The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat

Serguei Alex. Oushakine

I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system. This is perhaps what happened in the history of the Soviet Union.
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

At a certain point, the struggles of the dominated were so romanticized . . . that people finally forgot something that everyone who has seen it from close up knows perfectly well: the dominated are dominated in their brains, too.
Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words

For years, Western academic studies of the Soviet Union focused on the dynamic of domination and resistance, and Soviet dissidents were at the center of these studies. The disappearance of the Soviet system dramatically changed this situation: not only did the dissidents fail to perform the role of active political subjects in post-Soviet Russia, but they also virtually ceased to exist as an object of Soviet and Russian studies. This essay is an attempt to bring back the dissident movement by revisiting samizdat documents that circulated in the dissident network from the late 1960s until the late 1970s. I will try to avoid, however, the long-standing Sovietology tradition of locating these texts exclusively within the context of dissidents’ ideological struggle with the dominant political structure. Instead, I want to read them through the discursive web of Soviet society within which they were conceived (or caught?) and whose traces they carried. By analyzing the rhetoric of public political dissent in the Soviet Union, I suggest a Foucauldian version of mimetic resistance that significantly differs from the influential framework of hidden transcripts of resistance developed in the work of James Scott and appropriated by some scholars of Russian/ Soviet society. Contrary to the tradition of locating resistance outside of the field of power—be these “hidden” areas in the underground, background, or foreground of the dominant—I argue that the oppositional discourse of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union manifested itself as very much a “surface” phenomenon.

The oppositional discourse in a sense shared the symbolic field with the dominant discourse: it echoed and amplified the rhetoric of the regime, rather than positioning itself outside of or underneath it.1

Forgetting Samizdat

Among the representations of the swift collapse of the Soviet Union, the word glasnost is probably one of the most familiar. Traditionally, glasnost is translated in English as openness and transparency. While being basically right, this translation misses one essential point. Etymologically glasnost derives from the Russian word glas (voice). Thus to exercise glasnost means to become a subject of public speech or, to put it differently, to conduct one’s activity in the form of a publicly available discourse.

Certainly the word glasnost, often associated with the politics of Mikhail Gorbachev, had been in use long before perestroika. In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev articulated the idea of openness and public criticism in his famous speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” delivered to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party (CPSU).2 Ironically, it was the Soviet dissidents—the “children of the Khrushchev thaw”3—who took Khrushchev’s appeal seriously and in the 1960s and 1970s became probably the most vocal and articulate advocates of the politics of glasnost. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a writer who is usually seen as the epitome of the Soviet dissident movement, wrote in his 1969 “Open letter to the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union of the Russian Federation”: “Glasnost, honest and complete glasnost, is the first and foremost condition for the healthy development of any society, and our society as well. And those who do not want glasnost for our country are simply indifferent to the fatherland.”4 Vladimir Bukovsky, another prominent Soviet dissident, in 1979 described the task of dissidents in the following way: “We did not play in politics, we did not invent programs for ‘liberation of the people.’. . . The only weapon we had was glasnost. Not propaganda but glasnost, so that nobody could say afterwards ‘I did not know.’. . . We were not expecting any victory—there was not the slightest hope of winning. But everyone wanted to have the right to say to his descendants: ‘I did all I could. I was a citizen and I always demanded legality.’”5 And yet, despite their major role in the struggle for glasnost and their profound influence on public consciousness in the Soviet Union, dissidents’ presence in post-Soviet Russian public discourse is close to nothing. Along with their disappearance, the study of samizdat texts in Sovietology also rapidly faded away. Somewhat surprisingly, the field of postcommunist studies that is emerging in and outside Russia—whether it explores the nature of what Thomas Lahusen calls "late Soviet culture" or the roots of post-Soviet identity, culture, and discursive practices—has not so far expressed substantial interest in approaching the dissident movement from a cultural perspective.6 There are two major traditions that contribute to this reluctance to perceive of the dissident political movement as a subject of cultural analysis. First, there is a general tradition of associating the Soviet dissident culture exclusively with the domain of artistic artifacts. Second, there is a strong tradition of conceiving of any dissent in Russia or the Soviet Union within the frame of the intelligentsia versus the institutions of power. Let me briefly comment on these two traditions.

Sergei Kovalev, a prominent Soviet dissident, has called samizdat the "Internet-for- the-poor."7 Samizdat emerged in the 1950s and was simultaneously a mechanism for reproduction of and an institution for dissemination of unavailable texts. By reproducing in a typewritten form never-published texts and texts that were out of print due to ideological reasons, samizdat activists overcame the shortage of literature created by the state monopoly on publishing. Andrei Synyavsky, a prominent Soviet writer and dissident, has reminded us that as a mass practice, samizdat started as the copying of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, which was inaccessible in published form.8 Moreover, the term samizdat (which literally means self-made publication or self-publishing) became popular after the Russian poet Nikolai Glazkov began in the mid-1940s to put the word samsebiaizdat—that is, self-publication of one’s work—on the front page of his typewritten collections of poems.9 And yet, copying and disseminating literary work among friends was a major function of samizdat only until the mid- 1960s. After that, samizdat became dominated by political documents: letters, petitions, commentaries, and transcripts of trials, pamphlets, and so forth.10 Such backbone publications of the dissident movement as The Political Diary or The Chronicle of Current Events consisted almost entirely of politically oriented documents.11

It is precisely political samizdat that I want to look at in this essay. Besides a general attempt to demonstrate that “merely” political texts have significant cultural meaning, this choice is also determined by differences in symbolic strategies that samizdat art and political samizdat followed. As many participants in artistic samizdat pointed out, criticism of the Soviet regime was not their primary aim. Rather, artistic samizdat was an attempt to overcome stylistic restrictions of socialist realism by creating a “close circle of like-minded people who spoke their own language, inconceivable to others.”12 Even when samizdat art tried to engage in a dialogue with dominant stylistic conventions, these attempts exhibited a dynamic different from that of the dissident movement. Recalling his experience of the 1970s, Soviet artist Ilia Kabakov wrote: “There was a new situation that until then seemed improbable: it had become possible not to follow the direction of the pointing finger of propaganda but to turn around in order to look at the very pointing finger itself; [it became possible] not to accept the music from the loudspeaker as one’s inescapable accompaniment but to look at, even gaze at, this loudspeaker. . . . Put briefly, all these horrifying means of propaganda that used to constantly gaze at us without allowing us to gaze at them became the objects of the gaze itself.”13 This return of the gaze did not happen in political samizdat: the pointing finger of the regime was not scrutinized, nor was the origin of the propagandistic music. Instead, the authoritarian compulsion to direct was closely imitated and reproduced. I analyze political samizdat’s mimetic attitude of the dominated to the dominant in order to understand why and how this mimesis became subversive and resistant.

Along with the general reductionist trend to perceive the dissident movement through the prism of dissident artistic production, there was yet another methodological approach that helped to quickly exhaust the initial scholarly interest in dissent in the Soviet Union. There is a deeply rooted tradition of seeing the dissident movement as an example of the more-than-two-centuries-old, ongoing battle between the Russian intelligentsia and the institutions of power.14 In my interpretation of dissident resistance, I want to avoid this elevation of a concrete historical event to the level of an ahistorical archetype. By analyzing political samizdat materials, I instead argue for a Soviet origin to the forms and rhetoric of dissidents’ resistance. I contend that the dissidents’ public performance was largely framed by existing public discourses on Soviet law and civic and human rights. I demonstrate that it was through exploiting already present rhetorical devices elaborated within the dominant symbolic structure of state socialism that the dissidents were able to assume a certain symbolic and discursive position in the society and thus to represent themselves as political subjects. In other words, Soviet dissidents were remarkable not only because of their dissent but also because of the very Soviet expression of their political disagreement, and this very dependence on the regime they were struggling with determined the dissidents’ strength and weakness.

The Prisoners of Glasnost

One of the most striking features of the samizdat materials collected by the Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe research department is a paradoxical relation between the usual perception of samizdat as an underground activity and the very public nature of actual documents. Strange as it may sound, publicity was an essential characteristic of Soviet dissent. From the very beginning, the human rights movement in the Soviet Union was a public movement, actively engaged in production, reproduction, and transformation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “legitimate” linguistic practices, the “practices of those who are dominant.”15

As dissidents themselves indicate, the Soviet human rights movement began with a deliberate public self-exposure. On 5 December 1965—the day of the official celebration of the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Soviet Constitution— about two hundred people gathered in downtown Moscow with signs bearing two slogans, the first referring to the imprisonment of two samizdat writers: “We demand an open trial for Sinyavsky and Daniel!” and “Respect the Soviet Constitution!” 16Ludmilla Alexeyeva, an eyewitness to the event, calls it “the first demonstration in the history of the Soviet regime that was accompanied by human rights slogans.”17 In a sense, these two slogans framed the logic of the dissidents’ “legal resistance”18 throughout its history—with the dissidents’ insistence on open, public, glasnostlike activity, and with their appeal to closely follow the rule of law. Consider the style and rhetoric of arguments presented in another, less public, event. In 1966, twenty-five prominent Soviet intellectuals (the physicist Andrei Sakharov among them) wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, then secretary general. The letter was widely circulated in samizdat but was never published by the official press. Pointing to several recent attempts to rehabilitate Stalin, the letter then stated:

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Notes

I want to thank Kim Lane Scheppele, Olga Bain, Nicholas Dirks, Bruce Grant, Marilyn Ivy, Sherry Ortner, Irina Savkina, and an anonymous reviewer at Public Culture for stimulating comments on and useful suggestions for earlier versions of this essay. The International Exchange and Research Board (IREX) provided generous financial support through the IREX Alumni Small Grant Program.

1. 1. In this essay I use two collections of samizdat texts. Sobranie Documentov Samizdata [Collection of Samizdat Documents, SDS] contains materials from the mid-1960s to May 1973. Arkhiv Samizdata–Materialy Samizdata [Archive of Samizdat–Materials of Samizdat, ASMS] contains materials from 1973 until perestroika. Both collections were accumulated by the research department of the U.S.-funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (based in Munich) from 1971 until the early 1990s. They are now kept in the Open Society Archives in Budapest (see http://www.osa.ceu.hu) and are also available as bound photocopied collections at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. Documents in both collections have an assigned number (AC no.). Because documents are reproduced mostly, but not always, in chronological order, when quoting a document I will indicate its number in the archive and the date of its actual publication. The SDS materials are divided in volumes that do not indicate the date they were bound or photocopied; the documents from ASMS are reproduced as a series of issues with dates of publication. For the complete list of documents collected by Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe until 1977 see Albert Boiter, ed., Polnyi spisok documentov: Arkhiv Samizdata [The full list of documents: Archive of Samizdat] (Munich: Samizdat Archive Association, 1977). All translations of the samizdat materials are mine.
2. Nikita Khrushchev, “Speech by N. S. Khrushchev on the Stalin Cult Delivered Feb. 25, 1956, at a Closed Session of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party,” in Khrushchev Speaks: Selected Speeches, Articles, and Press Conferences, 1949–1961, ed. Thomas P. Whitney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963).
3. Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post- Stalin Era (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). For a discussion of the history of the term “thaw,” which was coined by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg and is today a common expression, see Julian L. Laychuk, Ilya Ehrenburg: An Idealist in an Age of Realism (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 258–71.
4. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Otkritoe pismo sekretariatu Souza Pisatelei RSFSR” [An open letter to the secretariat of the Writers’ Union of the Russian Federation], Sobranie Dokumentov Samizdata (hereafter SDS), vol. 4, AC no. 297 (1969).
5. Vladimir Bukovsky, I vozvrashaetsia veter . . . [And the wind comes back . . .] (New York: Khronika, 1979), 248–49. Also published in a somewhat different form as Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: Viking Press, 1979).
6. Thomas Lahusen, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to Novostroika, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Gene Kuperman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 2. In a recent collection of essays on post-Soviet Russia, Adele Barker proposed to shift the study of Russian culture from the analysis of the elitist dissident movement usually located by Western Sovietologists “on the fringes of official Soviet culture” toward the study of a “vast arena” of popular or mass culture situated between the party and the dissenting intellectuals. Barker, “The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia,” in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev, ed. Adele Barker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 20, 23. For a similar tendency, see Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar, eds., Re-entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), and Nancy Condee, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late-Twentieth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
7. Vasilii Aksenov, Larisa Bogoraz, Leonid Borodin, Yulia Vishnevskaya, Igor Golomshchtok, Sergei Kovalev, Roy Medvedev, Grigorii Pomerantz, Marina Rozanova (Synavskaya), Feliks Svetov, and Lev Timofeev, “Dissidenty o dissidentstve” [Dissidents on dissent], Znamia 9 (1998): 179.
8. Abram Terz [Andrei Synyavsky], “Iskusstvo i deistvitelnost” [Art and reality], Sintaksis 2 (1978): 113.
9. Natalia Gorbanevskaya, “Vstupitelnaya zametka” [An introductory note], Kontinent 52 (1987):
10. Bukovsky, I vozvrashaetsia veter . . . , 273. Also see: V. P. [pseud.] “Novyi samizdat” [A new samizdat], Kontinent 52 (1987): 256. (It was a common practice for authors—especially those who stayed in the Soviet Union while publishing abroad—to use initials instead of their real names.)
11. Roy Medvedev, An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union: From Roy Medvedev’s Underground Magazine Political Diary, ed. Stephen Cohen, trans. George Saunders (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). Mark Hopkins, ed., Russia’s Underground Press: The Chronicle of Current Events (New York: Praeger, 1983).
12. Viktor Krivulin, “Zolotoi vek samizdata” [The golden age of samizdat], in Samizdat veka [The samizdat of the century], ed. Anatolii Streliannii, Henry Sapghir, Vladimir Bakhtin, and Nikita Ordynskii (Minsk: Polifact, 1997), 346.
13. Ilia Kabakov, 60-e – 70-e . . . Zapiski o neofizialinoi zhizni v Moskve [The 1960s–1970s . . . Notes about the nonofficial life in Moscow] (Vienna: Wiener Slavistischer Almanach, 1999), 75.
14. See, for example, Aleksandr Saveliev, “Politicheskoe svoebrazie dissidentskogo dvizhenia v SSSR 1950-kh–1970-kh godov” [The political specificity of the dissident movement in the USSR in the 1950s–1970s], Voprosy Istorii 4 (1998): 109–19.
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 53.
16. Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, trans. Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 276.
17. Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent, 274.
18. Boris Shragin, “Sila dissidentov” [The strength of the dissidents], Sintaksis 3 (1979): 27.