“The term Samizdat translated from the Russian sam or ‘self’ and izadatelstvo or ‘publishing,’ is a play on the official soviet Gosizdat, or ‘State Publishing House.’ Literature which would be considered samizdat are manuscripts which were privately and illegally produced and circulated in the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Before glasnost in the 1980s, this was the only way in which to publish anything not endorsed and censored by the government.”
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