Spies and drug dealers, we learn in films and novels, always carry at least two mobile phones: a clean one for everyday dealings and a dirty one for those underground deals that are their real métier. In Josephine von Zitzewitz’s engaging book we now learn that in the Soviet Union this logic applied to typewriters. Samizdat typists had a clean typewriter for their more public stuff and a dirty one for the things they typed which could get them and their suppliers into prison. But really it should have been the other way around. The "dirty" typewriter was the one trying to speak the “truth” – the full, unvarnished “truth” (at least in the sense of not holding anything back), while the “clean” one was often in the service of the Soviet propaganda state, since everybody who was engaged in the production of samizdat also had an official job, and underground typists were often during the day – well – overground typists. Their skills connected them as much to official Soviet life as it did ally them with the world of non-conformism and dissent.

It is this and other simple, but revealing, facts that make Zitzewitz’s book an indispensable addition to the canon of literature about Soviet literary life and production.1 Samizdat (lit. “self-publishing”) is one of those Soviet terms even people far from Soviet and Russian studies have heard, yet whose actual mechanisms of creation, dissemination and consumption are surprisingly obscure even to specialists. Zitzewitz’s study, based mainly on questionnaires developed together with the Russian society “Memorial”, now fills this lacuna. She skillfully coaxes her readers in six chapters, each devoted to a particular cog in the machinery of samizdat, into the acceptance of a few crucial arguments. First, samizdat was a collaborative enterprise that blurred the lines between different actors of literary production – namely that of writers, producers, readers and disseminators, casting the same people in various, or sometimes, all of these functions. Second, for only a small number of people was samizdat actually an act of active dissent or resistance even though Zitzewitz claims that “a hint of political significance“ (p. 41) created something like a samizdat community. Third, Zitzewitz draws attention to at least two often overlooked agents within the samizdat business – that of typists and collectors, both crucial to the dissemination of the creative output. Fourth, samizdat culture and production were via its human agents as well as through material items and ideological indebtedness inextricably linked with the official sphere. Fifth, samizdat needed the restrictions of late socialism to exist. With the demise of censorship during Perestroika samizdat disappeared as a phenomenon.

While none of these claims are earth-shattering by themselves, the well-ordered manner in which Zitzewitz explores them turns samizdat from a hazy understanding of “something to do to with Solzhenitsyn” on the one hand or a highly specialized field of a few scholars on the other into a phenomenon that can be understood and explored by students and a broader audience. This is no small matter. Samizdat as a term is known outside the world of Soviet scholars because it exercises people’s imagination and relates so well to today’s battles of information, rhetoric and terminology. To get students thinking how alternative written discourses work in a repressive regime is hence an invaluable addition to how the Soviet Union can be taught with relevance to today’s politics and the current young generation. With its clear systematization of processes Zitzewitz’s book also provides a perfect jumping off point for further research. It makes no pretensions to be exhaustive in scope. The relatively small quantity of 122 questionnaires returned leaves much room for further explorations, especially since only about a quarter were obtained from places other than Moscow and Leningrad. The two examples explored in detail are both Leningrad publications, hailing from a place of production that has been at the forefront of historical self-reflecting ever since the early 1990s (the first conference on samizdat in Leningrad took place in April 1992 under the aegis of the Leningrad section of Memorial). Yet having established the full circle of production and consumption this treatise of how samizdat really works will provide the backbone for any future research, not least because it sets the parameters of what kind of agents and what kind of practices are involved.

It is clear that Zitzewitz’s favourite chapter is the one she has written about the typists. It is indeed the one that feels most vibrant and genuinely explores a set of actors who have been ignored not only in Soviet historiography but in literary studies worldwide. Despite the well-known and well-used wisdom that behind every famous man stands a strong woman, it has taken a long time until the role of muses and logistical supporters such as, for instance, Helene Weigel, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Lotte Lenya for Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill was highlighted.2 Zitzewitz points out that, of course, in this respect the world of Soviet dissenters and underground literary production did not differ from the generally male-dominated and often outright misogynist world of the official Soviet sphere. Anke Stephan has illustrated this convincingly in her book aptly titled “Von der Küche auf den Roten Platz”.3 The truth was that more often than not women remained in the kitchen, providing the tea and snacks for the men who debated right next to them and relied on their packages when they were sent to prison or camp and expected that their name was kept alive through petitions – or indeed the reproduction of their texts. The samizdat typist was hence a heavily gendered profession. This fact was already expressed in the fact that typist in Russian only exists in female form – mashinistka.

It is a bit of a shame that as a logical consequence of dragging the mashinistka into a well-deserved limelight, the very term itself is not questioned (as indeed one could do with a number of terms and assumptions that underpin the self-understanding of the samizdat producers and readers). Typists were at the very least also copy editors, often possibly more, since typing was just the last of the services they did for their male peers. Often, they were girlfriends and wives, spiritual as well as physical supporters and guardians over safety procedures and mechanisms of dissemination. The discussion of typists, while excellently contextualized into the samizdat process, remains strangely suspended from the content of their products and social environment of their lives. My own research has made me cross path with one of Zitzewitz’s interlocuters, Irina Tsurkova. She typed much of the new leftist samizdat journal Perspektiva in the hippie commune “Yellow Submarine”, constantly fighting for conspiratorial safety in a place that was a permanent overnight camp for passing visitors, many of whom liked a good alcoholic or drug-induced high. Tsurkova mastered this challenge resolutely just as she took on the cloak of active dissidence when her husband got arrested in 1979. She is most famous in the underground for a collection of political jokes she collected and published. It makes me wonder if granting a chapter to typists might just be a start to re-evaluating the dissident scene in terms of gender, production and contribution.

Yet it is ultimately proof of Zitzewitz’s compelling narrative that one wishes to know more about her protagonists. Her study is a wonderful introduction to a topic that deserves to be at the forefront of late socialist studies, since, while its impact is hard to measure, its importance is beyond doubt. And unlike many samizdat texts, which can be on the dense side of clarity, this book is beautifully written and can be read with pleasure and ease.

Notes:
1 Recent works in the field of Soviet official and unofficial literary production have been for example: Ann Komaromi, Uncensored. Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory, Evanston 2015; Polly Jones, Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography, Oxford 2019; Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here, Published There. How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain, Budapest 2014.
2 Pamela Katz, The Partnership. Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink, London 2015.
3 Anke Stephan, Von der Küche auf den Roten Platz. Lebenswege sowjetischer Dissidentinnen, Basel 2005.