Testimonies of Cold War. Samizdat Archives Cover Image
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Mărturii ale războiului rece:Arhivele samizdatului
Testimonies of Cold War. Samizdat Archives

Author(s): Olga Zaslavskaya
Subject(s): History
Published by: Institutul National pentru Studiul Totalitarismului
Keywords: samizdat; tamizdat; „communication circuit”; archives; crossing boundaries; transnational;

Summary/Abstract: In the last decades, the traditional approach to the samizdat in the context of the Cold War heroic narrative has been called into question, suggesting analyses of this phenomenon through the concepts and the ideas of post-structuralism, the theory of social mobilization and social practices, and with the help of recent archievemnets in the field of media studies, sociology of culture, and the theory of network analysis. The process of crossing boundaries by uncensored texts in the late socialism and creating of samizdat-tamizdat system can be contextualized and researched in terms of creating symbolic capital and transnational communication. The suggested analyses of samizdat and tamizdat as a social and cultural phenomenon is based on the concept of "communication circuit" developed by Robert Darnton for research of print culture. The article focuses on the role and specificity of such actors in the network as samizdat archives which are considered not as a passive collection of documents of a bygone era, but as a specific cultural practices, which still actualizes the story of the informal culture of the Soviet era.

  • Issue Year: XXI/2013
  • Issue No: 3-4
  • Page Range: 130-149
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Romanian