B (6:25)

Yeah, I mean, we'll talk about the variety, richness of sources that you include in your book, but maybe we can start first with the definition. How do you define Samistat for the purpose of your study. And can you tell us a bit about the approaches that you take in engaging with this term and some of the kind of theoretical perspectives that you introduced here?

C (6:49)

Sure. So samizdat is most basically self publishing. Sam Self at isdat a root for publishing, and it's a neologism. People say it was coined by Nikolai Glaskov, who was writing his own uncensored poetry in the beginning, in the 40s, and Glazkov was parodying the names of official Soviet publishing houses. So Gosizdat, state publishing house, military publishing house. And the term began to be used in certain circles in Moscow around the end of the 1950s and subsequently became the word used to designate the texts that were uncensored and the system of unofficial publishing within which they. They circulated. Publishing in that sense probably has to kind of be in quotation marks because it was not print publication and didn't have a lot of the features we associate with print publication. So it wasn't necessarily fixed for a long time. It wasn't necessarily disseminated very widely. And copies could vary among themselves because people would pick them up, they'd see errors and correct them, or they would shorten them when they copied them again to pass them on. So it's not publishing in the way we usually see it. And that kind of approach of thinking about it as a textual culture, of thinking of it in relation to how people had talked about Gutenberg print and sort of the social impacts of something like the Gutenberg revolution, that gave me a way to think about this. What I came to call after Yof Rubinstein, extra Gutenberg publishing was a kind of framework for thinking about text within it, but also for the social effects that might happen because people are producing and circulating text that way. So that's then also been, for me, something that I take as a kind of basis, this use of the term first in the Soviet Union and the practice certainly spread outside of it, and we can see unofficial circulation and manuscripts before the post Stalin period. But taking it in the post Stalin period in the Soviet Union provided something that was relatively bounded and I could sort of grasp in some way, and I thought it might be useful then for people to think about it in other comparative ways or in broader senses once we had this. This kind of, you know, bounded area established a little bit more thoroughly with. With this kind of approach.

B (10:07)

And I really like your introduction of the Gutenberg theme and the extra Gutenberg framework. Right. To think about this form of production. Now, your book opens with the consideration of semi state and history writing. And I'm interesting about this process of re examination of Soviet history after Nikolai Tehruzhev secret speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. This is a huge moment, right. A watershed moment in many respects. So can you tell us a bit about the role of samizdat in that process of the Stalinization and the toll?

C (10:50)

Yeah, yeah, thanks. I think that's certainly highlighted by looking at it in the Soviet Union in this period, because it was very much responding to and participating in the changes after Stalin died. And it's probably worth remembering that Roucheau's secret speech, the text of that speech, because it was delivered orally in a closed session and then the text was circulated to party organizations and it was, you know, meant to be kept just for their eyes only. Of course it wasn't because, you know, what he was talking about, the sort of reassessment of Stalin's mistakes, of the purges. Opening up these topics was so important to. And people wanted to share this and talk about it. So of course it leaked and got circulated more widely. That was before the term samistat was really being used. But it was, I think it's interesting as a kind of official prototype of what would become this unofficial network of samizdat. And, you know, the process of desty was not sort of smooth. It wasn't. The signals were kind of contradictory, so they needed to destalinize, as the party officials were telling people. But, you know, what you could say and how much could be sort of revealed remained contentious. And the party was really trying to control that process. And people felt the need to share their experience and talk about what they had heard or known and wrestle with the issues that arose in the wake of Stalin's regime more widely. And at the same time, there was this cultural liberalization of the thaw happening. So some repressed names were coming back, some things were being published that couldn't be be published before. And people were also, you know, I think, wanting to push the boundaries of that process further and, you know, read and write things that weren't necessarily approved by the authorities or controlled entirely by them. So samizdat was a way of extending that process of destalinization and the saw and making it possible to say and hear and discuss things and do things that fell on either side of what the party wanted to allow to happen.

B (13:44)

Yeah, obviously a lot of our listeners will be familiar with the secret speeches as an event in Soviet history, but I never thought about it as A text. And I do invite our listeners to when engage with your book to focus on that part that you explained Soviet that secret speech as an oral delivery, but also as a text. But also the text that changes within the Soviet Union, then outside the Soviet Union. So many life of that text or that speech is quite an interesting kind of a part of that story that I never thought about and that you reveal so beautifully in your work. There are many different case studies in this portion where you engage with history writing or some is that within this context you walk outside Moscow and outside Leningrad to bring to four different communities that engage or use semistat at that point to reexamine their histories and their position. I was wondering if you can talk about two case studies in particular. One is on Crimean Tatar community and also the Baptist community in Soviet Union, how they use MSDAT at this point in time.

C (15:01)

Yeah, thanks. I think. Excuse me. Both of those are really interesting cases because they do challenge what has been a very kind of Moscow centric view focused on the intelligentsia and. And in fact, people at the time, certainly rights activists, were really interested in what other people not living in Moscow and maybe not from their social circles were experiencing. And the Crimean Tatars are a particularly fascinating case. So they had been deported from the Crimea to Central Asia by Stalin during World War II and labeled an enemy people at that time. And they incurred horrible losses during the deportation and afterwards in the harsh living conditions. And the restriction on their movements was lifted in 1956, but they weren't allowed to return to the Crimea.

B (16:09)

So.

C (16:10)

So certainly they wanted to do that and felt they should have a right to do so. Rights activists in Moscow became aware of their efforts after some time and helped to publicize them, which is part of why these records are a little bit better preserved. And that history was discussed and known and. But it had actually been very early in 1965 that Crimean Tatar activists started putting together information in a samistat periodical called Information. That was a way to inform members of their community and also the wider society about their history, about their claims to the right to return to Crimea, and about ongoing persecutions of Crimean Tatars. Historian Gulnara Bekheerava writes, that Information, the publication, which was a bulletin series, helped foster a national consciousness among people and it made others aware of the tremendous injustice that had been perpetrated under Stalin and which was unfortunately still ongoing. Unregistered Baptists were another community not confined to the big cities. And they used samizdat in a few different ways. So unlike Other groups, in part because they were in the provinces and could conceal them. They had big underground presses and could produce primarily sacred literature, the Bible and prayer books, but also periodical publications to inform people in the community and keep them connected, since they were spread out, dispersed among a pretty wide area of. Of the Soviet Union, circulating these samistat bulletins and journals, which had sort of pastoral information and sermons and messages to the faithful, but also had information about persecution of Baptist arrests and suppression of their rights. Children were taken away because they were, as the state said, being subject to religious propaganda. This was the right to educate children in the faith that people in the community reasonably thought they should have. So the stories of persecution became a way of showing the steadfastness of the faithful and informing people about illegal and unjust actions by the state against them. And it's worth saying in this case that the Baptists had a very long history of rights awareness and working in many cases with the Russian imperial government and later the Soviet government, to try to establish the basis for their communities to continue living the way they wanted to live. But obviously that didn't go particularly smoothly, and they needed to tell people about what was going on.

B (20:01)

And your study moves from exploration of historical self to the question of voice. You note that famous anecdote with Anna, who gave the voice to all those people who were waiting in long lines to see their loved ones who were imprisoned and sitting in Soviet various prisons and camps. And poetry kind of comes into focus here, this part of your study. I want to focus, for very selfish reasons, on one case study in particular, where you look at Russian futurism, which is the avant garde movement that originally came about in the late 1910s and 1920s. This was a merger not just of poetry, but of visual arts, performing arts and so on. Russian futurists reappear in samiza culture in this late Soviet period. Can you tell us a bit more about how this comes about?

C (21:03)

Sure, I'd be glad to. And of course, one of the best known Russian futurists, Vladimir Mayakovsky, was hugely important in this return to futurism that happened still kind of a connection that continued under Stalin, but certainly in the post Stalin era. And Mayakovsky was important in part because he occupied such a prominent place in the canon of Soviet literature. So reading him and studying him was still possible, even if, you know, not sort of widely done in the way someone like Andrei Sinjavsky was able to do it. But Sinjavsky was someone who had seminars at the university where they studied, not just Mayakovsky. But people Mayakovsky knew, and this proved to be a network of, you know, really interesting poets and artists. And it was international, so it was a kind of memory of. Of, you know, this. This rich international and very experimental culture with. With all of this creative ferment. And Mayakowski was kind of like a. Like a gateway drug into that liberated view of things. And other people found him to be as well. So when the monument to Mayakovsky was opened in central Moscow in 1958, people flocked to Mayakovsky Square, which was known as the Mayakovka, to read his poems. They read other poems, including their own, and the socializing and sharing of work there, not confined to just what was published, although they knew that they were being, you know, that there were plainclothes policemen among them. And people weren't trying to do things that were too provocative, but it was a space of quite a bit of freedom. And people like Yuri Galinskov got up to read what were really very daring verses at the time in his Human Manifesto, calling on people to. To tear apart lies and. And remake their society in this kind of revolutionary way. And that scene gave rise to some early handmade collections and periodicals that people were passing around. And it went on for a while. Authorities cracked down on the scene in the early 1960s, but not before people had made really some interesting connections and tasted the kind of freedom that was both poetic and also social. And this was the basis for a number of later unofficial cultural initiatives and rights activist connections. There are people, a number of people, who trace the origins of that activity to the Mayakovka. So more broadly speaking, Russian futurism became this kind of engine of late Soviet unofficial culture. And it did so in different ways. There were people who were enthusiasts of Mayakovsky and that kind of experimental revolutionary poetry. There were others who sought Mayakovsky and. And his associates were too compromised by a revolutionary ethos and ties to a state that had become as oppressive as it did. So they sort of pushed off from the futurist wing and embraced often other types of high modernism. And Osip Mandelstam was a very big figure for many of those people. And there were. There were others who admired the bold experimentation and poetry and across media that the. The futurists were known for, but also felt they had to distinguish themselves from this very famous and internationally sort of canonized historical avant garde, represented by futurism, but also by suprematism. And Malevich and the Conceptualists were among those. So you see them referring back to that avant garde heritage, but to distinguish themselves and what they're doing from it. And Futurism continued to be generative in particular cases. It's worth noting the Trans Forests, the Transfouriste, a group that developed around RE Nikonova and Sergei Sige, they were based in the provincial city of Yask with connections to Leningrad, and they were convinced that there was a lot to be done to recover a wide sort of futurist legacy and to reimagine the creative potentials of it for their time. So it's relatively idiosyncratic, but absolutely sort of outstanding work in samizdat publications they created, like the journals Nomer and Transponants, which have to be the most visually striking and formally exuberant texts we found in the archive.

B (26:54)

Just on that. Where can one find these texts? Was that something that you discovered? Memorial archives? So I presume they're not easily located.

C (27:07)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, finding material like that was. Was just. Was so stunning. And it's not that it was hidden, but as you said, these things didn't exist in many copies and they were. They were only known to a few specialists. So Memorial had a lot of the documents associated with rights activism, particularly Moscow rights activists. But Bremen, Germany, where the Institute for the Study of Eastern Europe is located, had its own archive that included a lot of the literary and artistic materials that couldn't be found elsewhere and also couldn't be found in the Open Society archive where Radio Liberty Samizdat documents were and are kept. So for me, as someone sort of coming from training in literature and thinking about literature and art, I really wanted to do something to help make materials like that accessible. And over many years, working together with the Institute for the Study of Eastern Europe, we were able to digitize those editions by the Transforests and make digital copies available through University of Toronto libraries.

B (28:42)

That's fantastic. And one of the publications that you also mentioned is Art of the Commune, which is. Takes its name after the really original futurist publication. And I remember accessing that publication, even though it's well known among scholars, but that's no small feat. So it's fantastic that these futurist inspired publications from the Lyto period are now made available. And yeah, it's a fascinating story. I mean, as you know, futurist movement is so complex and has such a complex relationship with the Soviet regime originally, that it's quite an interesting story of how that's now taken at this point in time and which aspects of it are activated, I guess, in the semicide culture from poetry. We moved to visual arts, which again, for me was a bit of a surprise to see visual arts, or rather conceptual art within the semistat context. But it sort of makes perfect sense in many regards. And I would like for you to explain a little bit about how you see this relationship between semistat and conceptual art that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s. And maybe tell us a little bit about the artwork you chose for your book cover.

C (30:06)

Yeah, yeah, thanks. I'd love to talk about that. So conceptualist artists were kind of working in alternative ways and alternative spaces for their art, and many of them doing non conformist art, not within the regular art institutions and exhibition spaces controlled by officials, even though they in many cases had official jobs, sort of had their day jobs, maybe illustrating books or doing something else. And then in their personal time, they would work in their studios, they would visit one another, and they would have events and initiatives and do experimental things. And Sami Staat provided a place for documentation and theorizing and discussing the kind of work they were doing. And so, you know, creating a visible sort of cohort that could also be expanded beyond just the Moscow apartments where the core members were congregating. So the Folio series, MANI or mana, if you use the acronym from the English translation, Moscow Archive of New Art, this was a folio series from the early 1980s. And it's a good example, I think, of these different components. So there are reproductions of artworks, there are photographs of happenings and. And also typewritten texts with theorizing and discussion and instructions and things like that. And as you might imagine, something kind of multi form and intermediate like that is not so easy to just copy if you don't have mechanical means that are convenient for doing all of it. So they would do just a few copies and then have people come together and look at them and discuss them. But the idea was also that this would, you know, this was samizdat as an archive. It was a place to collect the traces of their activity, make it visible and preserve those for the longer term, because they couldn't do that in official ways. And you asked about the COVID art on the.

B (32:57)

Yes, the Natalia Abalakova's piece, which is quite striking because you mentioned Malevich just earlier. Malevich. And of course, the black square and the link in that piece is quite striking to me. So I was hoping you can share that with our listeners.

C (33:14)

Yeah, yeah, love to. So Natalia Abalakova was with her artistic and personal partner, Anatoly Zhugalov, one of the editors of the Mana series and photographs of her collages appeared there, as did her own essay about her work. And I think it's so interesting the way she talks about her collages in the essay. She talks about doing them in the kitchen, taking care of a small child, you know, washing diapers, doing other household work, and throwing together these collages out of material to hand in the moments she could spare from. From these other demands. And I don't take her entirely at her word. I think the work is a lot more sort of thoughtful and put together than that might suggest. But I love the way she describes it because it introduces the sense of a woman's work, a woman's perspective, woman's time into what was a very male dominated artistic group. And this collage, Black Hole on the COVID is another of the frequent references by Abba Lakhova and Shigalov as the group tote art, but also conceptualist overall to suprematism. And specifically of course, Medevic's iconic black square. This painting that is very widely known, the black form at the middle is not a square. It's the shape of the USSR as a landmass. And it overlays and is surrounded by scraps of text and image that show official Socialist Realism news and propaganda mixed with unofficial art and things from emigre publications. So it kind of shows this complex and slightly chaotic mix of cultural elements that was a kind of fertile ground for conceptualist and other art practices in Samistad and all of unofficial culture.

B (35:34)

Yeah, it's a really stunning piece that I was not familiar with before. And it makes perfect sense as a piece of conceptual art and obviously connection to the text itself. I'm really happy we could reflect a bit on conceptual art today. This week that marked kind of passing of Ilya Kabakov as a conceptual figure in that field and a good opportunity to revisit this history. Now your study moves from the voice time to space. And in the final section of your book you talk about Spaces of Semi stat Solidarity, one of the publications that. Well, first I would like you to tell us a bit about this concept of semi stat solidarity and spaces of Sami's Solidarity and talk about Ukrainian Herald as one of the case studies that you kind of highlight in this section.

C (36:37)

Yeah, so you know, Samizdat Solidarity or Sociality is something that. It was a concept I kind of arrived to with the help of some theorists, including Benedict Anderson, who talked about the role of print publications in fostering imagined communities and national the imagination. And I saw these extra Gutenberg Texts as doing something similar. They were connecting people across space and they were giving them a way to imagine themselves and their social ties and, and their. Their communities, but also the wider society in new ways. And, you know, time and space being the kind of parameters that define our imagination of ourselves and others, and which proved to be, you know, somewhat malleable. So there was a, you know, an official Soviet way of describing time and thinking about the space of the Soviet Union or a larger kind of international space of solidarity. But these communities were developing ways of expressing their values and their connections and their time and space differently. And Ukrainian activists had some, some special interests and challenges because of where they were and because of the difficult history they had with and relationship to, to the Soviet state centered in. In Moscow. And the Ukrainian Herald, which first appeared in Kyiv, edited by Vyacheslav Chornoville in 1970, was like the Moscow Chronicle of Current Events, designed to record and share information about violations of citizens rights. But certainly they were doing so with a focus on people in the Ukrainian Republican and people who were struggling, among other things, for the right to express themselves in Ukrainian language and have, you know, education and cultural activities in Ukrainian and, you know, do these activities associated with national self expression, which was formally not an illegitimate thing, but was de facto a trigger for a lot of repressive activity and repression happened earlier and was much harsher in the Ukrainian Republic, by all accounts, maybe more than anywhere else. So there were these waves of arrests. It was quite difficult to do things, and people were arrested and imprisoned on a much greater scale and much more frequently. So this Ukrainian Herald was kind of remarkable because it did continue for a number of issues and it focused on the particular conditions and questions Ukrainians were facing. So if the Chronicle of Current Events in Moscow aimed to be sort of universal, to cover everything and everyone, however imperfectly. The Ukrainian Herald was, was about Ukrainians and it featured also essays on Ukrainian culture and the struggle for Ukrainian identity. And it was important that they do that because not everything could be known and communicated to Moscow or through Moscow, which was a kind of main channel for doing. Was very important that Ukrainians in that place be able to keep a record of what they were seeing and experiencing and what they were thinking about it. And we're lucky to have that record today.

B (41:28)

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is one of those examples and they are there throughout your study. But Sam is serving to build this or create these communities and platforms for solidarity much more so than the perhaps more established view that we have of semi is that vertical Challenging up the authorities. This is, I guess, a good example of that horizontal line that you take in your study and how these communities were built through these publications and made records that were important to them. On that note, you highlighted the legacy of the late Soviet semis that goes beyond the history of the Soviet Union. And then this activity resonates today. Where can we see the influence of stem is that in our contemporary culture?

C (42:22)

I mean, I guess I would say we see it in different ways and that maybe that is a kind of ambivalent legacy because certainly when the Internet began to be much more widely used, people thought, this is wonderful. Anyone can publish or say anything they want. And it's those horizontal connections you're talking about, you know, sort of rhizomatic and grassroots. And this is amazing. And I think, you know, over the decades we've come to see that in fact, both governments and companies have much more control and determine the ways that communication happens, much more than we might have expected or hoped initially. So, you know, that, that, that makes it not, not a simple kind of kind of thing. I think, you know, the, the hope of sharing information about rights violations has been sort of counteracted by authoritarian governments that, that crack down on the spread of, of news and communications and in fact use channels to discredit and persecute people they don't like. And on the other hand, you know, things like social media have proven to be vulnerable to commercial forces in ways that distort the ability of people to express their interests and create solidarity. So there is still news that gets circulated to contradict propaganda. And there's the use of VPNs and even PDFs as ways that people who have access to news on independent sites can in fact print out copies to give to other folks who might fear the surveillance and control they would experience if they try to do it electronically. So I think that's something interesting that we're seeing on the Medusa site, for example, to facilitate kind of old style communication that can be a bit more authentic and hopefully keep people safer.

B (45:04)

That's certainly interesting. And transformation of that text and Samistat text is certainly something that the readers of your book will I think, appreciate in a new way. And thank you so much for talking about Soviet Semistat today. And I was wondering what comes after samistat? What are you working on at the moment?

C (45:26)

Yeah, thanks for asking about that. You know, I have had some long percolating interest in the conceptualist art and other types of visual arts, but the big project I'VE undertaken recently has to do with dissident memoirs. And this is in collaboration with some of my colleagues following up on some efforts to collect information about published accounts, to think about what wasn't published or what was published in editions that people just haven't seen or that haven't been translated, and also to try to collect and think about the information we have on Samis ARC or on dissident archives. So archives associated with people who are doing various types of rights activism. And it's something that I think gives us a chance to think critically about the Moscow center and to also ask questions about women's voices and the voices of activists and national movements. I have some history of working on the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union, but of course the Ukrainian national movement is another one of great interest to people today. And there are other movements that deserve to have more research done about what traces of the legacy remain and how we can think about them today. So that's going to be a multi year project to collect that information and facilitate some of the discussions and analysis around it. And it will be a new, a new phase of development for the project website at University of Toronto Libraries. So coming hopefully soon, hopefully sooner rather than later. Database of Soviet dissident memoirs.

B (47:50)

Yeah, that's terrific. And those topics are no less important today. They're not losing on their relevance in our contemporary time. And being able to access them, yeah, being able to access them in through these channels is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and activists around the world. So I do hope we'll have you back here to talk about at this stage of your research. But thank you again for talking about Soviet Semic with us today.

C (48:20)

Thank you.