts from the Writers’ Union. After that came anti-Stalin texts, Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture and only afterwards entire books already, Avtorkhanov et al. (#120,*1949)⁸⁷

53This respondent describes how the decision on what to read was determined by the availability of texts:

At home we only had literary texts, in homemade publications. (#83, *1968)⁸⁸

54The Russian adjective used here to denote ‘homemade’—samopal’nyi—means both homemade and counterfeit, highlighting that this was a special form of literature, produced not ‘how it is supposed to be made’.

55What it meant to have samizdat at home:

It was a book my mum was reading. We weren’t allowed to tell anybody about it. And during the week that the book was at ours we weren’t allowed to bring any friends home. (#6, *1977) ⁸⁹

56Particularly intriguing first encounters:

57I think that was a typewritten copy of Erofeev’s Moscow Circles. In 1972, if I remember correctly. My mum and I immediately typed up a copy. And I remember that a bit later a really funny thing happened with this book. An acquaintance of the time, [name supplied], who’d borrowed the book from me, spent several hours on the phone at night dictating it to his then girlfriend. She was a professional typist and typed it up, taking dictation. (#23, *1955)⁹⁰

58Evtushenko’s poem To the Memory of Esenin [Pamiati Esenina] and Vysotskii’s “The Gunlayer” [“Navodchitsa”]. But that’s something I found out only afterwards; I can’t remember whether authors and title were written on the texts. I found them in my aunt’s cupboard (I don’t remember whether by accident or whether I had been looking for them), on yellowish paper, either typescript or some other reproduction technique, faded letters. (#98, *1951) ⁹¹

59The sheer ubiquity of it:

It was in the air. (#113 m, *1960)⁹²

60How samizdat was vindicated by history when censorship was abolished:

When the formerly forbidden texts started to be published in large numbers during Perestroika (and later) it turned out that I was already familiar with the vast majority of them via samizdat and tamizdat. (#98, *1951)⁹³

61Our respondents cite a range of reasons for reading samizdat. In its basic form samizdat was a source of better literature. This is a selection of replies to Questions 20.1. (“Which textual genre was predominant in your samizdat reading? Please explain your choice or choices—why did you read those texts?”) and 21.1. (‘What was for you the most valuable element in the samizdat texts you knew? Please tell us why?’):

The utter poverty of “Soviet” theology, the limited access to literature. (#64, *1956)

I’m indifferent towards religion. Everything else was excellent ammunition for the battle against sensory deprivation (boredom). (#20, *1966)

New authors and styles were especially interesting, because I was all focused on literature: Brodskii, Prigov, Rubinshtein, Aksenov. (#25, *1963)

In those years I loved poetry... I was enchanted by the poetry of Iosif Brodskii. (#74, *1957)

62In its entirety, samizdat stilled a hunger for reading material that had arisen as a result of the Soviet regime’s isolationist policies and strict censorship. For many, it became an important source of information that could not be accessed in any other way:

Any literature that contained trustworthy historical information helped to put together the puzzle, to explain the historical process. (#63, *1950)

Without samizdat it was impossible to discover the history of the Soviet era. (#11, *1952)

Facts and pseudo-facts that were absent from official literature. (#20, *1966)

New and previously carefully concealed information came from outside. (#53, *1954)

63Some seem to have listed the functions of samizdat according to perceived importance:

Samizdat provided me with information about what was going on in the country, immersed me into social and philosophical topics and acquainted me with amazing works of literature. (#72, *1940)

Samizdat acquainted me with questions concerning the repressions under Stalin, the Thaw, the fate of the dissidents and the fate of writers in the 1920s and 1930s. (#29, *x)

64Some readers of samizdat had political motivations:

As I was busy searching for a way to transform the Soviet system, for me the most important samizdat materials were historical and sociological texts, alongside academic literature. (#21, *1941)

The orientation towards socio-political activity with the aim in the future to transform Soviet society, introducing a greater degree of democracy and social justice [was what motivated me]. (#57, *1953)

65Others explicitly resisted such ideas

The information and social journalism [in samizdat] seemed to be a bit biased. I wanted truth rather than howls and hysterics. The literary texts were gentler and more varied. (#48, *1959)

I think that as a Soviet reader I disliked critical anti-Soviet texts if they belonged to the genre of journalism without outstanding artistic and philosophical merit. (#52, *1960)

66The last response shows that some evidently saw no difference between identifying themselves as ‘Soviet people’ and reading samizdat.

2.3. What makes a regular reader?

67Everyone who took part in the survey has some experience of reading samizdat, and they regard this experience as important enough to warrant spending upwards of one hour on filling in a questionnaire. It is therefore even more interesting to check how many respondents considered themselves regular samizdat readers. (Question 19: “Would you say that at some point in your life you became a regular samizdat reader?”). Several of the older respondents name the year 1968, namely the ‘era of [protest] letters and Czechoslovakia [the violent suppression by Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces of the Prague Spring]’ (#81, *1935), as the moment that turned them into regular samizdat readers. #21 (*1948) specifies that he ‘began to regularly receive samizdat in October 1968’.

68#63 (*1950) attributes his regular reading, beginning in 1972, to his friendship with a particular individual. #105 (*1949) identifies personal contacts as crucial for a samizdat reader. Once a text is produced, samizdat is a chain with no particular beginning, as the reader who passes on samizdat to their friends in turn becomes their ‘source’.

69By contrast, #67 (*1947) questions the validity of the question itself—the haphazard channels through which samizdat was produced and passed to the reader means that “the word ‘regularity’ is inappropriate in this context”.

70Most interestingly, #105 (*1949) elaborates that one of the impediments for the average samizdat reader was the inability to have a designated space to keep the texts:

People with links to dissidence lived with the threat that their home might be searched at any moment. I believe that there were distinctive “repositories” and libraries even then. But only people in whom the KGB was not interested had them.

71#105’s point about the existence of libraries is indeed correct. We shall return to this question in section 2. 9 below.

7230 out of our 122 respondents identify themselves as only occasional readers. In 15 of these cases, this can be attributed to age: born in the second half of the 1960s or the 1970s (in two cases, as late as 1977); they simply would not have been old enough before the Soviet Union first relaxed and then abolished censorship, so their samizdat experience is limited to seeing samizdat texts, perhaps in the way one sees artworks, rather than using samizdat as a regular means of reading interesting new texts:

August 1984. It was Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, and next to it there were some pages with satirical poems on Gorbachev and his wife. I saw the book and the pages on the dresser in my parents’ room. (#6, *1977)

1988. Tale of the Troika by the Strugatskii brothers. Somebody brought and showed the text, which was printed on the reverse side of various papers from a Scientific Research Institute. (#68, *1977) ⁹⁴

73The answer of #68 stresses the different material quality of samizdat. Both The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita) and Tale of the Troika (Skazka o Troike) were in fact published in the USSR,⁹⁵ although The Master and Margarita was officially available only in censored editions until 1973.

2.4. Samizdat as a literary phenomenon; reading patterns, common authors

74While it owns it reputation as a counter-culture largely to the texts produced by the dissidents, which include certain ‘sensational’ literary or semi-literary works, such as the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his monumental ‘experiment in literary investigation,’ The Gulag Archipelago, literary texts not only preceded political, religious, philosophical and other materials, but also continued to dominate samizdat. The overwhelming majority of our respondents became acquainted with samizdat via texts that can be classified as literary; literature also continued to be the most commonly read samizdat throughout their reading ‘career’. Even for those born in the 1970s this was a common way of coming into contact with samizdat:

If we assume that samizdat is something copied out on a typewriter or by hand rather than a photocopy, then my first texts were my mum’s ‘lists’ of Esenin’s poetry. And my uncle’s computer copies of Vysotskii’s poems. (#22, *1976)

75On the other hand there were also those who seemed surprised that their own experience began with literature, evidently sharing the common perception that samizdat was political by definition and/or forbidden:

This may sound strange, but it wasn’t political samizdat [but] Nabokov’s novel The Gift (Dar). (#51, *1952)

76Here is a visual representation of the replies to Question 4 (“What was the first samizdat text you saw or read?”), divided by genre:

“What was the first samizdat text you saw or read?”

77If we bear in mind that this chart divides literature into four different categories—poetry of the Silver Age, pre-revolutionary literature other than Silver Age poetry, literature written after 1917 and translations—the predominance of literature as the genre that introduced respondents to samizdat becomes overwhelmingly obvious. Only the yellow and dark blue sections denote non-literary texts. I strongly feel that separating out Silver Age poetry is warranted because it played such a decisive role in the emergence of samizdat as a phenomenon. Moreover, some of it remained taboo, such as the poetry of Nikolai Gumilev, shot in 1921 as a counterrevolutionary. #36 (*1968) remembers being told “don’t tell anyone at school about Gumilev”.⁹⁶ #27 (*1954) told us the following anecdote: “According to one urban legend, Raisa Gorbacheva absolutely loved the poetry of Nikolai Gumilev that circulated in samizdat. And—or so the myth goes—this was one of the reasons for Perestroika: yes to the KPSS and to socialism, but it must be socialism with a human face where one is allowed to read Gumilev.”⁹⁷ The Silver Age poets remained hugely popular while samizdat flourished, as #110 (*1962), asked which texts were especially popular, affirms: “Poetry, especially Gumilev, Tsvetaeva, Mandel’shtam and Brodskii.”⁹⁸ #32 (*1954) also lists them when he remembers which writers were read in a group environment: “Poetry. Voloshin, Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva, Gumilev etc. The Silver Age.”⁹⁹ The post-revolutionary work of certain modernists, suppressed by official culture, was also very popular—Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse, Akhmatova’s Requiem (Rekviem) (mentioned 15 times), Mandel’shtam’s later texts. The fact that the Soviet regime repressed the heritage of the Silver Age to varying degrees is common knowledge; yet it cannot but (at least mildly?) shock to see how many authors who never wrote politically charged texts and are now on the Russian school curriculum were suppressed to such a degree that they could become samizdat hits. As #110 (*1962), asked which aspect of samizdat was especially valuable reminds us: “‘New literary styles’—well, ‘new’ in the sense that part of literature that wasn’t very new (e.g. the Silver Age) was available mainly via samizdat.”¹⁰⁰

78Alongside genre, we have asked respondents for the first authors they read in samizdat, about the ones they remember reading throughout and about the ones that left the strongest impression. One outstandingly popular author, and clearly the most popular pre-revolutionary ‘samizdat’ poet, was Osip Mandel’stham. His name is mentioned 66 times across different questions. Thus our respondents sided with contemporary (samizdat) poets who considered Mandel’shtam a key influence.¹⁰¹ Also widely read were the poems and song lyrics of two contemporary bards, Aleksandr Galich (41 mentions) and Vladimir Vysotskii (37 mentions), whose music circulated in magnitizdat—samizdat on tape. Fans would copy down and circulate their song lyrics, much as teenagers in the 1990s sharing CD booklets and now, playlists.¹⁰² Galich and Vysotskii feature prominently as respondents’ first samizdat authors. This is perhaps not surprising—they were contemporary, very popular among young people and not particularly ‘dangerous,’ i.e. likely to lead to prosecution.

79This chart shows the literary authors who initiated the readers into samizdat:

What was the first samizdat text you saw or read? Literary texts only

80Two conclusions can be drawn from this chart, including the replies that are hidden inside the items ‘others’. Firstly, the prevalence of what we might consider highbrow literature goes to show that samizdat satisfied primarily a hunger for culture, information and thought rather than easy entertainment. This data confirms the reasons our respondents gave for their attraction to samizdat (cf. section 2. 2). It is also at least implicitly a testimony to the Soviet background and education of the readers, who were brought up in an environment that afforded the written word a central role: the Bolsheviks had attempted to utilise literature as a tool for forging the new Soviet man,¹⁰³ while the belief in the ability of literature to influence behaviour was enshrined in the doctrine of Socialist Realism and arguably one of the reasons for censorship. Just as the reader according to Soviet ideology, the Soviet reader of samizdat was always a receiver of culture rather than a consumer. It just happened that they read—and sometimes, wrote—the wrong kind of text.¹⁰⁴ All these factors conspired to make the Soviet Union the ideal setting for the phenomenon of samizdat.

81Secondly, the prominence of Solzhenitsyn and the mention of Venedikt Erofeev are indicative of the relatively young age of our respondents. Erofeev wrote Moscow Circles (Moskva-Petushki) in 1969-1970; it became a cult text in samizdat almost immediately afterwards; it was published officially in the Soviet Union only in 1988.¹⁰⁵ Bulgakov was a slightly different case: his novel The Master and Margarita was written between 1929-1940 and serialised, in an abridged, censored version, in the journal Moskva (Moscow), in 1966-1967; an unabridged tamizdat edition appeared almost simultaneously. This edition, but in particular the passages excised by the censor circulated widely in samizdat even after a complete version was officially published in 1973; most respondents did not specify whether they saw the entire novel in samizdat or just the censored sections. The fate of The Master and Margarita displays remarkable parallels to a story from the nineteenth century. Aleksandr Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma) widely circulated in manuscript form while the censor’s office still deliberated whether to allow print publication.¹⁰⁶ This goes to show that genuine reader demand makes it impossible to suppress the material reproduction of a text, even when few technical means are available. Most of the sensationally popular science-fiction novels of the Strugatskii brothers were published, but hard to obtain. In the case of poets, our respondents rarely mentioned particular poems, with the exception of Akhmatova’s Requiem. Usually they name the author or specify ‘unpublished Mandel’shtam’. Sometimes a specific collection is named, but most common are the authors’ name or the author’s name accompanied by the word ‘poems’. This means that if we want to research the history of individual texts, and poems in particular, we need additional research tools. Below is a model answer—unfortunately such detailed answers are rare.

82Something from this list:

• the excised parts from Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita
• Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems from different years
• The Ugly Swans (Gadkie lebedi) by the Strugatskii brothers
• The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (#52, f, *1960)

83This list is a typical mixture of literary texts that circulated in samizdat in the 1970s: a censored text (Bulgakov), pre-revolutionary poems that were hard to find (Tsvetaeva), a suppressed text by two hugely popular contemporary fiction authors (Strugatskii), very topical and banned (Solzhenitsyn), foreign and banned (Orwell). The list also faithfully reflects the fact that prose texts, including contemporary works, enjoyed much greater prominence in the mature period of samizdat.

84Literature continued to predominate throughout the entire period the respondent spent reading samizdat. Here are the replies to Question 20 in graphic representation:

Which text did you predominantly read in samizdat?

85The rubric ‘other’ includes historical sources and scientific and esoteric texts. Some respondents were not entirely clear about the limits of samizdat. #81 (*1935) remembers “I don’t know whether protest letters can be considered samizdat. I was fired from my job because of such letters.” Naturally, those who associate samizdat with political dissidence would see these letters as the quintessence of samizdat. Indeed, Igor Golomshtok remembers that his main aim in writing letters of protest was “[to] inform, by means of samizdat, people about what was in fact going on in the country.”¹⁰⁷

86The picture looks slightly different for Question 18 (“Which of the samizdat texts you read left the strongest impression with you and why?”). Non-literary texts play a much more important role, especially if we decide, as I have done, to include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in this category. The Gulag Archipelago is by far the most frequently mentioned work: there are 31 mentions, alongside 14 others that simply say ‘Solzhenitsyn’ or cited one of his other works; respondents were allowed to name more than one text. Another non-literary ‘text’ mentioned frequently is the human rights bulletin Chronicle of Current Events (57 respondents mention it, many more than once). Many ‘impressive’ texts were also directly or indirectly linked to the topics of Gulag, state terror and repression: works by the historian Avtorkhanov¹⁰⁸ and Andrei Amalrik’s Will the USSR last until 1984? (Prosushchestvuet li SSSR do 1984), from among the clearly literary works, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan) and Chevengur, Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate (Zhizn’ i sud’ba) and George Orwell’s 1984—alongside a transcript explaining the rationale behind the yearly ‘rallies’ on Pushkin Square on 5 December, the Day of the Soviet Constitution (#14, *1967);¹⁰⁹ the last words of those who demonstrated on Red Square on 26 August 1968 (#21, *1948) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the USSR adopted in 1948.

87Those respondents who described their reaction broadly agree that these texts offered them new information about their own country; 81 respondents provided details, many, unfortunately, only very brief: ‘I found out about the existence of political prisoners’ (#14, *1967); “This was the first time I understood the system of control in the USSR,” (#29, *x); “A part of my country’s history that was completely unknown until then” (#34, *1965); “The sheer scope of the system, its huge size and coherence” (#48, *1959); “Information about resistance to the ‘communist’ system. Information about the scale of repression in the USSR” (#57, *1953); “Touching upon the truth” (#58, *1958); “Horror and hatred for the Soviet system” (#74, *1957); “Well, it’s more or less clear with regard to literature about the camps and the repressions: one can’t live like that” (#105, m, *1949); “The tragic history of my Motherland (tragedy generally leaves an impression)” (#116, m, *1966).

88Most eloquent are the explanations that refer to Orwell:

Orwell showed me that a totalitarian regime as such is the greatest evil there is, and that this evil is a fundamental characteristic of the regime rather than a price to pay for its transition period. (#52, *1960)
In 1984, I read the novel 1984 in English and cried: just HOW could Orwell know WHAT would happen to us in 1984? (#121, *1954)

89So while samizdat was a mostly a literary phenomenon, for many people even literary texts had an impact that exceeds strictly aesthetic criteria and might be seen as influencing a worldview that is wide open beyond the horizon of Soviet ideology and potentially critical of this ideology.

2.5. Reading Samizdat as an act of resistance

90In spite of the uncontested predominance of literary texts, most respondents nevertheless attached at least a nuance of political significance to Samizdat reading. Question 12 (“Do you agree that samizdat emerged in opposition to certain traits of Soviet society?”) was answered positively by 108 out of 122 respondents. The most commonly used term in the subsequent text field (12.1., “What is it that samizdat opposed?”) is “censorship” (38 times), accompanied by adjectives such as “total” or “savage”; also popular are “control” and “surveillance”. Here are a few examples: “The totalitarian essences of the Soviet regime” (#2, *1931); “The lack of tolerance for thought that was different, the lack of freedom, and censorship” (#5, *1951).

91In a monolithic, centrally controlled culture, Samizdat represented a way of counteracting, in the words of #34 (*1965) “the effort made by the government to control people’s information sources, tastes and views”. And indeed, samizdat was an antidote to the “greyness (in all its nuances) and the all-encompassing uniformity of thought that was imposed on us” (#7, *1957) and to the “impossibility to disseminate one’s creative work and views outside the official institutions” (#4, *1972). In this context, reading samizdat increased people’s individual feeling of freedom and represented a personal act of resistance. #49 (*1955) specifies: “People wanted more information—political, art-related, religious. The authorities would oppose this and even imprison people for reading and circulating samizdat. This was opposition.”

92Historians are still arguing about the reasons for the demise of the Soviet Union and the degree to which civil society had an impact. This argument is neatly reflected in the replies to Question 11, “In your opinion, what was the role of samizdat in the transformations that happened in the USSR (Russia) in the 1980s-1990s?” This question inspired a good number of longer replies, which are interesting in their own right. A basic tendency is immediately recognisable: the 20 people who reckon that the role of samizdat was negligible are invariably convinced this was the case because of samizdat’s limited reach—the phenomenon was limited to the educated strata of society in the big cities. The answers of those who are convinced that its role was significant (69 respondents) are more varied: quite a few point out that samizdat made ‘truthful’ information available to the ‘reading public’ and the ‘educated elites’ and thus had an influence on the worldview of those that were involved in shaping the fate of the country:

Samizdat widened the possibilities for education, and the reading public simply filled in the gap in both Russian literature and history of the twentieth century and in world politics and philosophy. This gave rise to questions that couldn’t be answered by the usual means and led to a more profound interest in, and knowledge of, reality. (#25, *1963)

Samizdat formed the mentality of the elite that would become involved in the political process during Perestroika. This mentality had an impact on political developments. (#21, *1948)

93This is not the place to collect historical evidence or argue whether samizdat had an impact on Soviet politics. More significant, and very hard to counter, is the argument for samizdat’s indirect impact on civil society as a unifying force that brought people together outside Soviet official culture:

It revealed hidden knowledge and bought together people who were close to each other in spirit. (#53, *1954)

[It played] an important role, because it united people. (#69, *1947)

Even if it didn’t form them, samizdat, alongside the songs of singer-songwriters and unofficial culture in general, supported an entire generation of people who were inwardly free from communist ideology and prepared for change. In addition, samizdat rallied, brought together and, one could almost say, created a stratum of people who understood each other by the merest hint and trusted each other, while not trusting the authorities in the slightest. (#73, *1941)

It prepared the soil, loosened it. (#5, *1951)

I think it helped bring up a generation that not only no longer believed, but also wasn’t afraid. (#108, *1960)

94In her article “Dissident Publics,” Ann Komaromi used Nancy Fraser’s concept of “alternative publics”.¹¹⁰ Such a reading emphasises that the groups that produced, distributed and read samizdat made a significant contribution to the increasing stratification of Soviet society in the last decades of the Soviet regime. In particular, samizdat was a symptom of the growing internal emancipation of certain segments of society, as a way of self-organisation that diversified a monolithic, centralised and very prescriptive cultural sphere. Read in this way, the emphasis and importance of samizdat is on the word sam – self. In the midst of a centrally organised ‘monoculture’ that discouraged, suppressed and penalised individual initiative, samizdat depended on it. This is also what the already cited Vladimir Bukovskii must have had in mind when he said “I write it myself, I edit it myself, I censor it myself, I publish it myself, I circulate it myself and I myself serve the prison sentence for it.”¹¹¹ While comparatively few of those involved in samizdat would go to such extreme length, our questionnaire received many statements confirming ‘freedom’ and ‘individual freedom’ as one of the most important functions of samizdat. #2 (*1931) specified “The spirit of truth and freedom,” while #6 (*1966) insisted that the possibility of circumventing the censor was in itself more important than the content of the texts:

Samizdat resisted the total censorship and the control the state exercised over each person. Not all the texts were of high artistic value, but the act of owning such a text or even just knowing about it made you a bit freer.¹¹²

9534 of our respondents experienced persecution for samizdat, either personally or in their immediate circle of family and friends. These range from invitations for a ‘chat’ with the KGB (14 mentions) to house searches (ten mentions), problems at work/being fired (five mentions) or at university (exclusion, not allowed to join—three mentions). Seven respondents or their next of kin served prison sentences between one and six years. The Soviet Criminal Code contained no article against samizdat per se, but many of those arrested for political activity, including the spreading of texts, in the years after Stalin would have been sentenced according to the infamous article 70.1, ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,’ adopted in 1960. Two respondents specify being accused according to this article. One of our respondents told a detailed story about how he was accused of speculation for facilitating the sale of a volume of tamizdat, although the reason for arresting him was the large amount of samizdat in his flat and the evidence that he was reproducing texts, including the Gulag Archipelago (Respondent #23, *1955, reply to Question 44 “It is well-known that during the Soviet era people were persecuted for samizdat. Were you affected by persecution?”).

96These figures suggest that serious persecution for samizdat was not a very high risk for those who merely read. Moreover, most instances of persecution were haphazard and intended first and foremost to bully and scare. Yet persecution remained a real prospect, and as such potentially contributed to a sense of identity that rallied samizdat readers. As an activity that potentially incurred a prison sentence, reading was invested with heightened importance. This was in addition to the significance afforded to the written word by the long tradition of writers acting as truth tellers in Russian society.

2.6. What was Samizdat: text, process, multi-media sphere

97The list of definitions offered by our respondents in response to question 7 (“Do you have a definition of samizdat, and if yes, what is it?”) is as varied as that used by scholars. Perhaps predictably, samizdat is most commonly understood to be a body of texts. The majority of the 50 respondents who answered to this effect stressed the fact that these texts were “uncensored,” “unofficial,” “banned from official publication” or “produced without the involvement of the authorities”. It seems that content defines samizdat to a lesser degree: three respondents specify “prose and poetry” while only one respondent is adamant that the term applies to political texts only (#72, *1940). Others (13 responses) place the emphasis on how the texts were made—most frequently, “typescript,” others accept “photocopy,” one respondent mentions “handwritten” or simply “not printed.”¹¹³ 12 respondents focused on the “private,” “non-public” aspects of samizdat, the fact that it was “done in private” and that the texts were “the work of one’s close friends” (#53, *1954; #55, *1954). In a Soviet context, which discouraged private initiative of any kind, the emphasis of samizdat as an essentially private practice—an area shielded from the enforced ‘publicity’ of official culture—carries significant weight.

98While the typescript page remains the iconic material representation of samizdat, samizdat was clearly not a monomedial cultural sphere, and few respondents limited samizdat to the typewritten page. Indeed, our question about the methods by which respondents themselves reproduced samizdat texts shows that all media were used—handwriting, typewriting, photography, copying machine, photocopy.

99Only one person explicitly included tamizdat into their definition as “texts imported without state control” (#20, *1966). However, when we also consider other questions it becomes clear that people did not always neatly distinguish samizdat and tamizdat. While the majority of respondents report coming across it (98 respondents out of 122), only a minority, namely 11 respondents, remember passing on texts for publication abroad. Once a text re-entered the USSR in a foreign edition, it would inevitably be further reproduced in order to maximise its readership, often by means of photocopy, which had become more widely available by the 1970s and facilitated the reproduction of long works.¹¹⁴ Thus tamizdat turned once again into samizdat, as these replies to various other questions show:

The Gulag Archipelago (photocopied, which means it can be counted as samizdat), as the volumes appeared one after the other. (#57 (*1953)¹¹⁵

They were for the most past photocopies of tamizdat editions (Pomerants, Iu. Annenkov, A. Galich, Mandel’shtam, with corrections by [his widow] Nadezhda Mandel’shtam) and classified editions (Dzhilas etc). (#50, *1955)¹¹⁶

We had photo prints of The Gulag Archipelago, which were kept in the overhead cupboard. (#59, *1951).¹¹⁷

100Question 29 asks about respondents’ experience of collective reading of samizdat, i.e. people meeting to share a single physical copy of a text (“Do you remember incidents when samizdat texts were read collectively (e.g. when one person would read a page and then pass it on to the next)? Which texts were read in this way, and when was that?”). Respondent. #57 (*1953), replied: “In 1975-1976 the first volume of [Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag] Archipelago was read by groups of students in the zone E dorms of the main building of Moscow State University.” It is highly likely that the respondent is referring to a tamizdat copy or secondary reproduction thereof.¹¹⁸ Respondents who mentioned “the American Mandel’shtam” or “the American Mandel’shtam edition” were without doubt referring to tamizdat, although it is not clear whether they had a printed copy or a reproduction thereof.¹¹⁹ Some people identified them completely: “I made no distinction between tamizdat and samizdat. It was all samizdat to me” (#45, *1947).¹²⁰ This reader evidently regarded samizdat as a culture or mode of being of the text. If we are prepared to consider tamizdat a distinctive sub-section of samizdat we see that within unofficial culture, hand-produced texts and print continued to overlap. In this sense the most accepted marker for samizdat is not so much the production method of a given text, or not even the fact whether it was a written text (see music, definition below), but rather the question of whether or not it was a product of Soviet official culture.

101Only a small minority (12 respondents) of those who answered Question 7 and 7.1., asking for their definition of samizdat, defined it as a process rather than a specific body of texts. In six cases this definition is simply “the circulation of typewritten and/or forbidden text,” placing the emphasis on the action rather than the object. Only one person calls samizdat “a means of resistance” (#122, *1965). Three respondents distinguish between the product, i.e. the text, and the process, i.e., in the words of #63 (*1950) “In the broad sense: unofficial cultural activity during the Soviet era. In the narrow sense: the texts.” The answer of #50 (*1955) is worth quoting at length, as it encompasses all the possible definitions that we have encountered; it is worth noting that he seems to rate the process as more important than the product and emphasizes the aspect that is nowadays popular among researchers; he also underlines that it is the reader alone who decides whether a given text is circulated and how many copies exist:

Samizdat is:
1) the process of producing uncensored copies of an uncensored text (it’s rarer that texts are unavailable for other reasons). Unlike in the case of Nikolai Glazkov’s “samsebiaizdat” [who gave copies of his own works to friends], the number of copies circulated is determined not by the author, but by the readers, according to reader demand;
2) the entirety of texts produced in this way;
3) an individual copy of a text, produced in a samizdat manner that is available to the ordinary person (photocopy, photo, copying by hand, reading on tape etc);
4) the same thing read on tape (a variety of “magnitizdat”) [...]

102For completeness’ sake we should supplement it with the words of #4 (*1972), who called samizdat “an unofficial, underground network for book publishing and book dissemination.” This reply evidently has its limits, considering only books, and draws a distinction between the process of publishing and dissemination that was not as clear-cut in practice. However, he is one of the few to emphasise the network aspect, which is crucial to samizdat as a whole and an essential rather than practical difference between samizdat and official/traditional print culture.

2.7. Samizdat as a collective reading experience

103Samizdat was an inalienable constituent of the culture of “kruzhki,” informal circles that allowed people to circumvent highly regulated and prescriptive Soviet official culture, as described by Liudmila Alekseeva: “These groups […] often replaced non-existent or for various reasons inaccessible institutions—publishing houses, lecture halls, exhibitions, notice boards, confessionals, concert halls, libraries, museums, legal consultations, knitting circles [...] as well as seminars on literature, history, philosophy and linguistics.”¹²¹ The ‘collective experience of literature’¹²² created and nurtured many of these circles, the functioning of which depended on the participants being able to identify and trust each other.¹²³ A closely related type of group emerged later as part of the unofficial music and art scenes in the 1970s and 1980s, but also some literary journals, namely that of tusovka, a group with no clear distinction between authors/perfomers and audience.¹²⁴

104The typical samizdat reader was thus more likely a highly sociable networker than the proverbial solitary bookworm. The majority of our respondents report knowing many others who read samizdat:

105Those who reported that the majority of their acquaintances read samizdat were counted as ‘many’. Typical such answers include:

Dozens. I think that there wasn’t a single one among my friends who didn’t read samizdat. And many of them made and disseminated [samizdat]. (#10, *1955)

Very many (practically everyone I knew). (#17, m, *1950)

Quite a lot, I think that in my social circle there weren’t any people who didn’t [read samizdat]. (#46, *1968)

106Yet this is precisely the genre of question where practical and methodological issues specific to samizdat make it hard to obtain precise information. Depending on the kind of samizdat they read, people were secretive about it and, as #119 (*X), pointed out, “[I knew] several dozens, but I can’t give a concrete number. If you were interested in [this question] people would have considered you an informer.” A more immediate problem is that even approximate numbers are hard to compare because they necessarily relate to different years and, as #50 (*1955) underlines: “This question must be considered in relation to time. It is impossible to put [samizdat readers] from the 1970s in with those from the 1980s.” Nevertheless, they illustrate clearly that samizdat reading was a sociable activity. Not knowing enough/the right people from whom to procure and to whom to give texts was cited repeatedly as the reason why somebody failed to become a habitual reader of samizdat, or why they did not read a particular genre of text (see also section 2. 3):

I didn’t have a reliable source for obtaining samizdat. If I heard of something interesting and could get my hands on it I would read it. (#11, *1952)

That depended on the sources to which I had access. For example, in my immediately social circle there were hardly any serious disseminators of political literature. (#56, *1945)

107In the reverse case, being part of a specific friendship group also predisposed a person to samizdat reading:

This is what people read and gave to others to read in my circle of friends at the time. (#19, *1966)¹²⁵

108All these factors—the limited availability of texts, the clandestine nature of the process as a whole, and the fact that texts were often lent only for a short period of time meant that people frequently read them in a group setting. Reading samizdat brought people together in the immediate physical sense. Indeed, 46 of our respondents remember incidents when texts were read collectively (Question 29: “Do you remember incidents when samizdat texts were read collectively (e.g. when one person would read a page and then pass it on to the next)?”). Quite a number of them remember poetry as especially popular in this context:

These were literary texts, mostly poetry. We read them aloud in my circle of friends. (#31, *1963)

Poetry. Voloshin, Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva, Gumilev etc. The Silver Age. (#32, *1954)

109Later, collective reading was common in the case of particularly topical (and definitely ‘forbidden’) texts:

We read one after the other. Me, my mum and my wife. An ordinary family evening. We would read Voinovich aloud, I remember that. (#24, *1976)

We would read, for example, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (Rakovyi korpus), passing the typescript pages round in a circle. I guess that was around 1970. (#73, *1941)

For example, a photocopy of The Gulag Archipelago. In the flat of my friend X [name supplied], in 1977. (#75, *1962)

110A particularly interesting report of a collective reading of The Gulag Archipelago from the archives rather than our survey is this:

The first chapters of the Archipelago I received from one of the Germans at the journal Der Spiegel. [...] And so we got together. We didn’t have the text in Russian, but everyone was keen on it. And so we decided to not postpone for a minute. Our kruzhok got together, if you can call it that, we never called ourselves a kruzhok, and I translated on the spot for everybody. I simply looked at the German text and translated it into Russian and sometimes even managed to get the style more or less right [...] This is how we got to know quite a number of the chapters, well, at least those that were published at that moment.¹²⁶

111The small group culture in which samizdat flourished brings to mind another time period in which kruzhki were seminally important to the development of Russian literature, namely the literary salons and circles of Pushkin’s era¹²⁷ and later, of the early Silver Age.¹²⁸ The earlier period is especially interesting for comparison because it encompassed manuscript as well as print culture and was characterised, in the words of Simon Franklin, “[a] fluidity of the relations of the various media […] Authors and readers, reciters and listeners, producers and critics, scribes and printers were in multimedia dialogue with each other as never before.” Franklin notes that “the elegant manuscript album was revered as an emblem of civilised pursuits’ and describes the salon members” vacillation between disdain for the vulgar new-ish technology of print and aspiration for print as the more reproducible medium which could provide professional writers with earnings.¹²⁹ Samizdat—a handmade, ‘backward’ medium that somehow managed to become the vehicle of the most interesting, novel, daring literary pursuits and rare, trustworthy facts—was held by its practitioners in similarly high esteem. The shabbiness of the barely legible typescript on onion paper was ‘cult’ in the 1960s already, and part of society preferred samizdat to official print as ‘more truthful’. A widely known anecdote goes like this: “A man asks a typist to type up War and Peace. Surprised, she asks him why, upon which the man explains: ‘My son’s in high school, he reads only samizdat, but I want him to read this novel…’”¹³⁰ Our respondents tell similar stories, without the hyperbole that makes the anecdote so funny:

I was a school kid and I fully understood the value and difference between the printed [party] newspaper Pravda and the Chronicle [of Current Events] lying on the table. Hearing the conversations of one’s parents and their friends is one thing, seeing the printed text quite another. That the pages were typescript made them more convincing in my view, weightier, more truthful. (#47, *1955)¹³¹

112However, while Pushkin’s friends despised print for its potential mass appeal, (some) samizdat practitioners held it in disdain for its dependence on official ‘mass’ culture which continued to marginalize, exclude and even persecute them. A comparison of the typical barely legible onion paper samizdat page and a nineteenth century manuscript illustrates this incongruity, and the limits of such a comparison.

2.8. Much more than just a reader

113As we have seen, different kinds of people felt an attraction to samizdat because it stilled a hunger for information not available due to censorship and cultural isolation. As such it fulfils the criteria of a classic reading community as described by DeNel Rehberg Sedo: “reading communities of the past often exposed their members to learning opportunities that were not available within the institutionalized education system”.¹³² Rehberg Sehdo defines reading communities very broadly; one element all those groups have in common is that they constitute a social process based on shared reading. Seen from this angle, samizdat fits the paradigm.

114However, the issues discussed in the final, theoretical part of Section I indicate that ultimately, samizdat explodes the theoretical framework of the reading community, at least as long as we do not find a way to expand it so that it encompasses production and distribution of texts. The literature makes it clear—and our research confirms it—that the ordinary samizdat reader is much more than ‘just’ a reader.

115In our sample, those who ‘only’ read and returned the text to the person who gave it to them are in the absolute minority. According to the data gleaned from the responses to Questions 17/17.1. (“Which samizdat activity were you involved in? You can tick several options. Please give details about your answer.”) and 24/ 24.2 (“Did you ever reproduce samizdat texts? If so, what influenced your decision to do so?”), the most common additional function fulfilled by the reader was duplication/reproduction, including for their own use or out of “the desire to commit [the text] to memory” (#97, *1951). Only twelve out of our 122 respondents reported that they merely read samizdat texts (for the sake of comparison: 22 respondents were also samizdat authors). 34 respondents popularised samizdat texts by reading and either passing on their copy or re-telling the content. However, 71 respondents—the majority—reported that they reproduced samizdat, usually with the help of a typewriter. This example clearly shows how deeply enmeshed reading and publishing functions were.

Which samizdat activity were you involved in?

116It is tempting to regard samizdat, especially its literary branch, as a particularly ‘pure’ literary process, depending solely on the reader’s approval on aesthetic grounds and thus rendering ‘viable’ even texts that would not stand up to commercial scrutiny. It is thus imperative to scrutinise our respondents’ motivation for reproducing samizdat.

117Indeed, the data submitted broadly confirms the thesis that the reproduction of texts depended on personal aesthetic approval or, in the case of political samizdat, the value of the text as information. Of the 71 people who reported reproducing texts, 32 stated as their reason variations of these three answers: a) “Delight in the unusual language” (#51, *1952) or even “My conviction that it was of exceptional literary value” (#63, *1950)¹³³ and (#59, *1951) “I was happy to reproduce true literature”¹³⁴; or, b) “I felt an insuperable urge to share this amazing text with my friends” (#23, *1955); or, c) “I simply wanted these books to myself” (#77, *1969) or, in greater detail,

118I was given the book for one day, it was very long, 800 pages, I wanted to read it but there was no time, so I had to photograph the book and return it. Later we printed the photographs, they took up a huge amount of space. (#103, *1954).

119This is classic reader behaviour, and indeed the latter reason is exactly why readers in an ‘ordinary’ literary process visit a bookshop, expressed very clearly:

The opportunity to own a copy of Jung’s lectures. (#70, *1962)

120By contrast, 17 people saw their function as closer to that of a middleman in a literary process, i.e. they were acting to satisfy a demand:

One of my dissident friends asked me to. (#10, *1955)

121or because they assumed a particular function, either professionally or through friendship ties:

I was a member of the Leningrad Rock Club’ (#18, *1967; this respondent typed the Club’s journal ROKSI)¹³⁵

My close acquaintance and friendship with the editors of various journals: Chasy, “37,” Obvodnyi Kanal etc. (#7, *1957; this respondent typed and circulated literary samizdat journals)¹³⁶

122or because they had access to the necessary resources, such as a typewriter:

They brought me a book and asked me to make copies. (#55, *1954)

I had taken typing lessons and could type very fast. (#14, *1967)

123The account of #26 (*1969), who remembers copying a tract of traditional folk medicine in Moscow in 1983, deserves to be quoted in full:

It was a proposal I couldn’t turn down: the original typescript was divided into parts and distributed for copying during lessons by the teacher of the industrial training centre, which all older pupils had to attend in order to learn some kind of profession. The subject was typing and office administration. Well, what did we care which text we used to train speed typing?

124Only four respondents cited a straightforwardly moral and/or political reasons:

August 1968 [i.e. the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia]. (#40, *1950)

My desire to share information and examples of moral resistance with others. (#41, *1954)

My friend’s insistent advice to use my position as a librarian and my steadfast hatred of the Soviet authorities. (#59,*1959)¹³⁷

125The outstanding 20 either gave no reason or one that does not neatly fit these categories.

126Does this really make samizdat an exceptionally ‘pure’ literary process though? When we look at Silver Age authors circulating in samizdat we should remember that interest in them was heightened because their work, belonging as it did to another era, had been suppressed; their popularity could not thus be compared to that of present-day authors, let alone present-day authors participating in a standard literary process. And what about ‘new’ samizdat authors, those writing in the 1960s-1980s? These authors implicitly assumed the position of people whose creativity was being thwarted by repressive official culture; the underground poet is the quintessential Russian poet, persecuted for the sake of the ‘truth’ he or she has to tell.¹³⁸ Underground culture added a further notion to this myth, namely that of the (underground) writer as the preserver of authentic literary culture in an environment that does everything to stifle this culture.¹³⁹ Of course this would not work if readers were not complicit; their leniency¹⁴⁰ and the absence of editorial input, in the case of self-produced texts, or permissive editors, in the case of some literary journals,¹⁴¹ temper any claim that samizdat, as a literary process, was dependent merely on the readers’ aesthetic judgement.

2.9 The location of Samizdat

127The topic of book collecting and libraries helps us establish some more of the fundamental particularities of samizdat reading in comparison to traditional print culture. During the early decades of the Soviet Union, mass reading was mainly confined to libraries. However, from the 1950s onwards, private collections grew in importance as leisure activities migrated to the private sphere. The demand for books rose sharply, as did the demand for more varied reading materials, one of the factors fuelling samizdat.¹⁴² This is in addition to the fact that intellectuals have always amassed home libraries. 120 out of our 122 respondents boast of having collected books at home or growing up in homes filled with books.

128Samizdat was a written culture, not an oral one. Yet the texts were highly mobile, constantly passing from hand to hand, being read in short bursts, often overnight. Add to this the fact that the possession of samizdat, especially politically relevant texts, was a risk, and it is evident that samizdat could never form part of readers’ private libraries in the same sense as printed books. Yet almost all of our respondents (102 people) kept samizdat at home (Question 23/ 23.1.: “Did you keep any samizdat at home?”; “If yes, can you remember the name of any texts you kept at home and/or the approximate number of texts?”). Those who named texts (93 people) usually list works of literature, alongside two political texts, The Chronicle of Current Events and The Gulag Archipelago.

I think I would have kept more samizdat if I had been able to obtain these texts—they were normally given to be “read by tomorrow,” more rarely for a couple of days, and in those cases I felt the need to share them with my friends. (#75, *1962)

129Several respondents queried the very concept of ‘preserving samizdat’:

Samizdat and tamizdat were not supposed to be kept at home, they needed to be disseminated. (#7,*1957)

By the way, in fact I tried hard to not keep the books at home for too long. It was a pity, as there were no copies. I acted according to the principle of reading as fast as I could and then passing the book on. (#105, *1949)

130Others made a distinction according to the topicality of the text—information ought to be passed around in real time, while belles-lettres could be kept.

131Why should one not keep literature at home? But to keep, for example, a regularly appearing dissident chronicle about what was going on in the camps in Mordovia would have been silly. The Chronicle was immediately circulated so that people could read it, not keep it in their bookcase. #116 (*1966)

132The perceived danger of a text also played a role:

The Gulag Archipelago, in a photocopy reproduction, was kept in the overhead cupboard, called “the Tablets of Testimony” and given to close friends, while other materials were constantly in free circulation. (#59, *1951)

[...] and the most dangerous part [of the samizdat archive], including copies of the Chronicle of Current Events, we burned in the Izmailov Forest. (#63, *1950)

Political samizdat (microfilms, to be precise) I would stash away in the basement. (#27, *1954)

A photocopy of the tamizdat Mandel’shtam was openly displayed on our bookshelf. And a few typescripts were kept in the cupboard, hidden from view. (#75, *1962)

133The very nature of samizdat severely disrupted the reading process, rendering impossible both book collecting and solitary, slow reading in the peace of one’s own home¹⁴³ as well as reading in a public library that was founded in order to preserve and disseminate knowledge.

134There were Samizdat libraries, although they remained a rare phenomenon and differed significantly from ‘ordinary’ libraries.¹⁴⁴ 20 of our readers report knowing of the existence of such libraries; four of which mention the well-known and meticulously organized library of Viacheslav Igrunov in Odessa. Other cities mentioned are Moscow, Leningrad, Obninsk, Kazan, Vilnius, Chelyabinsk. We were fortunate that Viacheslav Igrunov agreed to fill in our questionnaire:

In a special repository we had collected several hundred books (I think around 500), a certain number of periodicals, both samizdat and foreign, and several thousands of articles, letters, poems, stories, essays etc. (#21, *1948)

135But he is not the only respondent with a large collection:

There were thousands of texts and my samizdat library was used by several dozen readers in Cheliabinsk; people would also come from the surrounding area. (#60, *1969)

I had very many books—almost everything by Solzhenitsyn, including The Oak and the Calf (Bodalsya telenok s dubom), the American Mandel’shtam edition, Pasternak... Well, once again, I was a keeper and disseminator of illegal literature. (#89, *1950) ¹⁴⁵

136Perhaps samizdat libraries were a contradiction in terms. Some readers indeed question whether such a structure can be called a library: “How could libraries of samizdat exchange texts? Your question is a dead-end. By form of dissemination, samizdat and tamizdat were not a library but a network” (#116, *1966).¹⁴⁶ Be that as it may, the structures that became known as ‘samizdat libraries’ necessarily exhibited traits of ‘ordinary’ libraries, such as a subscription and a cataloguing system, as well as an (encrypted) system of borrowing records.¹⁴⁷ However, as part of a clandestine subculture they had to exist without an actual building for a repository and reading rooms that readers could visit. The task of a samizdat librarian was particular, too: in the cases that are described, each member of a group of librarians would keep certain books and pass them on to readers from a pre-approved circle.¹⁴⁸ Samizdat libraries relied heavily on copied rather than typed material and sourced much of their reading stock from tamizdat editions. There were two ways in which a text could be “photocopied”: with a photocopier (kseroks in Russian) or with a camera; in this case the individual shots would be developed like photos, on photo paper. Both Igrunov and Avrustskii describe this process as essential to their libraries.¹⁴⁹

137They were of course collections of samizdat, often sizeable, that were not libraries, already because they were private. In its archives, the International Memorial Society has amassed a large quantity of samizdat form private collections. When people submit these materials, the archivists record the owner’s relationship to the texts—was he the author of the text? A reader who managed to preserve some of the samizdat he read, perhaps by typing their own copy and giving others to friends? This person would not have collected samizdat in any organised fashion. Or was he a disseminator (“rasprostranitel’”)—somebody who was actively circulating texts in a deliberate attempt to secure the widest possible readership? Disseminators did not necessarily keep large amounts of texts at home, unlike the last category, the ‘librarian’ of samizdat who collected texts and passed them on to readers without getting a text in return, and the text would have returned to him.¹⁵⁰

138We tried a similar approach and asked our readers about different roles in the samizdat process. Question 16 listed a number of roles—much larger than the archival list given above—and invited respondents to tick if they fulfilled these roles or knew anybody fulfilling them:

139In interpreting these mentions we should note that we did not offer an explanation of the terms and did not use the term ‘librarian,’ as we foresaw it causing confusion. People who mentioned keeper/custodian (“khranitel’”) may well have implied somebody not collecting for themselves but for further dissemination and/or a library. ‘Disseminators’ includes those who merely passed on texts to close friends.

140Samizdat libraries, emerging in the late 1960s or 1970s,¹⁵¹ are evidence of the growing professionalisation of the subculture. Samizdat evolved from an informal subculture into a parallel culture that provided alternatives and substitute for those things official culture would not provide—in this case, reading material that was in high demand from a significant substratum of those who read a lot.

Conclusion

141Existing sociological models are of limited use for describing all of samizdat (reading). Such models work well for individual sub-sections, such as literary periodicals, which I have described as ‘communities of practice,’¹⁵² i.e. social groups defined by a shared outlook, values and behaviours,¹⁵³ such as interaction (“mutual engagement”), common endeavours (“joint enterprise”), and a shared repertoire of common resources of language, styles and routines by means of which they express their identities as members of the group.¹⁵⁴ But if we look at samizdat as a whole, this model loses its plausibility. There is, on the one hand, the sheer scope of the phenomenon. More importantly, samizdat was so heterogeneous with regard to the material being read, the origin and motivation of those involved, and the level of involvement, from occasional reading to authorship, dissemination and conspiracy to run an illegal library, that finding a common denominator is near impossible. The questionnaire, which will remain live for the foreseeable future, constitutes a sustained attempt at researching samizdat, in particular the reading and reproduction of literary texts, as social networks—the totality of acquaintanceships connecting people in a particular place and/or social cluster.¹⁵⁵

142Samizdat was both the process and the product of unofficial, i.e. non-state-sanctioned, cultural activity. It centered on written texts but was not limited to texts. Probably the most salient difference between samizdat and traditional print culture was the fact that readers alone were responsible for every single link in the chain that is the communications diagram. Samizdat depended on networks and in turn created and sustained networks. Samizdat readers mounted a sustained ethical challenge to the Soviet readers. Samizdat readers also developed a parallel culture that allowed certain people to factually ignore Soviet official culture. It is thus logical that samizdat as a phenomenon stopped existing once censorship was first relaxed and then abolished and independent/privately owned presses became a reality. Over the course of the 1980s official and unofficial culture came closer. Most of the texts previously available only in samizdat were published officially and independent journals emerged. When the two cultures ultimately merged with the adoption of the Law on Print in 1990, samizdat stopped existing.