Issue 1/Samizdat
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Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official censorship and keep underground political activity alive under severe oppression.
The circle of hope: samizdat, tamizdat and radio
Under communism there were different types of samizdat or underground publishing. On one level, there were writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky and many others in the Soviet Union who wrote simply because they could not stand the oppression. These free thinkers — writers, journalists, essayists and poets — wanted to express themselves despite, or against, the system.
The second level of samizdat, which took place in Poland throughout communism, took the form of intellectual-cum-political resistance. Most of the time, it was limited to small and often isolated groups of friends — mostly students — who trusted each other.
"The Russian word samizdat literally means self-publishing. It is meaningless in a world without censorship. But in countries where the government retains the right to control the publication of books, periodicals and articles, anything that is published and distributed without the censor's stamp is samizdat. Censorship and samizdat depend on each other: while censorship exists, uncensored writing will always be circulated." — Ferenc Kőszeg, founding editor of Beszélö (Talker), the most influential Hungarian samizdat periodical launched in late-1981.
In hacker and computer jargon, the term samizdat was used for the dissemination of needed and hard-to-obtain documents or information.
"Zines and underground culture offer up an alternative, a way of understanding and acting in the world that operates with different rules and upon different values than those of consumer capitalism. It is an alternative fraught with contradictions and limitations...but also possibilities." — Stephen Duncombe