Samizdat: How The Soviet Union’s Unique Literary Phenomenon Became a Caricature

Illustration Credit: Charli Foreman

What is Samizdat?

Samizdat can be broadly defined as the trend of clandestine self-publishing that swept the Soviet Union across the latter half of the 20th century and continues to fascinate readers to this day. Its title is a neologism composed of the Russian word ‘sam’, meaning ‘self’, and ‘izdat’, short for ‘izdatelstvo’, meaning ‘publishing house’. This functioned as a cynical pun on ‘gosizdat’, the state-sponsored publishing house whose unbending adherence to Soviet ideology samizdat sought to resist.

Originally, samizdat rings served to print and distribute literary texts that had been banned or distorted beyond recognition by heavy-handed state censors. Novels such as Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, both prohibited by the authorities, gained popularity initially via secret distribution networks operating under the noses of the KGB and its feared 5th Directorate. Samizdat’s independence also made it the perfect vessel for subversive political content, and as such it quickly became the mouthpiece for a variety of movements, each proposing their own radical visions for Soviet society.

However, as samizdat’s appeal increased, both domestically and abroad, it began to lose its identity as a pragmatic grassroots movement, acquiring a quasi-mythological status that rendered it little more than a vacuous, overwrought political cliché. Particularly in the West, the diversity and ambiguity that underpinned samizdat output was scrubbed from the record as it was incorporated into sweeping ideological narratives, characterised generically as an example of resistance against Soviet oppression.

Why was this? Well, as it turns out, samizdat’s metamorphosis has less to do with its content than it does the peculiar physical form of samizdat documents themselves. To explain what is meant by this, it is worth first taking a moment to outline how samizdat was produced and distributed, and how this impacted its external appearance. 

Production and Circulation

In the USSR, all copying machines and printing presses were inventorised, making it almost impossible for samizdat content to be produced on a large scale without attracting unwanted attention from the authorities. As such, most samizdat rings were forced to hand-type their output, using unregistered typewriters smuggled in from Germany to evade the KGB’s prying eyes. This reliance on the manual copying of original manuscripts introduced numerous typographic and formatting errors into samizdat texts, whilst lack of access to professional printing presses meant that texts usually appeared as unembellished typescripts devoid of any illustrations or artwork to spruce up their final presentation.

Dependence on typewriters also made large-scale print runs unfeasible. To get round this, samizdat circles would produce a small number of copies of a text before passing these onto their contacts, who would read them, type another batch of copies, and continue the cycle. As such, texts were hand-typed afresh at multiple different phases, with human error layered in at every stage, meaning that each new copy came out at a further remove from the original document. Often, this resulted in textual alterations of much higher significance than mere typographical errors, with readers taking massive editorial liberties in the copying process. Not just this, but the repeated physical exchange of samizdat documents between readers meant that texts’ pages often became wrinkled, dog-eared, and worn.

Samizdat texts, therefore, became infamous for their unprofessional, inconsistent, and minimalistic form. So much so that, in the Soviet Union, this ruggedness came to acquire its own political significance through its marked difference from the glossy, clinical appearance of state-sanctioned materials. Samizdat’s imperfect, flawed style came to be seen as a sign of its unadulterated authenticity, eschewing the artifice supposedly used by official culture to push through its propagandist, ideology-driven agenda. Dog-eared pages filled with typos were now well-known symbols of resistance.

The West and Samizdat

In the West, this association of samizdat’s physical appearance to the act of dissidence was taken to its extreme. The Cold War had fostered widespread hostility towards the Soviet Union, such that in a general sense any ‘dissidence’ was seen as entirely anti-Soviet agitation and therefore a ‘truth’ locked in battle with mendacious Soviet propaganda. Seen from this perspective, samizdat, a leading instrument of Soviet dissidence, was associated with ideas of truthfulness and authenticity even more earnestly than it had been in the Soviet Union. Indeed, a round table discussion among Western academics in 1971 specifically promoted samizdat as reliable primary material for historical analysis. As such, its distinct physical appearance acquired yet more potent political symbolism.

Unfortunately, the newfound focus on samizdat texts’ form resulted in their transformation into so-called ‘object-signs’. In other words, readers and critics alike began to ascribe value to samizdat based purely on whether it conformed to the aesthetic norms of flawed authenticity that had come to define it. The content of texts, therefore, lost its impetus, with samizdat becoming little more than a hollow gimmick evaluated in respect of its adherence to cliché aesthetics and no longer as a function of its capacity to provide an innovative contribution to political discourse.

The irony, of course, is that the very same Western culture that reduced samizdat to cheap political shtick now seeks to champion the fruits of its labour. Dr Zhivago, The Gulag Archipelago, even Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki are all held up by the erudite as shining examples of ‘real’ Soviet life, and have become the staples of lecture halls and seminar rooms. Without samizdat, these works would never have seen the light of day, and certainly not had the ground-breaking impact that they did. Yet, this is only ever mentioned in passing as superfluous contextual information, the crucial role played by samizdat in these works’ rise to prominence often downplayed.

Paradoxically, for samizdat to be truly appreciated, attention needs to be diverted away from it as a phenomenon in and of itself and towards the texts it sought to bring to the fore. That way, both its function as a crucial arm of the free press and the value of its content can be understood to the fullest extent.