Samizdat (“self-publishing”) was the clandestine copying and circulation of uncensored writing in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, usually by typing multiple carbon copies and passing them hand to hand. It spread from the late 1950s and carried poetry, fiction, banned works such as Solzhenitsyn’s, religious texts, and human rights documents. Its counterpart, tamizdat (“published there”), was work smuggled abroad, printed, and sometimes brought back in.

The best-known samizdat periodical, the Chronicle of Current Events, appeared from 1968 to 1983 and documented arrests, trials, and conditions in camps and psychiatric hospitals. The KGB, especially its Fifth Directorate, treated samizdat as ideological subversion; producing or distributing it could be prosecuted under Article 70 (anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda) or Article 190-1 (spreading deliberately false fabrications defaming the Soviet system) of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files show the service devoted considerable resources to tracing typewriters, informants, and courier networks behind it.

Sources

• Komaromi, Ann. “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat.” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004).
• Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.