Samizdat

[page 1] In a general sense any copy of a document which has been produced in the Soviet Union outside the chain of state publishing houses may be referred to as samizdat. […] [page 3] This term is modeled on the shortened form—gosizdat—of State Publishing House (Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo). […] According to Julius Telesin, a Russian writer who emigrated to Israel in 1970, the word samizdat occurs first in the late fifties when a Moscow poet, exasperated with the operation of the censorship system, bound together the typewritten sheets of his poems and wrote Samsebiaizdate ("Publishing House for Oneself") in the place where the name of the publishing house would normally appear. He also used the term samizdat with the same meaning but, as Telesin observes, samizdat ("self-publishing house") subsequently acquired a wider meaning.

From a clandestine network of friends passing to each other typed copies of their new work, the initiative developed over the years into a parallel publishing system. […] [I]n cities the inquisitive reader did not have much difficulty in obtaining access to what was in fact a banned literature. Samizdat was also an important source of new writing for the equally active and enterprising publishers of Czech (and some Slovak) books in exile.

Indeed, internal criticism of the USSR from a Marxist perspective has been a continuing fact of Soviet life for decades. While [Joseph] Stalin held sway, this criticism was limited to clandestine and fugitive expressions, circulated orally or in samizdat.

Carter chose not to publish on doomsday, discussing it only in seminars where he thought it could get a fair hearing. In this way the doomsday argument began as a secret, almost samizdat doctrine, known to a few as the “Carter catastrophe.”

Now liberal cultural power has increased, the ACLU doesn’t seem very interested in the liberties of non-progressives anymore, and Dr. Seuss sells as pricey samizdat.

In Poland, some samizdats are different: they are professionally produced and are sold for money. But the money that these Polish consumers pay for these illegal samizdats is not dissipated in the domain of individual or corporate profits, nor does it help support the government and its publishing monopoly. The money acquired through sales is used for – and this the consumer is well aware of – the advancement of the Solidarity movement.

Journals which once would have circulated, if at all, as underground samizdaty, those involved risking years in a labour camp, now carry the name, address and phone number of the editor.

The books of [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn and the recollections of Evgeny^([sic]) Ginsburg and Varlam Shalamoff were reprinted and broadly circulated in samizdaty.

What seems to be growing more pronounced is the time lag between open criticism, often via the Internet, and the state’s crackdown. Each case generates both more publicity and more impact: chat rooms, blogs, and electronic bulletin boards are becoming the new samizdaty.

Samizdats were unauthorized books reproduced with a typewriter and as many as seven carbon copies. They were the product of the country's artistic elite and were critical of the government. Possession of, writing, or typing a samizdat could and occasionally did result in arrest and the perpetrator being sentenced to a gulag. This was mostly an illusion. The writers and distributors of samizdats were seldom at risk after the death of Stalin.