The term Samizdat translated from the Russian sam or "self" and izadatelstvo or "publishing," is a play on the official soviet Gosizdat, or "State Publishing House." Literature which would be considered samizdat are manuscripts which were privately and illegally produced and circulated in the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Before glasnost in the 1980s, this was the only way in which to publish anything not endorsed and censored by the government.

Censorship in Russia dates back to the eighteenth century novel Journey from St. Petersburg by A. Radishchev. This continued through the Russian Revolution with varying levels of seriousness and control. With communism, however, literature became a state controlled and authorized instrument for the promotion of the Soviet Regime. With the death of Stalin and the end of his terrifying dictatorship, came the beginning of samizdat in the Russian literary tradition. At first dissident authors wrote mainly about the restrictions on their freedom of speech. However, the movement soon evolved into a disparagement of Soviet rule, such as, "ideologies, culture, law, economic policy, historiography, and treatment of religious and ethnic minorities." (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Duplicating machines could not be owned privately in Soviet Russia, therefore copies of samizdat manuscripts would be photographed or done on typewriters with numerous carbon copies and then passed from reader to reader. The number of copies of the manuscript would increase when a person in possesion of a copy would transcribe it themselves.

Samizdat began as a Moscow and Leningrad intellectual movement, but quickly became a way for Russian authors to have their works read which had previously been denied publication by the government or which had been kept hidden rather than face the risk of persecution. A distinct and strong underground literary culture grew out of samizdat, including the writings of Shalamov and Bulgakov. Samizdat also provided a way to circulate books which had been published before and were now unavailable because they clashed with the present Soviet ideal, such as the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Also, another way for writers to get their works in circulation was tamizdat, literally "there published." If a manuscript was able to be smuggled out of the country, published and circulated there, it could be smuggled back into the Soviet Union in limited numbers and distributed illegally. Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line is a product of both forms of publication. It was circulated in manuscript form, as well as sent to Israel and later Paris for printing. Samizdat literature proliferated during glasnost in the mid-1980s. However, with the fall of Communism came its disappearance; publishing became independent from the government and it therefore became possible to distribute literature without the demand for propaganda or the threat of censorship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crowe, David M., Jr. "Samizdat." Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History. Ed. Joseph L. Wieczynski. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1983.

Kasack, Wolfgang. "Samizdat." Dictionary Since Russian Literature Since 1917. New York, NY: Columbia University Press: 1988.

"Samizdat." Britannica Online. <http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/521/
70.html> [Accessed 8 May 1998].