I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers at Slavic Review as well as Mark D. Steinberg for their helpful comments and Benjamin Nathans and Alexander Gribanov for feedback on an early version of this article. My appreciation also goes to Anastassia Kostrioukova for sharing Baptist Samizdat materials from her research at the Keston Center, Baylor University.

1. Wolfe, Thomas C., “Comment” (on Special Section “Genealogies of Soviet Dissent,” Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 664.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), 37.Google Scholar

3. See definition 4 of “dissident” in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Lesley Brown, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1993), 1:703. The new definition of dissidenty as participants in a movement against totalitarian regimes in socialist countries appeared in Bol'shoi entsiklopedicheskii slovar', ed. A. M. Prokhorov (Moscow, 1997). The term dissident comes from the Latin dissidere, meaning “to sit apart.” It thus emphasizes physical action and location. Because of that etymology, I prefer to speak of “dissidence” radier than “dissent.“

4. From the Oxford English Dictionary, quoted by Steiner, Peter, “Introduction: On Samizdat, Tamizdat, Magnitizdat, and Other Strange Words That Are Difficult to Pronounce,” Poetics Today 29, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. See Kozlov, V. A. on “dissidentocentrism,” in “Vvedenie,” Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSRpri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve, 1953-1982 gg. (Moscow, 2005), 5-64, 10Google Scholar; and Yurchak, Alexei, on “deterritorialization” as a more widespread and significant phenomenon than dissident “opposition,” in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 115.Google Scholar

6. For example, Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov defined the aim of their volume From Samizdat to Tamizdat (New York, 2011) as the development of a critical approach, rather than “another celebratory, anniversary-style series” (2).

7. See location of dissidence in its Soviet context in Benjamin Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol'pin and the Idea of Rights under ‘Developed Socialism,'” Slavic Reviexu 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 630-63. For a discussion and illustration of new approaches, see the two special issues “Publish and Perish: Samizdat and Underground Cultural Practices in the Soviet Bloc (I) and (II),” Poetics Today 29, no. 4 (Winter 2008) and 30, no. 1 (Spring 2009).

8. Viktor Voronkov and Jan Wielgohs described a private-public sphere of dissidence in “Soviet Russia,” in Detlef Pollack and Jan Wielgohs, eds., Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society andDemocratic Transition (Burlington Vt., 2004), 95-118, 113. Kevin M. F. Piatt and Benjamin Nathans referenced the “private-public” formulation in a response to Yurchak, “Sotsialisticheskaia po forme, neopredelennaia po soderzhaniiu: pozdnesovetskaia kul'tura i kniga Alekseia Iurchaka, Vse bylo navechno, poka ne konchilos',” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 101 (2010): 167-84.

9. Philip Boobbyer explored dissidence as a moral project in his study Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London, 2005).

10. Samuel Moyn argued that human rights were widely understood as “a moral alternative to bankrupt political Utopias,” in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 5.

11. Approximately 300 periodicals are described in Ann Komaromi, “Soviet Samizdat Periodicals,” at http://www.samizdat.library.utoronto.ca (last accessed 1 December 2011).

12. Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, trans. Pearce, Carol and Glad, John (Middletown, Conn., 1985), 284.Google Scholar Alekseeva's history first appeared as Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR (Benson, Vt., 1984).

13. See Reddaway, Peter, “Introduction,” in Reddaway, , ed. and trans., Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union. The Annotated Text of the Unofficial Moscow Journal A Chronicle of Current Events (Nos. 1-11) (London, 1972), 17, 20.Google Scholar See also the name of Mark W. Hopkins's book Russia's Underground Press: The Chronicle of Current Events (New York, 1983).

14. Gordon Skilling, H., Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe (Columbus, Ohio, 1989), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Suetnov, Aleksandr, Samizdat: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ (Moscow, 1992), 1:6.Google Scholar

16. Reddaway described this legal angle as a distinctive aspect of Soviet dissidence as compared to the tradition that precedes it, Uncensored Russia, 23-24. For more on the dissident strategy of legalism, see Nathans, “Dictatorship of Reason.“

17. See the foreword to Svodnyi katalog russkoi nelegal'noi i zapreshchennoi pechati XIX veka: Knigi iperiodicheskie izdaniia, ed. I. P. Kondakov, B. S. Itenberg, et al. (Moscow, 1971), l:v-xvi. The editors wrote that uncensored periodicals of the nineteenth century were integral to the history of the workers’ press, by which one could study the “road from Populism [narodnichestvo] to Marxism” (v).

18. As an exception, unofficial Baptist groups constructed their own printing presses, which were regularly found and confiscated by authorities. See Sawatsky, Walter, Soviet Evangelicals since World War II (Kitchener, Canada, 1981).Google Scholar There was also relatively widespread use of photography to duplicate typescripts, although the bulkiness of the texts produced this way constituted a disadvantage.

19. Alexeyeva employed this metaphor in Soviet Dissent, 284.

20. See Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, 35, I specify the Moscow Chronicle because Lietuvos kataliku baznycios kronika (Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania) also existed.

21. The section appears in Nomer, no. 30 (August 1971). A copy exists at the Historisches Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Bremen, Germany, File 97 (Sigov and Tarshis).

22. An outstanding example is Leon Uris's novel Exodus, adapted and edited in Russian samizdat translations. See discussion of this example in Ann Komaromi, “Samizdat as Extra-Gutenberg Phenomenon,” Poetics Today 29, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 635.

23. See Sintaksis, reissued in Grani 58 (1965). Editor Aleksandr Ginzburg put his name on the front of what presented itself as a legal edition. See the description in V V. Igrunov and M. Sh. Barbakadze, eds., Antobgiia samizdata: Nepodtsenzumaia literatura v SSSR, 1950-e-1980-e., 3 vols. (Moscow, 2005), 1.2:349.

24. On Rea Nikonova (Anna Tarshis), Sergei Sigei (Sigov), and their work, which also included the journal Transponans, see Kukui, Il'ia, “Laboratoriia avangarda: Zhurnal Transponans,” Russian Literature 59, nos. 2 - 4 (2006): 225-59Google Scholar, and Janecek, Gerald, “Conceptualism in the Work of Sergej Sigej and Rea Nikonova,” Russian Literature, nos. 2-4 (2006): 469-85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Bukovsky, Vladimir, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, trans. Scammell, Michael (New York, 1978), 118.Google Scholar Evidence on early groups of this type is diin. Anatolii Zhigulin wrote about the unofficial Marxist-Leninist (and anti-Stalinist) student group in Voronezh in 1947 called the Communist Youth Party, which involved over 50 people. See Zhigulin, , “Chernye kamni,” Znamial (1988): 21.Google Scholar E. Iu. Zubkova wrote about an uncensored student poetic miscellany Snezhnoe vino (Snow Wine) in Cheliabinsk in the 1940s. She also mentioned more political student groups with names like “Army of the Revolution” and “Union of Struggle” in Moscow, Leningrad, Cheliabinsk, and Sverdlovsk from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. See Zubkova, , Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost', 1945-1953 (Moscow, 2000), 146-48.Google Scholar

26. Nathans wrote about Vol'pin's and Amal'rik's comments as indicative of the important break with the revoludonary tradition among democratic dissidents. See Nathans, “Dictatorship of Reason,” 634-35.

27. See Amalrik, Andrei, Notes of a Revolutionary, trans. Guy Daniels, (New York, 1982), 26.Google Scholar

28. Alexeyeva, , Soviet Dissent, 268-69.Google Scholar

29. From a copy of Tetrad', no. 8, Hoover Institution, NTS Collection, No. 7/1965- Box 1, Item 65/67. Tetrad', the “Notebook of Social Democracy,” was one of the few openly political samizdat periodicals that did in fact resemble the party literature of previous eras. The editor, Evgenii Kushev, was put into a psychiatric hospital.

30. Eclecticism in the themes of samizdat is visible in Suetnov's bibliography, Samizdat.

31. See Daniel', Aleksandr, “Istoki i smysl sovetskogo Samizdata,” in Igrunov, and Barbakadze, , eds., Antologiia samizdata, 1:18 Google Scholar; Telesin, Julius, “'Samizdat’ in Brief,” Samizdat Bulletin 1 (May 1973): 2.Google Scholar

32. See Albert Boiter's article, “Samizdat: Primary Source Material in the Study of Current Affairs,” Russian Review 31, no. 3 (July 1972): 282-85. For more on the Samizdat Unit at Radio Liberty, see Zaslavskaya, Olga, “From Dispersed to Distributed Archives: The Past and the Present of Samizdat Material,” Poetics Today 29, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 685-87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. From “Basic Information about Arkhiv Samizdata,” on the back cover of Register of Documents: Arkhiv Samizdata, enl. and rev. Sept. 1973 (Munich, 1973). Radio Liberty left out of its catalogued samizdat archive literary works and works that would be published elsewhere. Its collection cannot be considered a complete representation of Soviet samizdat. We need to expand our archive of information about samizdat combining the obvious aggregators like the Moscow Chronicle and Radio Liberty with less obvious sources.

34. Daniel', “Istoki i smysl,” 17.

35. Ibid.

36. Losev, Lev, “Samizdat i samogon,” Zakrytyi raspredelitel’ (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), 146-47.Google Scholar

37. For a clearly drawn distinction between “classic samizdat” and new samizdat or “alternative press” beginning in 1987, see the “Katalog periodicheskikh i prodolzhaiushchikhsia neformal'nykh izdanii na russkom iazyke v arkhive samizdata,” Materialy samizdata, no. 8 (1991): iii. See also Strukova, Elena, Al'ternativnaiaperiodicheskaia pechat’ vistorii rossiiskoi mnogopartiinosti (1987-1996) (Moscow, 2005), 24-25.Google Scholar

38. Skilling was one of the first to make the point that although the Czechs, Poles, and Chinese developed their own “samizdat” systems in the 1970s after the Soviets, they employed different technologies appropriate to their cultures and contexts: “Uncensored material in each country had, too, its own distinctive origins and special features and should therefore be examined separately.” See Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society, 11.

39. Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent.

40. Amalrik, Andrei, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (New York, 1970), 7-9.Google Scholar Michael Meerson-Aksenov recalled Amal'rik when he pointed out that social samizdat came after literary samizdat, in “The Dissident Movement and Samizdat,” in Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, eds., The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian “Samizdat“—An Anthology, trans. Nickolas Lupinin (Belmont, Mass., 1977), 19-49.

41. Gorbanevskaia quoted in Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, 35.

42. From “Zapiska KGB pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR ot 21 dekabria 1970 g., No. 3461- A,” signed by Iurii Andropov. Document 0044, dated 15 January 1971 on the cover letter, in the Bukovskii Archive online at http://www.psi.ece.jhu.edu/%7Ekaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/buk.html (last accessed 1 December 2011). An interesting point in Alexander Gribanov's analysis of the crystallization of the party's attitude toward samizdat is the degree to which Central Committee members still thought in terms of the Bolshevik underground and civil war factionalism, by which logic a movement could be pro-Soviet but still politically harmful. See Gribanov, and Kowell, Masha, “Samizdat according to Andropov,” Poetics Today 30, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 89-106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Komaromi, Ann, “The Unofficial Field of Late Soviet Culture,” Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 605-29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 51.Google Scholar Habermas talked about letter writing and the rise of the psychological novel, as well as the private bourgeois home with its sitting room as places for practicing “audience-oriented privacy,” 47-51.

45. Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 109-11.Google Scholar

46. See “Writing for ‘Samizdat,'” Index on Censorship 6, no. 1 (1977): 34.

47. Hopkins quoted an interview widi Gorbanevskaia in Russia's Underground Press, 23.

48. Bukovsky, To Build A Castle, 115, translation slightly altered. Compare Vladimir Bukovskii, Ivozvrashchaetsia veier… (New York, 1979), 103-4.

49. From the preface to A Chronicle of Current Events, no. 28 (London, 1975). This was part of a constant preface in Amnesty editions.

50. See the back cover of A Chronicle of Current Events, nos. 34, 35, and 36 (London, 1978).

51. Sigitas Tamkevicius, interview, Kaunas, Lithuania, 8 April 2008.

52. See “Presledovanie veruiushchikh,” at http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr/index.htm (last accessed 1 December 2011). Translation mine.

53. From page 1 of the copy of Bratskii listok in Folder: SU/Ini 11/10 Bratskii Listok S, Keston Collection, Baylor University. Translation mine.

54. Rostislav Evdokimov, “Informatsionnyi biulleten’ SMOT,” in V Dolinin and B. Ivanov, Samizdat (St. Petersburg, 1993), 102-3.

55. Roginskii is currently director of the International Memorial Society, Moscow, which possesses, among other resources, a sizable samizdat archive.

56. Arsenii Roginskii, interview, Moscow, 3 April 2008.

57. Aleksandr Voronel', interview, Tel Aviv, 1 July 2007.

58. See Voronel, Alexander, ‘Jewish Samizdat,” in Ro'i, Yaacov and Beker, Avi, eds., Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union (New York, 1991), 255-56.Google Scholar

59. Aleksandr Voronel', interview, Tel Aviv, 1 July 2007.

60. Crossley, Nick and Roberts, John Michael, eds., After Habermas: Nexu Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford, 2004), 15.Google Scholar Pauline Johnson pointed out that Habermas's later focus on the dialectics of system and life world in Between Facts and Norms (1996) constituted his own version of a decentered model of informal and formal publics. See Johnson, , Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere (London, 2006), 168.Google Scholar

61. Fraser, “Rethinking,” 116. Geoff Eley agreed that along with the struggle against traditional authority, the public sphere was always constituted by conflict. See Eley, , “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures,” in Calhoun, , ed., Habermas, 325-26.Google Scholar

62. Fraser, “Rethinking,” 127. Fraser noted that explicitly addressing inequalities in public debate accords with Habermas's later communicative ethics. Ibid., 120. 63. For a more detailed treatment of these periodicals and Jewish dissidence, see Komaromi, Ann, ‘Jewish Samizdat: Dissident Texts and the Dynamics of the Jewish Revival in the Soviet Union,” in Ro'i, Yaacov, ed., The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C., forthcoming).Google Scholar

64. Fraser, “Rethinking,” 124.

65. See Mamonova, Tatiana, “Autobiographic,” in Rossiianka: Desfemmes russes (Paris, 1980), 12.Google Scholar

66. Anna-Nataliia [Natal'ia] Malakhovskaia, “O zarozhdenii russkogo feministicheskogo al'manakha ‘Zhenshchina i Rossiia,'” Solanus, no. 14 (2000): 68-83.

67. Iuliia Voznesenskaia said that dissident men and women generally reacted with perplexity or derision to the samizdat feminist collection Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia), no. 1 (1979). Voznesenskaia's account of the humiliation of young women in prison was dismissed as vulgar, and the discussion of everyday hardships suffered by women was treated as banal and unworthy of debate. See Voznessenskaia, Youlia, “Le mouvement féministe dans notre pays,” in Maria: Journal du Club feministe “Maria” de Leningrad (Paris, 1981), 38.Google Scholar In Voznesenskaia's opinion, however, Leningrad's unofficial “second culture” greeted the feminist periodicals with sympathy. Ibid., 39.

68. See comments by the editors of the English edition, Almanack for Women about Women, Number one (10 December 1979) (London, 1980), 10.

69. Quoted by Adlam, Carol, “Feminism, Untranslated: Russian Gender Studies and Cross-Cultural Transfer in the 1990s and Beyond,” in Renfrew, Alastair and Tihanov, Galin, eds., Critical Theory in Russia and the West (New York, 2010), 161.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original. No gay samizdat periodicals in this era have been found, although there was uncensored circulation of gay literature by writers like Gennadii Trifonov and Evgenii Kharitonov. The barriers for discussing homosexuality were much higher, since homosexuality was criminal. See information and excerpts from Moss, Kevin, ed., Out of the Blue: Russia's Hidden Gay Literature. An Anthology (San Francisco, 1996).

70. Fraser, “Rethinking,” 132-36.

71. Habermas discussed the origins of this formulation in Francois Guizot's lectures of 1820, The Structural Transformation, 101.

72. See Fraser, , “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 4 (July 2007): 7-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Habermas himself sought in recent years to address the challenges of globalization. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans, and ed. Max Pensky (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 56-112.

73. Moyn, The Last Utopia.

74. See the editors’ introduction to Almanack for Women, 2.

75. Irina Prokhorova claimed that some of the more interesting developments in Moscow cultural life since the 1990s, including café life, Proekt OGI, new print and Web publishing enterprises, owed their existence to dissidence. See Prokhorova, “Heirs to the Underground,” Kultura (Bremen) 1 (October 2005): 3-7.

76. See description of the NOS-1973 project and award results at http://www.prokhorovfund.com/projects/own/108/242/ (last accessed 1 December 2011).

77. The Russian Media Project at the Berkman Center has been analyzing the character and role of alternative media. See the report, “Do Russian Blogs Represent an Alternative Public Sphere? Early Results from Russian Media Cloud,” 11 May 2011, at http://www.mediacloud.org/blog/2011/05/ll/do-russian-blogs-represent-an-alternative-publicsphere-early-results-from-russian-media-cloud/ (last accessed 1 December 2011).

78. The phrase “after Habermas” indicates the centrality of Habermas's ideas about the public sphere and communicative ethics to many contemporary debates. A critical history of Soviet dissidence can be part of the process of translating, critiquing, and extending Habermas's insights. See Crossley and Roberts on the continuing debate in their introduction to After Habermas, 10.

79. Fraser, “Rethinking,” 124.

80. See Viktor Krivulin, “'37,’ ‘Severnaia pochta,'” in Dolinin and Ivanov, Samizdat, 74-76.