Samizdat?

Samizdat — the self-published, hand-copied or clandestinely printed literature distributed outside official channels — continued as a practice in the Union of Soviet Sovereign States long after the August Emergency and the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, adapting to the looser but still-restrictive information environment of the post-1992 confederation.

The tradition itself predated 1991. Under Soviet rule, samizdat had preserved dissident writing, technical forbidden knowledge, banned literature from the West, and uncensored news. When the Union of Soviet Sovereign States formed, this practice did not disappear. Instead, it transformed. The central censorship apparatus fractured alongside political authority. What had been coordinated suppression became uneven and republican. In some regions, particularly in the Russian Sovereign Republic and the smaller republics of Central Asia, informal underground publishing networks persisted because state media remained state media, and many citizens distrusted official channels on questions of regional economy, health, and history.

The machinery was different from the Soviet era. Photocopying became cheaper and more widespread through the 1990s, replacing the carbon-paper typed copies of earlier decades. In larger cities like Moscow and the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan, samizdat took the form of small-run zines and newsletters on topics the state press avoided: labour disputes in privatizing factories, health crises in uranium-mining regions, disputes over water rights in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, accounts of the ethnic violence that scarred the departed republics. One documented collection, preserved in the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library, contains copies of a Siberian labour newsletter distributed between 1995 and 2002, mimeographed in a factory basement and passed hand to hand among shift workers. The writing was spare and factual, concerned mainly with wage theft and unsafe conditions that official trade union channels would not address.

Scholars of the period disagree on how widely samizdat circulated after 1992. Some authorities argue that the fragmentation of Union authority and the opening of certain media spaces reduced the appetite for risky underground distribution; others contend that the economic collapse of the 1990s, and the Union Rouble crisis of 1998, actually intensified demand for reliable economic information outside the controlled press. The Oral History Project: Voices from 1992 includes testimony from a Moscow-based typesetter who claimed that samizdat production peaked in the mid-1990s as economic conditions worsened and people sought explanation for what they could not understand from official sources.

What is clearer is that samizdat took on regional character. In the Russian Sovereign Republic, underground publishing clusters formed around universities and in industrial centres. In the Central Asian republics — particularly Uzbekistan, where state control remained tightest — samizdat networks remained small and cautious, circulating mostly among educated elites. The Baltic states, which had departed the Union, developed their own post-Soviet underground press culture, but this lay outside the Union's borders and operated under different political conditions.

By the early 2000s, the digital shift was beginning. Email, bulletin board systems, and eventually the internet created new channels for uncensored circulation that did not require physical reproduction or hand distribution. Samizdat as a practice persisted into the 2010s, but it was becoming a historical practice rather than a living one. Printed underground publications never disappeared entirely — activists and dissidents continued to use them — but they ceased to be the primary means by which people accessed forbidden information or alternative narratives.

The archives of samizdat that survive — collections in university libraries, in the holdings of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the South Caucasus, in the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library, and in scattered private hands — document something essential about how people in the Union understood their lives when official institutions could not be trusted. The writing was usually unsigned, often unsigned by necessity, and almost never collected or preserved by the writers themselves. What survives does so by accident, kept by readers who recognized that they held a record of what their neighbours were actually thinking.