Samizdat: Montag Comes for Gutenberg

by James Doone

James Doone foresees a future where samizdat returns, as the West now mirrors Soviet-era censorship, silencing dissent and rewriting history, forcing truth to be smuggled from Moscow to Bristol.

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world”. - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Many of you may not be familiar with the Russian word samizdat (самиздат), which means ‘self-publishing’ and refers to the underground printing presses of dissidents in the Soviet Union. Everyone knows the USSR was a tightly controlled police state where censorship was hard, like an iron fist in a steel glove. Stalin, despite being a communist diehard and a tyrant of the most despotic kind, far beyond any sense of normal tyranny, knew when to let the grip on books, cinema and other things slip. This was for pragmatic purposes, he knew when the lion needed to be thrown a piece of meat. A good example was just before WWII when there were rumblings of German ambitions in the east, Stalin forced or allowed Sergei Eisenstein to make his masterpiece of a film — with no less than Prokofiev creating the score — Alexander Nevsky (1936). One of the best all round films, and war films, ever made, with a brilliant battle scene, the ‘Battle of the Ice’, the film followed the tale of Prince Alexander of Novgorod in his fight against the invading Teutonic Knights and his effort to save the Rus. One can see why Stalin, in 1936, wanted to encourage Russian nationalism. As men would not sign up in droves to fight for communism, for an abstract German ideology totally contrary to the Russian soul, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out, rather they fought for Russia, many men would volunteer to fight for their homeland. At the time and just after the coup by Lenin, the USSR burned nearly all pre-Soviet literature; anything related to the old regime of the czars was destroyed for being ideologically impure. Very religious communism is, isn’t it?

The YouTube channel known as Unto Ages recently published a video called Everyone Has Sacraments where he talks how all men are divinely made to worship. I remember reading the writings of the old Bolsheviks, and a letter one of them wrote to some ideologically impure persons, and the language spoke of sin against the party, blasphemy against communism, and the letter was dripping with moral language and ethical maxims. It was a communist letter yet it sounded like a sermon from a medieval cleric calling the knights of France on a crusade.

Even after the thaw of Khrushchev after the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet literature and culture was still heavily censored by the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR (Russian: Главное управление по охране государственных тайн в печати при СМ СССР), which was quite understandably known as Glavlit. There was also the State Committee for Publishing in the Soviet Union, known in Russian as Государственный комитет по делам издательств, полиграфии и книжной торговли СССР, known as Goskomizdat, which was tasked with censoring books and printed media. There were other units of course but we shall be here all day going through the Soviet bureaucracy. These organisations were tasked with ensuring the ideological and political orthodoxy of books in line with the Communist Party and the Soviet state. Many important works of Russians and in Russian would go on to be world famous, particularly after their publication, such as the work by the Soviet dissenter Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his work The Gulag Archipelago about Soviet labour camps, which many have heard of, including people who have never read it know what it is about. Most of Solzhenitsyn’s works were published outside the USSR (mainly in Paris) by members of the Russian diaspora.

Any work deemed Western was immediately culled or censored to remove anything viewed as anti-Soviet. The Bolsheviks were not interested in truth, only in making the USSR look always the best, no matter how much lies were piled up. Sir Roger Scruton (1948-2020), the traditional conservative English philosopher and master of Kant, was during the days of the Iron Curtain in the Warsaw Pact nations an infiltrator and provider of censored literature to create a renaissance in the Soviet-led bloc. He was particularly active between 1979 and 1989 in Czechia and Poland and he helped to form links with the Czech underground and arrange lectures, books and other Western materials for scholars and citizens living in the Iron Curtain, and for his efforts he was awarded the Medal of Merit (First Class) of the Czech Republic (1998), Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2019) and the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Hungarian Order of Merit (2019). Long may our noble Scrutonius be remembered for the stout Englishman that he was.

Once Europe had Western intellectuals smuggling contraband literature from a free Europe and America to a tyrannical East. O how the tables have turned, gone are the days of the COLD WAR, between the Soviet bear and the American eagle. No. Now the West has become the axis of evil, America is now the evil empire. Once it was the Soviets persecuting, imprisoning, murdering priests, monks and lay Christians and burning Bibles and icons, yet Russia now in its post-communist state has not only fully allowed Orthodoxy — the one true faith — to flourish but actively supports and promotes it, with new churches and monasteries being built en masse! Once America was a protestant nation with all the zeal, devotion and piety of settler pilgrims, Calvinists clinging to their Bibles and Lutherans to their Book of Concord, and working to be moral, and yet now America has become a daemon. America now jails Christians, persecutes them, and actively supports everything anti-Christian, and things contrary to Christian morality. Whatever Christianity says is evil, America now says, ‘We’ll do it then.’

Britain is the same. One can see videos of Christians being arrested for saying ‘offensive’ things, and being arrested for praying silently in their heads as a BBC article showed. The BBC is our version of Lenin’s Pravda (meaning ‘truth’) newspaper in the USSR. Never mind the Orwellian BBC Verify, laughable propaganda outlet. Once people living under the Soviet yoke printed works underground to avoid the censors. Those days are over for Russia, but for us in Europe and America, we now live in nations where samizdat will not be a rare thing, but rather the norm. I see a time soon when any book the regime does not like will be banned, and therefore I can see them being printed in Russia to be smuggled out of Moscow and into Bristol harbour to be read by the dissidents of the AMERICAN EMPIRE.

Keep printed copies of great works, for the internet will swallow them whole never to be seen, but a copy of Evola or Spengler in paperback will last down the centuries. Gutenberg’s invention caused a revolution, not only a religious one, but also a cultural one. Guard your presses and typewriters from the hand of Leviathan. Books are being rewritten. Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Fleming’s Bond, and more are facing woke re-writes. Save the classics from mediocrity. Maybe one day, these articles will be samizdat, the ghost of Lenin will probably return from the grave to devour us all.

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” — Solzhenitsyn