samizdat
▪ Soviet literature
(from Russian (Russian literature) sam, “self,” and izdatelstvo, “publishing”), literature secretly written, copied, and circulated in the former Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and usually critical of practices of the Soviet government.
Samizdat began appearing following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, largely as a revolt against official restrictions on the freedom of expression of major dissident Soviet authors. After the ouster of Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1964, samizdat publications expanded their focus beyond freedom of expression to a critique of many aspects of official Soviet policies and activities, including ideologies, culture, law, economic policy, historiography, and treatment of religions and ethnic minorities. Because of the government's strict monopoly on presses, photocopiers, and other such devices, samizdat publications typically took the form of carbon copies of typewritten sheets and were passed by hand from reader to reader.
The major genres of samizdat included reports of dissident activities and other news suppressed by official media, protests addressed to the regime, transcripts of political trials, analysis of socioeconomic and cultural themes, and even pornography.
In its earliest days, samizdat was largely a product of the intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad. But it soon fomented analogous underground literatures throughout the constituent republics of the Soviet Union and among its many ethnic minorities.
From its inception, the samizdat movement and its contributors were subjected to surveillance and harassment by the KGB, the secret police. The suppression worsened in the early 1970s, at the height of samizdat activity. Culminating in a show trial of Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin in August 1973, the government's assault wounded the movement. But it survived, though reduced in numbers and deprived of many of its leaders.
Samizdat began to flourish again in the mid-1980s because of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (“openness”). KGB harassment virtually ceased, and as a result a variety of independent journals proliferated, though their readership remained tiny. By the late 1980s, the Soviet government had unofficially accepted samizdat, although it retained its monopoly on printing presses and other media outlets. Samizdat had almost disappeared by the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of media outlets that were largely independent of government control.
fellow traveller
▪ Soviet literature
Russian Poputchik,
originally, a writer in the Soviet Union who was not against the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but did not actively support it as a propagandist. The term was used in this sense by Leon Trotsky in Literature and the Revolution (1925) and was not meant to be pejorative. Implicit in the designation was the recognition of the artist's need for intellectual freedom and his dependence on links with the cultural traditions of the past. Fellow travellers were given official sanction in the early Soviet regime; they were regarded somewhat like experts who were filling the literary gap until a true proletarian art emerged. In the 1920s some of the most gifted and popular Soviet writers, such as Osip Mandelshtam, Leonid Leonov, Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, and members of the Serapion Brothers were fellow travellers. The period during which they dominated the literary scene is now regarded as the brilliant flowering of Soviet literature. They were opposed bitterly, however, by champions of a new proletarian art, and by the end of the decade the term came to be practically synonymous with counter-revolutionary.
Outside the Soviet Union the term was widely used in the Cold War era of the 1950s, especially in the U.S., as a political label to refer to any person who, while not thought to be an actual “card-carrying” member of the Communist Party, was in sympathy with its aims and supported its doctrines.
Slavophile
▪ Russian history
in Russian history, member of a 19th-century intellectual movement that wanted Russia's future development to be based on values and institutions derived from the country's early history. Developing in the 1830s from study circles concerned with German philosophy, the Slavophiles were influenced greatly by Friedrich Schelling. The movement was centred in Moscow and attracted wealthy, well-educated, well-traveled members of the old aristocracy. Among its leaders were Aleksey S. Khomyakov, the brothers Konstantin S. and Ivan S. Aksakov, the brothers Ivan V. and Pyotr V. Kireyevsky, and Yury F. Samarin. Their individual interests covered a broad range of topics, including philosophy, history, theology, philology, and folklore; but they all concluded that Russia should not use western Europe as a model for its development and modernization but should follow a course determined by its own character and history.
They considered western Europe, which had adopted the Roman Catholic and Protestant religions, as morally bankrupt and regarded Western political and economic institutions (e.g., constitutional government and capitalism) as outgrowths of a deficient society. The Russian people, by contrast, adhered to the Russian Orthodox faith; thus, according to the Slavophiles, through their common faith and church, the Russian people were united in a “Christian community,” which defined natural, harmonious, human relationships.
The Slavophiles considered the Russian peasant commune an uncorrupted representation of the “Christian community.” They also believed that the autocratic form of government was well suited to a people spiritually bound together. Viewing Russia as potentially able to develop according to the “Christian community” model, the Slavophiles also thought that once such a society was established, Russia's duty would be to revitalize the West by reintroducing spiritual values there to replace rationalism, materialism, and individualism.
But the Slavophiles also realized that their contemporary society did not represent their ideal. They believed that Peter I the Great (reigned 1682–1725), by introducing reforms imitating the West, had corrupted Russia, driven a wedge between the nobility and the peasantry, and upset the natural social relationships. They despised the state bureaucracy organized under Peter and his church reforms that had undermined spiritual authority.
In order to perfect Russian society and to restore the autocracy and the church in their ideal forms, the Slavophiles urged extensive reforms, including the emancipation of serfs, curtailment of the bureaucracy, the granting of civil liberties (i.e., freedom of speech, press, and conscience), and the establishment of an institution representing the whole people (similar to the veche or the zemsky sobor of pre-Petrine Russia).
Although they enthusiastically approved some facets of Russian society and held views resembling the government's official doctrine of narodnost (“nationality”), which emphasized the superior character of the Russian people, Nicholas I objected to their criticism of his regime (which, of course, was based on Peter's reforms). His government censored their journals and generally tried to suppress the movement. The Slavophiles were also opposed intellectually by the Westernizers (Westernizer), a group that developed simultaneously with them but insisted that Russia imitate the Western pattern of modernization and introduce constitutional government into the tsarist autocracy.
The Slavophiles were most active during the 1840s and '50s. After the Crimean War (1853–56), the death of its foremost leaders (1856 and 1860), and the promulgation of the reforms of Alexander II (1860s), the movement declined. Its principles were adapted and simplified by extreme nationalists, Pan-Slavists, and revolutionary Populists (Narodniki). In addition to their influence on those movements, the Slavophiles individually made significant contributions to their various fields of study, particularly theology (with Khomyakov's (Khomyakov, Aleksey Stepanovich) theory of sobornost, a spiritual unity and religious community based on a free commitment to Orthodoxy), Russian history, and folklore.