Iranian crisis, Soviet word | Samizdat
In a New York Times story today about the election crisis in Iran, it made a reference to samizdat video of a protest march. The Iranian authorities have banned press coverage of the demonstrations and are trying to suppress all information about the dissent:
For the third day in a row, supporters of (opposition candidate Mir Hussein) Moussavi massed in silence, from Hafteh Tir Square, with photographs and samizdat video showing a sea of people at least tens of thousands strong.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, samizdat means:
- 1a. The secret publication and distribution of government-banned literature in the former Soviet Union.
- 1b. The literature produced by this system.
- 2. An underground press.
Samizdat is Russian, coming from sam, meaning self, + izdatel’stvo, meaning publishing house.
I think the NYT story should have given context for the word. Aren’t the photos also samizdat? It could read as though it is a style of video, not a form of journalism.
But maybe I don’t recognize it because I grew up mostly after the Cold War ended? Does this word look more familiar to any of my Baby Boomer or Gen-X readers?
Here’s a link to the video.
The first word is “samoe”, the neuter declension of the adjectival form of “self” in Russian.
This is unquestionably a wrong use of the word. Back in the USSR, Samizdat referred to the press, not to movies, pictures, or anything else. I have some genuine Samzidat literature from the years I spent in the late USSR.
What made a book Samizdat is that it was hand-typed, often with 3 or 4 copy pages in the typewriter so that one pass yielded multiple copies. Etiquette was such that you tried to make a new set of copies every few times you received a book. Not every book you got you copied, but you tried to keep the chain going, because that cheap, high-acid Soviet paper wore out. People had clubs where they would not give you a book without you giving them a book in return – this not only helped keep copies circulating, it discouraged stool pigeons.
Posting something on the internet is not Samizdat, because the recipients do not have to copy it to pass it on, and in fact the original is available to the entire world. Samizdat died with the Internet. Although I think that it might still thrive in North Korea and Cuba, and perhaps Myanmar, there are few other places with a use for viral typewriting.
I think the world the NYT wanted here is “illicit”.
Oh, yes, it is familiar to all of us who grew up in the Cold War, because the great Soviet dissidents all published Samizdat – Solzhenytsin, Sinyavsky / Tertz, Bulgakov, Sakharaov…
John,
To play devil’s advocate: Granting that this isn’t samizdat in the sense of its original use, isn’t that video and all the Twittering and photography and everything else coming out of Iran in the spirit of the samizdat that you describe? And if the word literally means self-published, is the medium important?
And thanks for the background on samizdat. I knew nothing about it.
There’s a few reasons us old fogeys (especially Russian emigre old fogeys) would think this isn’t Samizdat. The first is the publishing aspect, as I noted above, there is not the buyer-making-copies aspect to it.
The other reason is that it’s not great literature that should have been published and would have been published but for state controls. It’s the kind of stuff that would make the news one night and be forgotten by all but historical specialists. When you say Samizdat to someone from that era (on either side of the Cold War), what comes to mind is something like Bulgakov’s masterpiece “The Master and Margarita”, which circulated Samizdat for over 40 years before finally being published by a real Soviet publishing house in 1987.
I guess my greatest objection to the term is that Samizdat also has the connotation of being a means of resisting the State while physically under the State’s geographic control. Publishing beyond the borders of the State was not Samizdat, that was termed Emigre Literature. Films and literature did get smuggled out of the USSR and published in the West. That act of smuggling was also not called Samizdat, and it is the closest we had in 1975 to broadcasting something to the West on the Internet. Sinyavsky and Solzhenytsin both published regularly in the West (Sinyavsky under the name Avram Tertz) by smuggling, while simultaneously being published Samizdat in the USSR – and the two means of publication were not considered the same thing.
Heh, now you’ve intrigued me, so I’m going into information overload.
From the Russian Wikipedia:
Самизда́т (читается [самызда́т]) — способ неофициального и потому неподцензурного распространения литературных произведений, а также религиозных и публицистических текстов в СССР, когда копии изготавливались автором или читателями без ведома и разрешения официальных органов, как правило машинописным, фотографическим или рукописным способами. Самиздатом распространялись также магнитофонные записи А.Галича, В.Высоцкого, Б.Окуджавы, Ю.Кима, певцов-эмигрантов и др.
Слово тамиздат часто встречалось рядом со словом самиздат; иногда как противопоставление. Тамиздатом назывались запрещённые книги и журналы, изданные «там», то есть за рубежом[1].
My translation:
“Samizdat (accent on the last syllable) – means of unofficial and therefore uncensored distribution of literary works, as well as religious texts and publicity in the USSR, when the copies were made by the author or readers without the supervision or permission of official bodies, as a rule [the copies were] by typewriter, photocopier or handwritten. Samizdat was also a means of distributing sound recordings of A. Galchin, V. Vysotsky*, B. Otkudjava, Yu. Klima and others.
The word “tamizdat”* also is frequently encountered along with the word “samizdat”, sometimes as an antonym. Tamizdat was the term for forbidden books and magazines published “tam”, or abroad.
* probably the most famous dissident “guitar poet” in the USSR
** “tam” means “there” or “over there” in Russian
I’d say what we see with the videos is more “tamizdat” than “samizdat”.
John,
Thanks for the further explanation. It does sound like this video doesn’t fit the definition of samizdat, then. I was under the impression that it was more of a news-oriented publishing as opposed to literature.
Arrgh, I had a post that I translated from the Russian Wikipedia which explained the difference, but seems to have disappeared into the ether. I had forgotten the Russian term for smuggling out wass “Tamizdat”, “tam” being Russian for “there” or “over there”, meaning the West.
This looks like tamizadat.