Forget Facebook, Bring Back Samizdat

Russia’s opposition activists are a dejected and fractured lot these days.

In February, Vladimir V. Putin passed a law making it possible to shut down any website at will — snuffing out the online presence of Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s biggest foe, overnight. Last week, Mr. Putin approved legislation that takes aim at all future Navalnys. The “Bloggers Law” forces the owners of any website receiving more than 3,000 visitors per day to register with the government, forfeit anonymity, and become legally responsible for the factual accuracy of their content.

It looks as if the Internet — one of the country’s last remaining enclaves for free speech — isn’t going to be available for much longer.

Political debate in Russia has found a home on Western-owned and run platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But these sites function at Mr. Putin’s pleasure and the new law also mandates that they maintain electronic records on Russian soil of everything posted over the previous six months, presumably so the government can peruse them. The Russian Internet may well be headed the way of China’s.

But the history of Russian dissidence is long, and if the Internet ceases to be an open and uncensored space, there is another medium that activists can and should look back to for inspiration and perhaps a more effective alternative: samizdat.

This decidedly pre-digital form flourished during the last 20 years of the Cold War, acting as the connective tissue that held together dissidents in Moscow, Leningrad and far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. From subversive writing to reprinted material from the West, it was hand-typed on carbon paper, disseminated by hand and then copied out again.

As a medium, the Internet dwarfs samizdat’s scale and speed. But because it was more discreet, samizdat was much harder for the government to shut down. And being more difficult to produce and disseminate it fostered a dissident community that was smaller but more cohesive and resilient.

Take the example of the Chronicle of Current Events (or Khronika in Russian), one of the most important samizdat journals. Started in 1968 by a group of Moscow dissidents, it survived for 15 years and 64 issues despite the serial arrests of its editors. It quickly became a wide-ranging regular catalogue of human and civil rights violations across the Soviet Union.

Khronika always had one editor in Moscow – the first was Natalya Gorbanevskaya until she was arrested in 1969 and sent to a psychiatric institution. That editor acted as the hub of a giant network with circuits spreading throughout the Soviet Union. Each new issue consisted of several typed out copies that would then pass from person to person, with new copies made along the way. But the network did not just disseminate information. It also funneled news back to Moscow.