Who Read, Typed, and Distributed Samizdat in the Soviet Union?

Abstract

Who Read, Typed, and Distributed Samizdat in the Soviet Union? Cécile Vaissié Josephine von Zitzewitz, The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union. 248 pp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ISBN 978-1788313766. $120.00. Samizdat appeared in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1950s, and Josephine von Zitzewitz defines it very validly as "the production and circulation of texts without the involvement of the state publishing houses and the censor's office" (1). She thus underlines that samizdat is not defined by the genre or the political stances of its texts, but by the ways these texts were produced and circulated. She adds that it was "a mass phenomenon" in the later decades of the Soviet Union, since estimations of the number of people involved range "from hundreds of thousands to several million people" (2). Therefore, samizdat deserves very well to be researched, and studying it has been made much easier by the fact that, as stated by Zitzewitz, samizdat texts are being made more and more accessible to researchers. Book collections are being progressively put online (as is the case, for example, for Viacheslav Igrunov's Antologiia samizdata [Anthology of Samizdat]), and rich collections of samizdat are now available in research centers all over the world: in various branches of Memorial in Russia (officially closed by the authorities since December 2021), in the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa in Bremen (Germany), the Open Society Archives at the Central European University (apparently still in Budapest), the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, the University of Toronto with its program for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence, and so on. This facilitated access to samizdat texts has helped, especially in the past decade, to develop scientific publications on this topic. The excellent journal Acta Samizdatica/Zapiski o samizdate and its editors, Elena Strukova and [End Page 941] Boris Belenkin, have greatly contributed to encouraging a scientific approach to samizdat. Prepared by Memorial International and the Historical Library in Moscow, Acta Samizdatica, which put out its fifth issue in December 2020, has since 2012 published articles on various aspects of samizdat and tamizdat, encouraged young researchers' publications, and coordinated the works of more senior scholars from the ex-Soviet Union and from "the West."1 Researchers and archivists from Memorial—such as Aleksei Makarov, Olga Rosenblum (who recently started a cycle of Zoom conferences, "The Dissident Library"), Gennadii Kuzovkin, and Aleksandr Daniel´, a samizdat "veteran"—have helped enormously to develop this research on samizdat.2 Scholars such as Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Ann Komaromi have done the same outside of Russia.3 Furthermore, more books on the dissident movement have been published, as well as memoirs written by dissidents and interviews of dissidents.4 Some Internet sites popularize high-quality, accessible resources on samizdat, dissidence, and late Soviet culture, and Arzamas may be the best site on such topics (https://arzamas.academy/courses/40/2). In this context of growing research and publications, Zitzewitz's last book nonetheless stands out, since it explores seriously some very understudied questions. One of her main positions consists in disconnecting samizdat, as a cultural and social practice, from the dissidence movement with which it is often associated. She is indeed right in stating that if "all dissidents were involved in samizdat" (9), not all readers of samizdat were active dissidents (10), even if the latter "made samizdat famous beyond the Soviet Union" (1). Furthermore, Zitzewitz aims [End Page 942] at analyzing samizdat readers and practices, not samizdat texts and authors, as many have already done, including Zitzewitz herself in her previous book.5 Since the samizdat reader was rarely only a reader, she explores the "individuals with personal experience of reading, reproducing, editing and circulating samizdat texts" (3), which has her returning, in her last two chapters, to some of the samizdat actors she analyzed in her first book. Zitzewitz points out the essential notion of "networks": people were reading samizdat mainly because they knew people who were reading/receiving/diffusing samizdat and not so much, or not only, because they had oppositional political positions or were looking for alternative texts. Therefore, she explores more generally the...