Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition

From courageous agitation by Pussy Riot to the popular working-class uprising for national sovereignty and political rights in Ukraine, events across the former Soviet Union in the 21st century bring new life to these works clandestinely circulated hand to hand in the USSR between the 1950s and early 1970s.

Authors give firsthand accounts of the Bolshevik revolution; 1918-20 civil war; and resistance to the Stalinist political counterrevolution that reversed V.I. Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course. Read about the 1953 rebellion at the Vorkuta forced-labor camp; opposition to Moscow’s 1968 invasion to crush the “Prague Spring”; and struggles by Ukrainians, Tatars, and other non-Russian peoples for national rights.

“Materials from the 1960s and afterwards produced by dissident Marxists extolling the lost revolutionary tradition of the original Bolsheviks.” —Research Book News

George Saunders is editor of Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (1974).