Samizdat

My research on Leningrad underground poetry demonstrated that the success of samizdat, the illegal grassroots publishing that flourished in the mid-to-late Soviet period, depended on networks of mutual trust. Even more crucially, samizdat networks could not have existed without reader demand. Soviet underground literature is an emblematic example of how informal circles and self-organisation emerged to fill a specific gap that could not be plugged through official channels: a lack of interesting things to read.

I decided that my next piece of research would start with the reader. After winning support from the University of Cambridge and a Leverhulme Trust grant, I got to work. 

The biggest challenge of this reader-first approach was that ‘ordinary samizdat readers’ did not tend to identify themselves proactively – I could not simply go to them, so I would have to convince them to come to me. To this end, I paired up with a researcher from the Memorial Society in Moscow to design an online survey. With the support of a group of Russian sociologists, we gathered close to 200 responses in a matter of months. Our survey found a permanent home as part of the Project for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence at the University of Toronto.

For my interdisciplinary monograph, which draws on both the sociology of reading and book history, I examined two more groups with the help of narrative in-person interviews:  grassroots journal editors, who helped me refine my theoretical approach to underground literature, and about a dozen women who typed illegal literature – an understudied group that was absolutely instrumental to samizdat networks.

Key Outputs

Publications

  • “Reading Samizdat” in Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, ed. by Damiano Rebecchini, Raffaella Vassena (Ledizioni, Milan 2020): a detailed investigation of how samizdat was read and who read it, supported by data from our reader survey.

  • Interview and public lecture for the “Anti-University” project : a conversation about new approaches to researching informal cultural networks [in Russian].

  • “Vielseitige Persönlichkeit: Befunde über den Leser des Samizdat“, Osteuropa 1–2 (2019): a piece on the social networks that promoted samizdat reading, commissioned by Germany’s leading journal for culture and politics in Eastern Europe [in German].

  • “Onlain-anketa dlia chitatelei samizdata: pervye itogi”, co-authored with Gennady Kuzovkin, Acta Samizdatica No 4 (Moscow: International Memorial Society, 2018): an evaluation of the results of our reader survey [in Russian].

  • “Reader Questionnaires in Samizdat Journals: Who owns Alexander Blok?” in Dropping out of Socialism, ed. by Juliane Furst and Josie McLellan (Lanham/Maryland: Lexington, 2016): my contribution to the eponymous AHRC-funded project at Bristol University, exploring user research in the late Soviet underground.

Event poster for a lecture titled 'Reading and Dissent in Soviet Russia', hosted by the University of Leicester on March 22, 2023, at Attenborough Arts Centre.

  • "The Culture of Samizdat is the book that every student and scholar of modern Russian culture must have in her or his library."

    Mark Lipovetsky

  • "An indispensable addition to the canon of literature about Soviet literary life and production ... this book is beautifully written and can be read with pleasure and ease."

    Juliane Furst

  • "The Culture of Samizdat is a well-researched and innovative book that offers new questions not only for future historians or literary scholars but also for a general audience interested in the history of late Soviet Leningrad."

    Europe-Asia Studies

  • "[A] very useful, deep, and original contribution—to the study of samizdat, but also of post-Stalin Soviet culture and society."

    Cécile Vassie