Samizdat is an abbreviated combination of the Russian words sam (self) and izdatelstvo (publishing house) that refers to dissident material illegally produced and distributed in the Soviet Union from the 1950s until the early 1990s. Early samizdat was primarily focused on advocating for freedom of expression, but over time it expanded to include other forms of social critique and cultural commentary. More than just a platform for dissident ideas, samizdat became a means of generating alternative identities, strengthening minority communities, and inspiring citizens to imagine new ways of living in the USSR.
Soviet Jews found this decentralized, grass-roots approach to communication particularly useful, and various journals emerged in the early 1970s to cultivate the renewed Jewish consciousness. These journals, which contained both original essays and translated works from the West, were produced by hand in hidden workshops across the country and then passed around in secret, requiring countless hours of labor under the looming threat of police raids and imprisonment. The KGB (the Soviet Union’s secret police) identified different levels of samizdat criminality—creation, production, distribution, and possession—and placed officers in synagogues, conscripted informants from Jewish communities, tracked various Jewish citizens as they went about their days, and occasionally imprisoned and interrogated suspected leaders.
Ironically, police surveillance became a key element in reinforcing the Soviet Jewish community’s self-awareness and desire to emigrate. In order to evade the KGB, Soviet Jews had to develop more robust and extensive networks of collaborators, turning average citizens into active participants in the counterculture. Additionally, the heightened KGB presence in major cities forced the initially urban samizdat movement to spread into rural areas, ensuring a wider reach of dissident materials. This resilience helped the Soviet Jewish community withstand attempts to suppress it, and in the late 1980s Jewish cultural centers began reappearing under Gorbachev’s more permissive government.