[In the following essay, Peterson explains how samizdat, or underground émigré publishing, functioned as a response to Soviet censorship in the twentieth century.]

On September 8, 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky was on his way to read a lecture at Moscow State University when he was arrested in the streets. As Sinyavsky recalled a few years ago, “A first arrest is almost like first love. You remember everything down to the smallest details. The last words my wife said to me before I left the house were, ‘Dear, we've run out of money. Maybe you could borrow from someone until you get your salary.’”¹ For the next five months, Sinyavsky had no contact with his wife and son and did not know whether or not they had gotten money for food. During this time, he was held for interrogation along with his friend, Yuli Daniel, who had also been arrested under Article 70 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which states in part:

Agitation of propaganda carried out with the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime or in order to commit particularly dangerous crimes against the state, the dissemination for the said purposes of slanderous inventions defamatory to the Soviet political and social system as well as the dissemination or production or harboring for the said purposes of literature of similar content are punishable by imprisonment for a period of from six months to seven years and with exile from two to five years, or without exile, or by exile of from two to five years.

In February, 1966, the two defendants stood trial for publishing anti-Soviet literature in France. Sinyavsky was prosecuted for three publications: The Trial Begins, On Socialist Realism, and Lyubimov (translated as The Makepeace Experiment). Daniel was tried for his novel, This is Moscow Speaking, and three short stories: “Hands,” “The Man from Minap,”² and “Atonement.” The trial began on February 10 and lasted four days. Though neither of the two were forced into exile, Sinyavsky was sentenced to the full seven years' imprisonment, and Daniel was sentenced to five.

Though the intelligentsia as a social class was not unused to state-sponsored repression, this trial sparked indignation and reaction among the Soviet intelligentsia. It was the first time Soviet writers had faced prosecution for the works they published.³ Many of them, in fact, had practiced the art of “writing for the desk drawer,” or self-censorship, and kept their works hidden in hopes that in the future the Soviet regime would loosen its controls on literature. However, the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial was received with outrage, for the government had set a dangerous legal precedent: a trial offers a sense of legitimacy which validates the regime in the eyes of the Soviet public. This validation, in fact, was confirmed before the trial even began when Izvestia and Literary Gazette both printed rather prejudicial articles in the weeks preceding the trial, thus launching a popular campaign against the defendants.⁴

Samizdat, in its most widely known form, first occurred in the late fifties. According to emigre writer, Julius Telesin, an unnamed Moscow poet became so aggravated with Soviet censors that he bound a typewritten collection of his own poems and typed on the title page Samsebyaizdat (“Publishing House for Oneself”) in the space where normally the publishing company would appear.⁵ Eventually the term samizdat, also coined by the poet, took on a wider meaning; that is, the term was not strictly applied to any work published by its author, but rather to all works published outside the official methods of publication in the Soviet Union. The term is a parody of the official term State Publishing House, or Gosizdat (Gosudarstvenoe Izdatel'stvo). This phenomenon quickly became a popular method for writers to disseminate information or to express themselves artistically without taking the chance that Soviet censors would disapprove of their work. The message to the Soviet leadership was then clear: if the government will not publish our works, we will publish them ourselves.

CENSORSHIP IN RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION

Censorship was not a unique phenomenon to the Soviet Union; rather, censorship in the Soviet Union, particularly in Russia, can be dated as far back as the sixteenth century, when Moscow established its own Patriarchate.⁶ Throughout Imperial Russian history, the tsars would censor the intelligentsia to keep them under their control. At various periods, relaxation on control of the press did occur, but those periods were invariably followed by a renewed determination to repress those who might be potential rivals of the tsar's rule.

After the fall of the Romanov dynasty, Lenin, too, recognized the utility of censoring Russian publications; as a dissident himself, he knew all too well the power which underground movements could possess and how their ideas spread through illicit literature. In 1905, he wrote an essay entitled, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” which would become the cornerstone of Soviet literary philosophy. In it, he stated:

Every artist … has the right to create freely, according to his ideal and independently of anything else.

But we are Communists, of course. We must not stand with folded arms and let chaos develop as it will. We must guide this process according to a systematic plan and mold its results.⁷

So it was that on October 27, 1917, just two days after seizing power, the Council of Peoples' Commissars issued a decree “against the counter-revolutionary press of all shades.” They banned several newspapers which the Provisional Government had legalized the previous March, namely those publications which supported the Konstitutional Democrats and the Mensheviks.⁸ Part of the decree stated:

It is common knowledge that the bourgeois press is one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Especially at this critical moment, when the new government of workers and peasants is consolidating its power, it is impossible to leave this weapon wholly in the hands of the enemy, because at the present time it is no less dangerous than bombs and machine guns. For this reason, we have taken these temporary and extraordinary measures for the suppression of torrents of filth and slander in which the yellow and green press would gladly drown the young victory of the people.⁹

On November 4, a week after the decree, Lenin reinforced this sentiment at the meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He said, “We announced earlier that if we took power we would close the bourgeois newspapers. To tolerate the existence of these newspapers means to cease being a socialist.”¹⁰ In May, 1919, the Bolshevik government established the State Publishing House (Gosizdat, which would later become known as Glavlit). This organization was to oversee the publication of all printed material and controlled all presses. For the next decade, Gosizdat also oversaw the nationalization of all means of publication and distribution of literature, which solidified the institution's complete control over the written word in the Soviet Union. Books, journals, newspapers, and pamphlets were printed on state-owned printing presses by state-owned publishing houses and sold in state-owned bookstores.

In 1932, Stalin desired to tighten control over literature, which had experienced a brief period of reprieve during the previous decade, most particularly during the New Economic Policy. Various writers' unions had been established throughout the country, such as RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) and the poputchiki (“fellow travelers”), all of which had different approaches and policies regarding Soviet literature. On April 23, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in order to dissolve all unions and unify them under one organization and one policy, issued a resolution creating the Union of Writers of the USSR.¹¹ Any writer intending to publish their works in the Soviet Union was required to join the organization and work under the guidelines it provided.

One of the main doctrines of the Union was that of socialist realism. Ivan Gronsky, the chairman of the Organizing Committee for the Writers' Union said at a literary meeting in Moscow on May 20, 1932, “The basic demand that we make on writers is: write the truth, portray truthfully our reality that is in itself dialectic. Therefore the basic method of soviet literature is the method of socialist realism.”¹² In essence, socialist realism was a literary tool that reflected Soviet philosophy. When the Union held its First All-USSR Writers' Congress in August 1934, socialist realism was defined:

Socialist realism, being the basic method of soviet literature and literary criticism, demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism.¹³

By demanding that all writers include only ideologically correct material in their works, the Writers' Union effectively limited the themes about which could be written. In fact, this demand grew even more insistent—in the years leading up to World War II, writers were instructed to focus on patriotic themes. In 1946, the Central Committee issued a resolution which commanded writers not to concentrate on themes which were not concerned with the affairs of the state.¹⁴ Stalin declared that Soviet literature “must convince the reader of the advantages of the Soviet social order, to counterbalance the lies and slander of our enemies.”¹⁵

After the Great Fatherland War, Glavlit had become an enormous institution, consisting of thousands of censors across the USSR. According to Leonid Finkelstein, a former technology editor for the journal Znaniye-sila (Knowledge is Power) from 1960 to 1966, censors were sometimes recruited from the Komsomol and other governmental bodies, but most came from other lines of literary work. They educated people who were familiar with the finer points of editing and publishing and were considered reliable and trustworthy. Finkelstein remembered censors as being business-like people who approached their work skeptically or even with open disapproval, rather than mindless gushers of communist dogma.¹⁶

In fact, censors had to be quite mindful of their jobs, for they were responsible for everything which crossed their desks, and they were given little latitude for misprints and other errors. In the words of writer Yuri Demin:

I knew a case, during the Stalin era, where the letter “I” was left out of a headline containing the word Glavnokomanduyushchy.¹⁷ The man responsible disappeared immediately. Or, for example, the headline: “The Fishing Season in the Far East—Into the Sea with All Communists!” The man who passed this was chased out so fast his feet did not even touch the ground. Sometimes their plight is pitiable. They must watch out for everything and be exceptionally vigilant, and frequently they concentrate so hard on the small print in the text that they overlook a howler in a headline. And, curiously enough, almost every one of these blunders concerns political material, with fateful consequences for the censors.¹⁸

CENSORSHIP AND SAMIZDAT

During the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev set the whole of the Soviet Union on its ear by attempting to reorganize the Party and redefine communism. However he may have succeeded, Khrushchev also succeeded in doing something more—he unintentionally redefined Soviet literature. A forty three year old ex-prisoner and dissident by the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew encouragement from Khrushchev's speech and submitted the manuscript for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to Novy Mir (New World), a Moscow literary journal. He had written the story between 1956 and 1958 but because Khrushchev's “secret speech” denouncing Stalin was indeed a secret to the majority of the citizens of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn felt that it had no chance of ever being published. In 1961, however, de-Stalinization became publicly known, and Solzhenitsyn felt that the time was right. In December, he had the manuscript delivered to Novy Mir, where the staff, completely enthralled, retyped it and presented it to the editor of the journal, Alexander Tvardovsky.

When Tvardovsky received Solzhenitsyn's manuscript in 1961, he took it home with him and began to read it in bed that evening. Soon after starting, he became so excited by it that he arose, dressed, and spent the remainder of the night reading at his desk. The next day, he began to inquire about the author, and eventually arranged an interview with Solzhenitsyn, wherein they decided to attempt to get permission from the Central Committee to have it published.

Tvardovsky sent a copy of the manuscript along with a letter to Khrushchev, who had his assistant, V.S. Lebedev, read it aloud to him. He immediately instructed Novy Mir to print twenty copies for the members of the Presidium of the Central Committee, and placed the question of having it published on the agenda. Eventually, the Presidium passed a resolution allowing the publication of One Day, which appeared in Novy Mir, no. 11, at the end of November 1962. Immediately, both literary critics and the press heralded the novel. Of its own accord, the Writers' Union awarded Solzhenitsyn, who had not submitted an application, professional membership in the Writers' Union as a Soviet writer.¹⁹

The freedom which Soviet writers enjoyed during this period was not to last, however; indeed, that freedom had not even been opened to all. Boris Pasternak, whose prose and poetry both had long been silenced by the government, had attempted to have his novel, Doctor Zhivago, published in 1956 but had been rejected and Pasternak was branded a traitor. It was published abroad in 1957, however, where it earned immediate notoriety, and in 1958 it was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Khrushchev, however, prohibited Pasternak from accepting the honor, and eventually he was expelled from the Writers' Union on October 31. Having lost his official position within the Union, Pasternak refused to give up his livelihood. He made continued plans to write but fell sick after Easter in 1960; eventually, Pasternak, gave up the will to live, and he died on May 30. Though not a samizdat writer himself, Pasternak did affect those who would publish on their own. He left behind him an invaluable legacy for Soviet writers, many of whom began to publish abroad out of indignation at the government's unforgivable treatment of a gentle and gifted man.

As a form of dissent, samizdat's main goal was to spread information. Originally, samizdat publications were primarily concerned with literary works which had been heretofore censored by the government. Many of the works of the writers of the Silver Age were accessible to the Soviet reader only through samizdat publications, such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Platonov, and Pasternak. Bulgakov's classic, The Master & Margarita, was first published through samizdat, as was Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Even when such works managed to get published under official sanction, they were often printed in small editions and were unavailable to most of the Soviet public.²⁰ However, most works were simply labeled “anti-Soviet,” and it was illegal to publish or possess any copies, such as this anti-Stalinist poem written by Osip Mandelstam in 1933:

We live without feeling the country beneath us,
our speech at ten paces inaudible,
and where there are enough for half a conversation
the name of the Kremlin mountaineer is dropped.
His thick fingers are fatty like worms,
but his words are as true as pound weights.
His cockroach whiskers laugh,
and the tops of his boots shine.
Around him a rabble of thick-skinned leaders,
he plays with the attentions of half-men.
Some whistle, some miaul, some snivel,
but he just bangs and pokes.
He forges his decrees like horseshoes—
some get it in the groin, some in the forehead,
some in the brows, some in the eyes.
Whatever the punishment he gives—raspberries,
and the broad chest of an Ossete.(21)

Eventually, though, samizdat publications grew to contain more than just literary works; readers were able to acquire information covering a variety of topics, such as literature, politics, economics, religion, and current events. Due to the stranglehold the government had on the press, much information regarding events within the Soviet Union was sanitized or omitted altogether. Samizdat publications often included essays on political reform, open letters to the Soviet government, and official government documents (such as reports on searches and arrests). After the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in February 1966, samizdat writers also published, as often as possible, reports on official trials of dissidents. Other publications informed readers of various human rights' violations performed by the government, such journals as Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii (The Chronicle of Current Events), and Kolokol (The Bell). Remarkably, Khronika was published, with very few exceptions, bimonthly for nearly five years and survived for nearly ten. It first appeared on April 30, 1968, in response to the United Nations General Assembly declaration that International Human Rights Year would be observed from December 10, 1967.

Thereafter, the journal became the model of samizdat in the Soviet Union. It reported, as accurately as possible, the actions of the government and its violations of human rights. It also served as a forum in which such topics as political and economic reform could be discussed. Such debates were often awkward, however, given the method by which information was passed on to its editors. One of the most remarkable things about the Chronicle was the accuracy and speed with which events were reported, given the fact that the editors often had very little time or means of communication to check their stories for factual errors.²²

The Soviet citizenry was not the only intended audience of samizdat writings. Western scholars and interested persons also relied on samizdat as a source of information for the same reasons as Soviet readers. Such works as managed to reach the West were often smuggled out by Western visitors to the Soviet Union or, as in the case of tamizdat were published by Soviet writers in the West and smuggled back into the country. Once samizdat publications reached the West, they were collected and catalogued. Radio Liberty would often broadcast Russian readings of these works for the benefit of Soviet citizens, which was then recorded and became known as radizdat.

The largest collection of samizdat material, the Arkhiv Samizdata (Samizdat Archive), was established in 1971 at the Research Department of Radio Liberty in Munich. ——— the amount of samizdat material received in the West increased dramatically in the years 1966 and 1968. It is impossible to determine how much literature did not manage to make its way West, but all things being equal, one can assume that the increases of samizdat indicate sharp reactions to the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in 1966 and the tightening of Soviet control over the arts in 1968, respectively.²³

One main purpose of smuggling samizdat to the West was the hope that the information contained in such works would be published by the Western press, thereby informing the rest of the world about the atrocities and human rights violations which were being committed by the Soviet government. The thinking was that Westerners, upon reading these publications, would increase pressure on the Soviet government to relax the severity with which it punished dissidents within its borders. While it may be argued that the West's involvement in publishing such material did indeed lead to a loosening of Soviet controls on literature, the argument may only be made from a long-term perspective. In the short run, it had just the opposite effect: Daniel, Sinyavsky, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, as well as many others were severely punished for managing to publish their works abroad. Nevertheless, writers continued to send their works to the West, hoping that their voices would be heard.

Notes

1. Sinyavsky, p. 25.

2. A man is able to predetermine the sex of the children he conceives by thinking about Karl Marx or Klara Zetkin (one of the founders of German Communism) during intercourse. Exploited by the authorities in, to use Max Heyward's phrase, “various comic ways.”

3. Brodsky was arrested in January 1964 and charged with “parasitism” rather than with anything expressly related to his actual writings. Though he was sentenced to five years on a state farm in Arkhangelsk, he was released in November of 1965 and allowed to return to Leningrad and continue translating from English.

4. Hayward, p. 20-24, Appendix.

5. Feldbrugge, p 3.

6. Terras, p 74.

7. Swayze, p 9.

8. Terras, p 75; Dewhirst, p 5-6.

9. The decree was signed by Lenin and dated October 27, 1917 and was published in Pravda the following day. See Dewhirst, p 6.

10. Ibid., p 6.

11. Terras, p 496.

12. Ibid., p 429, originally printed in Literaturnaya gazeta, May 23 1932.

13. Ibid., p 430, originally printed in Literaturnaya gazeta, September 3, 1934.

14. Ibid., p 430.

15. Swayze, p 33.

16. Ibid., p 64.

17. The word, roughly translated, means “head commander.” Without the “I,” the word means “shit commander,” as the word govno is often spelled gavno.

18. Dewhirst, p 63.

19. Medvedev, pp 6-12.

20. Terras, p 383.

21. McDuff, p 131.

22. Reddaway, p 29.

23. Feldbrugge, p 7-10.

Works Cited

Dewhirst, Martin, and Farrell, Robert (Eds.). The Soviet Censorship. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1973.

Feldbrugge, F. J. M. Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union. Leyden: A. J. Sijthoff, 1975.

Fleishman, Lazar. Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1990.

Gorham, Michael S. “Tongue-tied Writers: The Rabsel'kor Movement and the Voice of the ‘New Intelligentsia’ in Early Soviet Russia.” The Russian Review, vol. 55, (July 1996), pp. 412-29.

McDuff, David, trans. Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

Medvedev, Zhores A. 10 Years After Ivan Denisovich. London: Macmillan, 1973.

Reddaway, Peter (Ed.). Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.

Saunders, George (Ed.). Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition. New York: Monad Press, 1974.

Sinyavsky, Andrei, and Lynn Visson, trans. The Russian Intelligentsia. New York: Columbia University Press. 1997.

Swayze, Harold. Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Terras, Victor (Ed.). Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Thomas, D. M. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.