SOURCE: Meerson-Aksenov, Michael. “The Dissident Movement and Samizdat.” In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian “Samizdat”—An Anthology, edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov, Boris Shragin, and Nickolas Lupinin, pp. 19-43. Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.

[In the following essay, Meerson-Aksenov describes the phenomenon of the samizdat in the context of dissident ideologies of Soviet society, noting that an understanding of Soviet culture and polity is a crucial key that helps one understand the samizdat.]

The dissident movement and samizdat are two sides of the very same process which may be called the awakening of the consciousness of Soviet society. It has spawned a series of categories which have not yet been clearly defined. However, it is necessary to describe the realities which they state because the phenomenon of samizdat becomes understandable only in their context.

IDEOCRACY

Literally ideocracy means the supremacy of an idea—in our age of totalitarian societies, it means the supreme rule of a government ideology. The latter is possible only in the absence of competing ideas. Ideology predominates only in full isolation, for there is a great difference between ideology in the singular and the plural. In free press societies competing ideologies exist with political groupings behind them. Any kind of party membership assumes an ideology, though this does not yet constitute ideocracy in the sense in which totalitarian society knows it.

Ideology may be defined as a complete, closed system of ideas which have a specific meaning only within the given system. It is an interpretation of reality from a private point of view, an interpretation which claims an unconditional universality and hence is the essence of fantasy, a conjecture about reality.¹ But as a determining principle of life, one which has become victor over the consciousness of the people, this ideology gains access to the heart of social relations. If an ideology becomes a universal one and is collectively experienced as reality, it attains the capacity of creating its own reality. Reality begins to demand ideological interpretation; ideology is a deformation of this reality. For example, key ideas of communism such as “proletarian revolution,” “class enemies,” “ideological struggle,” “enemies of the people,” “building communism,” and others do not reflect reality. Rather, they create it, demonstrating, in Berdiaev's words, the unseen power of spirit over matter.²

An ideology which comes to power must shake off all forms of competition and quash the appearance of other ideologies, of any information which contradicts it or does not subject itself to “ideological” interpretation. In this way, by isolating and using one set of facts toward an end, and maintaining silence about the others, ideology locks consciousness into an illusory world. It creates an inner prison of the spirit.

Another essential aspect of ideology is its esoteric character, its inaccessibility to an external view. Any external view—not adhering to the ideology—sees in the ideology only one form of consciousness and classifies the ideology in historico-philosophical terms, terms which have no internal meaning in themselves. For the comparative method is relative and there is no place for relativism in an ideological consciousness. In and for itself ideology is a final and perfect state of the spirit. For an external view, ideology does not, by nature, possess that universality which it proclaims to and reserves for its followers. The nature of a prison is not that it is a building surrounded by a high fence, but its nature is that one cannot leave it of his own volition. Thus, for the prisoner, the inspector, or the journalist, the same prison denotes two different realities. In similar fashion, the same color appears to be different, depending on whether you see it in the spectrum of other colors or whether you see all other colors in the refraction of one color.³

Insofar as ideology is a uni-colored acceptance of reality, a closed intellectual state, ideocracy constructs a closed society in which “pure” information is disallowed. In his essay Will the USSR Exist Until 1984? A. Amal'rik wittily noted that nobody, from a kolkhoz guard to the General Secretary of the CPSU, realizes the true state of things, for all are fooled by ideological falsification.⁴ Soviet social science is not interested in the subject as it is but creates information which suits its own prejudices.⁵

Nevertheless, the ruling apparatus still must have a more adequate notion of reality than the mass of Soviet people. Hence, they have different levels of “initiation” into deideologicized information; from the “spetskhrans” of libraries,⁶ to “white TASS's,”⁷ secret party publications published in limited editions of 1[frac12] to 2 thousand copies, “anti-Soviet material” for “internal consumption.”⁸

Here we encounter samizdat, though yet in its governmental form, i.e. in unofficial publications of forbidden literature pursuing the goal of correcting the objective ideological conception. What does this duplication of information lead to? Here ideocracy gives birth to another phenomenon that has received the name dual consciousness.

DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The essence of ideological consciousness is in its “entirety,” its “totality.” Dogmatically it cannot allow contradictory facts and interpretations. In this way, irrespective of the private opinions of ideologues, ideology must remain true to itself. Arising from this, at the level of principle, is the necessity of correlating it with objective information.⁹ This, in turn, leads to dual consciousness. However, this trait is particularly inherent in the layer of Soviet intelligentsia whose function is, on the one hand, the preparation of ideological information, and, on the other, the extraction of “pure” information to supplement ideology.¹⁰

THE SOVIET INTELLIGENTSIA

Plato had already singled out the philosopher's role as the leading one in his Republic. In the conditions of ideocratic government, the significance of the intelligentsia, along with the secret police, grows immeasurably insofar as ideology, in its substitution for the mechanism of free economic competition and playing the role of a constituted social principle, demands a constant reproduction and application in all spheres of government life. For this reason, ideocracy needs a mentor in ideological catechism—the intelligentsia which simultaneously turns out to be the servitor and the victim of ideology. It is the servitor because it is precisely to it, and not to the strata of administrators, party workers, manufacturers and the military, that ideology is obliged for its worldly activity. At the same time it is the material foundation of its being. It is the victim because, consciously or unconsciously, it suffers from its mercenary role and the subjection of its labors to ideological goals which deprive it of its own professional values and which substitute for professional honesty. The historian, philosopher, literateur, teacher, journalist, writer, etc. … are judged not by their professional qualities but by the degree of their “ideological function.” The ruling party apparatus, recognizing its dependence on ideology, and through it also its dependence on the intelligentsia, watches the latter with a sleepless eye. From the start it attempts to quash any tendency toward free thought or even cultural pluralism in the intelligentsia, for this would be destructive to its monolithic nature. If a significant part of the intelligentsia considers this position of “service”¹¹ to be normal and even propitious insofar as it guarantees certain privileges, then it produces a moral conflict in the other sector of the intelligentsia between its professional consciousness and human virtue and that ideological role which it is forced to play. In the main this relates to the humanitarian intelligentsia whose activity is wholly drawn into the sphere of “ideological struggle.”

Being simultaneously the best informed, and also responsible for the ideological mis-information of the populace, the intelligentsia is the class of Soviet society that is most split. It is also the group which feeds the opposition to the regime.

THE DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

This Anglo-Saxon term, which initially signified a certain sectarian alienation of the minority from the ideological “monolith” of the majority, especially in reference to the opposition movement in the USSR, is unusually good. A. Amal'rik very accurately noted¹² that opposition first arose among the academic and creative intelligentsia and that the dissident movement commenced in the form of “cultural opposition.” The intelligentsia came out for the “separation of ideology from culture”¹³ not in the form of some kind of public announcement or an appeal to the party, but in the form of a free creativity frequently parallel to the activity within the framework of the system's “official culture.”¹⁴ This was the birth of SAMIZDAT—an independent sub-culture in the womb of which a social consciousness began to be formed.

Social consciousness must be distinguished from ideology. Before communism became the ruling ideology, it was one of the ideological forms of consciousness of Russian society. And though it inherently contained totalitarianism in itself, it was not that impersonal and alien reality which it became when, first, it became the party, and then, the government ideology.

Entering the governmental bureaucratic structure, ideology becomes a political reality acting according to its own inner logic irrespective of the will of various individuals. Furthermore, the possibility of “ideocracy” assures an ideological hypnotization of society, its rejection, whether voluntary or forced, of consciousness. It assumes an ideological somnambulism and a weak willed intellectualism. An ideologicized state signifies the rejection of personal values and the replacement of this system of personal values with that which is called ideology. The personality rejects its right of judgment, delegating this right to the representative organ of judgment. These, in the totalitarian regimes of our age, are central party committees or things of this type.

Social consciousness appears when inside society there awakens a will for independent judgment, when the delegated right of judgment is demanded back.

The appearance of samizdat, its spread, its transformation from an incidental to a social phenomenon, has become the banner of the return of society's right to judgment, the standard of the awakening of social consciousness.¹⁵

THE STANDARD OF SAMIZDAT

In a certain sense, samizdat always existed in Russia, whether in the form of Prince Kurbskii's letters to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the writings of archpriest Avvakum, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the unpublished letters of Chaadaev, or, finally, in the Soviet period, in the form of factional party polemics in the '20's and various works in the '30's that could not be published.

Despite Stalinist terror, samizdat in this form was never crushed. Even in the fiercest years, 1936-1938, there were small groups of intellectuals that passed around within the group typed literature which was forbidden¹⁶ or not publishable (the two are practically synonymous).

But samizdat, in the true sense of this word, arose when it was transformed from an incidental use of forbidden information to a form expressing social consciousness, when it began to grow into an independent area of culture that saw itself not as a corrective or a supplement to official Soviet culture but as a self-contained and singularly original sphere for the realization of society's spiritual and intellectual life.

As a phenomenon which now demanded its own definition, it appeared in the mid 1960's at the end of the Khrushchev era. There were reasons for this.

LIBERALIZATION FROM THE TOP AND SAMIZDAT

The impression may naturally arise that with every weakening of government control, with a falling off of the wave of persecution and terror, samizdat again comes out of its carefully hidden underground sources and flows widely, again to disappear under new pressure from the regime. However, if such were the case, the appearance of samizdat should be moved back to the period of Khrushchev's liberalization when millions of prisoners were released from concentration camps. Its decline should then be moved to 1965-1968 and the slow beginning of “re-Stalinization” with the gradual taking away of the few freedoms that Soviet society began to get accustomed to in the post-Stalin period. In actuality, only the timid shoots of samizdat began to appear toward the end of the 1950's. It grew to the level of a social phenomenon by the end of the 1960's when the intelligentsia already began to recall, sighingly, Khrushchev's era as the “golden era of our freedom.”

This slight historical disjunction is explained by the fact that samizdat was not just a political phenomenon tied to the regime's tolerance. It was an ideological phenomenon dependent on the activization of social consciousness.

The ideological inspiration of the Khrushchev era was a neo-communist romanticism¹⁷ which attributed former and current government crimes to the “cult of personality” and its “vestiges.” Accepting as real the significantly liberal countenance of the regime, the intelligentsia rushed to write leftist-communist works, translate Western literature, publish classics, make films and organize the theater. It partook of the evolutionist-progressive illusion that the current good would, without our own efforts, double in geometric progression tomorrow.

The regime, it seemed, in being reborn with the force of moral repentance, invited all the people, but especially the intelligentsia and the youth, to a voluntary collaboration in the building of a communism in the direction of one freed from “former mistakes” and “distortions.”

The first shock, which severely strained the alliance of intelligentsia and regime, was the fate of Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago. In a sense, Pasternak was always a poet of samizdat and, simultaneously, an official poet, because of his successful unworldliness and introverted creativity which allowed him, a Soviet writer, to be himself. The novel was not written for samizdat. It was written in general, just as many novels are written, unexpectedly, for all and for no one. But once it was written, the author intended it to be “officially” published.

The subsequent fate of the novel, of Pasternak himself, his Nobel Prize, the exclusion from the Writers' Union and his death is well known. Its essence is that the regime was taken aback by that literal understanding of “freedom” which the “fact” of the novel showed. With its full weight it fell upon the writer. It showed all the intelligentsia what an improper interpretation of “freedom,” “liberalization,” and “creative collaboration” could lead to.

Historical foresight has chosen as the creator of samizdat—as a phenomenon which arouses man's social being toward independence—a quite unexpected social champion, one quite distant from this role, a writer taken up with the inner life of the spirit, deaf to political history and a-social in the whole tone of his works. Spirit stands at the cradle of Russian samizdat. With Pasternak it began as a process of the creative formation of consciousness. At first it was in literature, poetry, the arts (“a cultural opposition” in Amal'rik's words). Then it grew into a spontaneous social process expressed in hundreds of letters, complaints, witnessing the violation of “human rights.” Finally, it gave birth to independent political and social thought. This swift growth of samizdat may be easily traced in the publication of Soviet works in the Russian émigré press. The Pasternak affair is the borderline; thereafter émigré writers begin to be replaced by works of all genres and trends arriving from Russia.¹⁸

THE FORMATION OF SAMIZDAT LITERATURE

In the process of the awakening of consciousness artistic creativity, by some secret laws of the spirit, preceded independent socio-political thought. Long before attempts at theoretical comprehension, free poetry and prose began to express the “existential aspect” of Soviet man, opening before him a multi-storied world of the “Soviet soul” in place of which, in the environment of an official culture of socialist realism, he had only an ideological construction of that world.¹⁹ It was not the first time in Russian history that literature began the work of spiritual and emotional emancipation from ideology. Without this preliminary emancipation from an imposed mode, without a new vision of man, i.e. of oneself, a vision born in independent creativity, the awakening of consciousness would not be possible.

That social samizdat came after literary samizdat (or repeating Amal'rik's expression: the succession of social opposition after cultural opposition) is an extraordinarily important fact indicating above all the spiritual source of “heterodox” or “dissident thought.” In general, culture does not touch on politics. It is only totalitarian government that transforms culture into a political means and thus makes the independent artist its enemy.²⁰ As writers, authors of literary samizdat were far from political problems. Each was occupied with his professional matter—the creation of an artistically convincing and truthful image of this world, the world in which he was formed, lived, which he came to know and to feel deeply; finally, a world which came to speak in the author's words, be it the world of concentration camps, the fateful chamber in Solzhenitsyn's Soviet clinic, the world of the Soviet province, the communal apartment of Abram Terts, the world of the Russian intellectual on the brink of revolution and civil war, the first year of Soviet reality portrayed by Pasternak, the world of the poisoned poet portrayed by Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, the world of the absurd, upside-down values and hierarchies of the post-revolutionary years portrayed by Andrei Platonov,²¹ or the world depicted by Mikhail Bulgakov which took on a truly devilish, or mardi gras aspect.

But it was exactly this “a-political” literature which gave birth to “dissonant thought.” Society needed someone to tear it away from that hypnotized gazing into the “crooked mirror” of official culture. And society's emancipation from “graphic” enslavement began through “cultural opposition.” Only after breaking away from the ideological image of the world did Soviet man become capable of thinking about himself (essays, autobiographies),²² reacting to the abnormalities of his situation which he discovered during this reflection (documents of “protest,” “complaints,” “appeals”). Only then did Soviet man seek ways of defending his spiritual, and consequently, his political autonomy from a government claiming his whole personality—a quite unexpected social champion (the human rights movement). He wanted to know that which was kept secret from him (all forms of samizdat information) and, finally, he wanted to ask questions about the sources of social evil and the means of political reformation (socio-political thought), the relationships between the social mind and the individual personality, the transcendence of personality over all material conditions of existence and the participation of personality in the eternal (the religious rebirth).²³

SOCIAL OPPOSITION²⁴

The progression of literary samizdat to social samizdat and the inner necessity for the growth of the first into the second are seen from the history of its appearance when social samizdat came out in defense of literary samizdat. Social opinion replied with its own samizdat against the trial of the two independent writers, Siniavskii and Daniel'. This reply was A. Ginzburg's “White Book” concerning the trial. Then, finally, there was a series of collected protest letters, this time about the arrest of Ginzburg himself.

The subsequent growth of a “legal” samizdat literature revealed: letters of protest to native and foreign organizations which witness widespread violations, a whole literature that calls for a formal adherence to socialist law and, finally, the emergence of the bulletin Khronika and the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR. All this can be evaluated as an immanent and organic development of a single process of the awakening and the formation of social consciousness.

A. INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP DOCUMENTS OF PROTEST

In the last few years we have become witnesses to an unprecedented growth of an “epistolary campaign,” a flow of letters by Soviet citizens of all classes to various Soviet and foreign sources, the emergence of a special genre of open letters to educational and cultural officials and political rulers. In fact, in their totality, they fulfill the same function performed by the press in free societies. However, there is a radical difference between these phenomena. “Documents of protest” arise spontaneously; they are not connected with any organizational framework. This form of independent expression could only arise in a country in which no organizational forms free from party and government control are possible. In contrast to the impersonal press, the genre of letters, even collective ones, has a clearly expressed personal character. The letter is always signed. It is meant for a person or institution and always has an addressee, though he may frequently be only symbolically chosen.²⁵ It asks for an answer, a reaction, an action. It is a witnessing, a demand, simultaneously a call and an entreaty. For this reason, it always contains a moral message. It appears at one and the same time as an expression of the author's moral consciousness and as an appeal to the moral consciousness of the addressee.

This genre of social publicism not only surmounts the barrier of silence by contraposing the polyphony of social consciousness to the regime's monologue, but it also plays a great educational role by creating responsible personalities out of a frightened, passive, faceless mass. Behind each letter, each signature, there may be weeks, months, even years of wavering, indecisiveness, fear, inner struggle, and finally the overcoming of fear in the expression of one's personal judgment. This very fact of expression already places the person face to face with the governmental Leviathan.²⁶

The success of this accidentally discovered genre demonstrates its instant diffusion in the most disparate of social strata. Born in a small group of the capital's intelligentsia, it has, in a few years, won over the whole country. Appeals and declarations are written by inhabitants of capitals, cities, districts, and villages, by writers and academicians, by political prisoners and peasants, by workers, priests, semi-literate religious old women, and by the simplest Soviet citizens who are aggrieved. This form of samizdat is truly national and probably represents the greatest internal freedom, a complete independence not only from government but from various groups which, for example, determine limits of press accessibility in the West.

B. THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT: KHRONIKA

The attempts to systematize this flow of evidence and complaints spontaneously created the Human Rights Movement, which may be defined as a collection of this evidence and a placing of a juridical base under it within the framework of Soviet law. This movement has begun to create a certain legal position for individual protest within the existing political system, one of whose pillars is the assumed negation of the Rights of an individual.²⁷

This movement is characterized by “an absence of ideals” and by empiricism: its purpose is to defend, on the basis of law, those who are under attack by the regime; and hence it can function without overly concentrating on the nature of the regime itself. Appearing as a loyal political and ideological movement, it attempts to create an all-enveloping juridical control of public opinion over the actions of the regime and, as far as is possible, to settle all governmental encroachments on the individual by means of the influence of society's moral authority and thus, hopefully, minimize such encroachments. The human rights movement has turned out to be the only form of opposition to the regime which the latter could not destroy, despite attempts and the practically unlimited possibilities of its punitive apparatus.²⁸ It may be asserted that, in general, it cannot be crushed even should the government be successful in stopping the illegal publication of this movement's organ—The Chronicle of Current Events [Khronika]. This is because the foundation of this movement, the awakening national movement for justice, is expressed in all the thousands of letters, declarations, and appeals. The human rights movement is non-party, has no program, is not national. But at its base, it is humane in that its only goal is the defense of MAN and the winning of his right to be a free individual. In this sense it appears as a certain background of defense for all forms of samizdat, as an expression of a free social consciousness.²⁹

The universal character of the human rights movement was proved by its spread all over the Soviet Union. After the Moscow Khronika the Ukrainian Herald appeared. It held to those same principles of the legal defense of an individual in the context of a nationalist-separatist tendency. There was also the Zionist bulletin, Herald of Exodus. Both of these chronicles did not last long. Besides these, two religious bulletins, based on the same principles, began to appear, The Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church and the Herald of the Evangelical Christian Baptists. The government has not yet been able to shut down these two publications.

Khronika is a chronicle. It contains, as its very name indicates, short and precise reports of facts and events. Judgment is refrained from. The human rights movement as such is foreign to philosophical-social problematics and to polemics on political themes. Its raison d'être is to attain for society the possibility of open and fearless polemics on troubling questions. Works of social thought formulating various ideological positions have recently come to occupy a constantly weightier place in samizdat.

THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF SAMIZDAT

Social thought is the most mature and the most recent fruit of samizdat,³⁰ and there are reasons for this. If samizdat was not an organic product of an awakening society but the result of the actions of “dissenting thinkers,” then “dissenting” social programs and independent political thought should have preceded all other varieties of samizdat. However, the fact that it began to appear only after samizdat became an independent literary world of many genres speaks of the opposite. Social thought was born as the foundation of a growing independent consciousness in the intelligentsia and as an emancipation from party-government ideology.³¹

At first, being primarily revisionist-communist in content,³² it thought itself to be not so much an expression of an independent political consciousness as much as a corrective to party ideology by means of free commentaries for practical application in government policy. In the same way as the world of official literature (by throwing out loyal authors for their creative independence) created the dissident literature of samizdat, government ideology (by disallowing pluralistic ideas within itself and zealously guarding dogma by accusing and ejecting heretics) created the groundwork for dissident political thought. The intelligentsia, which lost its faith in the possibility of dialogue with the regime, turned to independent creativity without now giving credence to government ideology. Today, the ideological struggle, at times sharply polemical, is in samizdat works. There are fewer and fewer who argue with the official press, for it is either of no concern or it is not taken seriously.³³

Another characteristic trait of political thought affirming its organic growth out of the internal demands of society is its non-professionalism. Today's “opinion leaders” are yesterday's dilletantes in the area of social philosophy. Such are the writers V. Maksimov and A. Solzhenitsyn who arrived at a definite social world view through the process of artistic creativity. Such are the scholars and academicians A. Sakharov, V. Chalidze, and I. Shafarevich who worked out new political views in the process of their participation in activities in defense of citizens' rights in the USSR.³⁴ This predetermines the specificity of samizdat political thought. In contrast to professional political science in the West which states synthetical judgments only on the basis of factographic analysis, analogous samizdat works have a tendency to generalize and, by not utilizing (due to understandable reasons) enough factual analysis, have more the character of reflections and ideas, which include a wide range of problems, or an ideological polemic within varying trends of the same samizdat. Arising in the abnormal conditions of a break in historical continuity, it often treads paths of ideological trends already trod in the past and without realizing it. It repeats ideological arguments of the Russian society of the 19th century, the pre-revolutionary period, or the post-revolutionary Russian emigration. However, since it is the expression of social consciousness and society's efforts to understand itself in the process of an ideological self-definition under conditions of an original citizens' struggle for such consciousness, the political thought of samizdat is dynamic and flexible. In its contents and its methodology it reflects both ideological problematics and the intellectual possibilities of society as a whole.

As a general survey of samizdat, this article does not place as a goal the analysis of the various tendencies of social thought. These were articulated in the brochure³⁵ by A. Amal'rik and, in my opinion, his schematization is still correct.

PUBLISHERS AND READERS OF SAMIZDAT

Naturally, the question—who are these people—arises sooner or later. Are they numerous, to what generation and social class do they belong, and how do they participate in this unusual phenomenon? It would be best to let samizdat answer for itself, because, as it does for everything, it has an answer here also. In the letter-article about samizdat in Russia by a certain Kolesov, we read:

Who, in general, reads samizdat? The readers are viewed as dissidents. But this is not quite so. Most often dissidents appear as active distributors of samizdat and illegal books. They are only “opinion leaders,” as Americans say, whereas opinions themselves have a much broader circulation. The weariness from censorship is so great that potentially all of our intelligentsia, at least the intelligentsia up to forty or forty-five years old, is a reserve of illegal readers. Reading is an exercise which is hard to control and non-compulsory. And a compulsory ideological diet is so tiring that today even an orthodox Soviet bureaucrat would read certain books if they happened to come into his hands. … What if The Gulag Archipelago was published … how many would buy it? How many copies would be needed? Five, ten, maybe twenty million? A country of censorship does in truth pave the way for a whole army of thankful readers.³⁶

The fact that samizdat has won the “book market” in just a few years is quite natural if we are to view it not as the work of a few dissidents but as a phenomenon caused by the depth of society's need for a free intellectual life. For a specific circle of the capital's intelligentsia and youth, it has supplanted the totality of books as such published in Soviet printing houses.³⁷

Actually, in the last few years it has become a diverse intellectual publishing world, an independent intermediary area of unofficial culture. To it belong original works of various genres and levels that have been written by Soviet people and translations in various fields from abroad that have not been published in the USSR.³⁸ Translations are unplanned. The professionals or amateurs who translate for samizdat specialize in a particular subject or field which is not connected with their employment obligations.³⁹ At the base of samizdat's translating activity—the most selfless of tasks—are enlightenment ideals. The purpose is to give the Soviet reader, cut off from Western intellectual life by administrative conditions and by lack of knowledge of foreign languages, the most interesting works in the most diverse fields of humanitarian studies, all of which is disallowed in the official press. There are even centers of thematic samizdat, underground prototypes of publishing houses which specialize in a particular field: philosophy, religio-instructive, political, historical.⁴⁰ With the Zionist movement in the USSR, dissemination of Jewish samizdat has begun. It encompasses the most varying of spheres, from documents of protest and instructions on what a person must do to get an exit visa, to books on Jewish history, culture and religion, Hebrew texts, and descriptions of Israeli life.

For many, samizdat becomes a professional conspiratorial undertaking rather than leisure time activity. There are people who devote their whole life, all their free time, to saving and collecting samizdat or creating samizdat libraries.⁴¹ Such “samizdat-publishers” arise and disappear spontaneously and it is impossible to indicate how widely this is spread because of its conspiratorial nature. From time to time publishers forget to be careful and announce their activity. The price they pay?—incarceration in concentration camps or mental hospitals. Thus, in 1972, a group came into existence to increase the number of books; it made itself known and called itself Kolizdat (Collective Publisher). In a few months, the publishers were found and arrested.

Basically, however, samizdat is a spontaneous undertaking. Readers themselves type—in several copies—that which interests them. For this reason it is impossible to gauge its spread. Like protest letters which everyone writes from everywhere and which do not demand any particular organization, it also exists at any level and in the most unexpected forms, for instance, being copied into a schoolchild's or student's notebook.⁴² With the spread of “Xerox” in Soviet business samizdat has entered a new technical stage. And for samizdat the introduction of this “technical miracle” is equal in importance to Gutenberg's invention.⁴³

If it is difficult to localize the samizdat centers and indicate their approximate numbers, it is all the more impossible to determine the channels of distribution. The basic mass of readers, for fully understandable reasons, does not like to keep samizdat works at home. Thus, upon reading it in a few days or nights, the reader passes it on to other hands where, similarly, it is not held up. Sometimes, upon receiving a beat-up typed copy of a “piece of samizdat” with half erased letters, one only guesses in how many hundreds of hands it has already been. The old Latin proverb, Habent sua fata libelli, applies exceedingly well to Russian samizdat.

GOVERNMENT AND SAMIZDAT

After all that was said above, a question naturally arises. What is the government's attitude toward samizdat and is the government capable of destroying it totally? This question may, of course, only be answered hypothetically, considering the totalitarian character of the Soviet regime. For this we shall have to compare two points of view on Soviet society: at the top, the aspect of governmental structure, and at the bottom, the view of the individual's interests. Both views are completely lawful but there is a different perspective to each. From the first point of view, the supragovernment (which in one way or another includes control over each citizen and all of society because of its ideological unity) protects itself against samizdat. From this point of view, each Soviet person looks at his neighbor to see if he indulges in anything illegal or whether he is involved in “ideological diversity,” which samizdat is by essence.

But if we are to look at the same picture from the other view point, that of the individual, then it will appear that almost everyone is involved in something illegal. Thus, one looks at his neighbor not with suspicion but with fear. He fears whether his neighbor will guess that he has his own personal interest, an interest which is different from the government's.

We have already noted that all of society, from top to bottom, from the laborer to the General Secretary of the CPSU,⁴⁴ is a victim of misinformation. This it tries to overcome by means of samizdat. After all, “government” samizdat,⁴⁵ the analogue of the peoples', has the same goal—to compensate for ideological misinformation. In order to read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, the Soviet leadership must resort, even if only to get rid of it, to the same source—samizdat. Well placed bureaucrats who wish to find out what the dissidents think, ask their similarly placed partners in the KGB to obtain typed copies for them. The very system of general censorship itself gives birth to samizdat at all hierarchical levels.⁴⁶ The closed government samizdat inevitably leaks down and “popular” samizdat, in turn, draws the interest of the “uppers.”⁴⁷

Actually, all this is far from an idyllic picture. The regime fights samizdat quite sternly. But this severity is not always the same. It wavers from year to year, even from season to season (depending on the vacation times of the local KGB members), from republic to republic, and from city to city. There are also no clear definitions of the limits of the “forbidden.” Local organs of search act in accordance with their own levels of information. Sometimes during searches they leave what they consider “harmless” religious samizdat but seize “dangerous” Soviet editions.⁴⁸ In a country so foreign to law as Russia, where the administration acts according to whim and according to an idiosyncratic biological feeling of danger, it is impossible to state any formulations concerning the oppression of samizdat.

Were it some sort of organized movement, it would have been crushed long ago, as is proved by the destruction, sooner or later, of all underground organizations. But like the human rights movement, which flares up spontaneously where there is violation of the individual and arbitrary law, samizdat⁴⁹ spontaneously arises where there awakens a thirst for knowledge, understanding, and freedom of thought. To crush samizdat means either to satisfy this thirst, i.e. allow samizdat to reach the level of a free press, or … to reestablish a total terror on an all-governmental level.

Notes

1. Marx in his critique of ideology (which for him denoted mystification, a perverted consciousness of social and economic realities, and a collective illusion shared by the class as a whole) seemed to anticipate the coming ideology which, because of a certain historical irony, decided, for some reason, to call itself “Marxism.” See his German Ideology.

2. This magical power of the word over reality has been very subtly noted by A. Siniavskii in his wonderful article, “The Literary Process in Russia.” He has, in fact, subjectivized the supra-personal ability of ideology, relating it to the act of the leader—Stalin, “A sorcerer who was able, for a long time, to take history itself and give it the strength and visibility of a story book fantasy. Art flew away, bent in order that, for a time … life would get an aesthetic foretaste of a dreadful and bloody farce played out according to rules of drama and fine literature. One can, say, take the sleuth's understanding of history which the leader was able to instill in millions, or his love for the realization of metaphor. … The enthusiasm of 1937 is not only in the breadth of the bacchanal sweeping the country, in the fact that now it was the turn of the most zealous party members to be annihilated, but also in the unusually clear, as in a novel, animation of metaphor when suddenly, over the whole country, there began to crawl certain unseen, and hence particularly dangerous, reptiles, snakes, and scorpions with the fearful names of ‘Trotskiist’ or ‘saboteur.’ … Stalin included … the magic powers locked in language and Russian society … bent to this illusion to live in a world of miracles, witchcraft, perfidy, art, which openly ruled reality.” Kontinent, No. I, pp. 160-164.

3. In corroboration, we will cite ideology's own reference concerning itself: “Socialist ideology at its root [my italics] differs from the ideology of all preceding epochs in its content as well as in its role in the life of society. This is stipulated by the very nature of communist social formation.” “Ideology,” Philosophical Essays, Vol. 2, p. 232 (Moscow, 1962).

4. A. Amal'rik, (Rus. Publ. Fund. Herzen, 1970), p. 38.

5. At its very basis, communist ideology rejects objective knowledge as being “bourgeois,” i.e. by definition it is harmful, deceitful, and unworthy of trust.

6. These are the so-called “special holdings” of libraries inaccessible to the average reader. They may be used only in specific, narrow fields by “specialists” who have to obtain special permission. Here there is literature of all kinds, from contemporary existential philosophy and psychoanalysis to the Church Fathers, from Western sovietology and Russian émigré literature to Soviet party polemics of the 1920's; everything, from theology to pornography.

7. These are information papers of TASS in which there are various articles from the Western press and which are also sent to the “special holdings.”

8. In these numbered editions of party publications which are given out when signed for, there have been the following: The History of the CPSU by Schapiro (trans. from English), The History of Russian Philosophy by N. Losskii (trans. from English), and many others.

9. The same has been very wittily expressed by A. Amal'rik: “It is paradoxical that the regime spends colossal effort in order to force everybody to be quiet and then again exerts itself nevertheless in order to find out what people think and what they want.” Op. cit., p. 29.

10. Two articles of this collection are especially devoted to an analysis of “dual consciousness”: Altaev's “The Dual Consciousness of the Intelligentsia and Pseudo-Culture” and Nelidov's “Ideocratic Consciousness and Personality.”

11. Officially in the USSR there is no intelligentsia as a social group. It is lost in the social category “employees.”

12. Op. cit., 3ff.

13. In part, such was the call of one of the samizdat articles (common in its content), “How to Be?” Vestnik RSKhD (Paris, No. 103), p. 199.

14. The three leading Russian samizdat writers, B. Pasternak, A. Solzhenitsyn, and V. Maksimov, were members of the Writers' Union: A. Siniavskii and Iu. Daniel' were simultaneously literary critics and translators. A. Galich, the Soviet screenwriter, is known throughout the country not for his screenplays, written with dire regard for the system's ideological “customs,” but for his songs which parody this whole system of ideologicized Soviet culture. The same may be said of many others, names less known.

15. It is characteristic that the very concept of samizdat was first used in connection with “social consciousness,” the “development” of which it aids. See “The Letter of G. Vladimov to the Fourth Congress of the Writers' Union in Support of A. Solzhenitsyn,” May 1967.

16. The field of “forbidden” literature changes along with Soviet political changes. In the 1940's, people were arrested for reading and discussing Romain Rolland. Hoffman and Dostoevskii were censored. Now it turns out that the central Soviet press of ten, twenty years—and even longer ago—is forbidden. Libraries do not give out Pravda or Izvestiia of the 1920's, '30's, '40's, '50's, or even of the early '60's. In searches the Bible published by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1956 or 1968 may be taken away, not to speak of the “series of Soviet publications” that are “guilty” before the fatherland of authors A. Solzhenitsyn, A. Belinkov, A. Siniavskii, A. Kuznetsov, and others.

17. I speak in more detail of this in my article “The Birth of a New Intelligentsia” in Somosoznanie (N.Y.: Khronika, 1976).

18. See the journal Grani. An editorial in No. 112-113 of Vestnik RSKhD, one of the oldest Russian émigré journals, states: “In the anniversary issue (Vestnik RSKhD, No. 100, [Paris, N.Y., 1971]—M. M.) nine tenths of the articles were still written in the West by old émigrés or their offspring; in the III'd number, the proportion was exactly the opposite: nine tenths of the articles were written in Russia or by recent immigrants from there.” (Paris, N.Y., Moscow, 1974).

19. This was accomplished precisely by Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, the works about the “concentration camp man” by Solzhenitsyn, the phantasmagoria of Soviet life by Siniavskii and Daniel' (Terts and Arzhak), the “Memoirs” of N. Mandel'shtam, the novels of V. Maksimov, the whole genre of camp literature which arose after the return from concentration camps, the recently surfaced similar samizdat works of the 1920's and 1930's of A. Platonov and M. Bulgakov, the poems of O. Mandel'shtam, A. Akhmatova, and of contemporary poets, Okudzhava, Brodskii, and others. Today these authors (of whom two are Nobel Prize winners who have won over the world's book market) are no longer thought to be of samizdat. But they are of samizdat; and not only in the technical sense: that is; having been written, the works were first published by the author himself on his typewriter and then circulated to a small group of readers until they reached the outside and its publishing houses and returned as books. But for Russian society, which re-types these books, they still belong to samizdat.

20. In his letter defending another Leningrad writer, V. Maramzin, I. Brodskii, the banished poet, expressed the same point in somewhat stronger language: “Soviet rule … is not occupied with a struggle against political opponents but with the spiritual castration of its population of 250,000,000. Therefore, the main object of the KGB's internal work is literature and everything connected with it, even posthumously. For more than half a century, Russian writers are being killed, exiled, locked up in jails or homes for the insane. … In Russia, the government treats its citizens, especially the writer, as an enemy or as a slave.” Khronika Zashchity Prav v SSSR, No. 10, July-Aug. 1974, pp. 10-11. (Khronika Press, N.Y.)

21. Especially his two stories: “Chevengur” and “Kotlovan.”

22. In this sense, the autobiographical essay, “Ispoved' Vel'skogo” [“Vel'skii's Confession”], which appeared at the end of '50's, early '60's, is very indicative.

23. “Religious rebirth” is a term that has firmly entered samizdat vocabulary. It does not assume the total turn of Soviet society toward religion. Rather, it implies the free spiritual search among the intelligentsia and the youth who, though educated in atheism and a totally secularized environment, arrive at a religious world view.

24. Samizdat itself is witness to this evolution. The Chronicle of Current Events, the first regular periodical of samizdat, which dedicated all of issue No. 5 to the problems of samizdat, wrote: “Over the course of a number of years, Samizdat evolved from a majority of literary works to a majority of documents and journalism. This is especially characteristic for 1968. In this year, Samizdat was not enriched by a single important prose work … but the readers—they are the voluntary publishers—of Samizdat accepted a whole flow of documents, letters, speeches, notes, informative reports, etc., in this year. Samizdat began to fulfill the function not only of a book but of a newspaper.” Khronika, No. 5.

25. For the sake of example, I will cite only a few of the hundreds of similar addresses: “A Letter to Pope Paul VI Regarding the State of the Russian Orthodox Church” by A. Krasnov-Levitin. Vestnik RHKhD, No. 95-96, p. 75. “An Appeal to the Soviet Public and That of Foreign Countries” by a group of the intelligentsia on the arrest of A. Krasnov-Levitin, ibid., p. 95. “An Appeal to Christians of the World” by a group of the “Pentecostals,” Khronika, No. 10 (N. Y., 1974), p. 46.

26. It is difficult for a person of the free world to comprehend this phenomenon in all its facets. But we, the witnesses and participants, know what kind of moral revolution precedes or follows each act of decisiveness, each appearance under one's name, as one of its originators wrote, “with open visor,” what a metamorphosis the personality goes through at this moment of existential choice on which his fate will depend.

27. I cannot devote a special place in this article for this courageous assertion. I refer the reader to the Russian legal philosopher, B. Vysheslavtsev, who has written a special article on the question of the relationship between communism and law: “Two Paths of the Social Movement,” PUT', No. 4 (Paris).

28. Indicative in this sense is the history of attempts to stop the editions of Khronika by means of a systematic policy of oppression. This was undertaken by the KGB against a broad circle of the intelligentsia which was suspected of supporting it and being connected with it. Khronika, appearing regularly from spring 1968 to autumn 1972, was finally crushed. Hundreds of people all over the USSR, suspected of connections with it, were arrested and jailed, placed in psychiatric hospitals, emigrated, or were chased out of their jobs. And what happened? In a year and a half, surprisingly for all, it again resumed publication. Four editions have appeared. The last one, No. 31, stated: “Seventh year of publication,” and “Khronika will appear in 1974 as well.”

29. It is not accidental that for every issue of Khronika the epigraph is paragraph 19 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”: “Each person has the right to the freedom of his convictions and free expression of them. This right contains the freedom to adhere to one's convictions without hindrance and to seek freedom; also to disseminate information and ideas by any means and irrespective of government borders.”

30. Even though individual works on social thought could appear from time to time (such as the academician A. Sakharov's brochure, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Co-Existence, and Intellectual Freedom, in the Political Diary), a journal of the “Marxist-Leninist Opposition,” appearing from 1964-1970, was still wholly politically orientated toward the regime and had no themes of its own. It was characterized by a thematical and theoretical lack of independence.

31. It is vitally important that all “leaders of opinion” in samizdat of various ideas, from the Orthodox-monarchists to the liberal-democrats, came out of Soviet Marxism no matter how much they denied it afterwards. Such are A. Solzhenitsyn (see the GULAG Archipelago, parts I and II, pp. 603-604 of the Russian ed.) and V. Osipov, who today represent a national-patriotic and the most anti-Marxist tendency, not to speak of authors in whom Marx's influence is more apparent.

32. This tendency is best represented in Political Diary, a typed monthly journal which appeared in samizdat from 1964 to 1970. Those numbers which made it to the West were published in 1972 by the Herzen Fund in Amsterdam.

33. Hence we can speak of the independence of samizdat's social thought. I recall a characteristic episode: at one of the underground Moscow seminars, the latest editions of The Chronicle of Current Events and The Ukrainian Herald were read. In the preface to The Ukrainian Herald, the editors dissociated themselves from the all-Russian democratic movement. Having read this declaration of dissociation, one of the participants of the seminar laughingly noted: “I guess we are beginning to stand on our own feet.”

34. Basically, the same may be said of the articles in this collection.

35. A. Amal'rik articulated seven ideological tendencies: “conformist-reformist,” “true Marxism-Leninism,” “official Marxism-Leninism,” “official nationalism,” “neo-slavophilism,” “the Christian-democratic,” the legal-liberal. See Will the USSR Survive Until 1984? Russ. ed., p. 37.

36. Letter to friends.

37. In the role of a disseminator of samizdat, typed in six to fifteen copies on a typewriter, I have heard the following requests many times from the reader: “Please give me one of the first copies. In five years of reading samizdat I have managed to ruin my eyesight.” In the last five years an anecdote about samizdat has made the rounds: a father of a family types out Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace—a classic Russian work that may be bought cheaply in any book store. When he is asked why he is doing this he answers: “My son is in school where they are studying War and Peace. He must read it for the course but he refuses to read anything that is not in samizdat.” This anecdote, by the way, demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the printed word in the USSR as such, no matter what is printed.

38. It is impossible to list everything that was translated in samizdat. Of literary classics I will list only Joyce, Kafka, Camus, Schwartz-Bart, Chesterton, Mauriac; in philosophy, Marcel, Buber, Heidegger, Kierkegaard; in theology, Theilhard de Chardin, Danielov, not to speak of hundreds of articles, essays, and digests. Sometimes one gets different translations of the same book, evidently translated in other circles of the intelligentsia. Thus, I read Camus's The Stranger in three different translations until it finally came out in a fourth translation in a Soviet publishing house.

39. One doctor of biology, who translated theological works in his spare time, once told me, while reading a chapter on Mariology from his latest religio-philosophical book, “This is my profession; I am a philosopher, not a biologist, by calling.”

40. The author of this article, in accordance with his own interests organized a center of publication for religio-philosophical literature. Translations were made as were collections of unpublished manuscripts (many of which, at present, have come out in Russian in Western publishing houses). Hence, as a “samizdat publisher,” I met many similar “publishers” with whom “productions” were exchanged. Division of labor was thereby attained. One represented a political “publisher” and brought translations of articles from the foreign press. Another, a professional historian, only made translations of serious monographs on the history of the USSR and the CPSU. A third occupied himself exclusively with typing Orthodox Christian literature: Church Fathers and pious readings from old Russian periodicals. A fourth worked only on philosophical translations.

41. To illustrate, I will cite only one example of the many I know. There is a young couple, historians of education, who spent all their free time photographing all forms of samizdat literature. Living in a communal apartment (i.e. occupying one room in an apartment where other families also lived), they basically worked at night photographing and then developing the film. In their days off they took the microfilms out of town where they had a secret place. In a few years they had hundreds of various microfilms and one could practically get any book that had ever appeared in samizdat.

42. This is far from an exaggeration. I recall an interesting case when a young man came to talk to me on religious topics. He was a student in the 5th course at one of the Moscow institutes and a secretary of either the Komsomol for the whole school or for that grade. At the end of our conversation I gave him a little book, published in the West, devoted to an explanation of the Orthodox service and Church organization, a general introduction for a secularized person. In a few weeks he again came to me and silently returned the book. In parting I asked timidly whether he had liked the book or at least, whether it had been useful. “Oh yes,” he said briefly, “I copied all of it into a notebook; that is why I kept it so long.” The book had close to 200 pages.

43. Here is another example of samizdat's spontaneity in the presence of technical possibilities more perfect than the typewriter. A priest came to me from another town which has fewer books than Moscow and asked to read something new in religious apologetics. I gave him a book written in Russia, The Origins of Religion, which made the rounds in typed copies for several years. It reached the West where it was published and in that form returned to Russia. He took it away and in one month brought back the book and twenty five exact Xerox copies that were neatly bound. It turned out that the local readers liked the book so much that they decided to spread it. They came out with 100 copies, the majority of which they distributed. They asked that the remaining twenty five be taken to Moscow, this as a percentage or so as not to waste the extras.

44. A. Siniavskii writes wittily about this in his article, “The Literary Process in Russia.” He says that “the whole list of persons who worked for the creation of the uncensored Russian book … was crowned by N. S. Khrushchev who, in his aging years went into revelry and published his memoirs in the West in story-book fashion.” Kontinent, No. I, p. 154.

45. See pp. 21-22 of this article.

46. I remember when, at the height of my samizdat activity, a well placed journalist, while taking a copy of a MS from me to read, said, confidentially, that he definitely knew that Shelepin himself (then still the KGB head) was reading Berdiaev. With this statement his face burned with liberal inspiration though he could not answer my question: what does that fact really change?

47. A provincial priest who once took a good samizdat book on the origins of religions, began to apologize to me later that he could not return it to me. The book had gotten into the hands of the party obkom (regional committee of the CPSU) and was being read by the whole staff. Finally, it reached the secretary himself who, utilizing his power, was “engrossed” in it.

48. There were cases where, in searches, editions of Marxist classics, with notes of the person being searched, were seized. After Solzhenitsyn fell into disfavor, all issues of Novyi Mir that contained his works were seized without word. Pre-revolution books are seized if the titles seem suspicious to the searchers. Sometimes comical things are taken, like statues of Buddha found in the apartment of Dardaron, a scholar of Buddhism.

49. Actually, this article can be ended with the description of the nature of samizdat given in A. Siniavskii's already cited article: “It is difficult to think up a name more harmless than ‘Samizdat,’ which speaks only of the fact that a person took and wrote all that he wished according to his own idea. He publishes himself without bothering about the consequences. He gives a small pile of pages tapped out on a typewriter to a friend. The friend runs to two similar recluses to boast of this; then, look, we are already again present in a project of something big, fantastic, comparable to nothing in the embryo of Russian writing. We have lived to, we were considered worthy to live to, o God, a second literature.” (We could add, to a second culture.—M. M.) “The Literary Process in Russia,” Kontinent, No. I, p. 155.