March 31, 2025 • 46 mins
Margaret talks to Katy Stoll about how the Soviet people evaded censors and kept poetry, literature, and political critique alive.
The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat, Ann Komaromi
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html
HG Skilling, Samizdat and an Indepedent Society in Central and Eastern Europe
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nikolai-gumilev
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anna-akhmatova
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/osip-mandelstam
https://libcom.org/article/1962-novocherkassk-tragedy
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-09284-0_1
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're a 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 Stole. Hi.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
How are you ugh, I'm okay, I'm good. I'm glad
to be here, happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
In fact, Yeah, the world's going great.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
It's true. Hey, completely unrelated. There's been all this stuff
about people bringing down the stock value of Tesla. But anyway,
through all kinds of methods.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah, anyway, I'm happy to be here. I feel like
this is a bright light in the world, being able
to commit talk about good things.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
I know, and people want to hear more good things.
Which of your various news shows should they listen to
or watch?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
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. Monday's we release one we
record Monday morning, release Monday evening, I know, and then
(01:27):
another one that we record Thursday's release Friday. We just
needed to add an extra episode because there's so much
to talk about and we couldn't get through it all.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, that actually makes sense.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
And also we now are doing video versions of them,
putting 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.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yeah, it's a whole other world out there, but yeah,
sure plug that. We try to We try to find
bright spots out there too, but we do talk about
the bad spots.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Is that every cross my mind from time to time?
It sure does.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
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 during dictatorship. But first, I'm being reminded by my
producer Sophie that I should do the rest of my introduction,
like introducing Sophie. Here's my producer, Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
How are you, Hi, Magpie. Hi Katie. You're doing great, Magpie.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Thanks. Thanks. And we also have an audio engineer named Rory.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Hi Rory, Hey, Roy, Hi Rory.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And our theme music is written for us by unwoman.
And I think that's the rest of the introduction. You
think I would know. I'm on episode like a one
hundred and fifty. Well, actually like three hundred, because there's
two of every thing.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, anyway, congratulations, that's a lot of episodes.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
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 substack 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.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Also a weird thing to do for a living, especially
right now.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, yeahm h. So we're going to just tell a
fun family story for no particular reason about continuing cultural
production during dictatorship. This week's story is about samas dot,
the underground publishing within the Soviet Union and the Communist
Bloc countries during the Cold War. You ever you ever
heard much about this stuff?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
No, not at all.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Actually, I like it's funny because so many people use
samas dot 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 arrest the sentence makes sense that you
just sort of ignore the word. Yeah, Okay, there's an
irony here. I'm doing this whole episode about how people
(04:23):
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 i'vory towered. I had to talk
to all of my friends with academic privileges to get
access to this. Yeah, so there's a little irony there
(04:46):
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 strict censorship, they were people evading that censorship
through various means. By the time you get to the
nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, there's this whole culture
(05:10):
that springs up around samisdot 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
like xerox machines. These were generally typed on carbon paper
(05:30):
and then retyped by their recipients like chain letters.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
But good, that's yeah, beautiful actually, yeah. Just the idea
of people receiving a hand type poem or what have
you and then typing it up and paying it sending
it forward, I think is really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
I know totally, especially with the like 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 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
(06:09):
in a camp that kills about ten percent of the people,
but better than earlier where they're just dying. And samas
dot as a culture lasted until basically nineteen eighty seven,
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
(06:33):
I've read two different sources that have different positions on this,
that political samas dot actually continued for a few more
years until the USSR actually fell completely in think nineteen
ninety two. Okay, because at least some people seem to
be censored still despite this like overall loosening.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
It might be some mixture of both.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, it's like almost everyone got to start publishing, and
basically the anarchosynical list didn't, is the best I can tell.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
The other annoying thing about researching samas dot, 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.
(07:26):
And there is a little bit of that, right, But
there's not a lot a 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 samas dot.
But a lot of it was about cultural production in
(07:48):
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 m hm
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.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Oh wait, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
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 samisdat was a culture samis dot was fun
and exciting. It was inherently cool because it was countercultural.
(08:30):
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
(08:54):
and songs and all of this stuff. And a lot
of it was self consciously what they could 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
(09:16):
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 twentieth century to make
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
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 yeah, you know, it's like, well, yeah,
I know I want this thing, but not by that person.
It's like I want our food system to be overhauled,
just not by our FK.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, totally, you know, totally. No. This is 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
(10:47):
should happen after I die. It's like a general rule.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Yes, then I'm fine, please have at it.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah that's 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 offscript. There's this thing
where like we all kind of look at what's happening
(11:15):
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. But it's not the only place,
Like the world is full of dictatorships that we can
look to.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
I know, I was just recently, like yesterday, I had
this thought of, like 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.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Most especially white people in America and probably just people
raised in the American educational system. Yeah, know a hell
of a lot more about Nazi Germany than they do
about like other terrible systems, including the one that's slaved
and genocided here on this very continent called the United
States of America.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Right exactly, we know way more about that than our
own history.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
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 block countries, especially by the time
you're talking about the sixties and seventies, is you're talking
about what does resistance look like for people who like
grew up inside this authoritarian system, you know, whereas when
we look at the directly fascist governments, they didn't last
(12:30):
an entire generation. They were well, Franco did, actually, so
franco Is 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 reasons.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Again, no apparent reason. Yeah, feels like a good idea.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, I'm going to do it until.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
It might be how can information in there for no
real reason?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
But maybe yeah, yeah, exactly. So what we have instead
of the commune system is the capitalist system, and it
asks that we interject this program with the sponsors.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
So, oh, here are those sponsors, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
So the context, you should see her face, big old smile.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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 in sixty seventy years earlier, and like
(13:49):
it was a very big unevened in autocratic society. In
seventeen ninety there was this book that was opposed to Serfdom,
a Journey from Peter's 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're just like,
(14:10):
so you have this like kind of lending library basically.
And then in eighteen twenty five you have the Decembrist 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.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
But I was going to ask, but I just said
to me in my brain, I went and like, don't ask.
That's a silly question.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah, no, 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 Decembrists are is a group of revolutionaries. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Cool, love that even more.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
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 Samas Dots, which don't have that
name yet. That name isn't coined until either fifty eight
or sixty two, probably sixty two, but I've read both.
(15:05):
In eighteen forty eight, Doskievsky, 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 not
a fucking free society, Nope. But as far as I
(15:29):
can tell, in the Czaris Times, it was largely the intelligentsia,
the sort of upper middle class of academics and shit,
who had access to this sort of proto samis Dot.
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
(15:51):
a much better chance of actually like reaching the masses.
By the dawn of the twentieth 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 ten episodes about
the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the anarchists and the
(16:13):
s rs 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 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,
(16:33):
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
(16:54):
that other people should be able to print whatever they want, Okay,
including other socialists, some communists and the anarchists and all
of those people. And I will compare this too, 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
(17:15):
were like, well, we can't tell you can't print your newspapers.
We can only tell you that you can't take over
you know, Yeah, which I think is 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.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Went or not, but yeah, like what's the line.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
But yeah, but they probably weren't killing the poets. We'll
get to them. 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 super
short version of it that's very biased by my position
is that it was a pluralistic revolution of all sorts
(18:11):
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 nineteen twenty two,
(18:32):
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 States like, all right, well, we'll pay you to
be a poet, will 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,
(18:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
It's like a step in the right direction and concept,
but not in execution when we're still utilizing the tactics
from before against people that frighten you.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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,
(19:41):
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 like TV
(20:04):
and shit, poetry was the They were like the fucking
rock stars, you know, like in England you have people
like lining up around the block for the new poem
that drops from Lord Byron or whatever the fuck you know.
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.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
But right, that's but that was what was available.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
But also you thought differently of poetry in general.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
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,
there was this poetry movement called the Acmeists that started
(20:51):
in the early twentieth century I want to say the
nineteen tents, 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 okay, the top of a game or whatever.
(21:14):
So the Acmists 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 they're poetry is going to be all
like utilitarian and kind of blocky, but it actually really isn't,
(21:34):
at least not the poet I read for this. The
poet I read for this is now one of my
favorite poets. 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 Acmists, a poet named Nikolai Gumelev, and
(21:59):
he was not a lefty. He was a monarchist, and
he was executed in nineteen twenty one 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. Wow, So art begins to go underground,
(22:20):
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?
Did you know that you can cut a potato in
half and then carve out whatever you would like and
put it on an ink blot or whatever you call
(22:43):
those things pad an ink pad. I didn't.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I did not know that.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Actually, yeah, that's why the potato is so perfect.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
I know you can do anything with a potato.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I've got some potatoes in the fridge, leftovers tonight.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I want potatoes now, our French fries after this. Anyway,
besides potatoes, apparently there's some other ads for some weird reason,
and here they are, and we're back back. We're so back.
(23:21):
So artists start learning whole new methods of distribution, including
why 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 acmeust poet Anna Akmatova,
who has been heralded as one of the country's great
poets before and during the revolution. And she's the main
(23:42):
poet who I read during that. 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.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
You know, it's like that's kind of poetry.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, she was not a monarch. You can't say like
the acmeus had the following political tendency, at least that
I've found, because I've read about three of them, and
one of them was lefty him, 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
(24:17):
to write poetry. 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
Bolshevik stole the Revolution in particular, and started like doing
things like killing poets, she refused to leave, which is
(24:39):
probably a familiar thought to everyone living in this country
right now is 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.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
That was her truth. Anyway.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
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 artists people places to stay in those 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
(25:20):
then all live in a palace. But you just just
like eighty of you or whatever.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
You know, Yeah, that is the dream.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
But they're like, okay, 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 and response to what happens to her.
But she used to be married to Gumalev, the monarchist
(25:48):
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 throw him.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Into jail ah Man.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
It, you know, wow at all, Like not even just
in your journal.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah. She writes it line by line and then burns
each line in her ash tray after she finishes writing it, wow,
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
(26:58):
poetry sometimes sometimes just until Stalin dies in nineteen fifty
two three. Sometimes they're doing it until the fall of
the Soviet Union. You know, this poem does not get
published in the USSR until nineteen eighty seven or eighty eight, wow,
or eighty nine. I've read both eighty seven and eighty nine.
(27:20):
Eighty eight didn't never.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Mind, well that's right in between.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
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 purchase,
(27:45):
I spent seventeen months waiting in prison cues 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
(28:06):
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 seventeen months hanging out outside this prison waiting
to find out what's going to happen to her kid,
(28:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
We've read that other piece very well.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Oh thanks, And 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.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
I mean it's chilling.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, yeah, because we often are like, well, what if
they come for us? They are already coming for people
in this country.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
This is just a we've been doing a fun bit
about how it's for no particular reason why this is important.
Obviously it's the same thing, bit different, but the same
for people speaking out.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah, for criticizing El Salvador.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
For yeah, these people, all Salvador people trying to get
into this country and their social media being checked. What
are we talking about here?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah? Anyway, it's funny because the people who are listening
to this a year from now are either going to
be like, who we pulled back from that cliff, or
people are going to be like, oh, that was really
cute that those are your biggest problems. Back now anyway,
here's a piece, a bit of requiem. We are everywhere
the same, listening to the scrape and turn of hateful keys,
(29:48):
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 life, the sun
lower every day, the never mistier, but hope still sings
forever in the distance. It happened like this, when only
(30:11):
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
(30:32):
death cold sweat on your brow. I will never forget this.
I will gather to wail with the wives of the
murdered STRELSTI inconsolably beneath the Kremlin towers.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
Wow, that's beautiful.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
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 poet almost published abroad in the nineteen sixties,
but yeah, published in Russia in nineteen eighty seven or
nineteen eighty nine. Her Son spent years in prison. They
(31:10):
let him out long enough to fight in World War
Two in the Red Army.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Oh how nice of them, and.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Then they put him back in prison afterwards.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Come on, fucking wild.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
I know, Okay, I did 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, and like,
oh no, he's a heavy influence on fucking Putin's race science. Okay, well,
(31:47):
you know, but he hadn't done any of that before
they locked him.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Up, and maybe maybe some of that happened to him inside.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
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, we're bad people.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
But like, yeah, sure, but the principle of it has
remains true.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
It's like, I still got to give people trials and.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Like exactly, even the shitty people.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah. So his mom's crew of acmists. 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 Ossip Mandelstam.
He's one of the acmists. He supported the revolution. I
(32:32):
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 h.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
That's not what I was revolutionarying for evlutionary ing.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Well whatever, Yeah, I like Oscar Wilde's take on this,
which is, you don't have art for socialism sake, your
socialism for art's sake. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
That one always the right phrasing. Yeah, yeah, that was good.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, And unfortunately the Bolsheviks must not have heard of
Oscar Wilder. 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
(33:23):
yourself over to the state, and he starts writing the
personal as political in a really direct way, like literally,
it becomes a revolutionary 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,
(33:47):
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 nineteen twenties, you
get the first culture of what will later be called Samisdak,
but it's still not called that at this time, and
kind of around Osip, the Jewish socialist guy, they're called
(34:07):
underwoods because of the brand of typewriter that everyone was
using is an underwood, and they would pass around their
poetry and their books an original manuscript like type written form.
Osip is very aware the eye of Sourn is like
on him, so for I had to get a Lord
of the Rings reference in here so much, that's right, Yeah, yeah,
(34:29):
thank you.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
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 while you go over
(34:53):
there for a while. And he's like, I will.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Bid move sounds like I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Meanwhile, he has this friend named Vladimir Mayakovsky, and nineteen thirty,
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
(35:24):
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 as yet another victim of Stalin. From my point
of view, many many of the original Bolsheviks are killed
by Stalin. In the nineteen thirties. After he died, Stalin
(35:47):
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 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
(36:09):
kill him. That is the poetry he writes. And then
in nineteen thirty three he wrote a poem that accused
Stalin of murder ooh, and two of the lines from
it are he rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. Oooh.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
(36:33):
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?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
And they're like, why would you even say that to me? Man?
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, So he was arrested and tortured and exiled and
then died in a prison camp of heart failure. YEP.
Poets and authors kept going memorizing everything that they could,
so that it could be public one day when society
was free once more. One author, Marina zvechya Yeva, sold
(37:06):
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, I'm writing this other one for
no one, But you couldn't actually keep it in a
regular old desk drawer because that's what's going to be
tossed by the fucking series.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
I was going to say, it doesn't sound like you
should leave it just laying around and needs to be
hidden under some floorboards or something.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, they are literally burying it.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yeah. During the peak of Stalin's terror in the nineteen
thirties and forties, 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
(37:58):
for writing. But then in nineteen fifty three, Joseph Stalin
made perhaps his great contribution to global communism. He died.
The man who replaced him for about ten years was
a guy named Nikita Krushev, And the overall vibe of
(38:20):
this guy is like, hey, I'm not Stalin, which is
a good vibe to have coming in after Stalin. Absolutely,
this fundamental dictorial 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, Okay, not free, but for your yeah, totally.
(38:43):
You can't just do whatever you want willy nilly like
writes stuff down and let people read it.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Sure, that would be wild.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, but it's easier to get it approved. And so
some people are able to start writing again under Krushev.
Don't worry, like ten years old is going to get
ousted for not being whatever. Yeah, and more stuff is
allowed through, including a book by perhaps the most famous
author going to talk about this week. He is not
(39:14):
quite cool people who did cool stuff, but he's a
complicated guy who did cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Okay, okay.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
A reoccurring theme on this show.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Uh oh, that's could be its own spinoff. I guess,
I know.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah, sure, but you can understand that people are complex.
In fact, we all are.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Yeah, well not me. I fortunately have been blessed by
never doing anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Good for you.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah no, and uh, anyone who tries to bring it
to my attention I've done something wrong is actually the
one doing something wrong is really important for people who
you're in the Goolag.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
You're perfect, We've been established, and.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
That's why I should be in charge the Narco Gulag.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
That's absolutely, that's right. If they criticize you, then there
must be something deeply evil about them.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
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?
Speaker 3 (40:23):
All right?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And that book, the more famous one and the author
and the rise of Samasdak culture, which I still hasn't
even been called that yet. We're going to talk about
on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Ooh, Wednesday, I know, I don't know, I just wanted
to add some flair. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
How are you feeling about underground publishing so far?
Speaker 3 (40:45):
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
(41:05):
outlined here are vital.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
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,
like 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. Like, the means of printing
(41:31):
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 like home printer,
leaves a fingerprint that can be tracked forensically.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I didn't know that. Isn't that fun? It's one of
those things where you're like, when you're in like normal
time society, you're like, well, all right, I mean I'm
not doing anything wrong, so whatever. You know, there's free speech.
But when you're like, oh, if you live in a dictatorship.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
Right, we're actually so much more traceable, trackable, detectable, yeah,
than you could even imagine, even if you're reading something
on your computer and not posting it. Well, it's I
guess that's imaginable at this point, people have access to
your hard drives.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
But yeah, depending, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Depending, and then there's other forms of censorship. It's it's
all relatable.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
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 it not free speech, well
except for, of course, the people who get pulled off
the streets for participating in protective free speech activities. Besides
those people, God damn it, what a fucking time.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Yeah. Yeah, I like to remind myself we aren't. Actually
it's happening, but it's we're not the endgame. There's still
time for us to change this outcome.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, totally, But I also think it's 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.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Now is the time to have those conversations and to
have with yourself with other people.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah, but we're not going to tell you how we're
gonna Well, we're just going to keep going forever because
everyone loves us.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Yeah, you can't stop me from podcasting. Maybe they could, Yeah, right,
that's hope.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
I think.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
I don't think it's like that's like a conversation Robert
and I have like every couple hours, like, hmmm, we
could keep doing this, I think.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Right, yeah, totally, yeah, yeah, probably.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Anyway, we'll probably be back on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
We'll probably see you Wednesday, folks.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
In the meantime, listen to you know, all the things
that we that we do.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
While while you can, oh yeah, while you can.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
When politics with prop Listen to sixteenth Minute of Fame,
Listen to Better Offline. That's it. Those are all the
cools on media shows.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
No, no, those other.
Speaker 5 (44:15):
Ones forgot it could happen here. Forgot weird little guys.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
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 US Yeah, and
listen to actual news on the even more Variety Yeah,
(44:42):
or the some more variety.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
We got that news. We've got it, some of it
and even more of it.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
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 I know, we did.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
I miss that. Yeah, it was fun. It was also
very hard to balance all everything.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
We did it during one of the hardest times in
the world.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Yeah, we burnt ourselves out. Nice, But then you guys
also launched all of your other shows and lots of things.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah, now we're even more tired.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Now we're even more even more tired.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
And then there's also this thing where I'm like, 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 them. 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,
(45:44):
it allows me to run on fumes sometimes, is how
much I care about motivate stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Oh, everybody has their own relationship to it, regardless of
what you do for a living or yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Welcome to the apocalypse, or we still have to pay
rent and yeah, yep, we'll see you all on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Bye.
Speaker 5 (46:33):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're a 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 Stole. Hi.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
How are you ugh, I'm okay, I'm good. I'm glad
to be here, happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
In fact, Yeah, the world's going great.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
It's true. Hey, completely unrelated. There's been all this stuff
about people bringing down the stock value of Tesla. But anyway,
through all kinds of methods.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah, anyway, I'm happy to be here. I feel like
this is a bright light in the world, being able
to commit talk about good things.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
I know, and people want to hear more good things.
Which of your various news shows should they listen to
or watch?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
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. Monday's we release one we
record Monday morning, release Monday evening, I know, and then
(01:27):
another one that we record Thursday's release Friday. We just
needed to add an extra episode because there's so much
to talk about and we couldn't get through it all.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, that actually makes sense.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
And also we now are doing video versions of them,
putting 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.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yeah, it's a whole other world out there, but yeah,
sure plug that. We try to We try to find
bright spots out there too, but we do talk about
the bad spots.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Is that every cross my mind from time to time?
It sure does.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
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 during dictatorship. But first, I'm being reminded by my
producer Sophie that I should do the rest of my introduction,
like introducing Sophie. Here's my producer, Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
How are you, Hi, Magpie. Hi Katie. You're doing great, Magpie.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Thanks. Thanks. And we also have an audio engineer named Rory.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Hi Rory, Hey, Roy, Hi Rory.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And our theme music is written for us by unwoman.
And I think that's the rest of the introduction. You
think I would know. I'm on episode like a one
hundred and fifty. Well, actually like three hundred, because there's
two of every thing.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, anyway, congratulations, that's a lot of episodes.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
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 substack 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.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Also a weird thing to do for a living, especially
right now.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, yeahm h. So we're going to just tell a
fun family story for no particular reason about continuing cultural
production during dictatorship. This week's story is about samas dot,
the underground publishing within the Soviet Union and the Communist
Bloc countries during the Cold War. You ever you ever
heard much about this stuff?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
No, not at all.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Actually, I like it's funny because so many people use
samas dot 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 arrest the sentence makes sense that you
just sort of ignore the word. Yeah, Okay, there's an
irony here. I'm doing this whole episode about how people
(04:23):
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 i'vory towered. I had to talk
to all of my friends with academic privileges to get
access to this. Yeah, so there's a little irony there
(04:46):
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 strict censorship, they were people evading that censorship
through various means. By the time you get to the
nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, there's this whole culture
(05:10):
that springs up around samisdot 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
like xerox machines. These were generally typed on carbon paper
(05:30):
and then retyped by their recipients like chain letters.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
But good, that's yeah, beautiful actually, yeah. Just the idea
of people receiving a hand type poem or what have
you and then typing it up and paying it sending
it forward, I think is really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
I know totally, especially with the like 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 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
(06:09):
in a camp that kills about ten percent of the people,
but better than earlier where they're just dying. And samas
dot as a culture lasted until basically nineteen eighty seven,
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
(06:33):
I've read two different sources that have different positions on this,
that political samas dot actually continued for a few more
years until the USSR actually fell completely in think nineteen
ninety two. Okay, because at least some people seem to
be censored still despite this like overall loosening.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
It might be some mixture of both.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, it's like almost everyone got to start publishing, and
basically the anarchosynical list didn't, is the best I can tell.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
The other annoying thing about researching samas dot, 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.
(07:26):
And there is a little bit of that, right, But
there's not a lot a 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 samas dot.
But a lot of it was about cultural production in
(07:48):
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 m hm
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.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Oh wait, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
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 samisdat was a culture samis dot was fun
and exciting. It was inherently cool because it was countercultural.
(08:30):
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
(08:54):
and songs and all of this stuff. And a lot
of it was self consciously what they could 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
(09:16):
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 twentieth century to make
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
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 yeah, you know, it's like, well, yeah,
I know I want this thing, but not by that person.
It's like I want our food system to be overhauled,
just not by our FK.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, totally, you know, totally. No. This is 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
(10:47):
should happen after I die. It's like a general rule.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Yes, then I'm fine, please have at it.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah that's 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 offscript. There's this thing
where like we all kind of look at what's happening
(11:15):
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. But it's not the only place,
Like the world is full of dictatorships that we can
look to.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
I know, I was just recently, like yesterday, I had
this thought of, like 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.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Most especially white people in America and probably just people
raised in the American educational system. Yeah, know a hell
of a lot more about Nazi Germany than they do
about like other terrible systems, including the one that's slaved
and genocided here on this very continent called the United
States of America.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Right exactly, we know way more about that than our
own history.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
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 block countries, especially by the time
you're talking about the sixties and seventies, is you're talking
about what does resistance look like for people who like
grew up inside this authoritarian system, you know, whereas when
we look at the directly fascist governments, they didn't last
(12:30):
an entire generation. They were well, Franco did, actually, so
franco Is 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 reasons.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Again, no apparent reason. Yeah, feels like a good idea.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, I'm going to do it until.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
It might be how can information in there for no
real reason?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
But maybe yeah, yeah, exactly. So what we have instead
of the commune system is the capitalist system, and it
asks that we interject this program with the sponsors.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
So, oh, here are those sponsors, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
So the context, you should see her face, big old smile.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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 in sixty seventy years earlier, and like
(13:49):
it was a very big unevened in autocratic society. In
seventeen ninety there was this book that was opposed to Serfdom,
a Journey from Peter's 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're just like,
(14:10):
so you have this like kind of lending library basically.
And then in eighteen twenty five you have the Decembrist 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.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
But I was going to ask, but I just said
to me in my brain, I went and like, don't ask.
That's a silly question.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah, no, 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 Decembrists are is a group of revolutionaries. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Cool, love that even more.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
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 Samas Dots, which don't have that
name yet. That name isn't coined until either fifty eight
or sixty two, probably sixty two, but I've read both.
(15:05):
In eighteen forty eight, Doskievsky, 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 not
a fucking free society, Nope. But as far as I
(15:29):
can tell, in the Czaris Times, it was largely the intelligentsia,
the sort of upper middle class of academics and shit,
who had access to this sort of proto samis Dot.
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
(15:51):
a much better chance of actually like reaching the masses.
By the dawn of the twentieth 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 ten episodes about
the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the anarchists and the
(16:13):
s rs 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 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,
(16:33):
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
(16:54):
that other people should be able to print whatever they want, Okay,
including other socialists, some communists and the anarchists and all
of those people. And I will compare this too, 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
(17:15):
were like, well, we can't tell you can't print your newspapers.
We can only tell you that you can't take over
you know, Yeah, which I think is 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.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Went or not, but yeah, like what's the line.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
But yeah, but they probably weren't killing the poets. We'll
get to them. 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 super
short version of it that's very biased by my position
is that it was a pluralistic revolution of all sorts
(18:11):
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 nineteen twenty two,
(18:32):
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 States like, all right, well, we'll pay you to
be a poet, will 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,
(18:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
It's like a step in the right direction and concept,
but not in execution when we're still utilizing the tactics
from before against people that frighten you.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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,
(19:41):
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 like TV
(20:04):
and shit, poetry was the They were like the fucking
rock stars, you know, like in England you have people
like lining up around the block for the new poem
that drops from Lord Byron or whatever the fuck you know.
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.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
But right, that's but that was what was available.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
But also you thought differently of poetry in general.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
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,
there was this poetry movement called the Acmeists that started
(20:51):
in the early twentieth century I want to say the
nineteen tents, 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 okay, the top of a game or whatever.
(21:14):
So the Acmists 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 they're poetry is going to be all
like utilitarian and kind of blocky, but it actually really isn't,
(21:34):
at least not the poet I read for this. The
poet I read for this is now one of my
favorite poets. 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 Acmists, a poet named Nikolai Gumelev, and
(21:59):
he was not a lefty. He was a monarchist, and
he was executed in nineteen twenty one 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. Wow, So art begins to go underground,
(22:20):
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?
Did you know that you can cut a potato in
half and then carve out whatever you would like and
put it on an ink blot or whatever you call
(22:43):
those things pad an ink pad. I didn't.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I did not know that.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Actually, yeah, that's why the potato is so perfect.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
I know you can do anything with a potato.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I've got some potatoes in the fridge, leftovers tonight.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I want potatoes now, our French fries after this. Anyway,
besides potatoes, apparently there's some other ads for some weird reason,
and here they are, and we're back back. We're so back.
(23:21):
So artists start learning whole new methods of distribution, including
why 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 acmeust poet Anna Akmatova,
who has been heralded as one of the country's great
poets before and during the revolution. And she's the main
(23:42):
poet who I read during that. 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.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
You know, it's like that's kind of poetry.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, she was not a monarch. You can't say like
the acmeus had the following political tendency, at least that
I've found, because I've read about three of them, and
one of them was lefty him, 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
(24:17):
to write poetry. 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
Bolshevik stole the Revolution in particular, and started like doing
things like killing poets, she refused to leave, which is
(24:39):
probably a familiar thought to everyone living in this country
right now is 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.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
That was her truth. Anyway.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
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 artists people places to stay in those 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
(25:20):
then all live in a palace. But you just just
like eighty of you or whatever.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
You know, Yeah, that is the dream.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
But they're like, okay, 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 and response to what happens to her.
But she used to be married to Gumalev, the monarchist
(25:48):
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 throw him.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Into jail ah Man.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
It, you know, wow at all, Like not even just
in your journal.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah. She writes it line by line and then burns
each line in her ash tray after she finishes writing it, wow,
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
(26:58):
poetry sometimes sometimes just until Stalin dies in nineteen fifty
two three. Sometimes they're doing it until the fall of
the Soviet Union. You know, this poem does not get
published in the USSR until nineteen eighty seven or eighty eight, wow,
or eighty nine. I've read both eighty seven and eighty nine.
(27:20):
Eighty eight didn't never.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Mind, well that's right in between.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
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 purchase,
(27:45):
I spent seventeen months waiting in prison cues 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
(28:06):
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 seventeen months hanging out outside this prison waiting
to find out what's going to happen to her kid,
(28:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
We've read that other piece very well.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Oh thanks, And 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.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
I mean it's chilling.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, yeah, because we often are like, well, what if
they come for us? They are already coming for people
in this country.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
This is just a we've been doing a fun bit
about how it's for no particular reason why this is important.
Obviously it's the same thing, bit different, but the same
for people speaking out.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah, for criticizing El Salvador.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
For yeah, these people, all Salvador people trying to get
into this country and their social media being checked. What
are we talking about here?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah? Anyway, it's funny because the people who are listening
to this a year from now are either going to
be like, who we pulled back from that cliff, or
people are going to be like, oh, that was really
cute that those are your biggest problems. Back now anyway,
here's a piece, a bit of requiem. We are everywhere
the same, listening to the scrape and turn of hateful keys,
(29:48):
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 life, the sun
lower every day, the never mistier, but hope still sings
forever in the distance. It happened like this, when only
(30:11):
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
(30:32):
death cold sweat on your brow. I will never forget this.
I will gather to wail with the wives of the
murdered STRELSTI inconsolably beneath the Kremlin towers.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
Wow, that's beautiful.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
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 poet almost published abroad in the nineteen sixties,
but yeah, published in Russia in nineteen eighty seven or
nineteen eighty nine. Her Son spent years in prison. They
(31:10):
let him out long enough to fight in World War
Two in the Red Army.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Oh how nice of them, and.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Then they put him back in prison afterwards.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Come on, fucking wild.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
I know, Okay, I did 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, and like,
oh no, he's a heavy influence on fucking Putin's race science. Okay, well,
(31:47):
you know, but he hadn't done any of that before
they locked him.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Up, and maybe maybe some of that happened to him inside.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
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, we're bad people.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
But like, yeah, sure, but the principle of it has
remains true.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
It's like, I still got to give people trials and.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Like exactly, even the shitty people.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah. So his mom's crew of acmists. 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 Ossip Mandelstam.
He's one of the acmists. He supported the revolution. I
(32:32):
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 h.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
That's not what I was revolutionarying for evlutionary ing.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Well whatever, Yeah, I like Oscar Wilde's take on this,
which is, you don't have art for socialism sake, your
socialism for art's sake. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
That one always the right phrasing. Yeah, yeah, that was good.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, And unfortunately the Bolsheviks must not have heard of
Oscar Wilder. 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
(33:23):
yourself over to the state, and he starts writing the
personal as political in a really direct way, like literally,
it becomes a revolutionary 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,
(33:47):
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 nineteen twenties, you
get the first culture of what will later be called Samisdak,
but it's still not called that at this time, and
kind of around Osip, the Jewish socialist guy, they're called
(34:07):
underwoods because of the brand of typewriter that everyone was
using is an underwood, and they would pass around their
poetry and their books an original manuscript like type written form.
Osip is very aware the eye of Sourn is like
on him, so for I had to get a Lord
of the Rings reference in here so much, that's right, Yeah, yeah,
(34:29):
thank you.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
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 while you go over
(34:53):
there for a while. And he's like, I will.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Bid move sounds like I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Meanwhile, he has this friend named Vladimir Mayakovsky, and nineteen thirty,
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
(35:24):
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 as yet another victim of Stalin. From my point
of view, many many of the original Bolsheviks are killed
by Stalin. In the nineteen thirties. After he died, Stalin
(35:47):
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 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
(36:09):
kill him. That is the poetry he writes. And then
in nineteen thirty three he wrote a poem that accused
Stalin of murder ooh, and two of the lines from
it are he rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. Oooh.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
(36:33):
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?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
And they're like, why would you even say that to me? Man?
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, So he was arrested and tortured and exiled and
then died in a prison camp of heart failure. YEP.
Poets and authors kept going memorizing everything that they could,
so that it could be public one day when society
was free once more. One author, Marina zvechya Yeva, sold
(37:06):
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, I'm writing this other one for
no one, But you couldn't actually keep it in a
regular old desk drawer because that's what's going to be
tossed by the fucking series.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
I was going to say, it doesn't sound like you
should leave it just laying around and needs to be
hidden under some floorboards or something.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, they are literally burying it.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yeah. During the peak of Stalin's terror in the nineteen
thirties and forties, 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
(37:58):
for writing. But then in nineteen fifty three, Joseph Stalin
made perhaps his great contribution to global communism. He died.
The man who replaced him for about ten years was
a guy named Nikita Krushev, And the overall vibe of
(38:20):
this guy is like, hey, I'm not Stalin, which is
a good vibe to have coming in after Stalin. Absolutely,
this fundamental dictorial 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, Okay, not free, but for your yeah, totally.
(38:43):
You can't just do whatever you want willy nilly like
writes stuff down and let people read it.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Sure, that would be wild.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, but it's easier to get it approved. And so
some people are able to start writing again under Krushev.
Don't worry, like ten years old is going to get
ousted for not being whatever. Yeah, and more stuff is
allowed through, including a book by perhaps the most famous
author going to talk about this week. He is not
(39:14):
quite cool people who did cool stuff, but he's a
complicated guy who did cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Okay, okay.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
A reoccurring theme on this show.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Uh oh, that's could be its own spinoff. I guess,
I know.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah, sure, but you can understand that people are complex.
In fact, we all are.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Yeah, well not me. I fortunately have been blessed by
never doing anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Good for you.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah no, and uh, anyone who tries to bring it
to my attention I've done something wrong is actually the
one doing something wrong is really important for people who
you're in the Goolag.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
You're perfect, We've been established, and.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
That's why I should be in charge the Narco Gulag.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
That's absolutely, that's right. If they criticize you, then there
must be something deeply evil about them.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
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?
Speaker 3 (40:23):
All right?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And that book, the more famous one and the author
and the rise of Samasdak culture, which I still hasn't
even been called that yet. We're going to talk about
on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Ooh, Wednesday, I know, I don't know, I just wanted
to add some flair. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
How are you feeling about underground publishing so far?
Speaker 3 (40:45):
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
(41:05):
outlined here are vital.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
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,
like 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. Like, the means of printing
(41:31):
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 like home printer,
leaves a fingerprint that can be tracked forensically.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I didn't know that. Isn't that fun? It's one of
those things where you're like, when you're in like normal
time society, you're like, well, all right, I mean I'm
not doing anything wrong, so whatever. You know, there's free speech.
But when you're like, oh, if you live in a dictatorship.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
Right, we're actually so much more traceable, trackable, detectable, yeah,
than you could even imagine, even if you're reading something
on your computer and not posting it. Well, it's I
guess that's imaginable at this point, people have access to
your hard drives.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
But yeah, depending, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Depending, and then there's other forms of censorship. It's it's
all relatable.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
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 it not free speech, well
except for, of course, the people who get pulled off
the streets for participating in protective free speech activities. Besides
those people, God damn it, what a fucking time.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Yeah. Yeah, I like to remind myself we aren't. Actually
it's happening, but it's we're not the endgame. There's still
time for us to change this outcome.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, totally, But I also think it's 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.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Now is the time to have those conversations and to
have with yourself with other people.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah, but we're not going to tell you how we're
gonna Well, we're just going to keep going forever because
everyone loves us.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Yeah, you can't stop me from podcasting. Maybe they could, Yeah, right,
that's hope.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
I think.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
I don't think it's like that's like a conversation Robert
and I have like every couple hours, like, hmmm, we
could keep doing this, I think.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Right, yeah, totally, yeah, yeah, probably.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Anyway, we'll probably be back on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
We'll probably see you Wednesday, folks.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
In the meantime, listen to you know, all the things
that we that we do.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
While while you can, oh yeah, while you can.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
When politics with prop Listen to sixteenth Minute of Fame,
Listen to Better Offline. That's it. Those are all the
cools on media shows.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
No, no, those other.
Speaker 5 (44:15):
Ones forgot it could happen here. Forgot weird little guys.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
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 US Yeah, and
listen to actual news on the even more Variety Yeah,
(44:42):
or the some more variety.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
We got that news. We've got it, some of it
and even more of it.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
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 I know, we did.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
I miss that. Yeah, it was fun. It was also
very hard to balance all everything.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
We did it during one of the hardest times in
the world.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Yeah, we burnt ourselves out. Nice, But then you guys
also launched all of your other shows and lots of things.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah, now we're even more tired.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Now we're even more even more tired.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
And then there's also this thing where I'm like, 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 them. 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,
(45:44):
it allows me to run on fumes sometimes, is how
much I care about motivate stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Oh, everybody has their own relationship to it, regardless of
what you do for a living or yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Welcome to the apocalypse, or we still have to pay
rent and yeah, yep, we'll see you all on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Bye.
Speaker 5 (46:33):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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