Part One: Samizdat: How to Self-Publish During a Dictatorship
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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people trying to do good things, or at least interesting things.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest this week is Katie Stoll. Hi, how are you? I'm okay. I'm good. I'm glad to be here. Happy to be here, in fact. Yeah, the world's going great. The world's going great. Nevertheless, I would love to hear some stories about cool people who did cool stuff. Not that we don't have a ton of cool people doing cool stuff right now at this moment in time. It's a good time.

It's true. Hey, completely unrelated. There's been all this stuff about people bringing down the stock value of Tesla. But anyway, there are all kinds of methods. Yeah. Anyway, I'm happy to be here. I feel like this is a bright light in the world, being able to talk about good things. I know. And if people want to hear more good things, which of your various news shows should they listen to or watch? Oh, well...

I'll plug even more news. People know us from some more news. A lot of people know me and Cody from that, which is our YouTube show, but we also have our podcast, even more news, which we're now doing twice a week. Mondays. We release what we record Monday morning release Monday evening. I know. And then another one that we record Thursdays release Friday. Um,

We just needed to add an extra episode because there's so much to talk about and we couldn't get through it all. Yeah, that actually makes sense. And also we now are doing video versions of them, putting them on YouTube.

because apparently a lot of people like to listen to podcasts with their eyes. I don't know. So we're doing that. I don't understand it. I'm going to pretend to understand it once they make us pivot to video. But for now, I don't understand it. Yeah, it's a whole other world out there. But yeah, sure, I'll plug that. We try to find bright spots out there too, but we do talk about the bad spots.

That makes sense. Yeah. So, Katie, have you ever thought about what it would be like to be a journalist or a writer during, like, an authoritarian regime? Has that ever crossed your mind? Yeah, it's crossed my mind from time to time. It sure does. Just a fun thought experiment. This week, for no particular reason, I thought, what a fun and random time to tell the story about how people have continued cultural production and news forever.

during dictatorship. But first, I'm being reminded by my producer, Sophie, that I should do the rest of my introduction. Like introducing Sophie, who's my producer. Hi, Sophie. How are you? Hi, Magpie. Hi, Katie. Hi. You're doing great, Magpie. Thanks. Thanks. And we also have an audio engineer named Rory. Hi, Rory. Hey, Rory. Hi, Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman.

And I think that's the rest of the introduction. You crushed it. You'd think I would know. I'm on episode like 150. Well, actually like 300 because there's two of every thing. Yeah. Anyway. Congratulations. That's a lot of episodes. Thank you. It's...

It's been a wild ride. It's every now and then I have these moments where I'm like, like my most recent like sub stack post is basically like it's a really weird moment to read history books for a living. But you actually read news for a living. And that's maybe even weirder. Also weird thing to do for a living, especially right now. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna just tell a fun family story for no particular reason about continuing cultural production during dictatorship.

This week's story is about Samizdat, the underground publishing within the Soviet Union and the communist bloc countries during the Cold War. You ever heard much about this stuff? No, not at all, actually. It's funny because so many people use Samizdat as a... I mean, I hadn't run across it a ton myself. It's one of those words where if you don't know what it means, you kind of just ignore it because you're like, I don't know what that means. And the rest of the sentence makes sense, so you just sort of ignore the word. Yeah.

Okay, there's an irony here. I'm doing this whole episode about how people...

created stuff and distributed it during the dictatorship of the Soviet era. This is the single episode where I could not find a source that was not behind an academic paywall. This is the most ivory-towered. I had to talk to all of my friends with academic privileges to get access to this. So there's a little irony there. That's interesting. Yeah. The shortest version of it is...

For more or less the entire time there was a Soviet Union, there was strict censorship of the press. And the entire time there was strict censorship, there were people evading that censorship through various means. By the time you get to the 1960s and the 1970s, there's this whole culture that springs up around samizdat, or self-publishing, but we'll talk about why it's actually a really clever play on words later.

in which people would distribute hand-typed copies of poems, novels, and news, because they couldn't even access Xerox machines.

Mm-hmm. These were generally typed on carbon paper and then retyped by their recipients, like chain letters, but good. That's, yeah, beautiful, actually. Yeah. Just the idea of people receiving a hand-typed poem or what have you, and then typing it up and paying it, sending it forward, I think is really beautiful. I know, totally, especially with the crime level where you're like, well, I can go to jail for the foreseeable future if they catch me with this

poem about being sad about the ocean or whatever it is. Because not all of it's political. But it was all wildly illegal. And there was a body count attached. Although by the end of it, people are mostly getting time in prison in a camp that kills about 10% of the people. But better than earlier where they're just dying.

And Samizdat as a culture lasted until basically 1987 when Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, relaxed censorship and people were finally able to publish what they wanted. That's one version of it.

It's possible, and I've read two different sources that have different positions on this, that political samizdat actually continued for a few more years until the USSR actually fell completely in, I think, 1992. Okay. Because at least some people seem to be censored still, despite this, like, overall loosening. It might be some mixture of both. Yeah, it's like almost everyone got to start publishing, and basically the anarcho-syndicalist is the best I can tell. Yeah. Yeah.

The other annoying thing about researching Samizdat, which actually overall I really enjoyed besides the whole ivory tower problem, is that because it was caught up in the Cold War, there's this Western narrative around it that's basically like some good anti-communists who wanted individual liberty and capitalism risked everything to spread the one real truth about what was happening. And there is a little bit of that, right? But there's not a lot of bit of that.

Nor was this a like, we're all desperate for novels from the West. Please, Westerners, come and save us with your superior storytelling. Some literature from the West snuck in and was distributed to Samizdat, but a lot of it was about cultural production in the Soviet Union. And actually, a lot of it was about getting cultural production out of the Soviet Union in really cool ways. There's like all this like spy shit where people are like,

Using microfiche, like little, and like fucking taking photos of all of the book manuscript pages and then like giving them to like foreign dignitaries and shit who are like smuggling them out. Oh wait, that's pretty cool. Yeah. And not all of it was even like, this is how it is in the Soviet Union. Some of it was like, this is my poem about how I wish I didn't have cancer or whatever, you know? Yeah, yeah. But mostly Samizdat was a culture, right?

Samizdat was fun and exciting. It was inherently cool because it was countercultural. A lot of it was parody. A lot of it was like artsy as fuck. Something that we've seen again and again in our episodes where we talk about resistance to authoritarian communism in particular is that a lot of the people who are out in front challenging like Soviet era rules and things like that,

are artists. And they're basically challenging dictatorship through cultural production of plays and poems and songs and all of this stuff. And a lot of it was self-consciously what they called ludic, playful. And the CIA has poisoned all of our brains about the USSR, to be clear, but not in the way that authoritarian leftists claim. If you've ever critiqued the USSR on social media, you end up with a lot of people who are like,

But actually, you know, everything was perfect there and you only are listening to the CIA's lies or whatever, right? And the thing is, is that the CIA did lie about the Soviet Union and build this false narrative, but not in the way that people claim. The CIA worked hard in the 20th century to make sure that every bit of dissidence in the USSR was co-opted to seem like it's pro-capitalism and pro-Western.

But while there's some of that, almost everything I've seen about resistance to the USSR from within the Soviet bloc comes from socialists, people who believe that we should all take care of each other. They just didn't want a corrupt state apparatus. They didn't want this like weird, bad oligarchy instead. I know it's so interesting how we boil things down to either you're a capitalist or you are a socialist or it's like, you know, it's like, well,

Yeah, no, I want this thing, but not by that person. It's like, I want our food system to be overhauled, just not by RFK. Yeah, totally. You know? Totally. No, it's such a perfect example of it where you're like, well, I too want more natural food in my diet. I also want to keep getting vaccines on a regular basis. Exactly. And not have the worms eat my brain.

Ideally. Yeah. That should happen after I die. It's like a general rule. Yes. Then I'm fine. Please have at it. Yeah. That's my hope for one day, but not for now. So for some weird reason, I think studying how people lived and acted and resisted under authoritarian regimes is going to be increasingly important. And...

Okay, this is a kind of tangent. I'm now off script. There's this thing where like, we all kind of look at what's happening right now. And it's very, very easy to draw connections to Nazi Germany, right? That is a reasonable place to look for our historical parallels, right?

But it's not the only place. Like, the world is full of dictatorships that we can look to. I know. I was just recently, like yesterday, I had this thought of like, you know, we could compare it to so many things. Maybe we should start mixing it up. Yeah. Instead of just, well, it's the most readily available for most people to, you know. Totally. Relate to, but. Yeah.

Most especially white people in America and probably just people raised in the American educational system know a hell of a lot more about Nazi Germany than they do about like other terrible systems, including the one that enslaved and genocided here on this very continent called the United States of America. Right. Exactly. We know way more about that than our own history. But anywho. And so there's all these other places that we can look and like.

The thing that's interesting about the USSR and Soviet bloc countries, especially by the time you're talking about the 60s and 70s, is you're talking about what does resistance look like for people who grew up inside this authoritarian system? Whereas when we look at the directly fascist governments, they didn't last an entire generation. Well, Franco did, actually. So Francoist Spain is another good place that we can look to for...

I don't know. I think this is the thing I'm going to be doing for a little while is looking at how people resisted dictatorships for no good reason. Again, no apparent reason. Yeah. Feels like a good idea. Yeah. I'm going to do it until suddenly I can't. There might be helpful information in there for no real reason, but maybe. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So...

What we have instead of the communist system is the capitalist system. And it asks that we interject this program with the sponsors. So here are those sponsors.

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And we're back. So, the context. Ha ha ha ha ha.

You should see her face. Big old smile. Yeah. Russia has a long history of people passing around manuscripts rather than finished books in order to bypass censorship. Because it is worth noting, it wasn't like the Bolsheviks came in and before that, like, they were, like, happy and free under the czar. You know, like, serfdom had only been abolished 60, 70 years earlier. And, like, it was a very uneven and autocratic society. Yeah.

In 1790, there was this book that was opposed to serfdom, A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, and it was confiscated by the cops. So folks started passing around person to person the actual original manuscripts of it. And they were just like, you have this like kind of lending library basically. And then in 1825, you have the Decemberist revolts, which I think we've covered a little bit in the Nihilist episodes, but there's so many revolts during all of this time.

Which is where the band gets its name. I was going to ask, but I just said in my brain, I went like, don't ask. That's a silly question. Yeah, I know. I was so excited. It almost certainly is. I haven't even specifically looked it up, but like that's where they get their name. That's who the Decemberists are, is a group of revolutionaries. Yeah. Cool. Love that even more. Yeah. Yeah.

And they had people passing around manuscripts and folks started having shit published internationally, like especially like printed in England and then smuggled into the country. Maybe most famously of all these pre-Soviet samizdats, which don't have that name yet. That name isn't coined until either 58 or 62, probably 62, but I've read both. Mm-hmm.

In 1848, Doskieski, whose name I will probably die not knowing how to pronounce properly, he got eight years in prison for passing around a letter that criticized the Orthodox Church and for trying to use a private printing press to evade censors. So it's not a fucking free society. Nope. But as far as I can tell, in the Tsarist times, it was largely the intelligentsia, the sort of upper middle class of academics and shit.

who had access to this sort of proto-Samizdat. As cool as secret handwritten publishing is, it doesn't break out of a specific social circle, and it doesn't break across class barriers. And things that are mass-produced have a much better chance of actually reaching the masses. By the dawn of the 20th century, a lot of illegal literature is being kind of mass-produced, as best as I can tell. The Bolsheviks themselves, who sort of

Whatever, we've done like probably at least 10 episodes about the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the anarchists and the SRs and all of that. The people who are going to have the revolution but aren't able to have it yet. Yeah. The Bolsheviks themselves relied on underground publishing before the revolution and

And I've read a while ago for a different episode a ton about how different radical groups were regularly getting shit printed overseas and smuggled into the country. And often in bulk. Like, I think people were, like, going to Switzerland and printing, like, a fuck ton of leaflets and pamphlets and stuff and then, like, bringing them back in however they can into Russia. But the Bolsheviks, even from the beginning, while they believe that they should be able to print whatever they want...

They don't think that other people should be able to print whatever they want. Okay. Yeah. Including other socialists and communists and the anarchists and all of those people. Uh-huh. And I will compare this to, and I suspect that the Mensheviks and the SRs also probably did, but I do know that the anarchists did believe in a free press. And so even when the Bolsheviks were like in the middle of attacking the anarchists, the anarchists were like, well, we can't tell you you can't print your newspapers. We can only tell you that you can't take over, you know? Yeah. Which...

I think it's cool as shit. Yeah? Like, yeah. In our anarchist society in Ukraine, you can print anti-anarchist stuff. Why would we tell you that you can't? Well, right. That's the point. If you want freedom of the press, you have to include things that you don't necessarily like. Totally. And I don't know whether they... I don't know whether or not they expanded that to, like, the monarchists who were trying to kill them all. I don't know how far it went or not, but...

Yeah, like what's the line? Yeah, but they probably weren't killing the poets. We'll get to the Bolsheviks killing poets in a little bit. Actually, in the next paragraph, we'll get to it. Oh, perfect.

As soon as the Bolsheviks seized power and put down the Russian Revolution, my like super short version of it that's very biased by my position is that it was a pluralistic revolution of all sorts of different socialist factions. And then the Bolsheviks were like, just kidding. It's our revolution. Went into a civil war to kill all of the other competing factions and put them down by force. And they instituted censorship.

By the time the USSR came into being in 1922, all literary production was state-controlled and sponsored, which is like, there's an upside to this, right? If you're a professional writer, the state's like, all right, well, we'll pay you to be a poet. We'll pay you to make books and stuff, right?

If they liked you. If they didn't like you, well, depending on who's in charge that year, they'll kill you or they'll put you in prison into a labor camp or they'll send you to Siberia. Or if you're really lucky, they just won't publish you and you'll be unemployed.

It's like a step in the right direction and concept, but not an execution when you're still utilizing the tactics from before against people that frighten you. Yeah, totally. And it was not just like people who wrote anti-Bolshevik stuff. It was like literally just, well, we don't like that, you know?

They had very specific rules about what kind of literature and what kind of art was encouraged and allowed and published. And among those that they started killing right away were poets. I guess, okay, so it's like worth pointing out. When we think about poetry nowadays, we're like, oh, poetry is really cool. Or like, oh, poetry is that thing that we hate when our friends tell us that they do because then they'll try and make us read their poetry. But we don't want to read their poetry because we don't want to tell them how we feel about it because that would hurt their feelings. You know? Yeah.

Before the fucking modern era, well, I guess the modern era includes all this. Before TV and shit, poetry was... They were like the fucking rock stars. In England, you have people lining up around the block for the new poem that drops from Lord Byron or whatever the fuck. And...

I mean, it's not because they were like inherently like smarter and cooler. They totally would have watched TV if they had TV. Right. But that was what was available. Yeah. But also you thought differently of poetry in general. Right. Exactly. And so when we say they're coming for the poets, it's a different thing. It's not like, oh, this person with this kind of niche hobby where they're sort of self-indulgent or whatever. I really like poetry and modern poetry. I'm not trying to talk shit. Just it's seen differently. Yeah. And I don't want to read your poetry, dear listener. I'm sorry. Or whatever. Anyway. Okay. Okay.

There was this poetry movement called the Acmeists that started in the early 20th century. I want to say the 1910s, but don't quote me. And the Acmeists, Acme comes from the same place as like literally like Roadrunner and shit, right? You know, like the Acme brand or whatever. Because Acme comes from like a Greek word that sort of means like it's used to mean the best. It's like the top of the game or whatever. Okay.

So the Acmeists, they were a response to the symbolists who came before them. And they were like, if you want to write about something, just write about it as clearly and succinctly as you can. And so this makes it sound like their poetry is going to be all like utilitarian and kind of blocky, but it actually really isn't. At least they're not the poet I read for this. The poet I read for this is now one of my favorite poets. Yeah.

And it's just, it's beautiful stuff. And I don't know enough about how to contrast it to symbolism because I'm like, well, there's still metaphor in it, you know? Right. But the Bolsheviks, they're killing people. For example, they kill one of the Acmeists, a poet named Nikolai Gumalev. And he was not a lefty. He was a monarchist. And he was executed in 1921 without a trial.

He wasn't executed for taking action against the communist revolution, but writing poetry that they didn't like and having ideas they didn't like. So art begins to go underground and artists learn whole new methods of distribution right away, including, and I don't know if they actually use this, but they could have, our sponsor, our perennial sponsor, the potato. Did you know that you can print with a potato? Yeah.

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So artists start learning whole new methods of distribution, including, well, I literally have no evidence that they did potato woodcuts. They probably didn't. It would not have been the most effective means. But take, for example, the Acmeist poet Anna Akhmatova, who has been heralded as one of the country's great poets before and during the revolution. And she's the main poet who I read during... That you liked? Yeah, no, she's fucking amazing. Her poetry is like...

Puts a little rip into your soul, but then it's like, but it's okay. It's okay. Like pets the wound, you know, it's like. That's kind of poetry. Yeah. She was not a monarchist. You can't say like the Acme has had the following political tendency, at least that I found because I've read about three of them and one of them was lefty and one of them was a political and one of them was a socialist. She was the non-political one. She didn't seem to stop the communists and I don't know, whatever. Yeah. Just trying to write poetry. Yeah.

Later, the communists worked hard to sort of claim she was a good Soviet patriot. She wasn't that either. She was just a poet. When all of her friends started emigrating during the revolution and after the Bolsheviks stole the revolution in particular and started like doing things like killing poets, she refused to leave, which is probably a familiar thought to everyone living in this country right now who's marginalized in a way that might make them vulnerable.

She would say shit like, a poet can only write in the country she's from, which I don't think that's true, but you're allowed to decide that for yourself. That was her truth anyway. Yeah. Since she's already kind of a big deal poet, when the Bolsheviks capture all the big rich villas and shit from all the rich people, they offer all the big deal artist people places to stay in those like palaces.

So she gets to live kind of one of my dreams, which is to live collectively, which is like you and all your friends take over some rich person's palace and then all live in a palace. But you just like 80 of you or whatever, you know. Yeah, that is the dream. But they're like, OK, you can move here. But then they're like, but we don't actually like your poetry. It's not the right kind of poetry. So they refuse to publish her. She's not towing the party line.

She's not really writing politically near, as I can tell. Later, she's going to write politically in response to what happens to her. But she used to be married to Gumalev, the monarchist that they'd executed. But she'd actually divorced him. But she divorced him well before the revolution started. And so they weren't married when he died. But she does have a kid with him. She has a kid named Lev Gumalev. And pretty much because Lev was the kid of someone that they'd executed without a trial, they threw him into jail.

Oh, man. So Anna starts hanging out outside the jail every day. She starts writing a poem about it, about her time hanging outside this prison. And the poem is called Requiem. And she has to write it line by line because it's not just like she's like, oh, I'm going to write it and I can't publish it. She's like not allowed to fucking write it.

Wow. At all, like not even just in your journal. Yeah. She writes it line by line and then burns each line in her ashtray after she finishes writing it. Because if the censors see it, they will throw her into prison. And so she memorizes this with her friends. She goes line by line and whispers it to her friends until they memorize it too. People did this for poetry sometimes twice.

Sometimes just until Stalin dies in 1952, 3. Sometimes they're doing it until the fall of the Soviet Union, you know? Yeah. This poem does not get published in the USSR until 1987 or 88. Wow. Or 89. I've read both 87 and 89. 88 didn't. Never mind. That's right in between, so. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And the story of how she came to write this poem is right in the opening of the poem. Most of it is more proper poetry, but there's like a prose paragraph kind of section at the top. And so I'm just going to read that. During the frightening period of the Yezhov Terror, which is the name of one of the guys leading Stalin's purges, I spent 17 months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad.

One day, somehow, someone picked me out. On that occasion, there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear, everyone whispered there, could anyone ever describe this? And I answered, I can. It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.

And so, yeah, after spending 17 months hanging out outside this prison waiting to find out what's going to happen to her kid who's done literally nothing wrong, she writes this poem. And it survives because her and other people memorized it. And I'm going to read some of that poem. I don't... Sometimes I read poetry on this show, but it's not a huge thing I do. You've read that other piece very well. Oh, thanks. And I...

I kind of figure like this is such an important part of the culture resistance. So I feel like reading some of it. Yeah. Also, I think some of it applies right now as we watch people getting disappeared off of the streets because that is happening. I mean, it's chilling. Yeah. Yeah. Because we often are like, well, what if they come for us? They are already coming for people in this country. This is just a we've been doing a fun bit about how it's for no particular reason why this is important. Obviously. Yeah.

It's the same thing, but different, but the same for people speaking out. Yeah. For criticizing the president. Sending people to El Salvador for, yeah. People to El Salvador, people trying to get into this country and their social media being checked. What are we talking about here? Yeah. Anyway. It's funny because the people who are listening to this a year from now are either going to be like, whoo, we pulled back from that cliff. Or people are going to be like, oh, that was really cute that those were your biggest problems back then. I know.

Anyway, here's a piece, a bit of Requiem. "'We are everywhere the same, "'listening to the scrape and turn of hateful keys "'and the heavy tread of marching soldiers, "'waking early as if for early mass, "'walking through the capital run wild, gone to seed. "'We'd meet, the dead lifeless, "'the sun lower every day, the neva mistier, "'but hope still sings forever in the distance.'

It happened like this when only the dead were smiling, glad of their release. You were taken away at dawn. I followed you as one does when a corpse is being removed. Children were crying in the darkened house. A candle flared, illuminating the mother of God. The cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold sweat on your brow. I will never forget this.

I will gather to wail with the wives of the murdered Streltsy, inconsolably beneath the Kremlin towers. Wow, that's beautiful. Yeah, like I'm just like, yeah, I had heard of her before. She's one of my best friend's favorite poets, but I hadn't really sat down with her before this. Yeah. The poem was published abroad in the 1960s, but yeah, published in Russia in 1987 or 1989.

Her son spent years in prison. They let him out long enough to fight in World War II in the Red Army. Oh, how nice of them. And then they put him back in prison afterwards. Come on! Fucking wild. I know. Okay, the one thing, Lev, her son, he's a bastard. Like, when he gets out, he gets out when Stalin dies, he becomes a bastard race scientist man.

He builds up this whole belief system that ethnicities are like their own organisms that have their own characteristics. Oh, no. He's a heavy influence on fucking Putin's race science. Okay, well, you know. But he hadn't done any of that before they locked him up.

And maybe some of that happened to him inside. I don't know. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's funny because there's a couple of these moments where I'm like, look, some of the people that they locked up were bad people. But like. Yeah, sure. But the principle of it is remains true. It's like. You still got to give people trials and like. Exactly. Even the shitty people. Yeah. So his mom's crew of acmeists, they're having a hell of a hard time under the new Bolshevik regime.

One of the more prominent early victims of Bolshevik crackdown and self-publishing was a Jewish socialist named Asip Mandelstam. He's one of the Acmeists. He supported the revolution. I think he was with the SRs and then later the Bolsheviks. And soon after the Bolsheviks take power, they're like, all right, all art must serve the revolution. And he's like,

Wait, what? That's not what I was revolutionary-ing for. Revolutionary-ing? Well, whatever. Yeah. I like Oscar Wilde's take on this, which is you don't have art for socialism's sake, you have socialism for art's sake. That one. Always with the right phrasing. Yeah. Yeah, that was good. Yeah. And unfortunately, the Bolsheviks must not have heard of Oscar Wilde or they totally wouldn't have become Bolsheviks. They were like, no, we don't really like that free expression stuff.

And so he starts writing politically, but not actually about politics. He starts writing about the autonomy of the individual versus giving yourself over to the state. And he starts writing the personal as political in a really direct way. Like literally it becomes a revolutionary, like or counter-revolutionary if you're a Bolshevik, act to write about individual love. Not even like, oh, loving a person is better than loving the state. Just literally being like,

I'm in love with this person. Yeah. Instead of writing about the love for your comrades. So he's struggling to get published as a poet, and he supports himself writing children's books. Throughout the 1920s, you get the first culture of what will later be called Samizdat, but it's still not called that. At this time, and kind of around Osip, the Jewish socialist guy, they're called Underwoods because of the brand of typewriter that everyone was using is an Underwood.

And they would pass around their poetry and their books in original manuscript, like typewritten form. Osip is very aware the Eye of Sauron is like on him. So for, I had to get a Lord of the Rings reference in here somewhere. So that's where I did it. Yeah, thank you. So for a while, he and his wife fuck off to Armenia. Basically one of his higher up, he's like, the literary scene is kind of close to power. And so like Stalin's like kind of paying attention to him, right? And he's like, I don't like that.

And so one of his other friends is a little bit more in with everyone, gets them basically being like, oh, yeah, we totally need someone over in Armenia. Why don't you go over there for a while? And he's like, I will. Good move. Sounds like. I know. I know. Meanwhile, he has this friend named Vladimir Mayakovsky. And 1930, this poet Vladimir kills himself. And this man had been a committed Bolshevik revolutionary.

He had spent years writing pro-communist poetry during the revolution. He was like the soul of Soviet poetry, according to everyone, for a while, right? Until he found himself banned and censored, like all other people who actually believed in art and beauty and shit like that. And so he killed himself.

And in my mind is yet another victim of Stalin from my point of view. Many, many of the original Bolsheviks are killed by Stalin in the 1930s. After he died, Stalin was like, oh, he was great and he loved us and we loved him, which has just got to be a horrid fate for your legacy. Osip comes back from Armenia and he starts writing poetry that he couldn't publish because he's

Well, he just couldn't get anything published. So at this point, he's like, he starts writing poetry about how he's doomed to die, that the Bolsheviks are going to kill him. That is the poetry he writes. And then in 1933, he wrote a poem that accused Stalin of murder. Oh. And two of the lines from it are, he rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. Oh. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

He didn't even publish this. He just started spreading it mostly by word of mouth and on like one or two typewritten manuscripts. And most of his friends are like, the fuck are you doing? And they're like, why would you even say that to me, man? Yeah. So he was arrested and tortured and exiled and then died in a prison camp of heart failure. Yeah. Poets and authors kept going, memorizing everything that they could so that it could be published one day when society was free once more.

One author, Marina Zvetyeva, sold her little hand-bound, hand-sewn poetry journals and called it Overcoming Gutenberg. Other people called it, quote, writing for the desk drawer, since they knew it could never go anywhere. They were just like, oh, I'm writing this other one for no one.

But you couldn't actually keep it in a regular old desk drawer because that shit's going to get tossed by the fucking secret. I was going to say, doesn't sound like you should leave it just laying around and needs to be hidden under some floorboards or something. Yeah, they are literally burying it. Yeah. Yeah.

During the peak of Stalin's terror in the 1930s and 40s, there weren't underwoods going around anymore, not really. There weren't people passing manuscripts anymore. There were just whispered words and memorization, like Requiem. People would have to hide the fact that they were writers at all. Many of them were writing from labor camps where they'd been sent for writing. But then, in 1953, Joseph Stalin made perhaps...

his great contribution to global communism. He died. The man who replaced him for about 10 years was a guy named Nikita Khrushchev. And the overall vibe of this guy is like, hey, I'm not Stalin, which is a good vibe to have coming in after Stalin. Absolutely. This fundamental dictatorial nature of the USSR doesn't go away under him, but he lessens it up quite a lot. It's not like free press, but more stuff is getting approved.

Right. OK. Not free, but freer. Yeah, totally. You can't just do whatever you want willy nilly, like write stuff down and let people read it. Sure. That would be wild. Yeah. But it's easier to get it approved. And so some people are able to start writing again under Khrushchev. Don't worry, like 10 years later, he's going to get ousted for not being whatever. Womp womp. Yeah. And more stuff is allowed through.

including a book by perhaps the most famous author we're going to talk about this week.

He is not quite cool people who did cool stuff, but he's a complicated guy who did cool stuff. Okay, okay. A reoccurring theme on this show. Uh-oh, that could be its own spinoff, I guess. I know, really. That's the secret subtext of half of the episodes. It's like, your heroes were more complicated than you thought. Yeah, yeah. But not in a, like, so fuck them forever way, but, you know. No. Well, some of them, but, yeah. Sure, but...

You can understand that people are complex. In fact, we all are. Yeah. Well, not me. I fortunately have been blessed by never doing anything wrong.

Good for you. Yeah, no. And anyone who tries to bring it to my attention that I've done something wrong is actually the one doing something wrong. It's really important for people to understand. You're perfect. We've established. And that's why I should be in charge of the anarcho-gulag. That's, I agree. Yeah, absolutely. That's right. If they criticize you, then there must be something deeply evil about them. Yeah, I was thinking like, well, they're not like permanently flawed. They could just be taught again. We'll call them teaching again camps.

Oh, yeah. Do it better this time is the subtitle. Build back better. And that book, the more famous one and the author and the rise of Samizdat culture, which is still isn't even being called that yet. We're going to talk about on Wednesday. Oh, Wednesday. I know. I don't know. I just wanted to add some flair. I don't know.

How are you feeling about underground publishing so far? I think this is really rad. There's so many parallels to be brought to, as we've established, modern day. I think it's cool. It sounds pretty punk rock. Yeah. Complicated, scary, terrifying, potentially demoralizing era where people such as these that you've outlined here are vital. Yeah. Yeah.

One of the things that I think about on a regular basis, a long time ago I did an episode about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And when I think about that closed, doomed society, the things that they smuggled in, there was three things that mattered to them, which was food, arms, and the means of printing. The means of printing was so important to people. And I think that's a thing that we sometimes take for granted. And obviously it would be harder to silence...

the free production of stuff in the modern era, but not impossible. Like, for example, did you know that every commercially available home printer leaves a fingerprint that can be tracked forensically? I didn't know. I didn't know that. Isn't that fun? It's one of those things where you're like, when you're in normal time society, you're like, well, all right. I mean, I'm not doing anything wrong, so whatever. There's free speech. But when you're like,

Oh, if you live in a dictatorship. Right. We're actually so much more traceable, trackable, detectable than you could even imagine. Even if you're writing something on your computer and not posting it, well, I guess that's imaginable at this point. People have access to your hard drives. Yeah, depending, but yeah. Depending, and then there's other forms of censorship. It's all relatable. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's not hopeless. And I mean, one, we're also not there yet. Or we might not get there. We might continue to have free speech. Well, except for, of course, the people who get pulled off the streets for participating in protected free speech activities. Besides those people. God damn it. What a fucking time. Yeah. Yeah. I like to remind myself we aren't actually. It's happening, but it's we're not at the end. There's still time for us to change this outcome. Yeah, totally. Totally.

But I also think it's worth people understanding that among other things to prepare for, I think it's worth people thinking about how they would continue to produce culture under different circumstances. 100%. Now is the time to have those conversations and to have with yourself, with other people. Yeah. But we're not going to tell you how we're going to... Well, we're just going to keep going forever because everyone loves us. Yeah. They can't stop me from podcasting. Maybe they could. Yeah, I know, right? I don't know. I hope. I think. I think.

I don't think they are. That's like a conversation Robert and I have like every couple hours. Like, hmm, we could keep doing this, I think. Right? Yeah, totally. Yeah? Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Anyway, we'll probably be back on Wednesday. We'll probably see you Wednesday, folks. In the meantime, listen to, you know, all the things that we do while you can.

Oh, yeah. Get it while you can. Listen to Hood Politics with Prop. Listen to 16th Minute of Fame. Listen to Better Offline. That's it. Those are all the cool Zen media shows, right? No. No? There's other ones. Forgot It Could Happen Here. Forgot Weird Little Guys. Oh, I did forget Weird Little Guys. I'm so sorry. I mean, and also It Could Happen Here. And Behind the Bastards. And Behind the Bastards.

Which has a lot more about, if you want to learn more about Stalin, listen to the really old episodes of Behind the Bastards. And listen to actual news on the even more variety. Yeah. Or the some more variety. Heck yeah. We got that. News, we've got it. Some of it and even more of it. I first actually heard about you not on Behind the Bastards, but on Worst Year Ever.

Really? That was a good show. I really liked it. I know. We did too. I missed that. It was fun. It was also very hard to balance all everything. We did it during one of the hardest times in the world. Yeah. We burnt ourselves out nice. But then you guys also launched all of your other shows and lots of things. Yeah. Now we're even more tired. Now we're even more tired. And then there's also this thing where I'm like, even

Even though I'm tired and a little bit burned out. There's also like a fire under me a little bit more where I'm like... Yeah, for sure. Oh, I better... Like researching this stuff was like, well, I want to know about how they did this, you know? And like all of the... I mean, that's the thing I like about my show is I genuinely care about the things that I talk about. But like it's been... I don't know. Unfortunately, it allows me to run on fumes sometimes is how much I care about this stuff. Right. It's an extra bit of motivation, but...

It's also feels like a necessity at times. Like I've got to. Yeah. No, I know what you're saying. It's hard to articulate, but yeah. And I want to not be entirely self-aggrandizing about the podcasting field here. I know that everyone is experiencing this. I want to be really clear about that. Oh, 100%. Everybody has their own relationship to it, regardless of what you do for a living or, you know.

Welcome to the apocalypse where you still have to pay rent. And yeah. Yep. We'll see you all on Wednesday. Wednesday. Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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