An interesting NY Times piece by Sarah Chatta (archived):
Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper. […] Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.
Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world. The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.
The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through. Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle. […]
Mr. Klots grew up with contraband Russian literature in the Soviet city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains. His mother, he said, “would take a train to Moscow just to stop by an apartment of one dissident who would give her Solzhenitsyn.” Then she would stay up late into the night duplicating the borrowed book, page by page. “One of my childhood memories is my mother typing something at night and me falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter,” he said. […]
New York City is a fitting locale for the work of the Tamizdat Project. For most of the 20th century it was home to the publishers, academics, activists and philanthropists who saw the potential of contraband books during and even before the Cold War.
The first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union, “We” — a dystopian vision of totalitarianism by Yevgeny Zamyatin — was published twice in New York before it could be released at home. Mr. Zamyatin managed to send his manuscript abroad, and E.P. Dutton released it, in English, in 1924. More than 60 years later, when Soviet authorities lifted the ban, some of the country’s citizens had already read it. Mr. Zamyatin’s Russian-language original had already been printed in 1952 by Chekhov Publishing House in New York. “It was just a pure detective story, how every single book got published as tamizdat,” Mr. Klots said. […]
As the scope of Russian censorship has widened in recent years, the history of New York’s Soviet-era banned-book publishers has gained new relevance. “Even if these people are no longer around,” Mr. Klots said, they “laid the foundation for a project like the Tamizdat Project to exist and to build on their legacy.”
One of the Tamizdat Project’s most significant donations came from the family of Edward Kline, a philanthropist who led a double life in New York. Most knew him as the millionaire chief executive of the Kline Brothers department store chain, but the Soviet human rights movement knew him as a chief advocate and underwriter of its publishing work. The Tamizdat Project has started to reveal the extent of Mr. Kline’s activities. Among his many endeavors, he acquired and revived Chekhov Publishing House, releasing what became canonical 20th-century Russian literature: original works by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lydia Chukovskaya and Joseph Brodsky.
I recommend reading the rest of it, with accounts of Kline’s activities and his modern successors; also, there are good photos.
The article mentions Alexander Godunov, who I remember for playing the heavy in Die Hard. His fight scenes look quite different if you watch them knowing he had been a star ballet dancer.
Soviet publishing practices were extremely weird. Often times, a book wasn’t banned, in fact, it was published by an official publishing place, but in extremely small run. And people who wanted to have a copy were forced to make it on a typewriter. In my childhood house there was one such book on yoga (gymnastics side of it). But I read stories about people copying poetry of Esenin, who was 100% approved by the officialdom.
In the later Soviet era, the audio equivalent of samizdat for disseminated not-officially-“published” music was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitizdat, which was a substantial technological improvement over the earlier “roentgenizdat.”
Earlier this year I finally got around to listening (40 years after its original release) to the tamizdat equivalent, viz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Wave, a selection of recordings by four Leningrad-based bands that was released on a semi-prominent-at-the-time indie/underground label in the West. It has an interesting disclaimer (perhaps intended to give the bands “plausible deniability” if the Soviet authorities were unhappy with the project) on the back cover: “The musicians do not bear any responsibility for publishing these tapes. Stingray Productions is grateful to all those people who had the courage to preserve and deliver the tapes.”
Although I suppose the difference was that the Red Wave collection was intended more to make these recordings accessible to a Western audience than to be smuggled back into the USSR?
But I read stories about people copying poetry of Esenin, who was 100% approved by the officialdom.
I remember that when I started to live in the former SU in the 90s, Esenin had somewhat of a “bad boy” image – maybe he hadn’t been banned, but he was a poet more stolid people would not admit to reading or liking. So if you wanted to avoid their opprobium, you might have preferred copying an edition to asking for it openly in a bookshop. And then, as you say yourself, not every legal book would have been widely available in all book shops.
Hans, yes. I remember it specifically as a demonstration of a completely crazy system of decision-making of official publishers who would engage in a complicated calculation of which author deserved to be published in which quantities instead of simply printing as many copies as people wanted to buy of the authors who nobody objected to. Like, I can understand that Sophiya Vlasjevna didn’t want to allow a lot of Bunin. He was an emigre and very anti-Soviet, but he wasn’t banned completely on account of being a great writer and majority of his work being entirely non-political. Obviously, I disagree, but understand. But why the hell not to print enough copies of Esenin? They taught him in schools.
I own an edition of Esenin published in 1983 in a print run of 1,000,000.
On the subject of magnitizdat, I wonder if people know the book “X-Ray Audio” by Stephen Coates (Strange Attractor Press, 2015), describing the re-use of X-ray plates for bootleg music recordings:
“Telling the story of forbidden culture, bootleg technology and human endeavour, this is the secret history of Russian X-ray records and of the people who made, bought and sold them. Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing mysterious vinyl flexi-discs when they were young. They had partial images of skeletons on them, could be played like gramophone records and were called ‘bones’ or ‘ribs’. They contained forbidden music. In the cold war era, the Soviet recording industry and permissible musical repertoire were ruthlessly controlled by the State. But a secret and risky subculture of bootleg recordings arose. Incredibly, bootleggers built homemade recording machines and found an extraordinary way to copy banned gramophone records – they used X-Rays clandestinely obtained from hospitals.”
@Mike C.: Yes, that’s the so-called “roentgenizdat” I referenced in my earlier comment (although for all I know that jokey name was given in hindsight and not used contemporaneously). The subsequent laxity of Soviet regulation of “normal” reel-to-reel tape recorders once they became widely available (which made things much much easier for music-sharers)* was an interesting failure of rigor/paranoia on the regime’s part.
*Without specialized gear you can duplicate an existing tape just with two “normal” units plus some cables connecting them.