The new Samizdat of Russians abroad

In *Novaya Gazeta*, Slavic studies scholar Jakov Klotz describes the flourishing of publications by Russian dissident authors during the period of repression in Moscow: “We do not translate books to entertain Western readers with tales of Putin’s horrors, but to save Russian culture.”

Milan (AsiaNews) – Dissent in the Soviet Union was expressed primarily through clandestine self-publishing, Samizdat, by hand-copying or typewriting as many copies as possible of banned books.

The phenomenon actually originated abroad, when in 1958 Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was published by Feltrinelli in Milan – a condemnation of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution – and was termed Tam-Izdat, ‘published over there’, rather than Sam-Izdat, ‘self-published’.

Novaja Gazeta therefore interviewed Jakov Klotz, a scholar of Slavic studies and professor at Hunter College in New York, founder of the literary and charitable project Tamizdat, who explains that “we do not translate books to entertain Western readers with tales of the horrors of Putin’s prison”, but to preserve Russian culture on an international level.

In 2021, Klotz had completed a large-scale academic study on the history of Soviet Tamizdat, treating the dissident texts from past waves of emigration as historical monuments to the era of closed borders.

Then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 transformed archival history into everyday reality: total censorship and self-censorship have returned to the Russian Federation, and free Russian literature has once again found itself in exile. Klotz therefore transformed his research project into a system for publishing contemporary books and supporting researchers and students. According to him, we are witnessing “the anthropology of the new exodus from Russia”.

The “Tamizdat Project” is accessible via its website and on social media, having undergone incredibly rapid growth since 2022 to build an entire ecosystem: an electronic archive, a publishing house, public events and charitable initiatives.

Initially, it was an exclusively academic project, but the war “triggered a mixture of shock, anger, confusion and energy, which called for some sort of immediate outlet”, says Klotz. Our collection contained a duplicate of the first edition of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, published in Munich in 1963.

The idea was to sell it and use the proceeds to help Ukrainian students who, in those very weeks, had already begun arriving in New York; Hunter College was one of the first to accept them, setting up a special programme in just two weeks, mainly for students from Ukraine, but also from Russia and Belarus.

This auction marked the start of the charity’s activities, and over four years the initiative has branched out in various directions, coming to be known as an ‘ecosystem’ or even ‘mycelium’ – the intertwining of various types of fungi.

The 2025 campaign, featuring a second auction, became fully international: on the final day, 18 May, in-person events were held simultaneously in eight cities around the world – Tbilisi, Paris, Prague, Berlin, London, Vilnius and New York.

Over 100 writers and poets signed their books especially for the auction, and eight authors gathered in Berlin – a city that has now become a major hub for the new wave of migration – posting updates on social media. In 2023, approximately ,000 was raised, and after deducting minimal organisational costs, 20 scholarships of ,000 each were awarded: 18 recipients were from Ukraine, and two or three from Russia. In 2025, 16 scholarships of ,000 each were awarded.

A publishing house was also established, beginning with Andrei Sinyavsky’s 1957 short story Pkhents, a brief text of just 15 pages that is unique not only for its time but also for the present day; it had never before been published as a book and recounts prison conditions and emigration for political reasons.

Subsequently, two New York children’s bookshops, White Rabbit and Apartment, have offered to distribute books for adults as well, organising public events on Russian literature from the ‘new Tamizdat’.

Klotz concludes that ‘if we look at the present, we see that the true Tamizdat is alive and well, alongside the new, technological Samizdat’. Many authors, for various reasons, remain in Russia, writing there and submitting their work for publication to independent foreign publishers, often under a pseudonym or anonymously. Now, amidst the turmoil of international politics and the crisis in culture at all levels, these autonomous forms of expression need support more than ever.