Quotes About Samizdat

Openly political socialist writings, not legally publishable under then-prevailing censorship practices, would either be published abroad and smuggled back into Russia or, as in this instance, duplicated and circulated clandestinely (a forerunner of the present-day samizdat, or "self-publishing," as the circulation of uncensored writings in typescript is called in Soviet Russia).

The fatal problem for the media, the official media, is that it is now in direct competition with social media, the unofficial media. All of the opinions that had been so carefully suppressed by the mainstream have suddenly got an airing and have proved widely popular because the people have been starved of them so long. They always wanted this kind of material, but the media deliberately prevented them from getting it. The West is now having its own Samizdat Moment, and loving it.

Sakharov in the Cold War year 1968 boldly wrote—in a book published in the West and widely distributed in samizdat in the USSR—"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships

and the almost samizdat sharing, or gobsmacked retelling, of otherwise private and deep-background conversations