all Sami publications destroyed. Ten years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sami became again an optional subject in Lujaur schools, and some basic texts were published. A Kola Sami association was formed in 1989 and later joined the worldwide Sami Council. See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES
Beach, Hugh. (1994). “The Sami of Lapland.” In Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development, ed. Minority Rights Group. London: Minority Rights Publications. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
The term samizdat is most often translated as “self-publishing.” It refers to the clandestine practice in the Soviet Union of circulating manuscripts that were banned, had no chance of being published in normal channels, or were politically suspect. These were generally typescripts, mimeograph copies, or handwritten items.
The practice got its primary impetus in the mid to late 1950s, a period that in a socio-literary context is often referred to as The Thaw. This itself is linked to Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization, which provided an opening for literary themes previously disallowed. The opening was frequently arbitrary as the case of Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago proved in 1958. The novel could not be published in the Soviet Union, and Pasternak was brutally vilified despite being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
The fact that broad categories of literature and sociopolitical themes still could not be addressed moved much of this output underground into samizdat. Sometimes this mode of literary output was systematic as with later journals and chronicles. But much of this was done spontaneously on an individual basis. Of key importance is that samizdat is inextricably linked to what came to be the dissident movements in the Soviet Union.
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These, in turn, were linked with other groups seeking, in early manifestations, protection of human rights, greater religious freedom, and more ethnic autonomy. As Scammell notes (1984, p. 507), samizdat “had come into existence in the late fifties as a result of the clash between the intellectuals’ post-Stalinist hunger for more freedom of expression and the continuing repressiveness of the censorship.” Freedom of expression was one thing, but it was deadly to the state’s perception of what could be allowed when the political admixture was included. The fact that samizdat and dissent were coeval is impossible to avoid and had great consequences for Soviet history.
From the early 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, samizdat had an uneven history. There were periods of extreme repression, for instance in 1972-1973. But samizdat was not quelled. Very often, trials were benchmarks in the advancement of samizdat and its many causes. The February 1966 trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had been publishing abroad for several years using pseudonyms, was a sensation since they were given seven and five years respectively at hard labor for allegedly writing anti-Soviet material. Their arrest led to public protests by dissidents. A number of them were then arrested, and this, in turn, led to further protests and corresponding arrests. Books and pamphlets with documents from these trials were frequently compiled and circulated widely in secret. These added much fuel to the fire, and a constant cycle was created. The Soviet government was also severely criticized worldwide because of a new policy of punishing dissident writers by confining them to mental hospitals.
Samizdat and dissent grew despite all impediments. It was a cultural opposition, an independent subculture, as Meerson-Aksenov (1977) called it, and it signified that social and political judgments stemming from sources other than the state were seen to be critically significant. In reality, the Soviet state was stymied by this phenomenon because it no longer knew quite how to handle it. The blanket executions of the 1930s were out of the question. The breadth of the criticism was also sometimes incomprehensible to the government. It could include everything from opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the latest broadsides against modern art.
The most famous of the systematic publications was The Chronicle of Current Events, which was issued without interruption from 1968 to 1972
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and sporadically thereafter. Other notable publications included the Ukrainian Herad, the Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania, and historian Roy Medvedev’s Political Diary (which ran from 1964 to 1971). This is by no means to minimize the huge number of individual contributions. Together they undercut the power and prestige of the Soviet state. See also: CENSORSHIP; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GOSIZDAT; JOURNALISM; SINYAVSKY- DANIEL TRIAL
Bukovsky, Vladimir. (1978). To Build a Castle. London: Deutsch; New York: Viking. Meerson-Aksenov, Michael, and Shragin, Boris. (1977). The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’-An Anthology, tr. Nickolas Lupinin. Belmont, MA: Nordland. Reddaway, Peter, ed. and tr. (1972). Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union. New York: American Heritage. Scammell, Michael. (1984). Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. New York: Norton.
(1876-1920), Bolshevik; leader of Communist Party Women’s Department.
Konkordiya Samoilova was one of the founders of the Soviet Communist Party’s programs for emancipating women. Born into a priestly family in Irkutsk, she studied in the Bestuzhevsky Courses for Women in St. Petersburg in the 1890s. In 1901 Samoilova became a full-time member of the Social-Democratic Labor Party.
Samoilova spent sixteen years in the revolutionary underground, mostly in St. Petersburg. An editor of Pravda (Truth) in 1913, she created a column on the female proletariat and, in 1914, with Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaia, and Lyud-mila Stal, founded Rabotnitsa (Female Worker), a newspaper devoted to working-class women. In 1913 she also organized the first celebration in Russia of International Woman’s Day.
In 1917 Samoilova revived Rabotnitsa, which had been closed by the tsarist government. In 1918 she worked closely with Inessa Armand and AlexanENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SAN STEFANO, TREATY OF
dra Kollontai to establish a women’s department (the Zhenotdel) within the Communist Party. While Armand and Kollontai developed the program for women’s emancipation, Samoilova concentrated on building the department from the ground up. Always an enthusiastic supporter of Vladimir Lenin and a reliable, hard-working, efficient Bolshevik, Samoilova was trusted by the party leadership, despite the fact that she was as ardent an advocate for work among women as the more flamboyant Kollontai. She was also an able propagandist who crafted vivid, accessible speeches and pamphlets. Samoilova died of cholera on a propaganda trip down the Volga in 1920. See also: FEMINISM; KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAIL-OVNA; ZHENOTDEL
Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Elizabeth A. (1997). The Baba. and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.
tion strategies to improve their operations and performance. Enterprise performance was to be gauged relative to long-run plans and norms. A system of state orders (goszakazy) was to replace compulsory output targets, although the distinction between state orders and plan targets was never clarified. Enterprises were granted the right to exchange goods, with contracts negotiated between firms to include output, delivery, and price components agreed upon by both firms. Enterprises were also allowed to retain a greater share of their planned profits to distribute as bonuses or to invest in additional capital. Samoupravlenie was an attempt to make Soviet managers responsible for the final results; that is, producing the quantity and quality of output desired by customers, whether firms or individual consumers. See also: PERESTROIKA
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