Samizdat, Tamizdat, and a Cold War Divide in the Library
Books and journals of the Soviet era fall roughly into three categories: (a) Printed by state-controlled publishing houses, (b) samizdat (самиздат), meaning “self-published”, (c) tamizdat (тамиздат), literally “there-published”, i.e., outside the Soviet Union and USSR-aligned countries1.
Now, this fragmentation still shows in the bibliographic records. Some digitized historical newspapers can only be found in Western repositories whereas others are solely available in Russian online collections. Good starting points are:
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Russian National Library: Газеты в сети и вне её (Newspapers online & offline)https://nlr.ru/res/inv/ukazat55/search_records.php
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Russia Abroad Digital Collection: https://radc.hoover.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1
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Russian Exile Publications (UB Bern) https://www.e-rara.ch/bes_1/nav/classification/13070746
References
- Digital Handbook for Research on Soviet History, Harvard University (“a bibliographic guide to primary source materials for the study of Soviet history”) https://dccollection.share.library.harvard.edu/
- Klots, Yasha (2023). Tamizdat: contraband Russian literature in the Cold War era. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, London https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501768972/tamizdat (Open access)
- Kind-Kovács, Friederike; Labov, Jessie, eds. (2015). Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism. Berghahn Books: New York.
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Tamizdat include low-circulation presses run by emigrated dissidents as well as Cold War operations such as the distribution of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago by the CIA, see the collection of declassified documents on the website of the CIA: “The Zhivago project was one of many CIA-supported covert publishing programs that involved distributing banned books, periodicals, pamphlets, and other materials to intellectuals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/doctor-zhivago ↩