Samizdat

Samizdat (самиздат) 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 most typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship. Etymologically, the word samizdat derives from sam (сам, "self, by oneself") and izdat (издат, an abbreviation of издательство, izdatel'stvo, "publishing house"), and thus means "self-published". The Ukrainian language has a similar term: samvydav (самвидав), from sam, "self", and vydavnytstvo, "publishing house". A Russian poet Nikolay Glazkov coined a version of the term as a pun in the 1940s when he typed copies of his poems and included the note Samsebyaizdat (Самсебяиздат, "Myself by Myself Publishers") on the front page. Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad (там, tam, "there"), often from smuggled manuscripts. The Polish term for this phenomenon coined around 1980 was drugi obieg, or the "second circuit" of publishing. Sergo Anastasi Mikoyan claimed that decades prior to the early 1960s, offices and stores had to submit papers with examples of their typewriters' fonts to local KGB branches so that any printed text could be traced back to the source, to prosecute those who had used the typewriter to produce material deemed illegal. With the introduction of photocopying machines, the KGB's Fifth Directorate and Agitprop Department required individuals to get authorization to use printing office photocopiers to prevent the mass production of unapproved material, though restrictions could be bypassed by bribing employees. Privately owned typewriters were considered the most practical means of reproducing samizdat during this time due to these copy machine restrictions. Usually, multiple copies of a single text would be simultaneously made on carbon paper or tissue paper, which were inexpensive and relatively easy to conceal.