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sa·miz·dat (sä'mĭz-dät', sə-myĭz-dät') n.
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- The secret publication and distribution of
government-banned literature in the former Soviet Union.
- The literature produced by this system.
- An underground press
System whereby literature suppressed by the
Soviet government was clandestinely written, printed, and distributed; also,
the literature itself. Samizdat began appearing in the 1950s, first in Moscow and Leningrad, then throughout the Soviet Union. It typically took the form of carbon copies of
typewritten sheets that were passed from reader to reader. The subjects
included dissident activities, protests addressed to the regime, transcripts
of political trials, analyses of socioeconomic and cultural themes, and even
pornography. Samizdat disappeared when media outlets independent of the
government emerged in the early 1990s.
The
underground press rose and declined in a very short time, but for a decade or
so, beginning with the founding of The Fifth Estate in 1965, dozens of
underground papers were published in virtually every major city in Michigan, alone. During that turbulent period,
the underground press was in the vanguard of public opinion on many of the
issues that seemed to threaten the social fabric of the country: Vietnam, drugs, women's liberation, sexual
freedom, high school students' rights. Coverage of
these issues in the underground press reflected and influenced the opinions
and activities of college and high school students and young workers, a
segment of society that had previously been ignored by the establishment
media.
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