Samizdat and Tamizdat Today Different from What They were in Soviet Times, Klots Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 8 – In Soviet times, there were three kinds of literature – gosizdat published with the imprimatur of the communist authorities, samizdat which was issued by people who wanted to communicate with others but couldn’t get or didn’t want official qpproval, and tamizdat which was published abroad and smuggled back in.

            Yakov Klots, a scholat at Hunter College who runs the Tamizdat Project there, says that “gosizdat in its pure Soviet form does not exist in Russia today” as publishing houses there now are privately owned however much government controlled (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/06/08/my-perevodim-knigi-ne-dlia-togo-chtoby-razvlech-zapadnogo-chitatelia-skazkami-ob-uzhasakh-putinskoi-tiurmy).

            But both samizdat and tamizdat have changed. “Samizdat has acquired a new technological dimension,” with online electronic forms now dominating the scene and able to reach their audiences “thousands of times better” than was the case in Soviet times with handwritten or typed documents.

            Despite that difference, however, Klots continues, there is “a paradox” in that “digital samizdat retains a key property of its Soviet ancestor: it has a limited, hermetic, and niche audience living inside a certain information bubble.”

            Tamizdat, he continues, is both similar and different from its Soviet antecedent. It is, of course, “a phenomenon that is directly oppose that of émigré literature, as the key distinguishing feature of tamizdat is that the text crosses the state border while its quthor remains within the metropolis where this text cannot be published.”

“If we look at the present day through this lens, Klots continues, “we will see that the real tamizdat is alive. There are many authors who, for various reasons, stay inside Russia, write there, but send their texts for publication to foreign independent publishing houses, often under pseudonyms or anonymously.”

“But, as before, the "new tamizdat" is dominated by authors who have already emigrated, that is those who have for some time now found themselves in the same jurisdiction and geography where their books are published,” a difference that sometimes leads to confusion.

The Hunter College scholar notes that “the role of paper has also changed. If Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago had been released simply in epub or Print on Demand format today, it would not have become the tectonic shift it was in 1974. Today's Gulag Archipelago would only be an event if it was released as a series on Netflix.”

And that in turn helps to explain why tamizdat and even samizdat issued now seldom has the same impact that they did in Soviet times.