You and a group of friends are nervously huddled around a cookstove in the kitchen of a tiny Moscow flat. It's a bitter cold night, just like all the other bitter cold nights in the winter of 1958. The vodka, chewy dark bread, and dubious potted meat you pass around do little to stave off the cold.... and the fear. You're jumpy with fear because your lives are in danger. Just having this many people in one place is against the law, but you're here for more than the vodka and the camaraderie. You're part of an underground reading cell that gets together to read and discuss ideas considered crimes against the state. You're a mind criminal, guilty of wanting to read and write ideas outside the scratching claw of the state's censor.

After everyone is settled, the host for the evening brings out a shabby box heavy with paper. Each piece of typing paper is textured with the tiny embossed impressions of mechanically produced text. The pages are smudged, wrinkled by dozens of hands, but you feel lucky because your group got a top copy, not one of the faded carbons hammered out by some generous soul who sat for months tirelessly typing and retyping multiples of the same manuscript. The host begins to read where he left off two nights before, and soon everyone settles into the beauty and power of the dissident literature. You let the words carry you away as you stare into the inky blackness and swirling cold outside the apartment window...

Since 1790, when Alexander Radishchev's banned anti-serfdom book A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow was distributed in manuscript form, scenes like this repeated themselves across what was to become the Soviet Union. Bands of independent thinkers, defying the law, gathered together to exchange heretical literature and ideas.

In the 1920s, Osip Mandelshtam and others circulated typewritten manuscripts called "Underwoods," named after the typewriters on which they were produced. At the time, a poet named Marina Tsvetayeva supplemented her income by "overcoming Gutenberg," selling hand-sewn poems she'd written and copied. During Stalin's paranoid purges, groups of renegade intellectuals passed around forbidden literature called "v yaschik," or "for the desk drawer." After Stalin's demise, with the rise of the relatively more liberal Kruschev regime, writers became bolder, producing several typewritten magazines which were copied by hand and passed among groups of trusted friends. It was during this period that an unknown Moscow poet coined samizdat to describe his collections of bound, typewritten poems. Short for "Samsebyaizdat", which means "a publishing house for oneself," samizdat quickly caught on.

Forming a samizdat publishing circle was a considerable and dangerous undertaking. Often, samizdat was written by Soviet exiles in Europe and then smuggled back into the USSR. Once across the border, pools of scribes would labor for months to make copies -- with a typewriter if they were lucky -- often, copying by hand.

The first phase of samizdat was mainly literary, beginning with Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago and continuing with the works of Solzhenitsyn, Mandelshtam, Brodsky, and Daine. The second phase, begun in the late '50s, was more political, consisting of letters, essays, and manifestos. In the late 1960s, the greatest of the "social samizdat" publications, the Chronicle of Current Events began. It continued to be published for years as the main organ of the Soviet human rights movement, reaching a peak circulation of over 10,000.

Samizdat entered its third phase in the mid-'60s when it began to carry intellectual debate and analysis rather than just news, rumor, and opinion. Many writers, such as Andrei Sahkarov, Solzhenitsyn, and Medvedev, who would later become famous worldwide, started in samizdat. In fact, samizdat had become so widespread that historian H. Gordon Skilling, author of Samizdat, and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe, claims that by the 1970s, samizdat had formed "the mainstream of independent thought and opinion, of free uncensored Russian literature.

Though today most samizdat is tolerated by the Russian government, the practice continues. Chinese samizdat, or datzepao, publishes opposition news, opinion, and various broadsides. The term samizdat has also migrated to West and is frequently used to describe any print or electronic document that's distributed through underground, non-commercial, channels.

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