A key element of the old Soviet culture, familiar to both Russian immigrants and Sovietologists, was samizdat, the combination of the Russian words “sam” (“self”) and “izdat”, the common Soviet abbreviation for “publishing office” (e.g. Politizdat, Lenizdat, Gosplanizdat). Usually produced using a typewriter and cheap paper, it was then copied using the archaic copy machines installed in Soviet factories and offices and technically overseen by the KGB. Therefore, samizdat was produced and distributed at great personal risk. Repeated possession of samizdat would send one to the Gulag.

Strictly speaking, samizdat only referred to books, articles, poems, and songs self-published underground inside the Soviet Union, but “tamizdat” (“tam” meaning “there”) – Russian books published abroad could also be included under it. The famous Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky described samizdat thusly: “I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it.” His own memoir And the Wind Returns was one of the more dangerous samizdat books to possess and distribute.

Among the most popular titles distributed as samizdat were the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s, Mikhail Bulgakov’s mystical masterpiece Master and Margarita, lyrics to the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky (some of them heard in the Hollywood movies White Nights and Warrior), Leon Uris’s Exodus, and the poetry of Nikolai Gumilev and Joseph Brodsky. Soviet readers were introduced to masterpieces such as Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, an 800 page saga of World War II and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago through samizdat. A year or two after the collapse of communism, I remember finding a thick, binder-like book, with no name on the cover. Inside, the cheap paper was covered with lines upon lines of Vysotsky’s songs, mostly tough, heart-rending, masculine ballads:

No mourning widows come to this place

The people who come here are tougher

No crosses are put on the brotherly graves

But that doesn’t bring any comfort… I should have felt quite happy, but instead

I howled like a wolf, in a terrific mood,

Because a German sniper shot me dead

By killing that same man who didn’t shoot. They offered us a quick exit from the war,

But somehow managed to jack up the price;

And so we are condemned to a long life

By guilt, by shame, by betrayal.

In the decades after the fall of communism and the unraveling of the Soviet Union, samizdat became a half-forgotten relic of the Soviet days, just like compulsory May Day demonstrations, portraits of Lenin, and a winning national hockey team. In the decades since the fall of Soviet power, hundreds of thousands of books from all over the world are translated into Russian without regard to their ideological content. Admittedly, many of them are the kind of Danielle Steel/Nora Roberts/Stephenie Meyer rubbish that teenage girls read on the way to school and tired middle aged women read on the way from work. However, books that are delegated to politically-incorrect, “hate speech” oblivion enforced by thought police outfits like the ADL and the SPLC in America are readily available in Russia and are released by mainstream publishing houses.

Take for example, The Races of Europe by Carleton Stevens Coon, a seminal work of physical anthropology, describing and discussing the development and physical characteristics of all Caucasian peoples, from the Cornish to the Tajiks. Harvard-educated Coon was professor of anthropology first at his alma mater and then at the University of Pennsylvania and was regarded as one of the most important anthropologists in the world, serving as the president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA).

In the very beginning of the 1960s, Coon, a heretofore mainstream scientific figure, fell afoul of the pernicious Establishment. His namesake Carleton Putnam, a Delta Airlines executive, published a forthrightly racialist book called Race and Reason: A Yankee View in response to the campaign of desegregation in the American South . For this thought crime, Putnam was censured by the AAPA, even though his book was endorsed by four distinguished scientists, among them anthropologist, botanist, and geneticist R. Ruggles Gates, Fellow of the Royal Society and Henry E. Garrett, former head of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University.

In protest at what he viewed as a violation of Putnam’s free speech, Coon resigned from the very organization he presided over. To the end of his life, this defense of another man’s right to speak his mind caused Coon to be endlessly hounded by the politically correct. Chief among his tormentors were anthropologists Ashley Montagu (whose real name was Israel Ehrenberg) and Theodosius Dobzhansky. The former was a prime example of an active participant in what Kevin MacDonald calls The Culture of Critique. As early as the 1940s, Montagu published a series of works, which questioned the reality of race as a biological concept.

The activism of Montagu and Co. led to the near obliteration of Carleton Coon and his work from American memory. In today’s Russia, on the other hand, The Races of Europe was published a couple of years ago by the ultra mainstream publishing powerhouse AST and is readily available both in hardcover and ebook formats. Coon’s son Carl, granted permission to AST for the publication of all of his late father’s works.

Carleton Coon’s book was translated by hard right Russian historian and publicist Mikhail Diunov who recently wrote a sympathetic profile of Jared Taylor for the conservative website Russian Idea (Русская idea). In his foreword to The Races of Europe, Diunov along with Russian racialist Vladimir Avdeyev stated:

Coon did not uphold the spirit of militarism, hedonism and reckless practical mastering of reality, which today is associated with the American mentality in Russian societal understanding. Instead, a fruitful, progressive synthesis of hard, natural, and social sciences was performed by Coon in his works. It was people precisely like him who in the Twentieth Century, began to rapidly change the perception of the United States of America as a country of nouveaux riche, showing the world that besides gangsters, bankers, cowboys, and the black underclass, there also is a significantly large class of intellectuals…

An even more controversial book, Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis, first published in 2006 by politically-incorrect Washington Summit Publishers has been republished in Russia, also by AST as Races. Peoples. Intelligence (Расы. Народы. Интеллект) this year. In the book, Lynn summarizes IQ data of different races and nationalities, showing differences in average measured IQ between them. While the English-language edition of Lynn’s book sells for at least $86.95, the beautifully done Russian translation could be obtained for a mere $2.57. In his especially written address to Russian readers, Richard Lynn sounds the alarm:

I am happy that my book is published in Russia and our kindred Russian people could familiarize themselves with views on racial differences in intelligence. I summarized the results of several hundred studies, showing that we, Europeans, along with the peoples of Eastern Asia (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans), have the highest IQ. This could be considered obvious. Almost all of the discoveries in science and technology in the last two and half thousand years were made by our peoples, the peoples of Europe and East Asia, they were also the ones that created almost all of the great works of art, music, and literature. Now, however, the future of our peoples is in danger. The number of children we are having is not enough to preserve the number of our national populations. How will we solve this problem? Will we be able to survive? Or is our place going to be taken by peoples with a lower IQ?

The fact that a mainstream American publisher would release a book like Lynn’s is simply inconceivable in today’s political and social climate where at least once a year there is a ritual defenestration of a writer, scientist, or celebrity who oversteps the ever-narrowing bounds of acceptable speech. But AST, the largest, most mainstream Russian publishing house prints authors like Coon and Lynn. The situation is exactly reversed, compared to the Soviet Union. Now, controversial, inconvenient, politically-incorrect books are pretty much unavailable in America, at least through the mainstream publishing houses. On the other hand, these same works are readily available in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Could the same Richard Lynn been right when half a decade ago he said:

I remain pessimistic about the probability of curtailing immigration in North America and Western Europe. I think the main hope for the survival of the European peoples is Eastern Europe including Russia.

Time will show, but it is certainly not on the side of the West.