Prince Samizdatsky in the Land of Soviets
Andrey Filimonov
A St. Petersburg court sentenced 19-year-old Darya Kozyreva to two years and eight months in prison for allegedly discrediting the Russian Armed Forces by attaching a quatrain from his poem "Testament" to a monument to Taras Shevchenko. This isn't the first "poetry sentence" handed down by a Russian court since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two years ago, members of an "organized criminal group of poets"—Artyom Kamardin, Yegor Shtovba, and Nikolai Daineko—were sentenced to terms ranging from five to seven and a half years for reciting "anti-mobilization poems" at the Mayakovsky monument in Moscow.
These repressions against poetry bring to mind the crackdown on samizdat in the USSR—back then, entire KGB investigative teams were tasked with tracking down and detaining poets who attempted to publish anything "without permission," even if it was only in a print run of four copies.
Sixty years ago, Alexander Galich wrote the anthem of samizdat—the song "We Are No Worse Than Horace," which included the famous lines: "Erica takes four copies... That's all. And that's enough." The song's heroine was a GDR typewriter, which became a symbol of freedom for an entire generation: to read and write whatever you want, regardless of the party line.
One summer evening in 1957, an interesting conversation took place in an apartment on Leninsky Prospekt. Three young men were present: the apartment's owner, Yuri Galanskov, his wife, Galina, and their friend, Valery Khromov. In Moscow, they were known as members of the "Chertkov group."
In the spring of 1957, Leonid Chertkov, a student at the Moscow Library Institute, was sentenced to 5 years in a labor camp under Article 58-10 “Anti-Soviet propaganda.”
The remaining members of the group discussed their plan of action: should they continue what Chertkov had started or should they run away to avoid repeating his fate?
A typewriter stood on the table, with four sheets of paper inserted into the carriage, lined with carbon paper. Finally, Yuri convinced the others that abandoning the fight would be cowardice and a betrayal of their ideals. To set an example of courage, he sat down at the typewriter first and began typing… poetry.
Yes, this is precisely what the poet Leonid Chertkov was guilty of—publishing poems unapproved by Soviet censors. This was the first political case of Khrushchev's "thaw" in which a typewriter was used as a crime weapon. The investigation determined, and the court agreed, that in the hands of a dissident, a typewriter becomes an "illegal printing press."
The printing house on Leninsky Prospekt worked all night. Six people typed fifty pages. And then, at dawn, the doorbell rang. "Open up, it's the police!" someone called from behind the door. It's unclear whether surveillance was conducted outside the apartment window or whether vigilant neighbors responded to the midnight sound of a typewriter, but the detectives worked efficiently. They prevented something terrible from happening—the distribution of four copies of the magazine "Kamin" or "Brazda"—the samizdat publishers hadn't yet decided on a name. They were loaded into separate cars and driven around Moscow for several hours in the early morning while investigators read their poems and questioned the authors. Ultimately, no charges were filed, confiscating the typescripts. The magazine's editorial board was sent home with stern warnings about the "inadmissibility of such actions in the future."
In her book, “The History of Dissent in Russia,” human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva recalls: “Samizdat began with poetry—perhaps because of the ease of reprinting them due to their small size, the ease of memorization, or perhaps there were deeper reasons for this: spiritual liberation began in the realm of simple human feelings.”
Poetry dominated the early samizdat movement, and the word itself was coined by poet Nikolai Glazkov, who, back in the 40s, gave friends typewritten collections of his works with the humorous inscription "SamSebyaIzdat" (SamSebyaIzdat) on the cover. This was a parody of such serious labels as Gosizdat, Goslitizdat, and others.
However, samizdat publishing in the USSR was not so easy.
First, they needed the means of production. Typewriters were expensive: the German Erika cost almost 300 rubles, while its Soviet clone, the Lyubava, cost 180. Moreover, they rarely appeared on store shelves. People hunted for them in second-hand shops, and traveled to the Baltics and other socialist countries.
It was possible to do without a typewriter. Those skilled in photography copied texts onto film and then printed them on photographic paper. This method had several advantages: the ability to copy books with illustrations, compact storage of the original, and the ability to reprint as needed. But there were also disadvantages. The photo samizdat process required equipment—a tripod, special lamps, a darkroom for printing—and was also time-consuming. Producing one copy of the novel "Doctor Zhivago," for example, took sixty hours. And there were very few illustrated books in samizdat.
In the mid-60s, Computer Centers appeared in the USSR, where one could (at least theoretically) gain access to a printer. A text file from magnetic tape or floppy disk was loaded into the computer and printed at incredible speed—three to seven minutes per A3 page. But to use this fantastic technology, one had to either work at the computer center or have reliable friends there.
The same applied to the copying machines in institutes and other institutions. They were operated by operators with special clearance. Furthermore, each machine was equipped with a sheet counter. It was impossible to copy Doctor Zhivago without raising questions from the First Department. Disabling the counter required exceptional technical skills and great courage. If exposed, the operator could lose both his job and his freedom.
Next, the printed text needs to be bound. This is crucial for a five-hundred-page novel. Losing a couple of pages deprives the copy of its value. That's why the manual "How to Bind a Book at Home" was wildly popular in the Soviet Union. It sold out instantly in stores, and the thousands of copies printed weren't enough for everyone.
But the main problem for every samizdat publisher was content. Those who printed the scarce "Master and Margarita" for themselves faced virtually no threat. But publishers of homemade magazines seriously risked their freedom.
In 1960, the KGB arrested Alexander Ginzburg, the editor-in-chief (and sole editor) of the almanac "Syntax." Contributors to "Syntax" included Joseph Brodsky, Bulat Okudzhava, Bella Akhmadulina, and other poets from Moscow and Leningrad. Before his arrest, Ginzburg had published three issues of the almanac. Its circulation reached three hundred copies, which pales in comparison to the circulation of thick journals. Nevertheless, the KGB deemed the publication of "Syntax" a socially dangerous act. During the search, according to Ginzburg's own recollection, investigators seized hundreds of kilograms of manuscripts, which filled "half a KGB truck."
No anti-Soviet content was found in the manuscripts, but the investigation, guided by the principle "where there's a man, there's a way," accused Ginzburg of document forgery. Alexander Ilyich sometimes wrote entrance essays for his acquaintances.
As a result, he received a two-year prison sentence. While serving his sentence in Vyatlag, Ginzburg became famous for gaining access to the camp commander's tape recorder and reciting a poem by the disgraced Boris Pasternak. A scrap of tape, wrapped around a match, was given to Radio Liberty, which broadcast the recording. The camp commander lost his job for his lapse in vigilance.
Long before the KGB, the poetry underground in Russia was the subject of political surveillance. Nicholas I personally proofread and edited Pushkin's works, knowing full well that Alexander Sergeevich's uncensored epigrams were circulating. Lermontov was sent to the Caucasus for his unpublished poem "On the Death of a Poet," which had spread among the reading public like a viral video.
But the true classic of Russian samizdat is the poet Ivan Barkov, whose obscene odes were never published in either the Russian Empire or the USSR. Several editions were published during the turbulent 1990s, but after the passage of the "obscene language law" in 2014, they were banned again. So Barkov holds the absolute record: 250 years without the right to correspondence.
Before the advent of copying machines, copies were typically made of poetry. Copying an entire novel by hand bordered on a heroic feat. Although such things had happened in the nineteenth century. In 1863, a scandal erupted over the publication of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel "What Is to Be Done?" in the magazine Sovremennik. The censors failed to discern the revolutionary fervor in what they considered a dull romance novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. When the authorities realized what an ideological bombshell the prisoner of the Peter and Paul Fortress had concocted, they ordered the confiscation of copies of "What Is to Be Done?". And then pens began to scratch – "What Is to Be Done?" was copied in the capital and the provinces. For forty years, until the censorship ban was lifted after the 1905 Revolution, Chernyshevsky's novel confidently remained among the top samizdat classics.
In the next half-century, nothing interesting happened in terms of the history of samizdat. After the Civil War, the Russian diaspora and Soviet citizens read completely different books, newspapers, and magazines. These two worlds barely intersected. "Tamizdat" was inaccessible to Soviet readers, and hardly anyone was eager to read it, when even the slightest suspicion of ties to the White émigrés led to a prison sentence or the death penalty. As for texts outside the control of the party and government, they certainly existed, and their stories are well known: from Mandelstam's famous tale of the "Kremlin Highlander" to Bulgakov's "The Master." However, these stories, written "for the drawer" and known only to a small circle, can hardly be called "published."
The situation changed dramatically after the Twentieth Congress. The first sign of mass samizdat, oddly enough, was Khrushchev's speech "On Overcoming the Consequences of the Personality Cult." The full text of the speech was not published openly; it was reprinted from classified brochures marked "for official use only."
In the summer of 1958, a monument to Mayakovsky was unveiled in Moscow. The authorities had conceived the site as a meeting place for official poets and their readers. But very soon, authors, who hadn't been allowed within cannon shot of any Soviet publishing house, began appearing near the monument. The bronze statue of Mayakovsky, a manuscript clutched in his fist, sparked a massive epidemic of literary readings. They took place spontaneously. Today, they would be called unsanctioned rallies, but back then, they were called free gatherings. At the foot of the monument, people not only read poetry but also distributed samizdat.
The authorities quickly grew tired of the Mayakovsky gatherings. Active participants in the gatherings near the monument began to be "registered." Vigilantes checked the speakers' documents, wrote down their names, and reported the "antisocial behavior" to their workplace or school. For students, this often resulted in expulsion from the institute. Former students went to work in boiler rooms or as private security guards, where they had plenty of time to read and copy samizdat texts. This is how a generation of janitors and guards was formed.
In the autumn of 1961, police swept the capital, "ensuring order" on the eve of the opening of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU. Arrests began to be made against those organizing the public gatherings. Poet Ilya Bokshteyn (Okudzhava dedicated his song "Paper Soldier" to him), writer Eduard Kuznetsov (later a participant in the "Leningrad Airplane Affair"), and future monarchist Vladimir Osipov were sentenced for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." After serving their sentences, they were released to pursue with a clear conscience the very things the Soviet government had accused them of.
The first generation of samizdatniks began with poetry and illusions about glasnost, but ten years later, it became absolutely clear to everyone how our words would resonate. Especially after 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush "socialism with a human face." A time of dissidence and cynicism had arrived.
The writer Vladimir Bukovsky gave a succinct definition of samizdat in his memoirs: “I write it myself, I edit it myself, I publish it myself, I distribute it myself, and I do the jail time for it myself.”
This is how I became a traitor
It's not only dissidents who write memoirs. Even retired KGB generals find time to express their views. Filipp Bobkov is one such general-writer.
His career began in the SMERSH counterintelligence agency and ended at the MOST media group, where Bobkov advised Vladimir Gusinsky. At the height of his career, the general headed the KGB's Fifth (Ideological) Directorate, which dealt with illegal literature and its authors.
In his book, "How Traitors Were Trained," Philipp Denisovich paints a stunning picture of an American conspiracy. He believes the CIA exploited the dissident milieu to recruit CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
"Under the guise of dissent, dissidents faithfully served the goals of the Cold War," writes Bobkov. "They ostensibly formulated these goals themselves, but in reality, they were implementing what was persistently being implemented by Western intelligence agencies and various anti-Soviet centers."
Readers of Soviet newspapers remember how dissenters were always accused of "singing from someone else's voice." However, the Fifth Directorate carefully worked with representatives of the fifth column, deciding which of them were ripe for the Mordovian camps and which would benefit from a "preventive talk." In his memoirs, Bobkov recalls conducting such a conversation with Andrei Voznesensky in 1961:
"Khrushchev stamped his feet on the poet Andrei Voznesensky. I personally had a rather lengthy conversation with the poet afterwards; we were sitting there smoking after the 'tsar's wrath' had erupted. He was in such a state; he could also veer off in the wrong direction, causing a lot of trouble... So I didn't leave until he calmed down."
Voznesensky's "rescue" from the temptations of dissidence is the only comic episode in the book. The Fifth Directorate had a brief conversation with the real "literary Vlasovites."
In the mid-60s, it emerged that Yuri Galanskov had disregarded the authorities' warnings "about the inadmissibility of such actions." The poet organized a "glasnost rally" on Pushkin Square and launched a samizdat literary and journalistic almanac, "Phoenix-66," where he published "An Open Letter to Mikhail Sholokhov."
The reason for the letter was the trial of the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky, who in 1966 were sentenced to five and seven years in prison camps for publishing in the West “works that defamed the Soviet state and social system.”
This assessment of the writer's work shocked the intelligentsia. Letters in defense of the convicted men flooded the editorial offices of Soviet newspapers. These letters were not published. However, Mikhail Sholokhov's speech from the podium of the 23rd Congress of the CPSU was broadcast on the radio. This living classic of Soviet literature and Nobel Prize laureate declared that "these young men got off easy," and he personally advocated capital punishment for Sinyavsky and Daniel.
Galanskov called Sholokhov's position "cannibalistic," and 1966 was the year when a new generation emerged in the USSR that had no illusions about Soviet power.
The authorities' response was harsh. In 1968, Galanskov's trial began, along with that of Alexander Ginzburg, who had published the collection "White Book" in the West, also dedicated to the Sinyavsky and Daniel case.
The technology for preparing the trial was described by Andrei Amalrik in his “Notes of a Dissident”:
"There are known cases where the KGB knows that some book, from its point of view, is being written or printed; two agents, having entered under some pretext, stole several sheets from Vera Dashkova, Ginzburg and Galanskov's typist, but allowed her to complete the work, so as to have a 'completed crime.'"
The typist was tried as an accomplice and given a "lenient" sentence—one year in a labor camp. The prosecutor demanded seven-year sentences for Galanskov and Ginzburg, as foreign agents writing for the CIA.
The prosecution's evidence, according to contemporaries, was weak. The investigation failed to even find the manuscript of the "White Book." The KGB received information that Ginzburg had buried the manuscript in a park near his home, and officers from the Fifth Directorate literally dug up the park but found nothing of interest. However, the court nevertheless heeded the prosecutor's arguments and sentenced Ginzburg to five years and Galanskov to seven years in prison.
After Czechoslovakia, the romantic fog lifted. In Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, and other cities, dissidents were no longer publishing poetry, but "A Chronicle of Current Events" and "The Gulag Archipelago." Courts regularly published sentences for samizdat publishers under Articles 70 ("with the intent to subvert") or 190 ("anti-Soviet propaganda"). A popular joke of the time held that all dissidents were divided into "pre-sidents," "sidents," and "post-sidents."
Alexander Ginzburg, after serving time for the "White Book," became a secret assistant to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and an outspoken enemy of the Soviet regime. He actively participated in the creation of the Moscow Helsinki Group. In 1977, he was arrested for the third time and sentenced to eight years in prison. No one doubted that this sentence condemned Ginzburg to certain death. But in 1979, he was unexpectedly exchanged for Soviet spies arrested in the United States.
Yuri Galanskov was never released. He died in the camp hospital in the fall of 1972, after spending five years and nine months in prison.
Epilogue
Samizdat has become history. Western and Russian museums hold collections of homemade magazines. Many have been digitized and posted online. For example, here, on the University of Toronto website. Or here, in the Samizdat Anthology.
Browsing these archives suggests the technical similarities between samizdat and the internet. Samizdat had no central authority, just as the World Wide Web lacks one, so shutting down one or more nodes (arresting samizdat publishers) couldn't stop the system. Texts spread virally, like on a social network. Anyone who risked printing banned material typically did so to share it with others. Four copies turned into sixteen, and so on, exponentially. These were reposts, the number of which determined the value of the text.
Samizdat can easily be considered the precursor to the internet. And vice versa, the internet is samizdat. Because each of us, when we sit down at our computer to post on Facebook or VKontakte, for a moment becomes a samizdat publisher. And in recent years, some are actually getting down to it for real, just like half a century ago. But that's a different story. Or is it the same story?