Samizdat
Samizdat is the self-publishing of censored texts in the Soviet bloc, copied by hand or on typewriters and passed from reader to reader.
The basics
The word joins the Russian sam ("self") and izdat, short for izdatel'stvo ("publishing house"). Wikipedia describes samizdat as "a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc".
Texts were copied by hand or typed. A typist could make several copies at once with carbon or tissue paper, which were cheap and easy to hide. People preferred private typewriters because using an official photocopier needed authorisation.
Related forms:
- Tamizdat: work published abroad, often from manuscripts smuggled out.
- Magnitizdat: sound recordings passed around on audio tape.
Eugeniusz Smolar, a Polish dissident who left Poland in 1970, writes that "Samizdat was known since the late 1940s in Poland". It stayed rare there until 1976, when the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) helped start a large underground press. Smolar describes a cycle he calls the "Circle of Hope". Samizdat circulated at home. Tamizdat came in from exile. Western radio stations such as Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Voice of America read banned texts on air. In his words, "Every broadcast was repeated several times over the course of a week."
Zines are a related form. A zine is a "noncommercial often homemade or online publication", usually made by one person or a small group. Wikipedia notes that Ukrainian samizdat (samvydav) continues today, with zines and artbooks as its most common forms. In hacker jargon, "samizdat" means sharing needed documents that are hard to get.
How it applies to Logos
LAN is the Logos movement zine. Its first issue, from September 2026, has an article on samizdat. See Issue 1/Samizdat.
Examples
- A Chronicle of Current Events, the longest-running samizdat periodical. It ran from 1968 to 1982, across 65 issues, and was dedicated to defending human rights.
- Poland's drugi obieg ("second circuit") of publishing, which grew from the mid-1970s. Smolar describes underground titles such as Zapis and Tygodnik Mazowsze.
- Aneks, a political quarterly made by Smolar's group in exile in Sweden.
- Václav Benda's essay The Parallel Polis, which first circulated in samizdat in 1978.
Add an example: edit this section.
See also
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Sources
- Samizdat, Wikipedia
- Eugeniusz Smolar, The circle of hope: Samizdat, tamizdat and radio, New Eastern Europe, 2 May 2019
- Zine, Wikipedia
- Václav Benda, Parallel Polis (publication history), The Anarchist Library