There are two schools of thought about how best to describe the complicated relationship between the Soviet project and those who were its makers, beneficiaries, participants, and victims. One school privileged theory, especially the kind that was pioneered by twentieth century French sociologists. This school embedded the Soviet experience in a more universal cultural reading. The second school concentrated on the meticulous recovery of empirical evidence from archives, memoirs, interviews, newspapers, and other primary sources. It foregrounded the diversity of Soviet society. These two schools did not always see eye to eye—or better, their findings sometimes left large gaps in their explanatory models. Yet once in a while, books come along that combine both approaches in a creative way, not only providing a new way of understanding Soviet society, but offering a glimpse into the dynamic processes that propelled change within it. Ann Komaromi's beautifully written book on the socialist phenomenon of samizdat is such a fortunate marriage of theory and evidence. It is brimming with interesting thoughts on how to understand the role of samizdat, while leaving no doubt about the breadth of the author's empirical knowledge, accumulated over many years of engagement with the topic and the materials of samizdat.
Soviet Samizdat is a thorough exploration of many different items of the underground publishing world, ranging from the Lithuanian Chronicle of the Catholic Church to the rock journal Roxy and much more. It constructs a model for making sense of the nexus between people, thought, and system with each factor constantly moving and repositioning itself, depending on time, space, place, and protagonists. Komaromi has one simple trick for making plain the higher truths and deeper intricacies of samizdat. She takes the texts as such—both in their physical and intellectual form—and turns them into a platform on which her actors meet, negotiate, and jostle for meaning. Rather than presenting samizdat as an extraordinary phenomenon of dissidence, Komaromi argues that it widened the possibilities of Soviet subject-society relations after Iosif Stalin's death and created a more complex and modern Soviet existence. In short, samizdat is one of the vital ingredients of late socialism, functioning as both participant in and reflection of its existence.
Each chapter privileges one agent on the platform—self, truth, time, and space—but all are present throughout the book. The rationale behind publishing non-literary samizdat, which was one step up from publishing literary samizdat in the Hegelian historicist view, was that the self can only emerge as a significant actor, if in the background there was a horizon of true historical facts (39). For the dissident and underground samizdat publics, the “telling of truth” was of existential necessity. Komaromi does not dismiss this most central of all samizdat credos as corny or naïve, as has become custom in the last few years—certainly in Russian society. To the contrary she approaches samizdat from a variety of angles, including historical, religious, and ethical truth, all of which did much more than merely challenge the authoritative discourse. The writing down of truths created communities. Komaromi also explores samizdat's search for truth by dwelling on the opposite: the burden of silence as described by Il΄ia Erenburg and the liberation of silence from the “human verbosity” as experienced by Boris Pasternak through his character Yuri Zhivago (57). Maybe it is only now that Russia is once again drowning in both deafening silence and an avalanche of propagandistic verbosity that the full meaning and existential importance of truth-seeking for the samizdat publics can be grasped in its full desperation by younger historians who did not live through the Soviet years.
The final two chapters about time and space also offer many historical insights into the nature of late socialism, while at the same time feeling sadly au currant. Showcasing the many levels of time and space that encompassed the samizdat life cycle, Komaromi argues that samizdat transcended chronological and spatial confines. It connected spheres of late socialist society that were otherwise drifting apart (especially the many particular national, religious, or cultural interest groups). Its manifestations, which included sound, art, and performance, dissolved established linear time by claiming all three modes of temporality: the nature of history, the here and now and its demands for activism, and the future which held the promise of individual and collective transformation. It is thus no surprise that the last chapter, which follows the many social and cultural tentacles of samizdat—beyond town, country, gender, and genre—finishes with a discussion of the transformation of samizdat into the independent press during perestroika and ultimately the mediascape of the post-Soviet world.
A review of this book would not be complete without a nod to the extraordinary labor that has gone into its appendix: an extensive list of samizdat periodicals 1956–86 with references about where to find them (a printed version of Komaromi's online database). Anyone who has written on topics related to the diffuse and elusive Soviet underground knows what an exhaustive labor of love such background work is. Future historians will thank Komaromi for this database and the excellent analytical compendium she provided with this book.
