Michael Laurence: producing and reading underground literature, known in Russian as samizdat – literally ‘self-published’ – was a cultural lifeline for the provincial intelligentsia in the Soviet period, and nowhere more than in ‘closed’ (forbidden to foreigners) cities such as Kuibyshev. How widely was samizdat available there?
Valery Pavlukevich: It was a real craze for Samarans. Everyone read it – university students, their teachers, office workers, pupils in the top classes at school, even Communist Party apparatchiks. You could find whatever you wanted: some people liked fiction, others political works. The educated public was thirsty for new books, but popular titles were difficult to find in the shops, so enterprising people found an alternative source. In the early 1970s, novels such as the French Angelique series, Robert Stillmark’s The Heir from Calcutta and other fashionable titles could be photocopied in bulk. There would be text on just one side of the page, and the paper was thick and of low quality; you couldn’t do any better with Soviet photocopiers. If there were illustrations, you photographed them off the page, printed them on photo paper and stuck them into each copy by hand. I can remember these thick tomes, 500-600 pages long. There was an enormous demand for them, so you could borrow them from acquaintances for literally just a day or two. And there were still not enough copies available – one friend of mine waited a month for James Hadley Chase’s Asphalt Jungle.
Muscovites queue to read samizdat newspapers on a wall, January 1990. (c) RIA Novosti/Vladimir Akimov
