Insight

The Gulag Archipelago though banned, continued to operate as a series of Samizdats within the Soviet Union. So, what were Samizdats, what were their social implications, and how do they relate to the notion of a “new media encounter”? “Vladimir Bukovsky summed up samizdat this way: “I write it myself, I edit it myself, I censor it myself, I publish it myself, I distribute it myself, I sit in jail for it myself.”[1] In other words, they represented a form of protest, grassroots activism and dissidence in the Soviet Union. As Komaromi puts it, “they illustrate the moment of critical self-reflection that proves to be key to the construction of dissident subjectivity and imagination of a different future toward which that subjectivity is orientated.”[2] The concept that Komaromi is trying to illustrate here is difficult to comprehend in the west where freedoms are taken for granted; samizdats were not simply a social trend but rather a social revolution. There was a risk of death or detainment simply through the possession of a samizdat. Thus, being a participant in any degree required conviction and a firm belief in the subjectivity of one’s goals. In retrospect, samizdats represented the culture of the Soviet dissident. Komaromi highlights this notion by stating that “one of the bourgeois mythologies that seem unviable in the context of the Soviet dissident culture of samizdat is the myth of the individual author… both the author and reader participate in the publication of samizdat, their roles blurred in their function as informal publishers of the text.”[3] As such Samizdats were flexible and evolved with the individual and subsequently society, in other words, Samizdat’s were a living and constant process. As Komaromi sums it up, “critical subjectivity is formed by the individual in tandem with a social community or communities.”[4] However, samizdats were textually unstable as they were subject to revision and yet if they resonated enough became hard to subvert. To sum it up, The Gulag Archipelago was not the work of just one man, Solzhenitsyn explicitly states he could not have done it on his own, but rather the living essence of the Russian people. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn helped bring together this sentiment, and the western Printing press helped cement it. In Truth, this is the reason Solzhenitsyn donated all the proceeds to Russian families affected, as The Gulag Archipelago was the embodiment of the Russian people and their struggle.