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Winner of the 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic TitlesSamizdat, the production and circulation of texts outside official channels, was an integral part of life in the final decades of the Soviet Union. But as Josephine von Zitzewitz explains, while much is known about the texts themselves, little is available on the complex communities and cultures that existed around them due to their necessarily secretive, and sometimes dissident, nature. By analysing the behaviours of different actors involved in Samizdat – readers, typists, librarians and the editors of periodicals in 1970s Leningrad, The Culture of Samizdat fills this lacuna in Soviet history scholarship. Crucially, as well as providing new insight into Samizdat texts, the book makes use of oral and written testimonies to examine the role of Samizdat activists and employs an interdisciplinary theoretical approach drawing on both the sociology of reading and book history. In doing so, von Zitzewitz uncovers the importance of ‘middlemen’ for Samizdat culture. Diligently researched and engagingly written, this book will be of great value to scholars of Soviet cultural history and Russian literary studies alike.

Winner of the 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic TitlesSamizdat, the production and circulation of texts outside official channels, was an integral part of life in the final decades of the Soviet Union. But as Josephine von Zitzewitz explains, while much is known about the texts themselves, little is available on the complex communities and cultures that existed around them due to their necessarily secretive, and sometimes dissident, nature. By analysing the behaviours of different actors involved in Samizdat – readers, typists, librarians and the editors of periodicals in 1970s Leningrad, The Culture of Samizdat fills this lacuna in Soviet history scholarship. Crucially, as well as providing new insight into Samizdat texts, the book makes use of oral and written testimonies to examine the role of Samizdat activists and employs an interdisciplinary theoretical approach drawing on both the sociology of reading and book history. In doing so, von Zitzewitz uncovers the importance of ‘middlemen’ for Samizdat culture. Diligently researched and engagingly written, this book will be of great value to scholars of Soviet cultural history and Russian literary studies alike.

The events of 1989 were the material of great reporting. They also revealed the power of journalism. Long before people in Central and Eastern Europe liberated themselves, they discovered democratic freedom, putting to print their own ideas and chronicling events of the day. Indeed, long before they had democracies in law, they had imagined them on paper.In the Solidarity network that produced books and leaflets and news bulletins, in the essays of Václav Havel, in the samizdat publishing house in Budapest that used a portable printing machine, Eastern Europeans demonstrated the organic link between journalism and self-government. They showed how journalism nurtures the imagination, dialogue, and honesty that are basic to democratic life.If history had ended in 1989, there would be cause for easy optimism. The changes that swept Central and Eastern Europe passed with relatively little bloodshed. But agonies of the former Yugoslavia, convulsions of the former Soviet Union, and enduring battles with censors and would-be censors bedevil emerging democracies. Not only does much remain for journalists to cover in Central and Eastern Europe, in some places there the fate of journalism is still an open question. For all these reasons, Reporting the Fall of European Communism explores, not only the events of 1989, but new stories that have emerged in Central and Eastern Europe over the past decade. This volume will be of interest to media professionals, academics and others with an interest in the power of journalism.

The events of 1989 were the material of great reporting. They also revealed the power of journalism. Long before people in Central and Eastern Europe liberated themselves, they discovered democratic freedom, putting to print their own ideas and chronicling events of the day. Indeed, long before they had democracies in law, they had imagined them on paper.In the Solidarity network that produced books and leaflets and news bulletins, in the essays of Václav Havel, in the samizdat publishing house in Budapest that used a portable printing machine, Eastern Europeans demonstrated the organic link between journalism and self-government. They showed how journalism nurtures the imagination, dialogue, and honesty that are basic to democratic life.If history had ended in 1989, there would be cause for easy optimism. The changes that swept Central and Eastern Europe passed with relatively little bloodshed. But agonies of the former Yugoslavia, convulsions of the former Soviet Union, and enduring battles with censors and would-be censors bedevil emerging democracies. Not only does much remain for journalists to cover in Central and Eastern Europe, in some places there the fate of journalism is still an open question. For all these reasons, Reporting the Fall of European Communism explores, not only the events of 1989, but new stories that have emerged in Central and Eastern Europe over the past decade. This volume will be of interest to media professionals, academics and others with an interest in the power of journalism.

This book tells the story of the dissident imaginary of samizdat activists, the political culture they created, and the pivotal role that culture had in sustaining the resilience of the oppositional movement in Poland between 1976 and 1990.This unlicensed print culture has been seen as one of the most emblematic social worlds of dissent. Since the Cold War, the audacity of harnessing obsolete print technology known as samizdat to break the modern monopoly of information of the party-state has fascinated many, yet this book looks beyond the Cold War frame to reappraise its historical novelty and significance. What made that culture resilient and rewarding, this book argues, was the correspondence between certain set of ideas and media practices: namely, the form of samizdat social media, which both embodied and projected the prefigurative philosophy of political action, asserting that small forms of collective agency can have a transformative effect on public life here and now, and are uniquely capable of achieving a democratic new beginning.This prefigurative vision of the transition from communism had a fundamental impact on the broader oppositional movement. Yet, while both the rise of Solidarity and the breakthrough of 1989 seemed to do justice to that vision, both pivotal moments found samizdat social media activists making history that was not to their liking. Back in the day, their estrangement was overshadowed by the main axis of contention between the society and the state. Foregrounding the internal controversies they protagonized, this book adds nuance to our understanding of the broader legacy of dissent and its relevance for the networked protests of today.

This book tells the story of the dissident imaginary of samizdat activists, the political culture they created, and the pivotal role that culture had in sustaining the resilience of the oppositional movement in Poland between 1976 and 1990.This unlicensed print culture has been seen as one of the most emblematic social worlds of dissent. Since the Cold War, the audacity of harnessing obsolete print technology known as samizdat to break the modern monopoly of information of the party-state has fascinated many, yet this book looks beyond the Cold War frame to reappraise its historical novelty and significance. What made that culture resilient and rewarding, this book argues, was the correspondence between certain set of ideas and media practices: namely, the form of samizdat social media, which both embodied and projected the prefigurative philosophy of political action, asserting that small forms of collective agency can have a transformative effect on public life here and now, and are uniquely capable of achieving a democratic new beginning.This prefigurative vision of the transition from communism had a fundamental impact on the broader oppositional movement. Yet, while both the rise of Solidarity and the breakthrough of 1989 seemed to do justice to that vision, both pivotal moments found samizdat social media activists making history that was not to their liking. Back in the day, their estrangement was overshadowed by the main axis of contention between the society and the state. Foregrounding the internal controversies they protagonized, this book adds nuance to our understanding of the broader legacy of dissent and its relevance for the networked protests of today.

The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidentsIt has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union—enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country.Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky.His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus.The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus.The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.

Human rights organizations. Hackers. Soviet dissidents. Animal welfare activists. Corruption-reporting apps. The world of whistleblowing is much more diverse than most people realize. It includes the prototypical whistleblowers—government and corporate employees who spill their organizations’ secrets to publicize abuses, despite the personal costs. But if you look closely at what the concept entails, then it becomes clear that there are many more varieties. There is a wide world of whistleblowing out there, and we have only begun to understand and explain it.In Whistleblowers, Leakers, and Their Networks: From Snowden to Samizdat, Jason Ross Arnold clarifies the elusive concept of "whistleblowing." Most who have tried to define or understand it have a sense that whistleblowers are justified secret-spillers—people who make wise decisions about their unauthorized disclosures. But we still have no reliable framework for determining which secret-spillers deserve the positively charged term whistleblower, and which ones should get stuck with the less noble moniker “leaker.” A better understanding can inform our frustratingly endless political debates about important cases—the Snowdens, Mannings, Ellsbergs, Deep Throats, etc.—but it can also provide guidance to would-be whistleblowers about whether or not they and their collaborators should make unauthorized disclosures.

Human rights organizations. Hackers. Soviet dissidents. Animal welfare activists. Corruption-reporting apps. The world of whistleblowing is much more diverse than most people realize. It includes the prototypical whistleblowers—government and corporate employees who spill their organizations’ secrets to publicize abuses, despite the personal costs. But if you look closely at what the concept entails, then it becomes clear that there are many more varieties. There is a wide world of whistleblowing out there, and we have only begun to understand and explain it.In Whistleblowers, Leakers, and Their Networks: From Snowden to Samizdat, Jason Ross Arnold clarifies the elusive concept of "whistleblowing." Most who have tried to define or understand it have a sense that whistleblowers are justified secret-spillers—people who make wise decisions about their unauthorized disclosures. But we still have no reliable framework for determining which secret-spillers deserve the positively charged term whistleblower, and which ones should get stuck with the less noble moniker “leaker.” A better understanding can inform our frustratingly endless political debates about important cases—the Snowdens, Mannings, Ellsbergs, Deep Throats, etc.—but it can also provide guidance to would-be whistleblowers about whether or not they and their collaborators should make unauthorized disclosures.

Examining how a single book inspired devotion, dread, and lasting superstition in Russian lettersWhen James Joyce first published Ulysses in 1922, the book enjoyed a hearty welcome in the Soviet Union. In fact, Russian was the second language into which excerpts were translated. However, the early enthusiasm soon gave way to apprehension, and then to public condemnation. The Russian literary community found itself at the epicenter of the political repression of the 1930s, suffering enormous losses among writers and translators, who died en masse through executions and exile. In the context of Ulysses, the numerous violent deaths of its Soviet translators and editors gave rise to rumors, which then developed into superstitious beliefs that managed to outlive their own time. Russian translation scholar Natalia Kamovnikova examines the struggles faced by those who attempted early translations, including death and imprisonment, and how both this translation work and the text itself became sources of fear.Alongside important background on these early translation attempts, including information on the translators themselves, The Fearful Steelpen unpacks the literary approaches to rendering Joyce's aesthetics in Russian and traces the socio-political beliefs behind translation and publishing decisions. Kamovnikova goes further, to examine why Ulysses in particular aroused fears in both in its contemporaries and in subsequent generations of Russian writers, as if the text held a dangerous power that could harm those working on it. This fascinating publishing case study reveals the complicated cultural and political dynamics at work behind a seemingly simple translation from one language to another that still resonates in the contemporary moment.

Examining how a single book inspired devotion, dread, and lasting superstition in Russian lettersWhen James Joyce first published Ulysses in 1922, the book enjoyed a hearty welcome in the Soviet Union. In fact, Russian was the second language into which excerpts were translated. However, the early enthusiasm soon gave way to apprehension, and then to public condemnation. The Russian literary community found itself at the epicenter of the political repression of the 1930s, suffering enormous losses among writers and translators, who died en masse through executions and exile. In the context of Ulysses, the numerous violent deaths of its Soviet translators and editors gave rise to rumors, which then developed into superstitious beliefs that managed to outlive their own time. Russian translation scholar Natalia Kamovnikova examines the struggles faced by those who attempted early translations, including death and imprisonment, and how both this translation work and the text itself became sources of fear.Alongside important background on these early translation attempts, including information on the translators themselves, The Fearful Steelpen unpacks the literary approaches to rendering Joyce's aesthetics in Russian and traces the socio-political beliefs behind translation and publishing decisions. Kamovnikova goes further, to examine why Ulysses in particular aroused fears in both in its contemporaries and in subsequent generations of Russian writers, as if the text held a dangerous power that could harm those working on it. This fascinating publishing case study reveals the complicated cultural and political dynamics at work behind a seemingly simple translation from one language to another that still resonates in the contemporary moment.

To survive Totalitarianism and retain their humanity, Czech women writers went underground to write, paint, sculpt, and create supportive communities. This book explores fiction, poetry, and life-sustaining activities of Eva Švankmajerová, “Mother of Czech Surrealism,” and Eda Kriseová, journalist, fiction writer, essayist, and activist who served in President Václav Havel’s first Cabinet, among other Czech women who wrote and engaged in dissent during the years when Czechoslovakia ached under Soviet rule.Women’s Artistic Dissent: Repelling Totalitarianism in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia highlights and unearths the work of women that is often undervalued and unacknowledged. Flanagan and Waisserová carefully detail the variety of ways in which women resisted through literature and ecological activities, shedding new light on the ways in which individuals and communities can retain their humanity even as they resist and repel dictatorial regimes in their countries.

The book is devoted to «contraband» literature from the USSR that was first published abroad over the Soviet period. The volume explores tamizdat as a literary practice and political institution from a variety of perspectives and situates it in the context of its domestic counterparts: gosizdat and samizdat. The Contributions to the volume range from first-hand accounts, archival explorations, and close readings of the texts vis-à-vis the histories of their first publications and reception abroad, to theoretical articles on tamizdat as «textual embodiment» and transgression. The volume lets world history speak through Russian literary manuscripts on their way from the drawer to publication abroad, and «repatriation» back to Russia in a printed form.

An untold history of Franz Kafka's reception in his homeland under two totalitarian regimes, from his death in 1924 to the end of communism 1989.In the first book-length study of the reception of Kafka in his homeland, Czechoslovakia, Veronika Tuckerová offers a contextualized understanding of the author by focusing on the period from his death to the end of the communist era in 1989. Using a broad comparative framework with a focus on translation and intercultural transmission, as well as archival materials and interviews with Czech intellectuals, Reading Kafka in Prague shows definitively how Kafka shaped the lives and perspective of his Czech readers, from one-time Communists to émigrés to dissidents, scholars, and artists.Tuckerová tells the story of five distinct readings of Kafka’s works in 20th-century Czech lands: The initial ”triple ghetto” reception that survived the Second World War and the Communist takeover. The surrealist and existentialist embrace of Kafka by Czech artists, mediated by the French reception in the 1930s. The reformed-Marxist reception of Kafka as a critic of socialist alienation and totalitarianism that led to Kafka’s rehabilitation at the 1963 Liblice conference. Official state reception “for export” that started in the late 1950s, reacting to the Western interest in Kafka’s Prague. And finally, the dissident and underground reception of Kafka, which started in the 1950s and reached fruition in the years after the 1968 Soviet invasion.This previously unknown story of Kafka in 20th-century Czechoslovakia offers 21st-century readers new insights into his oeuvre.