Samizdat: one of the key elements of Soviet dissent

CEUeTDCollection

From 1969 to 1974, the severe suppression of the dissidents led to the decrease of their activity: no issue of The Chronicle of Current Events was published from January 1972 to May 1974, and many dissenters were imprisoned or sent into exile. Although the ratification of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 caused a temporary revival of Soviet liberal dissent, and in 1976 the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group was founded to monitor human rights violations in the Soviet Union,²⁷⁵the US President Carter‘s 1976 campaign for human rights led to a new turn of repression in the USSR.²⁷⁶ Although some liberal dissident groups were active in the Soviet Union until the years of Glasnost, according to Alekseeva, ―by the mid-1980s, when most dissidents were either in prison or in exile, we were simply forgotten.‖²⁷⁷ However, Alekseeva‘s observation is correct only regarding Soviet liberal dissent. Literary dissent, as well the so-called Second culture (in relation to the first, official culture), flourished during the whole Brezhnev era.²⁷⁸

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Initially he stated that there were no political prisoners in the Soviet Union and that Sakharov was just a madman, but eventually Gorbachev changed his position.²⁷⁹ His years witnessed a radical transformation of the whole Soviet society, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, harsh economic reforms, the abolition of censorship, introduction of religious freedom, at least a partial solution of the national question and cessation of political repressions. Soviet dissent as a form of opposition to the regime ceased to exist.

CEUeTDCollection

Although Soviet dissent was not a coherent movement, it is possible to define some common characteristics that the majority of oppositional groups in the Soviet Union shared.

Non-conformist thinking, non-violent methods, extreme diversity of the groups and approaches and an extensive use of samizdat are the main characteristics of Soviet dissent. Samizdat, as one of the main features of Soviet dissent and the principal form of dissidents‘ activity, deserve separate consideration here.

Samizdat (―I-self-pub‖), which refers to underground amateur publishing of censored texts and transmission of these texts from one reader to another in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, was, according to Ann Komaromi, one of the principle forms of activity of Soviet dissidents.²⁸¹ The term samizdat was opposed to gosizdat (abbreviation for the State Publishing House)²⁸² and the poet Nikita Glazkov used it for the first time for his own texts in 1952.²⁸³

The first Soviet documents that introduced censorship were signed already in 1917.

These were ―The Decree on the Press‖ and the ―General Regulation on the Press,‖ which prohibited the non-Bolshevik press, introduced censorship regulations²⁸⁴ and created the legal preconditions for the emergence of Soviet Samizdat. Nevertheless, samizdat as a form of opposition and dissent is not a recent phenomenon in Russian culture. Already in 1790 the prominent Russian writer Alexander Radishchev published a book Поездка из Петербурга в Москву [A journey from Petersburg to Moscow] on his own press; it is well known that in the 1820s Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Griboedov also widely circulated their unpublished manuscripts.²⁸⁵ But although the underground publication of censored texts was known in Russia

281 Komaromi, ―The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,‖ 597-598.

282 Hyung-Min Joo, ―Voices of Freedom: Samizdat,‖ Europe-Asia Studies, 56/4 (2004): 572.

283 Komaromi, ―The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,‖ 598.

284 Hollander, ―Political Communication and Dissent in the Soviet Union,‖ 236.

285 Ibid 263.

CEUeTDCollection

long before the emergence of the Soviet Union, as historian Andrei Daniel remarks, nobody among the opposition of the past wrote as much as Soviet dissidents.²⁸⁶

Komaromi points out in her 2004 article ―The Material Existence of Samizdat‖ that the heroic representation of the authors of samizdat in the historiography of Soviet dissent made samizdat the repository of ―‗heroic and uncompromising truth‘ wielded by dissident-warriors struggling valiantly against the totalitarian regime to bring about its eventual demise.‖²⁸⁷ Therefore, even though samizdat was a complex phenomenon that encompassed not only political writings but also other genres including pornography, first in the West and later in the Soviet Union and Russia, samizdat became the symbol of the Soviet opposition, ―a rebirth of free speech behind the Iron Curtain, defying ideological brainwashing by the Dart Vaders of the

‗Evil Empire‘.‖²⁸⁸

According to Peter Steiner, the analysis of Soviet dissent and particularly of Soviet samizdat is a challenging task because the ―concept of ‗totalitarianism‘ that usually provides a convenient backdrop for any discussion of uncensored publishing in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe exemplifies the perils of homogenizing some seventy years of Communism into an ahistoric sameness.‖²⁸⁹ It is of great importance to acknowledge that, although the historiography often understands and interpretssamizdat as an integral part of the fight for universal human rights, it was a complex phenomenon.

While analyzing the phenomenon of samizdat, Hyung-Min Joo in his 2004 article

―Voices of Freedom: Samizdat‖ claims that it ―was a predominantly ‗political‘ phenomenon in spite of its literary origins.‖²⁹⁰ In his analysis he relies on the materials of Arkhiv Samizdata (the Samizdat archive) at the Open Society Archive in Budapest. The author divides all the materials into four categories: literary, nationalist, religious and political (the last group, according to him,

286 Андрей Даниэль, ―Диссидентство: культура ускользающая от определения,‖ Россия (Москва: 1998) [Andrei Daniel,―Dissent: culture that is difficult to define‖ inRussia (Moscow: 1998)], 14-15.

287 Komaromi, ―The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,‖ 599.

288 Peter Steiner, ―Introduction: On Samizdat, Tamizdat, Magnizdat, and Other Strange Words That Are Difficult to Pronounce,‖ Poetics Today 29/4 (2008): 616.

289 Steiner, ―Introduction,‖ 614.

290 Hyung-Min Joo, ―Voices of Freedom,‖ 572.

CEUeTDCollection

constitutes 63% of all documents in the collection). However, even though Hyung-Min Joo mentions that the US Congress sponsored the foundation of the Open Society Archives,²⁹¹ he does not question the institute‘s policy and origins, nor he asks how and why the materials for this archive were selected. Therefore he misses a very important component in his research, namely, the Cold War competition, which not only influenced the conceptof Soviet dissent constructed in the West, but also defined which ―valuable‖ materials were to be preserved in the archives.

The phenomenon of samizdat was accompanied by tamizdat, writings of Soviet authors that were published abroad and then smuggled back to the Soviet Union²⁹² with the assistance of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to recent data, from 1956 to 1993 no less than around 10 million books and periodicals were distributed among East European and Soviet people.²⁹³ These data exemplify the enormous involvement of the West in the activity of Soviet dissidents.

3.1.4 The Moscow Helsinki Group and the woman question: inclusive exclusion