A New Kind of Monetarized ‘Samizdat’ Emerging in Russia – Crowd-Funded Publishing

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 6 – In the last decades of the USSR, samizdat – self-published materials passed from hand to hand – became an ever more important channel for Soviet citizens to discuss issues of importance to them that the authorities did not want raised, until Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign rendered it unnecessary.

            Now, with the increasing repression of the Putin regime and ever more restrictive censorship on publishing, a new kind of samizdat is emerging, not the handwritten or typescript kind of the Soviet past but rather crowd-funded publishing of works that couldn’t pass muster at more controlled publishing houses.

            Most often this takes the form of authors posting their works online and then asking readers to send money to support them. As a result, authors can live by their writing without subjecting themselves to the restrictions of government-controlled publications or publishing houses.

            According to Ivan Rybin of the Svobodnaya pressa portal, officially published books in Russia either in hard copy or even in their electronic forms have become both too expensive and too boring for most people, and ever fewer Russians are buying them, with total sales having dropped by ten to 20 percent over the last two years (svpressa.ru/culture/article/354516/).

            But that doesn’t mean that interesting, even provocative books aren’t being published, he says. They are, and a large share of them are posted online with authors asking people to support them by sending money directly to them. An estimated three to four billion rubles (60 to 80 million US dollars) flowed through this “monetarization” of samizdat this year.

            That still pales in comparison with the regular book market in the Russian Federation, which totals an estimated 70 billion rubles (1.1 billion US dollars); but like samizdat in Soviet times, these self-published materials are helping to keep intellectual life alive by distributing materials and by reviving ties between readers and writers just as samizdat did.

            At the very least and again as at the end of Soviet times, this new samizdat shows that “changes in Russia are inevitable.”