Samizdat Underground Media (Soviet Bloc)

Russia

After Stalin's death in 1953, the next 11 years saw cautious and contested steps by Khrushchev, his successor up to 1964, to soften the horrifying repression and media blackout of the previous three decades. The best known single sign was the 1962 publication of a short novel in a literary journal Novy Mir (New World), which was written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and provided some details of his daily life in Stalin's huge chain of prison camps. This topic was banned completely in Soviet media until then.

However, after Khrushchev was ousted, his successors mounted a major 1965 show trial of two other writers for publishing tamizdat work, and he gave them harsh prison sentences. Other writers, who had hoped previously that curbs might continue to soften, took their cue and continued writingbut now underground. There had been small and occasional precedents earlier, but this event marked the start of a movement. The movement accelerated after “Prague Spring” in 1968, when Soviet troops crushed Czechs' and Slovaks' attempt to create open and nonrepressive reforms within the Soviet bloc.

The standard production mode was to use a manual typewriter with up to nine carbon copy sheets interleaved one each between blank pages, making 10 typed sheets in all, the legal maximum. The typing usually stretched to the margins and left no blank space top or bottom to use paper to the maximum. The copies made lower down would, of course, be increasingly blurry. Those who received one of these illicit publications were [Page 452]expected to retype it with at least four copies and distribute them onward, and so on.

Typing paper was not always easily available and not in large quantities. Individuals who bought more than relatively small amounts might be reported for suspicious behavior. The political police (KGB) kept each typewriter's distinctive key impressions on filesome manual machine keys were typically slightly out of alignmentto enable them to check the source of any illicit document they discovered. Later, when photocopiers came into use, access to them was strictly hemmed about by procedures and restrictions. Punishments were severe for being found responsible for any phase in samizdat production, circulation, or possession.

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