The Dissidents Who Kept Writing and Printing (Samizdat networks, USSR and Eastern Europe, 1950s–1980s)
Quick answer: What was samizdat?
Samizdat, meaning self-publish, was the underground practice in the USSR and Eastern Europe of retyping banned writing by hand with carbon paper and passing it person to person. From the 1950s to the 1980s it carried works like The Gulag Archipelago, Havel's essays, and the Chronicle of Current Events, despite the risk of prison.
In a small Moscow apartment in 1966, Natalya Gorbanevskaya types with onionskin and carbon paper. One sheet becomes four. Eight copies is a good night. Those pages go to another apartment and get retyped there. The text moves the way water does, through cracks and around barricades. They called it samizdat, self-publishing, a pun on the official state presses. By the 1980s it was an underground logistics system of typists, couriers, readers, and safe apartments, carrying manuscripts from Moscow to Prague to Warsaw. Possession could mean arrest, prison, forced psychiatric hospitalization, or exile. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago traveled this way, and so did Havel's essays and the Chronicle of Current Events, which recorded arrests and trials from 1968 to 1983: names, dates, charges. It was slow and exhausting. It worked because it didn't have to outprint the state, only outlast its ability to stop every node. Once people have read something, John writes, you can't unread it for them.
Why it matters for leaders: Concentrated information creates fragility; distributed information creates resilience that no single actor can freeze.
Q: How many copies could one typist make?
A: Natalya Gorbanevskaya considered eight carbon copies a good night; each reader could retype more.
Q: What modern question does John pose?
A: Are you building a system that depends on permission, or one that survives interference?
Read the full essay on Substack → https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-dissidents-who-kept-writing-and
By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation