Samizdat, the underground Soviet practice of self-publication and distribution of texts, has received serious scholarly attention in recent years, enriching our understanding of the phenomenon. Much attention has been paid to the texts themselves, whether their contents or their material form. The Culture of Samizdat offers an interesting new approach to samizdat by focusing in detail on the people involved, tracing their interconnections to explore their networks and foregrounding their voices through the use of interview and survey data.

Focusing primarily on the Brezhnev period and mainly (though not exclusively) on the Leningrad scene, Josephine von Zitzewitz offers detailed case studies of the various agents and groups involved in samizdat in order to show samizdat not just as a means of subverting the control of censorship, but also a vibrant and complex “alternative culture sphere” (4), albeit one that retained links to official Soviet culture and, in some ways, modelled on its structures.

Chapters 1 and 2 set the scene for the focused chapters that follow, with Chapter 1 offering a set of definitions and approaches to the topic. Von Zitzewitz emphasizes here that samizdat was a practice, a product, and a process at one and the same time, involving textual reproduction but also engaging shifting networks and groups. Chapter 2 explores the results of a detailed online survey that allowed participants in the samizdat culture to speak for themselves. This in itself is a highly valuable exercise, preserving voices that risk being lost or never excavated. While it would perhaps have been useful to offer more reflection on the potential risks of using this kind of source (memory being fallible), foregrounding the words of samizdat participants is nonetheless immensely interesting and useful to future scholars.

The following chapters zoom in on the agents who made up the samizdat networks. Particularly fascinating and original is Chapter 3, which studies the activities and positions of the hitherto anonymous typists who produced the texts. Heavily female, this group has an almost unique position within samizdat culture, with their professional and administrative positions seeming to keep them in some ways on the outside, although they incurred significant risks in their work. They were also subject to the oppressive gender norms of “official” culture, with their skilled work sometimes devalued or ignored. I could not help but feel that this “bottom up” approach that foregrounds the administrative and practical could be usefully applied to many other contexts and the author lays the ground for such developments here.

Chapter 4 moves on to discuss samizdat “libraries,” which did not, of course, exist as physical buildings, but as constant circulating sets of texts. Nonetheless, there seems to have been a surprising amount of record keeping (particularly given the risks of identifying consumers and producers), showing that samizdat production began to professionalize and even borrow from the practices of the official culture. Chapter 5 builds on this idea in its discussion of samizdat journal editors, tracing the development of journals into increasingly professional undertakings. Interestingly, this development also saw editors begin to borrow from the repertoires of the official “thick” journals, highlighting the often intertwined relationship between the underground and official culture. The author also highlights the relative importance of journals as a way of supporting the editors’ networks, with readers sometimes being a secondary consideration.

Chapter 6 and the conclusion take a more theoretical turn, assessing the relationship between official and samizdat culture. Defining samizdat networks as “communities of practice” (149), von Zitzewitz emphasizes the social importance of samizdat for Soviet citizens not only to obtain new information or be free from the restricted, censored official literature, but as a means of establishing an alternative community for oneself. The complex interactions and links between samizdat agents (producers and readers) complicates the idea of samizdat as a so-called dissident phenomenon, and establishes it as particularly rooted in the late Soviet context. The Culture of Samizdat is immensely valuable not only for its preservation of the voices of participants in the underground publishing scene and use of personal testimony, but also for its focus on the agents and their role(s) within the system. This is a pathbreaking work that enriches our understanding not only of the late Soviet period, but of the concepts of the “underground” and “dissidence” in themselves.