Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 18 – In the final decades of the Soviet Union, samizdat, the Russian word for books and articles prepared and distributed not by official publishing houses but by individuals and groups became so prominent that many focused on its materials as a window into Soviet reality and the word itself passed into international use.
Far less attention was devoted then to books and articles published abroad and then sent via various channels to the USSR known as tamizdat that Soviet citizens were prevented from publishing at home. Indeed, in most discussions, it is treated at best as a junior partner of samizdat rather than a phenomenon of its own.
Now, the situation is different. With the rise of the Internet and social media, samizdat has declined in relative importance – unless one includes all posting on such outlets in it – and tamizdat, books and articles published in hard copy abroad has gained and may now have the prominence for the cognoscenti that samizdat once enjoyed.
That reflects among other things the rise of a new Russian diaspora as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The hundreds of thousands of Russians now living abroad want to read new books about their homeland and its issues, and they provide the financial basis for tamizdat that is being sent into the Russian Federation.
An indication of tamizdat’s new prominence was a festival of Russian-language books being published abroad that was held in Prague earlier this month, a meeting at which numerous publishers of Russian-language materials abroad were represented (praguebooktower.cz/ and novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/09/18/nedeliu-nazad-prisnilos-chto-ia-v-pitere-i-zakhozhu-v-knizhnyi-prosnulas-v-slezakh).
Much of the output of these publishers is directed at the diaspora market, but some of it, especially works about Russia today, is making its way into that country and providing, alongside the Internet, materials to a Russian audience that the Kremlin obviously would prefer they not see.
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