Cool People Who Did Cool StuffPart Two: Samizdat: How to Self-Publish During a Dictatorship
Margaret continues talking to Katy Stoll about how the Soviet people evaded censors and kept poetry, literature, and political critique alive.
The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat, Ann Komaromi
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html
HG Skilling, Samizdat and an Indepedent Society in Central and Eastern Europe
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nikolai-gumilev
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anna-akhmatova
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/osip-mandelstam
https://libcom.org/article/1962-novocherkassk-tragedy
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-09284-0_1
Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that you're probably listening to by audio format and not a hand typed transcript. And if it was a hand type transcript, I'm terribly sorry to whoever had to type it, because I would have written more succinctly. I'm your host, Martya Kiljoy and my guest today is Katie Stall. How are you.
Hi, I'm good. I'm excited for part two. And I don't think you need to apologize. If someone loves your show and wants to type it out, they want all of you, They want all of your words.
Yeah, okay, fair enough. But I was thinking Katie Stole is a nice short name. So if if I ever have to start writing samas dot, maybe I'll name a character after you, just because it doesn't take very long to type, you know.
Oh gosh, I would be honored. And yeah it is. It's pretty to the point.
Our audio nope weight producer. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, I'm so so.
My dog Truman is standing on the other side of the room with me and barking at me.
Hi, Triman and eating your pillow or no, and.
Just being a menace to society today. She has not been able to do full hurting dog activities today, and so she is letting me know that I am unacceptable to her, and that's fair.
Yeah, you're acceptable to us.
Thank you. Did you hear that, Truman? Did you hear that? She's like, oh, are you petting me?
Now?
I've forgiven you for all your all your bad behavior.
My dog does a thing where he comes to the back door as if he wants to get let in, and as soon as you open the door, he runs away because his trick is to try and get you to come outside to play with him.
Oh yeah, it's a trick.
Truman does the same thing.
Yeah, so annoying. I mean sometimes I let him. This is probably partly why he does it, but exactly.
It works like it's so annoying because I'm just like, yeah, whatever you want, girl.
Yeah, well do what I want. Is also to finish my introduction, which is that our audio engineers Rory hi, Rory.
Hi, or hello Hi. I don't know, I don't know what their voice sounds like.
And our theme music was written forced by un woman. And we are on part two talking about samas Dot the Soviet self publishing revolution wasn't a revolution, but a way to try to continue to make things happen despite intense censorship. The cliffhanger for last week, I promised you the most famous author we're going to talk about this week, which I mean I I've actually literally read one of his books, but I still didn't recognize his name. But that's because I'm basically like, I'm both name blind and face blind. It's really not good. I just like don't recognize people.
You know, Well, I'm going to assume it's, you know, not a name that's around a lot here. Maybe it's hard to pronounce in some capacity.
I don't know.
Maybe not. Yeah, I shouldn't have guessed you're about to say it.
I am about to say it. So the guy that we're going to talk about. His name is Alexander Solzhenitsen.
Steve rolls right off the tongue. I can't know if you forgot that name anyway, I know.
And then there's also this thing where, like everything that's transliterated, you're gonna run across multiple spellings on the internet, you know, because the actual spelling isn't this at all. It's you know, in cyrillic. And the thing about Alexander, which is what I'm gonna call him, is that he's kind of nobody's hero. He doesn't like the West, he doesn't like the USSR, he's not a monarchist. By the end of his life, he maybe liked Putin, but then I've also read that that was like entirely played up by Putin.
I don't know which is believable.
I know Jordan Peterson likes talking about him, which is the grossest thing about him.
Red Flag, I know, I know, Yeah, but that doesn't mean that this guy would like Jordan Peterson talking about.
Him, right, and like, And I've read so many contradictory things about this man and his beliefs, and so I tried to read his beliefs directly as much as possible. But the thing is, he is caught up in Cold War culture war, sure, and so both sides want desperately for him to be their guy. Well, the US has alreadyn't want him to be their guy. They kicked him out, but that's a spoiler. But like post Soviet Russia, Yeah, he is one of the most famous anti communist writers of the twentieth century. So the right Wing gloms onto him, and I know I talked a big game about how most of the samas dot writers and people purged by Stalin and Shit were socialists. Alexander he's kind of an exception of that. He's one of many exceptions to that. I mean, he's a lot of different things over the course of his life. On the whole. Near the end of his life, he's a grouchy Eastern Orthodox guy who liked to write history and write about his experiences in the gulags. Basically, he wrote about how much he fucking suffered. That's what this man liked doing.
Okay, okay, sure.
Alexander was born on December eleventh, nineteen eighteen, during the Russian Revolution. His father died before he was born, and he grew up with his mother in a dilapidated hut. His family was Eastern Orthodox, but he converted to atheism as a teen and joined the Communist youth. He is a brilliant scientist, especially a mathematician. He gets married to a chemist. By the time World War II was doing its thing, he commanded an artillery battery as a loyal Red Army soldier off to rid the world of Nazism. Math is a really useful skill when you're talking about where shells land when you shoot them from artillery batteries. But he made a mistake. He wrote one of his friends a private letter during the war in which he made fun of a certain man with a mustache. So he sent to prison. Wait because he's making fun of Stalin.
Oh I thought you met the other man with a mustache.
Oh yeah, no, that would be now. This is after when Stalin and Hitler were no longer friends, when they were on shooting terms.
Yeh, gotcha.
They sent him off to prison. I think after the war they're like, oh, you did bad, but we need you to keep doing some.
Math on We need you to keep adding yeah.
Yeah. And so for a while he just went and dug clay in a labor camp. Eventually they realized he was a science guy and the Gulag system was just fucking ginormous at this point in history. These days, it seems likely that about fourteen million people were held in the Gulag system. Wow, about ten percent of them would die in captivity or immediately after being released. Everything about this is argued because of the fucking Cold War. There's like Soviet apologists who were like, well, the numbers of people who died are really high because they let people free right before they died. And I'm like, well, why does that make it better?
Right?
I'm like, and your point is what?
Yeah? And his estimates, Alexander's estimates during his lifetime is sixty million people in the gulag system instead of fourteen million. And there's that was a believable number that he came to through for good reason, I believe, but I'm not certain because everyone's arguing about this shit. I believe it's more like fourteen million people, which is, to be clear, too many fucking people.
A ton of people. Yeah, neither of these numbers are.
Okay, yeah, one time, Okay, it's unrelated. It's like Margaret anecdote. Time. One day I was at a farmer's market in Canada and I met a guy whose father had been a Polish guy who was held in a gulag in Siberia. And this guy he kept staring at me. And my friends were like punks and were like playing according and stuff at the farmer's market. He's just glaring at us. He does not like us. And finally I like, go over, I'm gonna go off script and just tell the story. I go over and he's tabling this book. It's called The Shadow of Caiton and I'm like, oh, it's this book. And he's like, what do you know about World War II history? And I'm like, let's talk about Finland's and World War Two. I love talking about Finland and World War Two. And I talked to him for a while and he goes, you and your friends you're not Bolsheviks, are you? And I was like no. In my mind, I'm like, who the fuck is a Bolshevik? Uh?
What?
Yeah? I'm like, no, We're anarchists. And his eyes light up as soon as I say that we're anarchists. He picks up a copy of his father's memoir. He flips through it to find the chapter where his father's life was saved by an anarchist fellow prisoner in the gulag system. Wow, and so like that act of kindness in a nineteen forties like, yeah, made me a friend in the twenty tens. Yeah, and it was really nice. Wow.
Yeah, I love that anecdote.
Yeah, a lot of people are in the gulags and it's like me and this, like the anarchist and the Polish guy had did not the same politics, right, but the Polish guy had literally was just thrown in there because the USSR had invaded. Yeah, Poland anyway, whatever, whole separate story. So the Gulag system not a nice place, Alexander. He's digging clay and then they're like, wait a second, you can do science. And the nice thing about having a really big gulag system is you can have all these like specialized work camps, like, for example, the Forced Science Experiment work camp. They had so many people in gulags that they had a dedicated advanced research team of imprisoned scientists. What's wild that is?
Well, I guess with that many people, it's not that unbelievable.
Yeah, And I'm sure they're arresting the intelligencia and like educated people and whatever. And uh So he spends three years out of his eight years in a advanced research science camp for imprisoned people. And he says that this is how he survived being in the camps, is that only five of the years were in like the horrible clay digging parts.
You know, he's probably right, Yeah.
But he kept talking shit, and he talked shit on the scientific research of the guy who ran the place, basically being like, oh, that guy doesn't know how to fucking do science, Am I right? And people are like, you know, I'll have to like say that shit. So he gets sent to Kazakhstan, back to a regular gulag time.
Oh man.
While he's there, he learned how to memorize his own writing by using a rosary, and each bead represented a line of writing. And he wasn't even religious at this point. I think kind of shortly after this he converts to orthodox I think he's still an atheist at this point, but they're like, well, they'll give you a rosary if you ask, And so he did, and he would pass the bead and it would be like another line, Like each bead represented a different line of what he was writing. Wow, the kind of skills that I have not developed in my life.
I say that sounds complicated.
Yeah. After he was released, he was totally free to do whatever. No, I'm just kidding. He had to go to Siberia. Oh, there's there's internal exile at this point in history, where if you I had a friend who was sent to internal exile. Actually, he was arrested in Georgia, and found guilty eve though it should have been self defense case for like a defending himself from a gay bashing, and then they put him. Georgia has this specific law where they can exile you into a different part of Georgia, and so we had to go to a different county and live in exile. And it's like small rural town.
That's so weird. Yeah, internal exile, out of county jail.
Well, no, he isn't a jail. He's just living in a town.
Oh I see, Oh okay, huh weird.
Yeah. So it's like, so when when our guy Alexander, we're no longer talking about my friend in Georgia. When he sent to Siberia. He's free, but he's free to go live in Siberia. He's not free to live in Western Russia. Gotya, And he's having a rough go of it. His wife divorced him while he was in prison, and he started teaching in the school. I've read. He was like a high school science teacher basically, and he started secretly writing poems in plays. He was thirty five, he was divorced and he was struggling with cancer. He recovered from the cancer. He remarried his ex wife, and then after the death of Stalin, the courts invalidated his original conviction. They retroactively decided it was okay to make fun of the man with a mustache and a private letter to a friend, and he was allowed to move back to Western Russia. Wow, so everything's fixed forever. At this point, he publishes his first famous book, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich, which is the book that I read and I wasn't like I'm reading about Russia. It was just like a book I ran across. It's short, and it's about life and a gulug. It was interesting and it was actually published in the USSR. Khrushchev himself, the new leader, he signed off on publishing this book because while it's critical of the gulag system, it's not a particularly radical book. It's like Khrushchev is down with shit that criticizes Stalin, you know. Yeah. But soon after that, after this book comes out to like great, everyone likes it, and he starts writing some other books and some of them get published in a West and whatever. It's complicated. He's soon persona non grata in the literary scene of Russia. The government decides they don't want him writing anymore, and they steal all of his manuscripts. His repression leads to this massive cultural boycott of the USSR, and all of these writers get together and are like, are you kidding? Why are we doing this to this you know, important writer. And this includes Western leftists like Sart and Vonnegut, you know who probably wouldn't join in a cultural boycott if it affected their botty line.
I couldn't begin to think of an answer.
It's the sponsors of this show.
The sponsors, of course, it's the sponsors of this show.
I know they would do whatever's best morally at all times, right, Sophie, we could say that all of our sponsors always do it's correct morally.
I don't know.
We love sponsors.
This podcast is brought to you by Don't Gamble. Here's to Nuts, and we're back. So Alexander in Secret starts writing what's going to become his most famous book, or at least his most influential book. It takes him ten years to write this book, from nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty eight. So if you're listening to this, my editor at Feminist Press, to whom I owe book. Hey, I'm writing faster than this guy did. Book he writes is called Gulag Archipelago, and it is this long, damning history of the Gulag system. It's written in novel form, but it's like Russian novels are very often like, look, I'm basically writing nonfiction, but every now and then I'm gonna have some characters in it, you know, hmm. And it's a very Russian novel. Is three hundred thousand words long, which is baby shorter than all of the Lord of the Rings books put together.
You know, I would struggle through it these days, I have the attention span of a goldfish. Lately, I know topic for another day.
I feel like I'm gonna have to like live in the woods for a solid way. I do live in the woods. I'm gonna have to live in the woods without the internet. It's the internet for a year before I can finally read more and piece by Tolstein.
Yeah, it's a real problem. I might cut all the chords soon, but anyway, not during this show done via internet.
Nope.
Do you ever read Tolsoy' is the Death of Ivan Iliot. It's like a novella of his that's like about a funeral.
It's not okay, No, I've I read this one about a soldier going off somewhere and hiding in the mountains.
No, this one's like all about grief. It's like, okay, what's it called? The death of Ivan Illy? I could be pronouncing the last name a.
Real theme with the titles of these writers. Yeah, a dain, the Life of Ivan whatever his last name is.
Yeah.
I feel like a lot of these things were like as generically titled as possible, somewhat on purpose, you know.
Sure. Yeah, Tolstoy was I mean, everyone like sort of loved him, but he was also a Christian anarchist and like sometimes hated him. You know.
That was like my first to intro to Tolstoy, and I was like, Jesus Christ, that was depressing, give me more.
What I did is I just had I had a really good friend who was really into reading Tolstoy, and I would just like make her tell me what she was reading as too, So I didn't actually read them, but I like not the blow.
By blow, you know, yeah, like the cliff notes.
Yeah, one day I'm going to read warm Piece and one day, which is actually gonna come up later. There is gonna be a joke about a grandma tricking a granddaughter into reading warm Piece later in this oh and one day I'm going to read a Goolag Archipelago. So he writes his long, damning history and I don't know if this is exactly why he can't get it published, but one of the things he does is he traces the origins of the system to before Stalin. He traces it back to nineteen eighteen and Lenin and like, whoops, you're not allowed to criticize anyone but Stalin. Everyone has to be like, the only thing that was ever wrong with the USSR was just Stalin. Is what everyone wants to pretend, you know. Oh God. He works with a number of people to get this book smuggled out to the West on microfilm. Paris wants to publish it, but he desperately wants to try to leverage everything he can to get it published in the USSR first one, because he wants to have more impact to There's like, if you get stuff published in the West while you're living in Russia, you're like guaranteed that the USSR is never going to touch it, Like is never going to let you publish it at that point. And there's only three manuscripts, three copies of the manuscript in the USSR, and I believe all three of them were literally buried. I know that two of them were. One was buried in Estonia by his friend's daughter. Another copy one of his typists knew where it was because he was working with typists. Sometimes the isamas dot publisher. Typists are getting paid, sometimes they're not, Sometimes they're volunteer. I don't know enough about this particular person. I do know that because she typed this book, the state captures her and tortures her, and she gives up the location of the manuscript, so the KGB go and they burn it. And then as soon as she's released, she is found hanging in her own apartment building stairwell. It's either murder or suicide. Yeah, But honestly, I think claiming that she was murdered by the state, whether or not she tied the rope herself, is perfectly fair.
I agree, I completely agree.
Meanwhile, the USSR's Writers Union has kicked him out in nineteen sixty nine, and he's hiding on his friend's property. He's kind of I think openly hiding on his friend's property because the USSR is like totally equal. Everyone's equal in the USSR. But he has a friend who's a world famous cellist, and because he's a world famous cellist, he gets his own villa like a dacha. Okay, he gets his own fancy house just outside of town. And because he's world famous and has his own datcha, the KGBS like kind of not allowed to search his place. Okay, you know, so that's where he's hiding in the good and equal society of the USSR. People have probably caught on by now that I'm not a big.
Fan and oh, okay, now I see, which means that I love the US and capitalism.
That's the obvious logical conclusion. Only one thing can be bad at a time, right. Anyway, he wins the nineteen seventy Nobel Prize for Literature. Goolog Archipelago isn't even out yet, but he's written these other books. He's unable to attend the event. It's in I think Stockholm because he's convinced that if he leaves, the USSR will never let him back in again, right, which isn't something that my friends are thinking about. Now at all. I don't know what you're talking about.
No, I can't relate.
Yeah, but he wrote a banger speech that he sent out there that included that ordinary man was obliged quote not to participate and lies. Basically, his whole speech was like, tell the fucking truth. That's it. That's the goal, that's the whole fucking point of doing anything, is to tell the fucking truth. And when he won this Nobel prize, the people who took the biggest risk, inmates from his former prison camp, risked everything to smuggle notes out to congratulate him. And that's fucking cool. It is really cool. Along the way, he divorces his wife, the scientist Natalia, to marry and yeah, well this time she divorced him, and then they get back together. And then this time he's like, well, actually I'm sorry my wife, the scientist Natalia. I'm in love with another woman, a scientist named Natalia.
He's got a type. Well, this is another complicated figure.
I don't I actually I don't know. I have no particular reason to believe that this new Natalia is like agent appropriate or anything like that. You know, it's like they're actually working together and they're falling in love, I think, is what's happening.
I'm making a joke. Life happen. It could have been good, it could have been bad.
I spent a while trying to find out, and I didn't find the answer.
It's also like she did divorce him the first time.
But yeah, I also reasonably certain there's like only ten first names available in the USSR. There's also that somewhere in here there's a joke about how they had to share the names because of communism. And so he's getting real paranoid because the States after him, you know, and they killed his typist. Sure, and so he sleeps with a pitchfork by his bed, which is classy and strange.
That is both of those things.
You know.
I'm not sure it gives you a fighting chance, Okay.
Yeah, I mean, like, honestly, a pitchfork by your bed is really just to like take me down fighting. It's like, like, I don't want to go alive, That's all it says. If you have a pitchfork by your bed, yeah, totally. But yeah, after his typist is found dead, he's like, all right, Paris, go ahead and publish Gulag Archipelago. It's clearly not getting published in Russia. Yeah, and so they publish it. In nineteen seventy three, one guy Azaiah Berlin wrote about it, quote, until the Gulag Archipelago, the Communists and their allies had persuaded their followers that denunciations of the regime were largely bourgeois propaganda. And so basically it's like, this first handily detailed account of the Gulags broke the myth because the Communist Party was like, what are you talking about. There's not sixty million, fourteen million people in Gulags. No, it's just like three guys named Nikolai. Yeah, that's all we got. It's just the Nicolai camp. You know, a lot of academics in the West hated Gulag Archipelago. Frankly, I think because they're associated with the Communist Party in the West that's the And people who survive the Gulag are like, no, this is pretty dead on, whereas the people in the West are like, nah, it can't be true, you know. Yeah, And finally the USSR is like, get the fuck out of our country. He is deported to West Germany and then he moves to Vermont. This is in nineteen seventy four in Vermont. His family soon joins him the new wife I believe, only one of the one of the wives. Yeah, he's not actually a big of us anyway. Yeah, and this is where I wish the story was he just pivoted into being a Vermont guy. He would have been such a good Vermont guy. There's like pictures of him, and he looks just like a Vermont almost amish guy. He's got the big beard.
Are you telling me this is Bernie Sanders?
Oh, no beard? Yeah, imagine if Bernie Sanders was in like eighteen seventy.
Yeah.
Instead, he goes into exile mode, which is perfectly reasonable. All he does is write, eat and sleep. He starts writing what he intends to be as magnum Opus, a series of books he never finishes, although he finishes like four of the books. I can't talk shit. It's called The Red Wheel and it is a complete history of the Russian Revolution. Oh and it's turned down for Soviet publication because he refuses to uncapitalize the word God, which is just like two petty people fighting, and I kind of respect it, you know.
Yep.
He's famous as hell because of the US is trying hard to just turn him into like a cold warrior, you know. Yeah, yeah, but all of his neighbors chip in to help him keep his privacy. They put up a sign in town saying no directions to the souls in it sens so they're like, no, we're not gonna tell anyone where to find you, Like, you can just live in your weird writing retreat in Vermont.
I love that. Also, I'd be like, low key horrified if every time I drove by a.
Sign no directions to the stoles.
Yeah, you're like that, yeah, but also way to go.
Yeah. His wife, Natalia runs a relief fund for Soviet prisoners, and all the proceeds from Gulag Archipelago go directly to supporting her fund. So they're like, okay, doing a thing together, all right, Natalia. Yeah, but instead of becoming a cool guy, he kind of just starts increasingly alienating everyone from all political.
Sides, more and more complicated.
Uh huh. Partly this is kind of cool. It's impossible to make him the stooge of the CIA or anyone else because he's mad at the US. Yeah, you want to know. One of the things he's mad at the US about it makes sense from his position, Yeah, I do abandoning the Vietnam War, okay. And also, to quote the New York Times from their obituary of him, quote, he criticized the US's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.
Wow. So he's like, you just really can't get this right, can you, Goldilocks?
Oh?
Oh?
The unfettered press.
Yeah, he doesn't like that it's unfettered press.
The music thing. I'm like, yous just sound like a cranky old guy.
Yeah, but he's also a cranky, old, weird Russian man on top of it.
Yeah, complicated.
After the fall of the USSR, he goes back home. He's accompanied by a news crew to capture his response, and he's basically just like, fuck, it's all crime and corruption, and also the ethnic Russians are not being protected in the former block country. I have spent a bunch of time reading arguments on both sides about whether or not he was an ethnonationalist, whether or not he was an anti Semite, and all of this stuff. And the problem is everyone is so politically engaged around him that it's hard to peace out like he did in two thousand and two write a like book covering hundreds of years of the history of Jewish people in Russia. But in it he's critical of all of the anti Semitic policies of the government and like talks about the problem with the programs and like all of this stuff. But also he I don't know, like earlier he had like he might be an anti Semite. He certainly meets some people's definitions of anti Semite, but he also like, yeah, isn't the kind of anti Semite that you imagine when you imagine a Russian anti Semite.
Kind of don't even need to try to put him into one box or another. He's a complicated figure of a very complicated a time, with different influences and clearly doesn't subscribe to one thing or another. Yep, there's this influence. There's that he might be anti Semitic, but doesn't mean that he thinks the Polgrims were good.
You know.
Well, it's also hard because the only thing I've read, I didn't read everything. I read several articles about it. But he was accused of anti Semitism because he, like, for example, he was saying that the programs.
Were anti Zionists.
Sorry, oh no, if that would have actually been interesting. He was claiming that the programs didn't come from the top of society, but instead like came bottom up from the Russian peasants, but not in a way where he was like, and therefore it's good, you know, And I'm like, I think that's true. I think that it was a bottom up populist revolt of horrible racist bullshit, you know, m h.
Because he's they're tapping into something and that's coming from somewhere.
Yeah, but he is also sort of an ethnopatriot about like Russian people, and he wants to leave I don't know whatever he's fucking.
It's also interesting given all that he's been through.
Yeah, you know, totally. In nineteen ninety four he went before the Russian Parliament and was like, this is not a democracy but an oligarchy, and then continuing on his like he can't make friends on either side. In two thousand and five, he criticized NATO. He told the Times of London and I actually think this is sick. He told The Times of London that democracy is quote not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet, and so he's like criticizing the like bomb countries into democracy thing that's been going on, you know. Yeah, But also I think Putin likes him, and Jordan Peterson likes him and whatever. Fucking you know. He died at eighty nine years old in two thousand and eight, and people want to use him to prop up this or that position, including people who know more about him than I do. Right, But my takeaway was grouchy old man who had a hardish, shit life, who grew up in a dilapidated hut, whose writing helped break through the lives of the Soviet shame. Yeah. Yeah, but do you know what doesn't know how to transition to ads?
Me? That's not true, Margaret, You're so good at it.
Okay, you're right, Oh, thank you, thank you. Even this was a clever ruse of a because I actually was transitioning to ads, I think very.
Well, perfectly. Thank you, and anybody listening at home, that's like, ugh, how hard could it be?
It can be hard.
It can be hard to find a graceful transition and respect it as I do.
Here's the ads and we're back him.
So glad to be back from those ads.
I know, I know, I learned so much about so many wonderful things. Sometimes we do get ads for good things. I will say that every now and then. I want the listeners to use their own discretion.
It's true.
So Alexander's work was a little bit influential as samas Dot, but honestly, a lot of what was influential about it. I didn't really expect to go on this like Longhold rabbit Hole about him, but I just spent so long reading about him.
It was fascinating. I'm glad to have learned about him.
Yeah, but a lot was influential about his work was what broke containment and was published widely. There had been other similar pieces before. For example, in nineteen fifty one, a poll named Gustav Girlin had written a World Apart about three years in a prison camp. It was spread by carbon copies that were spread around and retyped. And also that one stands as an exception. This is that's before samas Dot culture Stalin's Alive in nineteen fifty one. Gustav Girland was risking an awful fucking lot by writing about that. Yeah, but by the end of nineteen fifties. In the USSR, you get the culture of what we call samas dot properly, so the word samas dot. The various publishing houses run by the state all had names like gosses dot, which is the state publishing house, or polisi dot, the publishing house for politics. So this poet named Nikolai Glaskov, when he started self publishing his poems, he ironically put the word samsabiyazdt as the publisher on them, which meant the self publishing house instead of the state publishing house or of the politics publishing house. And he shortened it to samas dot and it gets translated as self publishing. But it's really more clever than that. Despite the word coming into regular usage in Soviet Russia, no Soviet dictionary ever included it. It was a non word. It's just so petty, you know. Yeah, Nikolai Nikolai Glaskov, his dad had been killed during the Great Purge, the late nineteen thirties thing where Stalin killed most the original Bolsheviks, and he was very aware of the stakes of what he was doing, but he didn't use it to be like, here's the self publishing to bring down the regime. He wanted to publish poetry. Yeah, and sometimes as a kind of kind of a joke or like a to be clever, he would self censor the poems, like do fake censorship on them to make a point. He was just a clever poet trying to do his thing. He once wrote a poem. I couldn't find it in English, but I read the description of it and it's still clever enough to repeat. It's a rewrite of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, which I think most people know this. But there's a depressed author and he's like sitting around and he's like, oh, woe is me? Will I ever be happy? And a bird comes in it's like never more, you know, and he's like, ah, I'm extra sad. The bird told me I'm doomed or whatever. It's been a while since I read this, And so he did a rewrite of it where at the end the character just looks the raven is like, yeah, if you're so smart, name a city in Chile. And the bird, I think just the implication is the bird just as never more again, and the author's like, yeah, you're just a bird doing bird shit. Whatever. I don't care. Yeah, his poems spread word of mouth or re typed, and like all ssamisdat, they entered a sort of folk art tradition where they were subtly changed from person to person. The closest comparison I can find is poetry and translation. You know, it's slightly different every time you read different translations of things. Soon enough, samisdad is a culture in the nineteen sixties. It's mostly in Russia. It picked up in particular after the brief period of the more open Krushchev came to an end in the early nineteen sixties because for a little while people didn't want to do samasdot because they're like, well, I can probably get this published officially, right. You know. By the nineteen seventies it spreads to the satellite states and rather than presenting it, the CIA version of samas dot is like the heroic struggle against Stalinism and you know, Soviet oppression. But it was more a way to have fun. Mikhail Botten wrote an essay that samasdt was basically homebrew alcohol, said that boredom led to quote binge drinking and its variants binge sexual activity and binge reading. Binge reading. I kind of love that as a cultural idea.
I do too. It's like, watch out, it's going to lead to binge reading.
Yeah, I have read Homebrew as a description of the stuff in a number of places, Like so, I think it was usually called samasdot, but I think it was. I think literally people someone are just just calling it homebrew basically, Okay. Often it was a parody of the official channels. The official newspaper was called Pravda or Truth, and so they were like presenting a counter truth. But mostly they wanted to critique the idea that there was such thing as one truth. They wanted to present that literature could in fact be divorced from politics and could be autonomous and ambiguous. So while they were quote neo rests who challenge Soviet realism by offering counter truths, which is kind of what you would say that Alexander's writing was doing, right, is that you're like, He's like, no, I will present the real truth. You know, a lot of people, especially younger writers, were like, what if we offer hypotheses instead of goals? What if we don't have answers, we have questions? And I think that's coolest shit. Yeah, access to copy machines was tightly controlled. So was all this type written stuff by and large on carbon paper and tissue paper, like literally toilet paper I think sometimes. And this was easier to conceal and therefore easier to destroy because you know, you get caught with it, you're doing time.
Yeah, that's actually smart, delicate but smart.
Yeah, totally, which I mean, you know, it's just funny because it's getting past around hand to hand, so it's probably gonna all fucked up and like, yeah, one of the like esthetic qualities of it is that often you're doing like multiple layers of like onion skin, carbon paper and so so like the last one is like barely readable at all, you know. Yeah. Sometimes they would distribute things by photographing them and then like printing photos, but photos were bulkier and harder to conceal. Yeah, the esthetics of samas dot soon had their own value. A type written thing on carbon paper or tissue paper or whatever was inherently subversive and interesting. Here's where I get the joke I promised you. There's a Soviet era joke that a grandmother can't get her granddaughter to read War and Peace, so she stays up late at night furiously and retypes it all as samas dot and then it no longer looks official, so her granddaughter reads it.
That's really funny.
I know, underground authors started writing so much that it started being called graphomania and obsession with writing as much as possible.
Wow.
And I think this is interesting because like when I was first reading about how goolog Archipela goes three hundred thousand words long, and part of it is he never got to write the whole thing at once. He couldn't look at the old pages while he was writing the new pages, right, And so I'm like, yeah, of course it's going to be longer and more repetitive and less. Yeah, he needs an editor very desperately. And so it makes sense to me this like graphamania thing. It also ties into the long Russian tradition of elevating the written word and the author, and also elevating the idea of everyone writing unbearably long books. In fact, they started writing stories making fun of themselves for writing some laws and writing so much. There's a nineteen sixty story called Graphomaniacs, and the author Sinoviski wrote, I am born for poetry insists a young man who looks like he should have been a boxer. Galkin laughs. We are all born for it, a general national penchant for refined letters. And do you know what we have to think censorship the government itself, damn it gives you the right, the inalienable right to consider yourself an unacknowledged genius. That's funny.
Yeah, I like some self awareness.
Yeah, totally. It kind of reminds me of how like, like sometimes the like punk or like genres that are very political, you kind of put up with like things that aren't quite as good because you agree with them, you know. And I think that there's like a certain amount of like, well, if it's Samisdad, it doesn't have to be good because it's inherently edgy and radical because you wrote it.
Right, Yeah, but I'm pro it no matter what.
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And some of this stuff was that they wrote was very serious too. There were entire newspapers and journals published this way. One was a bulletin called Chronicle of Current Events, and it started in April nineteen sixty eight and it appeared every two weeks, and it collected human rights abuses within the Soviet regime. It stopped for a year and a half due to repression, but then it picked up again in nineteen seventy two. This more political samas DOT was actually the second wave of SAMASDT, and it worked through the channels that have been built by artists. It reached a readership of somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand readers per issue, with roughly one thousand to ten thousand copies being made of each edition. They estimated ten people read each copy, right, Yeah, yeah, but each of those fucking ten thousand copies is fucking typed. Wow. That is so much fucking.
Work, an unfathom of wolameta work.
Yep. Besides a general we don't like the dictatorship we live under journal, other political and religious positions started publishing samasdat as well. There's one for Ukrainian Independence. There's the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church. There's the Zionist Herald of Exodus, there's the Herald of the Evangelical Christian Baptists. There's a Russian nationalist journal, and there's one called Jews in the USSI, which I am guessing by the context because it's not the Zionist Herald of Exodus is the anti Zionist Jewish paper of the time.
Okay.
The typewritten thing became a style that everyone would imitate, including in the West, and the thing that I want to try and figure out but I don't have any answer to yet. You know how in the nineties, like everything that was like edgy and grunge us a typewriter font. Yeah, I think that might come from samas dot Okay, because typewriter became the like counter cultural iconic thing to do, and that style got imitated in the West.
Fascinating, and you're probably right, yeah.
I mean I could be wrong. It might also come from like Zene culture, right, it could.
Maybe it's a mixture of both. But you know, it becomes a style that seeps over and then people started adopting it. Which came first the chicken or the egg. Yeah, good theory though.
And folks were ignoring design can iterations when they made this stuff overall and tried to cram as much text onto the page as possible. Ana Komoromi said, quote. Highly circulated type scripts became brittle and worn from handling. The physical page seemed as embattled and fragile as the Soviet author himself. And so you get a copy of samas dot and you would type up like four copies yourself sometimes. And then it seemed like on cursory reading, my cursory reading, it seems that the majority of the authors were men and the majority of the typists were women, and that women took a substantial chunk of the risk. Yeah, that's my own interpretation based on what I read. And then also a pattern I've seen time and time again.
Well, knowing that about that typist that was jailed and then committed suicide, that's a perfect example of it.
Yeah, totally, And this is like absolutely still a thing to this day in the West of the publishing industry. Is like how you could take podcasting. A lot of prodcast producers are women, and a lot of podcasts voices are men. You know, yeah, absolutely, but I mean, you know they I want to point this out and not to be like on fuck these men who wrote stuff like whatever, No, like, they were also risking things, and so typists would also make editorial changes sometimes when they are typing these things, and so there's like kind of a fun playing around with it. A typist named Natalia Trauberg would translate works from English. Oh yeah, also just gets called the typist. She's a translator.
Another Natalia Natalia would translate works from English and would cut out the redundant passages in like GK.
Chesterton. Good for her, I know, I know. Also I saw some of the photos of there's a lot of ssamis doant like collections and stuff like that. And sometimes the typewrit and covers were basically like ASKI art, where they would like do the title in big letters by just doing x's, you know, and like organizing them. Some folks resisted the samas dot style and tried to make it look official, like Alexander Ginsburg's see once again another Alexander. Every time I do a Russian thing, there's like four.
Names, Alexander and Natalia.
Yeah, Alexander Ginsberg did a book called Syntoxis, which looks like an art book and it ran from nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty one. Or there would be poetry editions with hand drawn covers and hand sewn bindings. Authors would sometimes bind their books. Often they were signed. This is the thing that kind of surprised me. You would think that they would all be like, I'm writing this shit anonymously because I don't want to spend my life in prison.
Yeah.
They mostly, I think because there's this like culture. This is my inference, because there's this culture of prestige around being a writer in Russian society. They were writing their name on these things and often their addresses.
Yeah, they're like, I want the credit for this. You know it might kill me, but I want the credit.
Which I guess, like tagging culture is like a.
Little bit that you know, sure it's human nature.
Yeah, good degree. Sometimes books were unbound so that multiple p people could read them faster, each person passing the page they finished on to the next person. So you get like five people sitting in a circle and you just all people reading the same book at the same time.
See that sounds kind of fun.
It really does. Although what if you're the slower reader, You're just like, I know, you got I guess you got to go in the end. Yeah, you know, you just like arrange the city. We got to implement a speed reading test before we Yeah, I think as you go, you can be like, okay, clearly you're reading slower than you and then you know, like.
Switch around you're right, all are welcome here.
Yeah, totally. And there were other spin offs from samas Dot. Ratazot were books and others such that were broadcast by foreign radio stations that Soviet dissidents would then dutifully transcribe. Maganizot was Samazot music recorded by tape recorder. I think the origin of the word is like magnet for like tape, you know, they record with magnets or whatever. I could be wrong. I don't know. I didn't actually look up the etymology.
I'm saying as if I know, Yeah, okay, sounds good.
And this music was sometimes foreign radio broadcasts. Sometimes it was like DIY production. People would like record songs in their living room and put it on tape and spread it around. And then there was Thomas Dot, which is the more famous after samas Dot. Thomas Dot is anything that was smuggled out of Russia to be published elsewhere. Often Thomas Dot would then be smuggled back into Russia as samas dot. So you, okay, you write a book, you put it on microfiche, you get it smuggled out Paris publishes it, and then it comes back into Russia and then someone hand types it you know, okay, it wasn't a perfect and happy underground and wasn't like everyone was like noble and good. I was going to tell an anecdote that I thought was going to go really differently until I read more about this man. Years ago, I was in Prague and I went to the punkash show that I felt like I'd ever been to in my life. It was a solo show by this round bald accordion player named Jim Chirt, and I think that means like Jim Devil. I was there with a friend who had escaped across the Iron Curtain to the West when she was four years old, and she was then living back in Prague, so we went to go see this accordion player who had been an illegal accordion player performing illegal shows during the Soviet era. And Jim Cherit was screaming over this accordion while old guys with ponytails danced on tables, bashing into the low ceiling of a literally underground pub. And Jim Chait wasn't singing like I hate the government. He was singing like most of it was in Check, but some of it was in English, and it was like I have to go to Mexico to smoke weed, you know, like like it's just like a guy, you know.
Sorry, you're just making me remember about how much weed I smoked in Prague.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It was the best time of my life, very strong weed.
Anyway, continue, I just drank an obscene amount in Frog that too, the whole nights. I don't remember. The worst thing I ever did while I was drunk, which I will not say on air right now, I did in Prague. It wasn't morally bad, it was just embarrassing. No, Yeah, anyway, So I was like going to tell this story to be like, and here's an example of a guy who made music illegally. And so then I like was reading check Wikipedia about him and like through auto translate. He uh, he was absolutely part of the samas dot scene U and he snitched out one of his best friends, who then spent eighteen months in prison for publishing samas dot. Okay, Jim Chaird apologized for it since, and that's good. You know, we've all read nineteen eighty four. We all understand that sometimes people have rats in cages put on the face or whatever.
But it complicated time things. Yeah, yeah, taking accountability not the worst person in the world.
Then, Yeah, his friend who went to prison died four years before he apologized, before his official letter of apology was published.
That is something that you probably don't get over.
Yeah, totally.
But to your point, you know, you said, it's not like it was all roses this movement. It's complicated. And do you think that that people get so easily dissuaded from different movements because of infighting or complications or not. You expect that, Oh, I've designated myself as a part of this, Well we all immediately agree on something that's not true.
Yeah, totally.
You know, you can't get so worked up that you're turning your back on all of it just because there's different factions within it. And there's no perfect movement, is my point. We're all human beings with different opinions, and that's a good thing.
Totally. There's this quote by a science fiction author who I can't remember his name, and I remember not particularly liking him as a person, but he has a quote that I think about all the time, which is that there's no ideology so pure that you cannot find assholes practicing it exactly. Yeah, And then like and this guy wasn't even a sad an asshole. He just gave in to state pressure.
He definitely made a mistake or yeah, maybe I don't know the calculations. At the moment in time, you gave it, right.
So, for some weird reason, the paragraph I read through auto translated Wikipedia and from Czech didn't give me enough context to make a moral judgment about the same, you know, even though shouldn't have done that and you shouldn't do it. But yeah, and then after so like the first wave of samas dot is just like poetry and art, the second wave is more of this political stuff from all different corners. And then academia is sort of the third wave of samas dot because you couldn't really do certain types of science in Soviet times, right, which feels really accurate to right now when suddenly all of the funding is being cut. If it like literally has the word gay in.
It or transition, if transitions in the word, it is out of here. It doesn't matter what the context is diversity, Nope, you're done.
Yeah, And so they started publishing anyway, and historical studies were published, legal studies were published. One writer, Georgia Vladimov put it, quote there are now two kinds of art in the country. One is free and uninhibited, whose distribution and influence depends only on its genuinely artistic qualities, and the other, one, commanded and paid for, is badly mutilated, suppressed and uppressed. It is not hard to predict which of these two arts will be victorious and so like. Yeah, by and large, as far as I can tell, people, when they look at the literature of Soviet era, they're like, well, the underground shit was kind of the real shit. Yeah, it was different in every country. We've mostly focused on Russia. In Poland, folks actually had access to more copy machines and so there was xerox, samas dot there, and a lot of it was political as hell. They had things like the Committee for the Defense of the Workers because once again politics against the USSR is often fucking socialist anyway. Yeah, and they were putting out a bi monthly bulletin. There were at least thirty of these radical newspapers running by the late seven in Poland. In the Czech Republic, there was this more professional vibe. It was like hand bound and like hand typed art manuscripts and shit, and they would literally say in the front like this is mine, don't copy it, you.
Know, oh wild, yeah different.
And the typists were generally paid and they were like sold. But even though they were like bougie or an artsier, they were still going to prison over this. Like if you have this in a safe hidden in your house and they catch you, you're going to fucking jail. Right in China, there was this whole other culture of it that I won't be able to get into as much as I'd like. And they used posters where they would paint in huge letters and hang them up around the city because there was a specific provision in the nineteen seventy five constitution that said basically like, yeah, we can't. You can't do a lot of stuff, but you can you can hang up posters with giant letters in public places if you need to say something.
And they're like, got it.
And then by nineteen seventy nine they were like, wait, we didn't mean like that, might take it back, and so they started putting people in prison over it. And then in nineteen eighty the constitution was like not just kidding, you can't do that at all. Wow. And also in China, they would make like political journals, and they would use handcut stencils for mimiograph machines. And I have studied a lot about various methods of printing, and I could not tell you exactly what that.
Means something about printing, Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Radical journals there often had print runs in the thousands or tens of thousands, but people were regularly getting like fifteen year sentences for running them. Wow. SAMASDT has been used as a way to describe self publishing against official censorship, not just in communist countries, but in places like Iran or Chile and various like just dictatorships in general, whether right wing, left wing, or theological. It ebbed and flowed, though by nineteen eighty two, samas dot was pretty successfully repressed by the USSR, But then in nineteen eighty seven, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, started breaking down the systems of censorship in what was called glossknot, and samasdot became less necessary because you could publish again. I did read about one piece of samasdot after nineteen eighty seven, though, or rather I've read two sources, and one claims that this was SAMASDT, and one claims that it was officially allowed to be printed, and I don't know which one's true, okay, but this piece. In nineteen sixty two, there was this big strike in Russia. Fourteen thousand workers, after their pay was docked by a third, went on strike for days and they were massacred. Twenty six strikers were killed, hundreds were wounded. Seven of the organizers or people accused of being organizers, were later sentenced to death, and tons of people served years in prison. The bodies of the slain were buried in a secret grave, the location of which wasn't revealed to their families until fucking nineteen ninety four.
What yeah, wow.
And so it's like we never hear about strikes in the USSR, largely because they didn't happen, because you all got killed if you did it. I mean just kidding. It was a glorious workers republic and everyone was paid equally, so it didn't matter, and no one needed to strike, and if they did strike, it's their fault for being counter revolutionaries. They're probably capitalists. Anyway. There was no news about this in the official press of Russia, and one of the participants was an anarcho syndicalist worker named Peter Suda, who spent years in prison after the strike. In nineteen ninety eight, when samas Dot supposedly had stopped because censorship had lifted, the narcosyndicalist group he worked with KAS still had to put out their journal in an underground fashion. According to one thing I read, the other thing was that they could finally do it because of whatever klasmod Either way, in nineteen eighty eight, Peter was finally able to publish his account of what he'd experienced at the state twenty six years earlier in nineteen sixty two, but probably related to that, in nineteen ninety, a year before the end of the USSR, Peter was beaten to death by the KGB. Wow.
So anyway, right, Like was it, yeah, finally able to and then he dies It's yeah.
I know, And it's like, well, he could have been killed also just for being an anarchist organizer. I don't know, but like the implication in both things I read was, yeah, that like absolutely, because he's the one who like kind of broke the news on this thing years decades later. Anyway, getting around censors is cool and good and it rules that people were able to do so much with it. They tracked the abuses of the dictatorial system, despite official attempts to claim that no repression was ever happening. They kept entire legacies of literature and art alive, and they kept their spirits up with their homebrew reading mania, their binge reading, just like their binge sex. And they probably got really, really tired of typing all the time time.
I'm sure they did. I'm sure they were over it, but it was so vital and this is a beautiful story and it's such an important one inspiring. I mean, it's the long period of time to be navigating different versions of censorship and imprisonment and death and the stakes and exile. But the spirit feels pretty unbreakable, and that's why they were ultimately able to make some changes. Although I'm not positive that rushes.
No, it didn't didn't work out great.
I feel super free to say whatever. I'm sure in theory, but you're watching your back if you're saying whatever you want right now. Yeah, you know, the journey continues, but it is super inspiring and important reminder right now how vital art is and sharing of information and organizing.
Yeah, and that's why librarians are fucking crucial and important. Keep archives of things. Archivists are fun and crucial and important. And encrypting your hard drive. My final plug of this show is learn about encrypting your hard drive and especially any kind of backup drive you have. Encrypt it not just with like the kind of password you want to type in every day all the time, but like six or seven randomly picked dictionary.
Words, something that I will forget and never remember.
Well, what you have to do is you create anamonic around it. It's like you have to actually practice to do it. This is actually why I say that, like, although in a weird way. Actually, if you do it as your like regular open your computer thing, then you can remember it because you type it every day. Right. But yeah, like preserve information. It's important. Much like I was actually thinking, I'm probably gonna download most of Coolsen Media and keep it on encrypted hard drive somewhere.
Not a bad idea.
It's got to be an archive, yeah, But in the meantime you don't need that. You can just use your regular podcast app or subscribe to Cooler Zone Media and get all of the same content without the ads. Because maybe for good we live in a society where you can do that. But at least right now.
You can, yep, take advantage of it.
Yeah, the kind of thing that I took for fucking granted.
Yeah, while you still can.
Yeah, you got anything you want to plug?
Oh my goodness, Well we ourselves over at somewhere News. Do have a Patreon that you can subscribe to and get ad free versions of all of our things and some bonus content. Yeah, do that, but you know, some more news, even more news are shows, watch listen. You can do both through all the shows. Hell yeah, watch it or listen whatever you prefer while it lasts.
Let's see if you're not listening to it could happen here, It could happen here. Is also it's on the cool Zone Media network, and there's been a bunch of good episodes recently about things like should you leave the country and the answer is like probably not unless the answer is yes, But you know.
It's I will. Let's definitely listen to that episode because that's a conversation I keep having.
It's a good breakdown of it. It's a good breakdown of like, look like for most people, that's not going to be the answer you know, surround yourself with things that don't inspire despair but also don't inspire you to stick your head in the sand, is what I would have to say. And that's my plug. Yeah, mine too, Sophie.
You got anything, Yeah, I mean, just listen to our every Friday on It could happen here. We do episodes called Executive Disorder. Listen to that if you want to be the most up to date on things going on politically.
Do you think that there's a joke that could be made a sort of school house age level like crude joke around and ed?
Do you think I keep trying to get us sponsored by a thing that goes with that joke.
That feels like a gimme.
And I just need them to do their jobs. Well, it'll happen. I'm manifesting it. It's gonna happen.
Sometimes we get the ads for like the girl version of Pills.
For I just I just uh want once we're once we're off recording, I'll tell you a very funny thing about this entire situation.
Haha. And what's gonna happen after we stop recordings. I'm going to say the most embarrassing thing I've ever done while drunk, but you don't get to listen to it.
Oh yeah hahaha, Bye bye bye bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com. Check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will it You're Happen
