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How has art been a form of protest? The story of samizdat

  • Writer: Amy Lee Lillard
    Amy Lee Lillard
  • Nov 17
  • 8 min read
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Listen to the story of Soviet samizdat on The Art of Resistance Podcast!


Can art be a form of protest? Does art really work as resistance? And how can you make protest art?


In times like these, it's natural to wonder if art is really important. If writing, music, performance, and other creative work really matters.


I find hope and inspiration from looking at stories of artists using their work to resist the status quo. The story of Soviet Samizdat is a super powerful example to show the way.


PART 1: ART IN THE REVOLUTION


From the start, the leaders behind the Russian Revolution in 1917 knew the power of writing and art. Russia was already famed for its plays, novels, and poetry. The Bolsheviks behind the communist revolution knew if they could make art work for them, well, that’s a massive tool that could keep them in power.


So writing and art became an official partner in the revolution. And the revolution demanded devotion.


Joseph Stalin took over after Lenin died in 1924. He sped up the revolution: forcing industrialization and collectivization across the vast continent, which killed millions from famine. He built up the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. He controlled Russia with a vice grip. And soon writers and artists were in his sights.


Under communism, writers could have an official job as a writer. But that was totally dependent on government approval. And in 1934, the government declared socialist realism as the official rule for Soviet culture. Books, movies, plays: all should talk about the glorious future of communist society, make heroes of ordinary people, and reflect reality. Of course, the reality the leaders demanded was one of enthusiasm, optimism, happy happy happy Soviets.


The real reality was one of terror.


There had been many purges since the start of the revolution, where party members solidified their own power by claiming other party members were counterrevolutionaries. But under Stalin, the purges spread. Massive show trials convicted thousands and sent them to work camps far north in Siberia and other remote locations.


Then it spread beyond the party, to citizens who supposedly committed any number of crimes. To suspicious folks, like Jewish people, ethnic minorities, religious practitioners. And to writers who didn’t show those happy happy happy Soviets.


Over decades, the prison camp system, called the Gulags, ultimately captured and killed millions.


PART 2: THE THAW

After Stalin died in 1953, the Thaw began. Nikita Khrushchev, the new leader, delivered a secret speech in 1956 where he did the unthinkable – he denounced Stalin, and all his repression. Almost immediately, he relaxed the unwritten rules of Soviet art.


But…people weren’t sure. In the shadow of the past, they wondered - what can we talk about now? What art can we make? What can we critique? And what would get us sent to a prison camp?


Because the rules had never been clear. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn later wrote in his Gulag Archipelago, the people who were punished never saw the laws. No one besides the Party, and sometimes even them, knew what was legal or not. And ultimately – the truth didn’t matter anyway.


Under Khruschev, officially-approved writers gingerly tested the waters with slightly more free expression. Unofficial writers turned to the growing underground.


The underground consisted of novels, stories, poems, essays, and memoirs, passed on typed pages secretly from person to person. The pages were typed again and again by hand to make multiple copies, meaning small print runs. It was called Samizdat, a combination of “self” and “publishing” in Russian.


The publications could be about anything. That was the intoxicating allure – a bit of freedom that would have meant arrest and maybe even death before. So some of the writers, at least at first, were not necessarily critical of the USSR – they were just not allowed to publish, and like most writers, they wanted someone to read their work.


The key was to be very careful about who you passed a copy to. Soviet citizens were pressured to report on their neighbors, their friends, their family members; even if people didn’t actively snitch, if they were caught up in an arrest for an inexplicable reason, they could be tortured to report anything untoward.


By the 1960s, the Thaw wasn’t so thawed anymore. Official, not underground writers were increasingly being put on trial for pornography and anti-Soviet art. Then in 1965, Article 70 declared “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation” illegal and those that did it bound for prison. Two well-known writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were arrested under this new code. They were convicted and sent to labor camps in Mordovia.


PART 3: SAMIZDAT


Many writers working underground, no matter what they believed at the start, now turned against the regime. And Samizdat increasingly became a critique of the Soviet way.


Writers used Samizdat to talk shit. Resulting in more arrests. Which drove more writers to use samizdat. Which resulted in more arrests, and writers sent to camps. But now, none of it was publicized. The arrests, and any trials that did exist – they were secret once more.


Some writers were actually sent to mental institutions instead of labor camps. Natalya Gorbanevskaya was one of them, arrested for her poetry. After a stay in the Kashchenko institution, she immediately started plotting. She wanted something new, and even more dangerous: a collection of samizdat. An anthology publication, a newspaper, that people could turn to for the truth.


Natalya put together a journal called the Chronicle of Current Events, known as the Chronicle. She used notes she collected from friends and contacts: who had been arrested, when, and if the contact knew where that person was now, and if they were alive.


Natalya’s goal was to help readers and creators see the patterns of oppression, the big picture you couldn’t see in state-owned publications or from the state itself. She wanted to pull together all the different niches of samizdat: anti-Soviet, religious, other ethnicities, and political dissidents. And – she wanted to get more news to the west. Tell the world what was happening.


In 1968, she wrote the first issue on her typewriter. Because the government could track every typewriter’s keystrokes, she paid to have it altered.


She made six copies, and gave them to friends to copy and spread. Then she burned her notes. And she started on the next issue.


The writing in the Chronicle was stripped down, focusing just on the facts. She wrote about the writers arrested and put on trial. She listed who had been expelled from work, or kicked out of the party. She wrote about searches, arrests, and sentences to the gulag.


With each issue, it felt more like a network of organized resistance. Because ultimately the USSR thrived on secrecy. Brutal repression made sure it continued. So a publication that simply showed the secrets, and the lies, and the hypocrisy, was revolutionary.


PART 4: ACROSS THE USSR


As the Chronicle spread, more stories came her way – written on notes passed from each person back and back to her. The Chronicle kept expanding. And the west reported on it. BBC and Voice of America even read issues on air.

A new section appeared – from the camps. Relatives allowed to visit their imprisoned family would come back with what was happening – how many prisoners? Where did they sleep? Were they given enough to eat? What were they forced to work on? And it went in the Chronicle.


But because it kept spreading, so did the risk of being found out. And so did the threat level to the KGB and the state at large.


They arrested Natalya in Dec of 1969. They sent her to another institution, where she was diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” – a term made up by the soviet doctors. The main symptom? Thinking her actions were right. They had a trial without her. In January, she was shipped to the Special Psychiatric Hospital 500 miles from Moscow. She’d reported on that place for Chronicle, and knew prisoners were strapped to beds for three or more days for any offense, like refusing to take meds.


She was eventually released in 1972, and left USSR in 1975. Lived in Paris for the rest of her life.


But the Chronicle went on with new, rotating editors. All through the 70s. It made the government enraged. The KGB and the government finally got everyone involved the early 1980s. They crushed the samizdat network.


Around that time, though, the new premier, Gorbachev, saw the tide turning. He said transparency and truth, or Glasnost, would be the new way. Just a few years later, the regime collapsed.


PART 5: IMPACT

There are some critics and scholars who say samizdat led to Glasnost. That it led to the downfall of the USSR in 1991. Because once citizens got that taste of free expression again – they weren’t going to let it go.


But living every day in the 1960s, knowing your writing could get you killed – what would that 1991 denouement mean for them? The people who weren’t writers, who lived under even more oppression than normal, because of their religion, their nationality, who knew passing along information could get them killed – what would 1991 mean to them?


Writers had to focus on the impact writing had on themselves. They had to write to stay sane. They had to write so they felt whole, like a person who wasn’t split in two. No matter if they wrote for a drawer, or for a few copies passed to a few readers, they wrote so they could feel alive.


And isn’t that really just as important? To make us, the creators of art, feel alive. To make us feel like we should, we can, survive even in the midst of horrific things.


Many readers saw the underground writing of samizdat, even if it was in copies they received in secret, read quickly, and had to pass on. Those readers then knew that art survived, no matter if the state allowed. That fact existed, no matter what the Party said. That thought could not be controlled, no matter if repression returned. That there were others like them, who saw another way.


That’s one of the beautiful things about art as resistance. It can help the creator and the audience nurture and love their true selves, no matter if those selves have to stay hidden for a little longer.


CONCLUSION:

What can we learn from samizdat? What can we do as creative people in this fucked-up world? Because we are all creative. We can all finds ways to resist.


It’s a scary time right now for the U.S. press, for publications, for speaking your mind. And it’s very scary to think where that will go in the future. If our police state will continue to grow, and demand the kind of loyalty the USSR demanded of its creatives.


But I don’t tell the story of samizdat to scare us. For me it’s a reminder of how important creating is. How we need it, no matter what. We need to make the art. Write the thing. Learn as you go. Because we all have a voice, and someone needs to hear it.


So here’s what we do from here:

  • We prize the truth, and we tell the truth.

  • And we don’t think of this as short term. Even if we get a new administration down the road, even if we miraculously come out of this terrifying, tyrannical moment, there is so much to fight against and for.


This is a long-term commitment to making art for a better world.



Listen to this story of Samizdat on The Art of Resistance Podcast!


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