The practice of bootleg tape recording (magnitizdat) was less risky, as Soviet citizens were permitted to own a reel-to-reel recorder, and the majority of content was not overtly political, largely comprising of songs by solo Russian singers known as bards. Whereas the readership of written samizdat rarely exceeded the thousands, up to a million citizens listened to reel recordings. One of the most popular and subversive bards, Aleksandr Galich, used his songs to criticise “the fairy godmothers of censorship” and laud the role of underground media:

Untruth roams from field to field,

sharing notes with neighbouring Untruths,

But that which is sung softly, booms,

What’s read in whispers, thunders.

Although the term samizdat refers specifically to the Soviet period, most notably after the death of Stalin in 1953, unauthorised publishing has a long tradition in Russia. In the late 19th Century, students circulated radical pamphlets denouncing the Tsar, and after the failed revolution of 1905 and the subsequent crackdown on civil liberties, texts deemed subversive were shared widely. From the time of World War One, interrupted in Russia by the revolution of 1917 and a civil war that ran until 1922, considerable restrictions were placed on printed material.

Cultural cachet

Samizdat reflected the changing political, cultural and geographical landscape of the Soviet state. Some of the material protested the suppression of Christian denominations (Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist) or made the case for ethnic groups seeking self-determination (Jews, Crimean Tartars, Volga Germans). Slavophile samizdat opposed the ethnic heterogeneity of the Soviet Union, in favour of autocratic Russian orthodoxy and Slavic supremacy – invariably tinged with racism and anti-Semitism – and against Western political concepts such as democracy and socialism.