Samizdat: Fighting Censorship
Imagine if you lived in a country where everything
you wrote was under scrutiny. All your essays and books would be checked
according to the will of the state and censored if they opposed that will.
Anything not published or distributed under the explicit approval of the state
would be seen as illegal and would render you as a criminal and dissident of
the state. This was the daily reality for people living in the Soviet Union
from Stalin’s years until the Gorbachev era. Even so, many published and
distributed their censored works without state approval, and this action came
to be called Samizdat.
Samizdat was a grassroots form of dissidence that
started in the Khrushchev Thaw as a sort of outcry against the censorship and
oppression of the state. Poetry was perhaps the most popular form of free, “anti-state”
expression. In 1958 after a monument to Vladimir Mayakovski was opened in the center
of Moscow, many Muscovites especially students began to meet at this place
known as the Mayak and to have public readings of poetry. It was until 3 years
later that the state cracked down on them and arrested several of the regular
attendees. However, the samizdat continued to spread giving rise to a moderate
dissident movement throughout the Soviet Union. The samizdat eventually helped
to bring about the lifting of censorships through Gorbachev and the fall of the
Soviet Union.
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