Networking before the Internet: Samizdat

I was talking to my friend Will Hill at Cambridge School of Art about the 1960s phenomenon of writers surreptitiously using new office technologies to become the printer/publishers of their own work. He mentioned Samizat, something I had not heard of (not an uncommon occurrence when talking to Will). The following was published in Parenthesis.

There was a time (remembering the 1950s) when a young writer eager to see his or her work in the public domain would, in lieu of visiting a printer, buy a second-hand typewriter. Mine was an Underwood: small and light enough to carry and which transferred characters onto paper with a satisfying thwack. There were few ‘options’ but, nevertheless, it was possible to arrange a text so that – with a little imagination – it evoked the authority of a printed page in a book. With the use of carbon paper, copies could be made and with the aid of a stapler and a friendly bookshop owner the young writer was as good as ‘published’. 

The Underwood Typewriter Company’s sales were equal in quantity to all of the other firms in the typewriter industry combined with exports from its base in New York to every part of the world. One of its more surprising and successful export destinations was the Soviet Union. The fact that Underwood typewriters dominated the market there until the Second World War would play an important role in a necessarily convoluted but highly effective Soviet literary underground movement. 

Recovery after the War was desperately slow in the Soviet Union, but although the 1950s began frugally and ended only a little less frugal, there was also a growing optimism. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the period up to the early 1960s was referred to as the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’, (after Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel, The Thaw) and it is certainly true that repression and censorship in the Soviet Union was relaxed to the extent that millions of ‘political’ prisoners were released from the gulag labour camps. However, to understand the meaning of ‘relaxed’ it is necessary to understand that before Khrushchev there had been Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’: thirty years in which millions of innocent Soviet citizens were snatched off the street and sent to Gulag labour camps or executed in prison. In comparison, Khrushchev was, indeed, a benevolent leader, yet restrictions on information in the media, arts, and culture; foreign films; books; as well as emerging national television, remained in force and harsh punishments were meted out not only to the perpetrators: authors, artists, composers, designers etc, but even to anyone caught in possession of material construed to be anti-Soviet. ‘Relaxed’ meant that under Khrushchev, the production of material ‘not in accordance with official ideology’ no longer carried a death sentence. 

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Russian ‘unofficial’ literature has a long tradition. Ever since Ivan Fedorov, founder of the first Russian printing press in 1564, was forced to flee Moscow when his printing workshop was burned down, apparently, by scribes fearful for their livelihoods, book-printing in Russia has remained under the close scrutiny of the authorities. Most major 19th century writers, including Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy had problems: works could be denied publication or at the very least subject to major ‘editing’. 

In the first three decades of the 20th century, although state control remained absolute, some of the most innovative art, film, dance, drama, music, and poetry was created in Russia before Trotsky’s fall in 1928. Creative endevour, perceived positively within the political system as an innovative yet quintessentially Soviet culture inspired by a spirit of revolt against Western bourgeois art was now, under Stalin, regarded with suspicion.The Party quickly came to the view that the same work should now be dismissed as ‘the last desperate struggle of capitalism’ within the Motherland. The avant-gardists responsible took flight or were ‘replaced’ by what the Writers’ Union and the Central Committee described as a ‘strong, young, materialist, earthbound, proletarian culture’. Thus began the persecutions and purges of artists, dissidents, and anyone else who happened to point a finger in the wrong direction. The drive toward a Stalinist ‘Father of Nations’ personality cult was merciless. 

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Nikolai Glazkov, born 1919, was a Soviet poet and coined the term ‘samizdat’ (‘I self-publish’) in 1940. Glazkov named his ‘publishing house’ Samsebyaizdat, which was shortened to samizdat, a term later defined by Vladimir Bukovsky in To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, ‘Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself.’ 

During the latter 1950s, samizdat gained such enormous momentum that its significance overtook ‘official’ literature, although its status remained uncertain. (Composers distributed music using magnetic cassette tapes, a process called magnetizdat.) Under Khrushchev every citizen had the right to make and distribute up to five copies of their writing. To steer around this rule an author would give his or her five copies of their typed manuscript to five others within a trusted network. Each would then type five more copies and pass these to five others, and so on. By the time that a fifth ‘batch’ had been typed there could be more than 3,000 copies in circulation. This surreptitious activity was half-jokingly referred to as ‘overcoming Gutenberg’. (There are intriguing similarities between the samizdat process and the common pre-Gutenberg activity of students and scholars making hand-written copies of the books they required for their own studies. The cost of a manuscript meant that such ‘amateur’ copies far out-numbered those produced by the monastic scriptoria.) 

However, anything that was written, let alone typed, without official knowledge aroused suspicion. By no means was all samizdat material critical of communist ideology, but it certainly included a great deal of material that the authorities considered ‘anti-Soviet’ – such as violations of human rights, mass protests and petitions, secret court minutes, foreign books such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, and, of course, the work of Russian writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak (samizdat versions of Doctor Zhivago circulated for decades before it was officially published in Russia in 1988). 

A curious aspect of these documents is that their crude physical state and harried typing became a potent symbol of resourcefulness and rebellious spirit. The distinctive blurry typewritten text and thin creased pages wrapped in utilitarian covers, separated and elevated samizdat material from imperious, smartly marketed Western literature. The result was that despite the complete lack of care or apparent interest in its appearance, this clandestine work attained not only cultural but also an aesthetic cachet; each crease, smear and typo adding to the work’s ‘authenticity’. As a result, samizdat documents – each, by definition, unique – have become highly prized by collectors. 

Samizdat had no access to printing presses and the few duplicating machines that existed were closely guarded: the KGB was far too vigilant. So it was the typewriter on which samizdat material, guardedly nicknamed ‘underwood’ after the ubiquitous typewriter, was produced. Paper was in short supply because those who purchased more than modest quantities were liable to be reported, so to maximise the use of space, the lines of text stretched to the paper’s edges; both width and depth. 

Typewriters were hard to trace simply because of the monopoly enjoyed by Underwood in the Soviet Union, and there were countless thousands of these. Even a machine with a damaged key that made an identifiable impression would only be visible on the top or first copy, plus the practice of dividing a single manuscript among several typists – for speed as well as an aid to conspiracy – made tracing a culprit’s typewriter all but impossible. 

Author’s often adopted a pseudonym, a practice pounced on by the Communist Party which argued that self-publishing work was anti-communist because the writer (or ‘worker’) was unpaid. This imaginatively cynical tactic gave the impression that the state was concerned that the genuine proletariat writer should not be exploited – and, after all, only a ‘bourgeois’ author could afford to give away their labour for free. 

Samizdat authors certainly wrote without pecuniary constraint; in effect, they donated their work to the samizdat network. The same applies to those typing and distributing copies of a given text. Their actions were based on the belief that freedom of expression was more important than, conceivably, their own physical freedom. Because of this, the number of copies generated was the clearest and most genuine signal of how important or significant a particular text was judged to be (although it was quite impossible to know precisely how many copies had, finally, been made). 

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It is difficult to measure the impact of samizdat, although it is commonly accepted that the Soviet Union was finally brought to an end by information unofficially distributed – and the document considered to have been the most crucial of the samizdat process is Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (which, like Animal Farm, also had the advantage of being short).  The circulation of samizdat publications may have reached a relatively small audience, but many of those readers were culturally or even politically influential. Indeed, government officers were known to be regular readers of samizdat material in both an official and unofficial capacity. 

After sixty-five years, the inauguration of glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’) after Gorbachev’s rise to power in the mid-1980s caused the samizdat system to wane. However, its cultural legacy remains a potent one. A contemporary Russian writer who resorts to self-publishing might call themself a ‘samizdat’ author as a gesture of defiance against the constraints of a ‘commercially oriented, risk-averse publishing industry’. Indeed, an exhibition in Berlin; Präprintium: Moscow books from the Samizdat, held in 1998, included post-1990 work and described short-run limited edition artists’ books, and even work produced using digital technology delivered on CD, as ‘samizdat’. 

Naturally, dissenting voices have shifted to the Internet. Like Samizdat, the Internet itself is not illegal, and because 77 million Russian citizens use it daily any attempt to control it cannot be achieved quite so covertly as was Samizdat. Nevertheless, this has not stopped the current Russian leadership from passing a law requiring websites used by Russians, from social networks to e-booking services, to store their data on servers in Russia so that their activities become accessible for intelligence surveillance. Similarly, popular bloggers – those with more than 3,000 followers – must comply with tougher rules governing media content and if they don’t comply the authorities are now able to block websites without a court order. Such political activities mean that it is increasingly likely that if a document is not printed – or typewritten – the prospect of it surviving for another hundred years looks unlikely, with or without censorship.