Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: your weekly podcast that you're probably listening to by audio
Speaker 2: format and not a hand typed transcript. And if it
Speaker 2: was a hand type transcript, I'm terribly sorry to whoever
Speaker 2: had to type it, because I would have written more succinctly.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Martya Kiljoy and my guest today is
Speaker 2: Katie Stall. How are you.
Speaker 3: Hi, I'm good. I'm excited for part two. And I
Speaker 3: don't think you need to apologize. If someone loves your
Speaker 3: show and wants to type it out, they want all
Speaker 3: of you, They want all of your words.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, fair enough. But I was thinking Katie Stole
Speaker 2: is a nice short name. So if if I ever
Speaker 2: have to start writing samas dot, maybe I'll name a
Speaker 2: character after you, just because it doesn't take very long
Speaker 2: to type, you know.
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I would be honored. And yeah it is.
Speaker 3: It's pretty to the point.
Speaker 2: Our audio nope weight producer. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie,
Speaker 2: I'm so so.
Speaker 1: My dog Truman is standing on the other side of
Speaker 1: the room with me and barking at me.
Speaker 2: Hi, Triman and eating your pillow or no, and.
Speaker 1: Just being a menace to society today. She has not
Speaker 1: been able to do full hurting dog activities today, and
Speaker 1: so she is letting me know that I am unacceptable
Speaker 1: to her, and that's fair.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're acceptable to us.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Did you hear that, Truman? Did you hear that?
Speaker 1: She's like, oh, are you petting me?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: I've forgiven you for all your all your bad behavior.
Speaker 2: My dog does a thing where he comes to the
Speaker 2: back door as if he wants to get let in,
Speaker 2: and as soon as you open the door, he runs
Speaker 2: away because his trick is to try and get you
Speaker 2: to come outside to play with him.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's a trick.
Speaker 1: Truman does the same thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so annoying. I mean sometimes I let him. This
Speaker 2: is probably partly why he does it, but exactly.
Speaker 1: It works like it's so annoying because I'm just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: whatever you want, girl.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well do what I want. Is also to finish
Speaker 2: my introduction, which is that our audio engineers Rory hi, Rory.
Speaker 3: Hi, or hello Hi. I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 3: what their voice sounds like.
Speaker 2: And our theme music was written forced by un woman.
Speaker 2: And we are on part two talking about samas Dot
Speaker 2: the Soviet self publishing revolution wasn't a revolution, but a
Speaker 2: way to try to continue to make things happen despite
Speaker 2: intense censorship. The cliffhanger for last week, I promised you
Speaker 2: the most famous author we're going to talk about this week,
Speaker 2: which I mean I I've actually literally read one of
Speaker 2: his books, but I still didn't recognize his name. But
Speaker 2: that's because I'm basically like, I'm both name blind and
Speaker 2: face blind. It's really not good. I just like don't
Speaker 2: recognize people.
Speaker 3: You know, Well, I'm going to assume it's, you know,
Speaker 3: not a name that's around a lot here. Maybe it's
Speaker 3: hard to pronounce in some capacity.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe not. Yeah, I shouldn't have guessed you're about to
Speaker 3: say it.
Speaker 2: I am about to say it. So the guy that
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about. His name is Alexander Solzhenitsen.
Speaker 3: Steve rolls right off the tongue. I can't know if
Speaker 3: you forgot that name anyway, I know.
Speaker 2: And then there's also this thing where, like everything that's transliterated,
Speaker 2: you're gonna run across multiple spellings on the internet, you know,
Speaker 2: because the actual spelling isn't this at all. It's you know,
Speaker 2: in cyrillic. And the thing about Alexander, which is what
Speaker 2: I'm gonna call him, is that he's kind of nobody's hero.
Speaker 2: He doesn't like the West, he doesn't like the USSR,
Speaker 2: he's not a monarchist. By the end of his life,
Speaker 2: he maybe liked Putin, but then I've also read that
Speaker 2: that was like entirely played up by Putin.
Speaker 3: I don't know which is believable.
Speaker 2: I know Jordan Peterson likes talking about him, which is
Speaker 2: the grossest thing about him.
Speaker 3: Red Flag, I know, I know, Yeah, but that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean that this guy would like Jordan Peterson talking about.
Speaker 2: Him, right, and like, And I've read so many contradictory
Speaker 2: things about this man and his beliefs, and so I
Speaker 2: tried to read his beliefs directly as much as possible.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, he is caught up in Cold
Speaker 2: War culture war, sure, and so both sides want desperately
Speaker 2: for him to be their guy. Well, the US has
Speaker 2: alreadyn't want him to be their guy. They kicked him out,
Speaker 2: but that's a spoiler. But like post Soviet Russia, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he is one of the most famous anti communist writers
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century. So the right Wing gloms onto him,
Speaker 2: and I know I talked a big game about how
Speaker 2: most of the samas dot writers and people purged by
Speaker 2: Stalin and Shit were socialists. Alexander he's kind of an
Speaker 2: exception of that. He's one of many exceptions to that.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's a lot of different things over the
Speaker 2: course of his life. On the whole. Near the end
Speaker 2: of his life, he's a grouchy Eastern Orthodox guy who
Speaker 2: liked to write history and write about his experiences in
Speaker 2: the gulags. Basically, he wrote about how much he fucking suffered.
Speaker 2: That's what this man liked doing.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, sure.
Speaker 2: Alexander was born on December eleventh, nineteen eighteen, during the
Speaker 2: Russian Revolution. His father died before he was born, and
Speaker 2: he grew up with his mother in a dilapidated hut.
Speaker 2: His family was Eastern Orthodox, but he converted to atheism
Speaker 2: as a teen and joined the Communist youth. He is
Speaker 2: a brilliant scientist, especially a mathematician. He gets married to
Speaker 2: a chemist. By the time World War II was doing
Speaker 2: its thing, he commanded an artillery battery as a loyal
Speaker 2: Red Army soldier off to rid the world of Nazism.
Speaker 2: Math is a really useful skill when you're talking about
Speaker 2: where shells land when you shoot them from artillery batteries.
Speaker 2: But he made a mistake. He wrote one of his
Speaker 2: friends a private letter during the war in which he
Speaker 2: made fun of a certain man with a mustache. So
Speaker 2: he sent to prison. Wait because he's making fun of Stalin.
Speaker 3: Oh I thought you met the other man with a mustache.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, that would be now. This is after
Speaker 2: when Stalin and Hitler were no longer friends, when they
Speaker 2: were on shooting terms.
Speaker 3: Yeh, gotcha.
Speaker 2: They sent him off to prison. I think after the
Speaker 2: war they're like, oh, you did bad, but we need
Speaker 2: you to keep doing some.
Speaker 3: Math on We need you to keep adding yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so for a while he just went and
Speaker 2: dug clay in a labor camp. Eventually they realized he
Speaker 2: was a science guy and the Gulag system was just
Speaker 2: fucking ginormous at this point in history. These days, it
Speaker 2: seems likely that about fourteen million people were held in
Speaker 2: the Gulag system. Wow, about ten percent of them would
Speaker 2: die in captivity or immediately after being released. Everything about
Speaker 2: this is argued because of the fucking Cold War. There's
Speaker 2: like Soviet apologists who were like, well, the numbers of
Speaker 2: people who died are really high because they let people
Speaker 2: free right before they died. And I'm like, well, why
Speaker 2: does that make it better?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: I'm like, and your point is what?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And his estimates, Alexander's estimates during his lifetime is
Speaker 2: sixty million people in the gulag system instead of fourteen million.
Speaker 2: And there's that was a believable number that he came
Speaker 2: to through for good reason, I believe, but I'm not
Speaker 2: certain because everyone's arguing about this shit. I believe it's
Speaker 2: more like fourteen million people, which is, to be clear,
Speaker 2: too many fucking people.
Speaker 3: A ton of people. Yeah, neither of these numbers are.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, one time, Okay, it's unrelated. It's like Margaret anecdote. Time.
Speaker 2: One day I was at a farmer's market in Canada
Speaker 2: and I met a guy whose father had been a
Speaker 2: Polish guy who was held in a gulag in Siberia.
Speaker 2: And this guy he kept staring at me. And my
Speaker 2: friends were like punks and were like playing according and
Speaker 2: stuff at the farmer's market. He's just glaring at us.
Speaker 2: He does not like us. And finally I like, go over,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go off script and just tell the story.
Speaker 2: I go over and he's tabling this book. It's called
Speaker 2: The Shadow of Caiton and I'm like, oh, it's this book.
Speaker 2: And he's like, what do you know about World War
Speaker 2: II history? And I'm like, let's talk about Finland's and
Speaker 2: World War Two. I love talking about Finland and World
Speaker 2: War Two. And I talked to him for a while
Speaker 2: and he goes, you and your friends you're not Bolsheviks,
Speaker 2: are you? And I was like no. In my mind,
Speaker 2: I'm like, who the fuck is a Bolshevik? Uh?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I'm like, no, We're anarchists. And his eyes light
Speaker 2: up as soon as I say that we're anarchists. He
Speaker 2: picks up a copy of his father's memoir. He flips
Speaker 2: through it to find the chapter where his father's life
Speaker 2: was saved by an anarchist fellow prisoner in the gulag system. Wow,
Speaker 2: and so like that act of kindness in a nineteen
Speaker 2: forties like, yeah, made me a friend in the twenty tens. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it was really nice. Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that anecdote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of people are in the gulags and
Speaker 2: it's like me and this, like the anarchist and the
Speaker 2: Polish guy had did not the same politics, right, but
Speaker 2: the Polish guy had literally was just thrown in there
Speaker 2: because the USSR had invaded. Yeah, Poland anyway, whatever, whole
Speaker 2: separate story. So the Gulag system not a nice place, Alexander.
Speaker 2: He's digging clay and then they're like, wait a second,
Speaker 2: you can do science. And the nice thing about having
Speaker 2: a really big gulag system is you can have all
Speaker 2: these like specialized work camps, like, for example, the Forced
Speaker 2: Science Experiment work camp. They had so many people in
Speaker 2: gulags that they had a dedicated advanced research team of
Speaker 2: imprisoned scientists. What's wild that is?
Speaker 3: Well, I guess with that many people, it's not that unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I'm sure they're arresting the intelligencia and like
Speaker 2: educated people and whatever. And uh So he spends three
Speaker 2: years out of his eight years in a advanced research
Speaker 2: science camp for imprisoned people. And he says that this
Speaker 2: is how he survived being in the camps, is that
Speaker 2: only five of the years were in like the horrible
Speaker 2: clay digging parts.
Speaker 3: You know, he's probably right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: But he kept talking shit, and he talked shit on
Speaker 2: the scientific research of the guy who ran the place,
Speaker 2: basically being like, oh, that guy doesn't know how to fucking
Speaker 2: do science, Am I right? And people are like, you know,
Speaker 2: I'll have to like say that shit. So he gets
Speaker 2: sent to Kazakhstan, back to a regular gulag time.
Speaker 3: Oh man.
Speaker 2: While he's there, he learned how to memorize his own
Speaker 2: writing by using a rosary, and each bead represented a
Speaker 2: line of writing. And he wasn't even religious at this point.
Speaker 2: I think kind of shortly after this he converts to
Speaker 2: orthodox I think he's still an atheist at this point,
Speaker 2: but they're like, well, they'll give you a rosary if
Speaker 2: you ask, And so he did, and he would pass
Speaker 2: the bead and it would be like another line, Like
Speaker 2: each bead represented a different line of what he was writing. Wow,
Speaker 2: the kind of skills that I have not developed in
Speaker 2: my life.
Speaker 3: I say that sounds complicated.
Speaker 2: Yeah. After he was released, he was totally free to
Speaker 2: do whatever. No, I'm just kidding. He had to go
Speaker 2: to Siberia. Oh, there's there's internal exile at this point
Speaker 2: in history, where if you I had a friend who
Speaker 2: was sent to internal exile. Actually, he was arrested in Georgia,
Speaker 2: and found guilty eve though it should have been self
Speaker 2: defense case for like a defending himself from a gay bashing,
Speaker 2: and then they put him. Georgia has this specific law
Speaker 2: where they can exile you into a different part of Georgia,
Speaker 2: and so we had to go to a different county
Speaker 2: and live in exile. And it's like small rural town.
Speaker 3: That's so weird. Yeah, internal exile, out of county jail.
Speaker 2: Well, no, he isn't a jail. He's just living in
Speaker 2: a town.
Speaker 3: Oh I see, Oh okay, huh weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's like, so when when our guy Alexander,
Speaker 2: we're no longer talking about my friend in Georgia. When
Speaker 2: he sent to Siberia. He's free, but he's free to
Speaker 2: go live in Siberia. He's not free to live in
Speaker 2: Western Russia. Gotya, And he's having a rough go of it.
Speaker 2: His wife divorced him while he was in prison, and
Speaker 2: he started teaching in the school. I've read. He was
Speaker 2: like a high school science teacher basically, and he started
Speaker 2: secretly writing poems in plays. He was thirty five, he
Speaker 2: was divorced and he was struggling with cancer. He recovered
Speaker 2: from the cancer. He remarried his ex wife, and then
Speaker 2: after the death of Stalin, the courts invalidated his original conviction.
Speaker 2: They retroactively decided it was okay to make fun of
Speaker 2: the man with a mustache and a private letter to
Speaker 2: a friend, and he was allowed to move back to
Speaker 2: Western Russia. Wow, so everything's fixed forever. At this point,
Speaker 2: he publishes his first famous book, A Day in the
Speaker 2: Life of Ivan Denosovich, which is the book that I
Speaker 2: read and I wasn't like I'm reading about Russia. It
Speaker 2: was just like a book I ran across. It's short,
Speaker 2: and it's about life and a gulug. It was interesting
Speaker 2: and it was actually published in the USSR. Khrushchev himself,
Speaker 2: the new leader, he signed off on publishing this book
Speaker 2: because while it's critical of the gulag system, it's not
Speaker 2: a particularly radical book. It's like Khrushchev is down with
Speaker 2: shit that criticizes Stalin, you know. Yeah. But soon after that,
Speaker 2: after this book comes out to like great, everyone likes it,
Speaker 2: and he starts writing some other books and some of
Speaker 2: them get published in a West and whatever. It's complicated.
Speaker 2: He's soon persona non grata in the literary scene of Russia.
Speaker 2: The government decides they don't want him writing anymore, and
Speaker 2: they steal all of his manuscripts. His repression leads to
Speaker 2: this massive cultural boycott of the USSR, and all of
Speaker 2: these writers get together and are like, are you kidding?
Speaker 2: Why are we doing this to this you know, important writer.
Speaker 2: And this includes Western leftists like Sart and Vonnegut, you
Speaker 2: know who probably wouldn't join in a cultural boycott if
Speaker 2: it affected their botty line.
Speaker 3: I couldn't begin to think of an answer.
Speaker 2: It's the sponsors of this show.
Speaker 3: The sponsors, of course, it's the sponsors of this show.
Speaker 2: I know they would do whatever's best morally at all times, right, Sophie,
Speaker 2: we could say that all of our sponsors always do
Speaker 2: it's correct morally.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: We love sponsors.
Speaker 2: This podcast is brought to you by Don't Gamble. Here's
Speaker 2: to Nuts, and we're back. So Alexander in Secret starts
Speaker 2: writing what's going to become his most famous book, or
Speaker 2: at least his most influential book. It takes him ten
Speaker 2: years to write this book, from nineteen fifty eight to
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight. So if you're listening to this, my
Speaker 2: editor at Feminist Press, to whom I owe book. Hey,
Speaker 2: I'm writing faster than this guy did. Book he writes
Speaker 2: is called Gulag Archipelago, and it is this long, damning
Speaker 2: history of the Gulag system. It's written in novel form,
Speaker 2: but it's like Russian novels are very often like, look,
Speaker 2: I'm basically writing nonfiction, but every now and then I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have some characters in it, you know, hmm. And
Speaker 2: it's a very Russian novel. Is three hundred thousand words long,
Speaker 2: which is baby shorter than all of the Lord of
Speaker 2: the Rings books put together.
Speaker 3: You know, I would struggle through it these days, I
Speaker 3: have the attention span of a goldfish. Lately, I know
Speaker 3: topic for another day.
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm gonna have to like live in
Speaker 2: the woods for a solid way. I do live in
Speaker 2: the woods. I'm gonna have to live in the woods
Speaker 2: without the internet. It's the internet for a year before
Speaker 2: I can finally read more and piece by Tolstein.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a real problem. I might cut all the
Speaker 3: chords soon, but anyway, not during this show done via internet.
Speaker 2: Nope.
Speaker 1: Do you ever read Tolsoy' is the Death of Ivan Iliot.
Speaker 1: It's like a novella of his that's like about a funeral.
Speaker 2: It's not okay, No, I've I read this one about
Speaker 2: a soldier going off somewhere and hiding in the mountains.
Speaker 1: No, this one's like all about grief. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: what's it called? The death of Ivan Illy? I could
Speaker 1: be pronouncing the last name a.
Speaker 3: Real theme with the titles of these writers. Yeah, a dain,
Speaker 3: the Life of Ivan whatever his last name is.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of these things were like
Speaker 1: as generically titled as possible, somewhat on purpose, you know.
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, Tolstoy was I mean, everyone like sort of
Speaker 2: loved him, but he was also a Christian anarchist and
Speaker 2: like sometimes hated him. You know.
Speaker 1: That was like my first to intro to Tolstoy, and I
Speaker 1: was like, Jesus Christ, that was depressing, give me more.
Speaker 2: What I did is I just had I had a
Speaker 2: really good friend who was really into reading Tolstoy, and
Speaker 2: I would just like make her tell me what she
Speaker 2: was reading as too, So I didn't actually read them,
Speaker 2: but I like not the blow.
Speaker 3: By blow, you know, yeah, like the cliff notes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one day I'm going to read warm Piece and
Speaker 2: one day, which is actually gonna come up later. There
Speaker 2: is gonna be a joke about a grandma tricking a
Speaker 2: granddaughter into reading warm Piece later in this oh and
Speaker 2: one day I'm going to read a Goolag Archipelago. So
Speaker 2: he writes his long, damning history and I don't know
Speaker 2: if this is exactly why he can't get it published,
Speaker 2: but one of the things he does is he traces
Speaker 2: the origins of the system to before Stalin. He traces
Speaker 2: it back to nineteen eighteen and Lenin and like, whoops,
Speaker 2: you're not allowed to criticize anyone but Stalin. Everyone has
Speaker 2: to be like, the only thing that was ever wrong
Speaker 2: with the USSR was just Stalin. Is what everyone wants
Speaker 2: to pretend, you know. Oh God. He works with a
Speaker 2: number of people to get this book smuggled out to
Speaker 2: the West on microfilm. Paris wants to publish it, but
Speaker 2: he desperately wants to try to leverage everything he can
Speaker 2: to get it published in the USSR first one, because
Speaker 2: he wants to have more impact to There's like, if
Speaker 2: you get stuff published in the West while you're living
Speaker 2: in Russia, you're like guaranteed that the USSR is never
Speaker 2: going to touch it, Like is never going to let
Speaker 2: you publish it at that point. And there's only three manuscripts,
Speaker 2: three copies of the manuscript in the USSR, and I
Speaker 2: believe all three of them were literally buried. I know
Speaker 2: that two of them were. One was buried in Estonia
Speaker 2: by his friend's daughter. Another copy one of his typists
Speaker 2: knew where it was because he was working with typists.
Speaker 2: Sometimes the isamas dot publisher. Typists are getting paid, sometimes
Speaker 2: they're not, Sometimes they're volunteer. I don't know enough about
Speaker 2: this particular person. I do know that because she typed
Speaker 2: this book, the state captures her and tortures her, and
Speaker 2: she gives up the location of the manuscript, so the
Speaker 2: KGB go and they burn it. And then as soon
Speaker 2: as she's released, she is found hanging in her own
Speaker 2: apartment building stairwell. It's either murder or suicide. Yeah, But honestly,
Speaker 2: I think claiming that she was murdered by the state,
Speaker 2: whether or not she tied the rope herself, is perfectly fair.
Speaker 3: I agree, I completely agree.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, the USSR's Writers Union has kicked him out in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine, and he's hiding on his friend's property.
Speaker 2: He's kind of I think openly hiding on his friend's
Speaker 2: property because the USSR is like totally equal. Everyone's equal
Speaker 2: in the USSR. But he has a friend who's a
Speaker 2: world famous cellist, and because he's a world famous cellist,
Speaker 2: he gets his own villa like a dacha. Okay, he
Speaker 2: gets his own fancy house just outside of town. And
Speaker 2: because he's world famous and has his own datcha, the
Speaker 2: KGBS like kind of not allowed to search his place. Okay,
Speaker 2: you know, so that's where he's hiding in the good
Speaker 2: and equal society of the USSR. People have probably caught
Speaker 2: on by now that I'm not a big.
Speaker 3: Fan and oh, okay, now I see, which means that
Speaker 3: I love the US and capitalism.
Speaker 2: That's the obvious logical conclusion. Only one thing can be
Speaker 2: bad at a time, right. Anyway, he wins the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy Nobel Prize for Literature. Goolog Archipelago isn't even out yet,
Speaker 2: but he's written these other books. He's unable to attend
Speaker 2: the event. It's in I think Stockholm because he's convinced
Speaker 2: that if he leaves, the USSR will never let him
Speaker 2: back in again, right, which isn't something that my friends
Speaker 2: are thinking about. Now at all. I don't know what
Speaker 2: you're talking about.
Speaker 3: No, I can't relate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he wrote a banger speech that he sent
Speaker 2: out there that included that ordinary man was obliged quote
Speaker 2: not to participate and lies. Basically, his whole speech was like,
Speaker 2: tell the fucking truth. That's it. That's the goal, that's
Speaker 2: the whole fucking point of doing anything, is to tell
Speaker 2: the fucking truth. And when he won this Nobel prize,
Speaker 2: the people who took the biggest risk, inmates from his
Speaker 2: former prison camp, risked everything to smuggle notes out to
Speaker 2: congratulate him. And that's fucking cool. It is really cool.
Speaker 2: Along the way, he divorces his wife, the scientist Natalia,
Speaker 2: to marry and yeah, well this time she divorced him,
Speaker 2: and then they get back together. And then this time
Speaker 2: he's like, well, actually I'm sorry my wife, the scientist Natalia.
Speaker 2: I'm in love with another woman, a scientist named Natalia.
Speaker 3: He's got a type. Well, this is another complicated figure.
Speaker 2: I don't I actually I don't know. I have no
Speaker 2: particular reason to believe that this new Natalia is like
Speaker 2: agent appropriate or anything like that. You know, it's like
Speaker 2: they're actually working together and they're falling in love, I think,
Speaker 2: is what's happening.
Speaker 3: I'm making a joke. Life happen. It could have been good,
Speaker 3: it could have been bad.
Speaker 2: I spent a while trying to find out, and I
Speaker 2: didn't find the answer.
Speaker 3: It's also like she did divorce him the first time.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I also reasonably certain there's like only ten
Speaker 2: first names available in the USSR. There's also that somewhere
Speaker 2: in here there's a joke about how they had to
Speaker 2: share the names because of communism. And so he's getting
Speaker 2: real paranoid because the States after him, you know, and
Speaker 2: they killed his typist. Sure, and so he sleeps with
Speaker 2: a pitchfork by his bed, which is classy and strange.
Speaker 3: That is both of those things.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure it gives you a fighting chance, Okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like, honestly, a pitchfork by your bed
Speaker 2: is really just to like take me down fighting. It's like, like,
Speaker 2: I don't want to go alive, That's all it says.
Speaker 2: If you have a pitchfork by your bed, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: But yeah, after his typist is found dead, he's like,
Speaker 2: all right, Paris, go ahead and publish Gulag Archipelago. It's
Speaker 2: clearly not getting published in Russia. Yeah, and so they
Speaker 2: publish it. In nineteen seventy three, one guy Azaiah Berlin
Speaker 2: wrote about it, quote, until the Gulag Archipelago, the Communists
Speaker 2: and their allies had persuaded their followers that denunciations of
Speaker 2: the regime were largely bourgeois propaganda. And so basically it's like,
Speaker 2: this first handily detailed account of the Gulags broke the
Speaker 2: myth because the Communist Party was like, what are you
Speaker 2: talking about. There's not sixty million, fourteen million people in Gulags. No,
Speaker 2: it's just like three guys named Nikolai. Yeah, that's all
Speaker 2: we got. It's just the Nicolai camp. You know, a
Speaker 2: lot of academics in the West hated Gulag Archipelago. Frankly,
Speaker 2: I think because they're associated with the Communist Party in
Speaker 2: the West that's the And people who survive the Gulag
Speaker 2: are like, no, this is pretty dead on, whereas the
Speaker 2: people in the West are like, nah, it can't be true,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, And finally the USSR is like, get
Speaker 2: the fuck out of our country. He is deported to
Speaker 2: West Germany and then he moves to Vermont. This is
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy four in Vermont. His family soon joins
Speaker 2: him the new wife I believe, only one of the
Speaker 2: one of the wives. Yeah, he's not actually a big
Speaker 2: of us anyway. Yeah, and this is where I wish
Speaker 2: the story was he just pivoted into being a Vermont guy.
Speaker 2: He would have been such a good Vermont guy. There's
Speaker 2: like pictures of him, and he looks just like a
Speaker 2: Vermont almost amish guy. He's got the big beard.
Speaker 3: Are you telling me this is Bernie Sanders?
Speaker 2: Oh, no beard? Yeah, imagine if Bernie Sanders was in
Speaker 2: like eighteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Instead, he goes into exile mode, which is perfectly reasonable.
Speaker 2: All he does is write, eat and sleep. He starts
Speaker 2: writing what he intends to be as magnum Opus, a
Speaker 2: series of books he never finishes, although he finishes like
Speaker 2: four of the books. I can't talk shit. It's called
Speaker 2: The Red Wheel and it is a complete history of
Speaker 2: the Russian Revolution. Oh and it's turned down for Soviet
Speaker 2: publication because he refuses to uncapitalize the word God, which
Speaker 2: is just like two petty people fighting, and I kind
Speaker 2: of respect it, you know.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: He's famous as hell because of the US is trying
Speaker 2: hard to just turn him into like a cold warrior,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, yeah, but all of his neighbors chip
Speaker 2: in to help him keep his privacy. They put up
Speaker 2: a sign in town saying no directions to the souls
Speaker 2: in it sens so they're like, no, we're not gonna
Speaker 2: tell anyone where to find you, Like, you can just
Speaker 2: live in your weird writing retreat in Vermont.
Speaker 3: I love that. Also, I'd be like, low key horrified
Speaker 3: if every time I drove by a.
Speaker 2: Sign no directions to the stoles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're like that, yeah, but also way to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah. His wife, Natalia runs a relief fund for Soviet prisoners,
Speaker 2: and all the proceeds from Gulag Archipelago go directly to
Speaker 2: supporting her fund. So they're like, okay, doing a thing together,
Speaker 2: all right, Natalia. Yeah, but instead of becoming a cool guy,
Speaker 2: he kind of just starts increasingly alienating everyone from all political.
Speaker 3: Sides, more and more complicated.
Speaker 2: Uh huh. Partly this is kind of cool. It's impossible
Speaker 2: to make him the stooge of the CIA or anyone
Speaker 2: else because he's mad at the US. Yeah, you want
Speaker 2: to know. One of the things he's mad at the
Speaker 2: US about it makes sense from his position, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: do abandoning the Vietnam War, okay. And also, to quote
Speaker 2: the New York Times from their obituary of him, quote,
Speaker 2: he criticized the US's music as intolerable and attacked its
Speaker 2: unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.
Speaker 3: Wow. So he's like, you just really can't get this right,
Speaker 3: can you, Goldilocks?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: The unfettered press.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he doesn't like that it's unfettered press.
Speaker 3: The music thing. I'm like, yous just sound like a
Speaker 3: cranky old guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's also a cranky, old, weird Russian man
Speaker 2: on top of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, complicated.
Speaker 2: After the fall of the USSR, he goes back home.
Speaker 2: He's accompanied by a news crew to capture his response,
Speaker 2: and he's basically just like, fuck, it's all crime and corruption,
Speaker 2: and also the ethnic Russians are not being protected in
Speaker 2: the former block country. I have spent a bunch of
Speaker 2: time reading arguments on both sides about whether or not
Speaker 2: he was an ethnonationalist, whether or not he was an
Speaker 2: anti Semite, and all of this stuff. And the problem
Speaker 2: is everyone is so politically engaged around him that it's
Speaker 2: hard to peace out like he did in two thousand
Speaker 2: and two write a like book covering hundreds of years
Speaker 2: of the history of Jewish people in Russia. But in
Speaker 2: it he's critical of all of the anti Semitic policies
Speaker 2: of the government and like talks about the problem with
Speaker 2: the programs and like all of this stuff. But also
Speaker 2: he I don't know, like earlier he had like he
Speaker 2: might be an anti Semite. He certainly meets some people's
Speaker 2: definitions of anti Semite, but he also like, yeah, isn't
Speaker 2: the kind of anti Semite that you imagine when you
Speaker 2: imagine a Russian anti Semite.
Speaker 3: Kind of don't even need to try to put him
Speaker 3: into one box or another. He's a complicated figure of
Speaker 3: a very complicated a time, with different influences and clearly
Speaker 3: doesn't subscribe to one thing or another. Yep, there's this influence.
Speaker 3: There's that he might be anti Semitic, but doesn't mean
Speaker 3: that he thinks the Polgrims were good.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Well, it's also hard because the only thing I've read,
Speaker 2: I didn't read everything. I read several articles about it.
Speaker 2: But he was accused of anti Semitism because he, like,
Speaker 2: for example, he was saying that the programs.
Speaker 3: Were anti Zionists.
Speaker 2: Sorry, oh no, if that would have actually been interesting.
Speaker 2: He was claiming that the programs didn't come from the
Speaker 2: top of society, but instead like came bottom up from
Speaker 2: the Russian peasants, but not in a way where he
Speaker 2: was like, and therefore it's good, you know, And I'm like,
Speaker 2: I think that's true. I think that it was a
Speaker 2: bottom up populist revolt of horrible racist bullshit, you know,
Speaker 2: m h.
Speaker 3: Because he's they're tapping into something and that's coming from somewhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he is also sort of an ethnopatriot about
Speaker 2: like Russian people, and he wants to leave I don't
Speaker 2: know whatever he's fucking.
Speaker 3: It's also interesting given all that he's been through.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, totally. In nineteen ninety four he went
Speaker 2: before the Russian Parliament and was like, this is not
Speaker 2: a democracy but an oligarchy, and then continuing on his
Speaker 2: like he can't make friends on either side. In two
Speaker 2: thousand and five, he criticized NATO. He told the Times
Speaker 2: of London and I actually think this is sick. He
Speaker 2: told The Times of London that democracy is quote not
Speaker 2: worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet,
Speaker 2: and so he's like criticizing the like bomb countries into
Speaker 2: democracy thing that's been going on, you know. Yeah, But
Speaker 2: also I think Putin likes him, and Jordan Peterson likes
Speaker 2: him and whatever. Fucking you know. He died at eighty
Speaker 2: nine years old in two thousand and eight, and people
Speaker 2: want to use him to prop up this or that position,
Speaker 2: including people who know more about him than I do. Right,
Speaker 2: But my takeaway was grouchy old man who had a hardish,
Speaker 2: shit life, who grew up in a dilapidated hut, whose
Speaker 2: writing helped break through the lives of the Soviet shame. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but do you know what doesn't know how to transition
Speaker 2: to ads?
Speaker 3: Me? That's not true, Margaret, You're so good at it.
Speaker 2: Okay, you're right, Oh, thank you, thank you. Even this
Speaker 2: was a clever ruse of a because I actually was
Speaker 2: transitioning to ads, I think very.
Speaker 3: Well, perfectly. Thank you, and anybody listening at home, that's like, ugh,
Speaker 3: how hard could it be?
Speaker 1: It can be hard.
Speaker 3: It can be hard to find a graceful transition and
Speaker 3: respect it as I do.
Speaker 2: Here's the ads and we're back him.
Speaker 3: So glad to be back from those ads.
Speaker 2: I know, I know, I learned so much about so
Speaker 2: many wonderful things. Sometimes we do get ads for good things.
Speaker 2: I will say that every now and then. I want
Speaker 2: the listeners to use their own discretion.
Speaker 3: It's true.
Speaker 2: So Alexander's work was a little bit influential as samas Dot,
Speaker 2: but honestly, a lot of what was influential about it.
Speaker 2: I didn't really expect to go on this like Longhold
Speaker 2: rabbit Hole about him, but I just spent so long
Speaker 2: reading about him.
Speaker 3: It was fascinating. I'm glad to have learned about him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but a lot was influential about his work was
Speaker 2: what broke containment and was published widely. There had been
Speaker 2: other similar pieces before. For example, in nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 2: a poll named Gustav Girlin had written a World Apart
Speaker 2: about three years in a prison camp. It was spread
Speaker 2: by carbon copies that were spread around and retyped. And
Speaker 2: also that one stands as an exception. This is that's
Speaker 2: before samas Dot culture Stalin's Alive in nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 2: Gustav Girland was risking an awful fucking lot by writing
Speaker 2: about that. Yeah, but by the end of nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: In the USSR, you get the culture of what we
Speaker 2: call samas dot properly, so the word samas dot. The
Speaker 2: various publishing houses run by the state all had names
Speaker 2: like gosses dot, which is the state publishing house, or
Speaker 2: polisi dot, the publishing house for politics. So this poet
Speaker 2: named Nikolai Glaskov, when he started self publishing his poems,
Speaker 2: he ironically put the word samsabiyazdt as the publisher on them,
Speaker 2: which meant the self publishing house instead of the state
Speaker 2: publishing house or of the politics publishing house. And he
Speaker 2: shortened it to samas dot and it gets translated as
Speaker 2: self publishing. But it's really more clever than that. Despite
Speaker 2: the word coming into regular usage in Soviet Russia, no
Speaker 2: Soviet dictionary ever included it. It was a non word.
Speaker 2: It's just so petty, you know. Yeah, Nikolai Nikolai Glaskov,
Speaker 2: his dad had been killed during the Great Purge, the
Speaker 2: late nineteen thirties thing where Stalin killed most the original Bolsheviks,
Speaker 2: and he was very aware of the stakes of what
Speaker 2: he was doing, but he didn't use it to be like,
Speaker 2: here's the self publishing to bring down the regime. He
Speaker 2: wanted to publish poetry. Yeah, and sometimes as a kind
Speaker 2: of kind of a joke or like a to be clever,
Speaker 2: he would self censor the poems, like do fake censorship
Speaker 2: on them to make a point. He was just a
Speaker 2: clever poet trying to do his thing. He once wrote
Speaker 2: a poem. I couldn't find it in English, but I
Speaker 2: read the description of it and it's still clever enough
Speaker 2: to repeat. It's a rewrite of The Raven by Edgar
Speaker 2: Allan Poe, which I think most people know this. But
Speaker 2: there's a depressed author and he's like sitting around and
Speaker 2: he's like, oh, woe is me? Will I ever be happy?
Speaker 2: And a bird comes in it's like never more, you know,
Speaker 2: and he's like, ah, I'm extra sad. The bird told
Speaker 2: me I'm doomed or whatever. It's been a while since
Speaker 2: I read this, And so he did a rewrite of
Speaker 2: it where at the end the character just looks the
Speaker 2: raven is like, yeah, if you're so smart, name a
Speaker 2: city in Chile. And the bird, I think just the
Speaker 2: implication is the bird just as never more again, and
Speaker 2: the author's like, yeah, you're just a bird doing bird shit. Whatever.
Speaker 2: I don't care. Yeah, his poems spread word of mouth
Speaker 2: or re typed, and like all ssamisdat, they entered a
Speaker 2: sort of folk art tradition where they were subtly changed
Speaker 2: from person to person. The closest comparison I can find
Speaker 2: is poetry and translation. You know, it's slightly different every
Speaker 2: time you read different translations of things. Soon enough, samisdad
Speaker 2: is a culture in the nineteen sixties. It's mostly in Russia.
Speaker 2: It picked up in particular after the brief period of
Speaker 2: the more open Krushchev came to an end in the
Speaker 2: early nineteen sixties because for a little while people didn't
Speaker 2: want to do samasdot because they're like, well, I can
Speaker 2: probably get this published officially, right. You know. By the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies it spreads to the satellite states and rather
Speaker 2: than presenting it, the CIA version of samas dot is
Speaker 2: like the heroic struggle against Stalinism and you know, Soviet oppression.
Speaker 2: But it was more a way to have fun. Mikhail
Speaker 2: Botten wrote an essay that samasdt was basically homebrew alcohol,
Speaker 2: said that boredom led to quote binge drinking and its
Speaker 2: variants binge sexual activity and binge reading. Binge reading. I
Speaker 2: kind of love that as a cultural idea.
Speaker 3: I do too. It's like, watch out, it's going to
Speaker 3: lead to binge reading.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have read Homebrew as a description of the
Speaker 2: stuff in a number of places, Like so, I think
Speaker 2: it was usually called samasdot, but I think it was.
Speaker 2: I think literally people someone are just just calling it
Speaker 2: homebrew basically, Okay. Often it was a parody of the
Speaker 2: official channels. The official newspaper was called Pravda or Truth,
Speaker 2: and so they were like presenting a counter truth. But
Speaker 2: mostly they wanted to critique the idea that there was
Speaker 2: such thing as one truth. They wanted to present that
Speaker 2: literature could in fact be divorced from politics and could
Speaker 2: be autonomous and ambiguous. So while they were quote neo
Speaker 2: rests who challenge Soviet realism by offering counter truths, which
Speaker 2: is kind of what you would say that Alexander's writing
Speaker 2: was doing, right, is that you're like, He's like, no,
Speaker 2: I will present the real truth. You know, a lot
Speaker 2: of people, especially younger writers, were like, what if we
Speaker 2: offer hypotheses instead of goals? What if we don't have answers,
Speaker 2: we have questions? And I think that's coolest shit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: access to copy machines was tightly controlled. So was all
Speaker 2: this type written stuff by and large on carbon paper
Speaker 2: and tissue paper, like literally toilet paper I think sometimes.
Speaker 2: And this was easier to conceal and therefore easier to
Speaker 2: destroy because you know, you get caught with it, you're
Speaker 2: doing time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's actually smart, delicate but smart.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, which I mean, you know, it's just funny
Speaker 2: because it's getting past around hand to hand, so it's
Speaker 2: probably gonna all fucked up and like, yeah, one of
Speaker 2: the like esthetic qualities of it is that often you're
Speaker 2: doing like multiple layers of like onion skin, carbon paper
Speaker 2: and so so like the last one is like barely
Speaker 2: readable at all, you know. Yeah. Sometimes they would distribute
Speaker 2: things by photographing them and then like printing photos, but
Speaker 2: photos were bulkier and harder to conceal. Yeah, the esthetics
Speaker 2: of samas dot soon had their own value. A type
Speaker 2: written thing on carbon paper or tissue paper or whatever
Speaker 2: was inherently subversive and interesting. Here's where I get the
Speaker 2: joke I promised you. There's a Soviet era joke that
Speaker 2: a grandmother can't get her granddaughter to read War and Peace,
Speaker 2: so she stays up late at night furiously and retypes
Speaker 2: it all as samas dot and then it no longer
Speaker 2: looks official, so her granddaughter reads it.
Speaker 3: That's really funny.
Speaker 2: I know, underground authors started writing so much that it
Speaker 2: started being called graphomania and obsession with writing as much
Speaker 2: as possible.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And I think this is interesting because like when I
Speaker 2: was first reading about how goolog Archipela goes three hundred
Speaker 2: thousand words long, and part of it is he never
Speaker 2: got to write the whole thing at once. He couldn't
Speaker 2: look at the old pages while he was writing the
Speaker 2: new pages, right, And so I'm like, yeah, of course
Speaker 2: it's going to be longer and more repetitive and less. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he needs an editor very desperately. And so it makes
Speaker 2: sense to me this like graphamania thing. It also ties
Speaker 2: into the long Russian tradition of elevating the written word
Speaker 2: and the author, and also elevating the idea of everyone
Speaker 2: writing unbearably long books. In fact, they started writing stories
Speaker 2: making fun of themselves for writing some laws and writing
Speaker 2: so much. There's a nineteen sixty story called Graphomaniacs, and
Speaker 2: the author Sinoviski wrote, I am born for poetry insists
Speaker 2: a young man who looks like he should have been
Speaker 2: a boxer. Galkin laughs. We are all born for it,
Speaker 2: a general national penchant for refined letters. And do you
Speaker 2: know what we have to think censorship the government itself,
Speaker 2: damn it gives you the right, the inalienable right to
Speaker 2: consider yourself an unacknowledged genius. That's funny.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like some self awareness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. It kind of reminds me of how like,
Speaker 2: like sometimes the like punk or like genres that are
Speaker 2: very political, you kind of put up with like things
Speaker 2: that aren't quite as good because you agree with them,
Speaker 2: you know. And I think that there's like a certain
Speaker 2: amount of like, well, if it's Samisdad, it doesn't have
Speaker 2: to be good because it's inherently edgy and radical because
Speaker 2: you wrote it.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, but I'm pro it no matter what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And some of this stuff was that
Speaker 2: they wrote was very serious too. There were entire newspapers
Speaker 2: and journals published this way. One was a bulletin called
Speaker 2: Chronicle of Current Events, and it started in April nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight and it appeared every two weeks, and it
Speaker 2: collected human rights abuses within the Soviet regime. It stopped
Speaker 2: for a year and a half due to repression, but
Speaker 2: then it picked up again in nineteen seventy two. This
Speaker 2: more political samas DOT was actually the second wave of SAMASDT,
Speaker 2: and it worked through the channels that have been built
Speaker 2: by artists. It reached a readership of somewhere between ten
Speaker 2: thousand and one hundred thousand readers per issue, with roughly
Speaker 2: one thousand to ten thousand copies being made of each edition.
Speaker 2: They estimated ten people read each copy, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: but each of those fucking ten thousand copies is fucking typed. Wow.
Speaker 2: That is so much fucking.
Speaker 3: Work, an unfathom of wolameta work.
Speaker 2: Yep. Besides a general we don't like the dictatorship we
Speaker 2: live under journal, other political and religious positions started publishing
Speaker 2: samasdat as well. There's one for Ukrainian Independence. There's the
Speaker 2: Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church. There's the Zionist Herald
Speaker 2: of Exodus, there's the Herald of the Evangelical Christian Baptists.
Speaker 2: There's a Russian nationalist journal, and there's one called Jews
Speaker 2: in the USSI, which I am guessing by the context
Speaker 2: because it's not the Zionist Herald of Exodus is the
Speaker 2: anti Zionist Jewish paper of the time.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: The typewritten thing became a style that everyone would imitate,
Speaker 2: including in the West, and the thing that I want
Speaker 2: to try and figure out but I don't have any
Speaker 2: answer to yet. You know how in the nineties, like
Speaker 2: everything that was like edgy and grunge us a typewriter font. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that might come from samas dot Okay, because
Speaker 2: typewriter became the like counter cultural iconic thing to do,
Speaker 2: and that style got imitated in the West.
Speaker 3: Fascinating, and you're probably right, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean I could be wrong. It might also come
Speaker 2: from like Zene culture, right, it could.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's a mixture of both. But you know, it
Speaker 3: becomes a style that seeps over and then people started
Speaker 3: adopting it. Which came first the chicken or the egg. Yeah,
Speaker 3: good theory though.
Speaker 2: And folks were ignoring design can iterations when they made
Speaker 2: this stuff overall and tried to cram as much text
Speaker 2: onto the page as possible. Ana Komoromi said, quote. Highly
Speaker 2: circulated type scripts became brittle and worn from handling. The
Speaker 2: physical page seemed as embattled and fragile as the Soviet
Speaker 2: author himself. And so you get a copy of samas
Speaker 2: dot and you would type up like four copies yourself sometimes.
Speaker 2: And then it seemed like on cursory reading, my cursory reading,
Speaker 2: it seems that the majority of the authors were men
Speaker 2: and the majority of the typists were women, and that
Speaker 2: women took a substantial chunk of the risk. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: my own interpretation based on what I read. And then
Speaker 2: also a pattern I've seen time and time again.
Speaker 3: Well, knowing that about that typist that was jailed and
Speaker 3: then committed suicide, that's a perfect example of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, And this is like absolutely still a thing
Speaker 2: to this day in the West of the publishing industry.
Speaker 2: Is like how you could take podcasting. A lot of
Speaker 2: prodcast producers are women, and a lot of podcasts voices
Speaker 2: are men. You know, yeah, absolutely, but I mean, you
Speaker 2: know they I want to point this out and not
Speaker 2: to be like on fuck these men who wrote stuff
Speaker 2: like whatever, No, like, they were also risking things, and
Speaker 2: so typists would also make editorial changes sometimes when they
Speaker 2: are typing these things, and so there's like kind of
Speaker 2: a fun playing around with it. A typist named Natalia
Speaker 2: Trauberg would translate works from English. Oh yeah, also just
Speaker 2: gets called the typist. She's a translator.
Speaker 3: Another Natalia Natalia would translate works from English and would
Speaker 3: cut out the redundant passages in like GK.
Speaker 2: Chesterton. Good for her, I know, I know. Also I
Speaker 2: saw some of the photos of there's a lot of
Speaker 2: ssamis doant like collections and stuff like that. And sometimes
Speaker 2: the typewrit and covers were basically like ASKI art, where
Speaker 2: they would like do the title in big letters by
Speaker 2: just doing x's, you know, and like organizing them. Some
Speaker 2: folks resisted the samas dot style and tried to make
Speaker 2: it look official, like Alexander Ginsburg's see once again another Alexander.
Speaker 2: Every time I do a Russian thing, there's like four.
Speaker 3: Names, Alexander and Natalia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Alexander Ginsberg did a book called Syntoxis, which looks
Speaker 2: like an art book and it ran from nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: to nineteen sixty one. Or there would be poetry editions
Speaker 2: with hand drawn covers and hand sewn bindings. Authors would
Speaker 2: sometimes bind their books. Often they were signed. This is
Speaker 2: the thing that kind of surprised me. You would think
Speaker 2: that they would all be like, I'm writing this shit
Speaker 2: anonymously because I don't want to spend my life in prison.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They mostly, I think because there's this like culture. This
Speaker 2: is my inference, because there's this culture of prestige around
Speaker 2: being a writer in Russian society. They were writing their
Speaker 2: name on these things and often their addresses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're like, I want the credit for this. You
Speaker 3: know it might kill me, but I want the credit.
Speaker 2: Which I guess, like tagging culture is like a.
Speaker 3: Little bit that you know, sure it's human nature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good degree. Sometimes books were unbound so that multiple
Speaker 2: p people could read them faster, each person passing the
Speaker 2: page they finished on to the next person. So you
Speaker 2: get like five people sitting in a circle and you
Speaker 2: just all people reading the same book at the same time.
Speaker 3: See that sounds kind of fun.
Speaker 2: It really does. Although what if you're the slower reader,
Speaker 2: You're just like, I know, you got I guess you
Speaker 2: got to go in the end. Yeah, you know, you
Speaker 2: just like arrange the city. We got to implement a
Speaker 2: speed reading test before we Yeah, I think as you go,
Speaker 2: you can be like, okay, clearly you're reading slower than
Speaker 2: you and then you know, like.
Speaker 3: Switch around you're right, all are welcome here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. And there were other spin offs from samas Dot.
Speaker 2: Ratazot were books and others such that were broadcast by
Speaker 2: foreign radio stations that Soviet dissidents would then dutifully transcribe.
Speaker 2: Maganizot was Samazot music recorded by tape recorder. I think
Speaker 2: the origin of the word is like magnet for like tape,
Speaker 2: you know, they record with magnets or whatever. I could
Speaker 2: be wrong. I don't know. I didn't actually look up
Speaker 2: the etymology.
Speaker 3: I'm saying as if I know, Yeah, okay, sounds good.
Speaker 2: And this music was sometimes foreign radio broadcasts. Sometimes it
Speaker 2: was like DIY production. People would like record songs in
Speaker 2: their living room and put it on tape and spread
Speaker 2: it around. And then there was Thomas Dot, which is
Speaker 2: the more famous after samas Dot. Thomas Dot is anything
Speaker 2: that was smuggled out of Russia to be published elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Often Thomas Dot would then be smuggled back into Russia
Speaker 2: as samas dot. So you, okay, you write a book,
Speaker 2: you put it on microfiche, you get it smuggled out
Speaker 2: Paris publishes it, and then it comes back into Russia
Speaker 2: and then someone hand types it you know, okay, it
Speaker 2: wasn't a perfect and happy underground and wasn't like everyone
Speaker 2: was like noble and good. I was going to tell
Speaker 2: an anecdote that I thought was going to go really
Speaker 2: differently until I read more about this man. Years ago,
Speaker 2: I was in Prague and I went to the punkash
Speaker 2: show that I felt like I'd ever been to in
Speaker 2: my life. It was a solo show by this round
Speaker 2: bald accordion player named Jim Chirt, and I think that
Speaker 2: means like Jim Devil. I was there with a friend
Speaker 2: who had escaped across the Iron Curtain to the West
Speaker 2: when she was four years old, and she was then
Speaker 2: living back in Prague, so we went to go see
Speaker 2: this accordion player who had been an illegal accordion player
Speaker 2: performing illegal shows during the Soviet era. And Jim Cherit
Speaker 2: was screaming over this accordion while old guys with ponytails
Speaker 2: danced on tables, bashing into the low ceiling of a
Speaker 2: literally underground pub. And Jim Chait wasn't singing like I
Speaker 2: hate the government. He was singing like most of it
Speaker 2: was in Check, but some of it was in English,
Speaker 2: and it was like I have to go to Mexico
Speaker 2: to smoke weed, you know, like like it's just like
Speaker 2: a guy, you know.
Speaker 3: Sorry, you're just making me remember about how much weed
Speaker 3: I smoked in Prague.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 3: It was the best time of my life, very strong weed.
Speaker 2: Anyway, continue, I just drank an obscene amount in Frog
Speaker 2: that too, the whole nights. I don't remember. The worst
Speaker 2: thing I ever did while I was drunk, which I
Speaker 2: will not say on air right now, I did in Prague.
Speaker 2: It wasn't morally bad, it was just embarrassing. No, Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: So I was like going to tell this story to
Speaker 2: be like, and here's an example of a guy who
Speaker 2: made music illegally. And so then I like was reading
Speaker 2: check Wikipedia about him and like through auto translate. He uh,
Speaker 2: he was absolutely part of the samas dot scene U
Speaker 2: and he snitched out one of his best friends, who
Speaker 2: then spent eighteen months in prison for publishing samas dot. Okay,
Speaker 2: Jim Chaird apologized for it since, and that's good. You know,
Speaker 2: we've all read nineteen eighty four. We all understand that
Speaker 2: sometimes people have rats in cages put on the face
Speaker 2: or whatever.
Speaker 3: But it complicated time things. Yeah, yeah, taking accountability not
Speaker 3: the worst person in the world.
Speaker 2: Then, Yeah, his friend who went to prison died four
Speaker 2: years before he apologized, before his official letter of apology
Speaker 2: was published.
Speaker 3: That is something that you probably don't get over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: But to your point, you know, you said, it's not
Speaker 3: like it was all roses this movement. It's complicated. And
Speaker 3: do you think that that people get so easily dissuaded
Speaker 3: from different movements because of infighting or complications or not.
Speaker 3: You expect that, Oh, I've designated myself as a part
Speaker 3: of this, Well we all immediately agree on something that's
Speaker 3: not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: You know, you can't get so worked up that you're
Speaker 3: turning your back on all of it just because there's
Speaker 3: different factions within it. And there's no perfect movement, is
Speaker 3: my point. We're all human beings with different opinions, and
Speaker 3: that's a good thing.
Speaker 2: Totally. There's this quote by a science fiction author who
Speaker 2: I can't remember his name, and I remember not particularly
Speaker 2: liking him as a person, but he has a quote
Speaker 2: that I think about all the time, which is that
Speaker 2: there's no ideology so pure that you cannot find assholes
Speaker 2: practicing it exactly. Yeah, And then like and this guy
Speaker 2: wasn't even a sad an asshole. He just gave in
Speaker 2: to state pressure.
Speaker 3: He definitely made a mistake or yeah, maybe I don't
Speaker 3: know the calculations. At the moment in time, you gave it, right.
Speaker 2: So, for some weird reason, the paragraph I read through
Speaker 2: auto translated Wikipedia and from Czech didn't give me enough
Speaker 2: context to make a moral judgment about the same, you know,
Speaker 2: even though shouldn't have done that and you shouldn't do it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, and then after so like the first wave
Speaker 2: of samas dot is just like poetry and art, the
Speaker 2: second wave is more of this political stuff from all
Speaker 2: different corners. And then academia is sort of the third
Speaker 2: wave of samas dot because you couldn't really do certain
Speaker 2: types of science in Soviet times, right, which feels really
Speaker 2: accurate to right now when suddenly all of the funding
Speaker 2: is being cut. If it like literally has the word
Speaker 2: gay in.
Speaker 3: It or transition, if transitions in the word, it is
Speaker 3: out of here. It doesn't matter what the context is diversity, Nope,
Speaker 3: you're done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so they started publishing anyway, and historical studies
Speaker 2: were published, legal studies were published. One writer, Georgia Vladimov
Speaker 2: put it, quote there are now two kinds of art
Speaker 2: in the country. One is free and uninhibited, whose distribution
Speaker 2: and influence depends only on its genuinely artistic qualities, and
Speaker 2: the other, one, commanded and paid for, is badly mutilated,
Speaker 2: suppressed and uppressed. It is not hard to predict which
Speaker 2: of these two arts will be victorious and so like. Yeah,
Speaker 2: by and large, as far as I can tell, people,
Speaker 2: when they look at the literature of Soviet era, they're like, well,
Speaker 2: the underground shit was kind of the real shit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was different in every country. We've mostly focused on Russia.
Speaker 2: In Poland, folks actually had access to more copy machines
Speaker 2: and so there was xerox, samas dot there, and a
Speaker 2: lot of it was political as hell. They had things
Speaker 2: like the Committee for the Defense of the Workers because
Speaker 2: once again politics against the USSR is often fucking socialist anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they were putting out a bi monthly bulletin. There
Speaker 2: were at least thirty of these radical newspapers running by
Speaker 2: the late seven in Poland. In the Czech Republic, there
Speaker 2: was this more professional vibe. It was like hand bound
Speaker 2: and like hand typed art manuscripts and shit, and they
Speaker 2: would literally say in the front like this is mine,
Speaker 2: don't copy it, you.
Speaker 3: Know, oh wild, yeah different.
Speaker 2: And the typists were generally paid and they were like sold.
Speaker 2: But even though they were like bougie or an artsier,
Speaker 2: they were still going to prison over this. Like if
Speaker 2: you have this in a safe hidden in your house
Speaker 2: and they catch you, you're going to fucking jail. Right
Speaker 2: in China, there was this whole other culture of it
Speaker 2: that I won't be able to get into as much
Speaker 2: as I'd like. And they used posters where they would
Speaker 2: paint in huge letters and hang them up around the
Speaker 2: city because there was a specific provision in the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five constitution that said basically like, yeah, we can't.
Speaker 2: You can't do a lot of stuff, but you can
Speaker 2: you can hang up posters with giant letters in public
Speaker 2: places if you need to say something.
Speaker 3: And they're like, got it.
Speaker 2: And then by nineteen seventy nine they were like, wait,
Speaker 2: we didn't mean like that, might take it back, and
Speaker 2: so they started putting people in prison over it. And
Speaker 2: then in nineteen eighty the constitution was like not just kidding,
Speaker 2: you can't do that at all. Wow. And also in China,
Speaker 2: they would make like political journals, and they would use
Speaker 2: handcut stencils for mimiograph machines. And I have studied a
Speaker 2: lot about various methods of printing, and I could not
Speaker 2: tell you exactly what that.
Speaker 3: Means something about printing, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Radical journals there often had print runs in
Speaker 2: the thousands or tens of thousands, but people were regularly
Speaker 2: getting like fifteen year sentences for running them. Wow. SAMASDT
Speaker 2: has been used as a way to describe self publishing
Speaker 2: against official censorship, not just in communist countries, but in
Speaker 2: places like Iran or Chile and various like just dictatorships
Speaker 2: in general, whether right wing, left wing, or theological. It
Speaker 2: ebbed and flowed, though by nineteen eighty two, samas dot
Speaker 2: was pretty successfully repressed by the USSR, But then in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR,
Speaker 2: started breaking down the systems of censorship in what was
Speaker 2: called glossknot, and samasdot became less necessary because you could
Speaker 2: publish again. I did read about one piece of samasdot
Speaker 2: after nineteen eighty seven, though, or rather I've read two sources,
Speaker 2: and one claims that this was SAMASDT, and one claims
Speaker 2: that it was officially allowed to be printed, and I
Speaker 2: don't know which one's true, okay, but this piece. In
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty two, there was this big strike in Russia.
Speaker 2: Fourteen thousand workers, after their pay was docked by a third,
Speaker 2: went on strike for days and they were massacred. Twenty
Speaker 2: six strikers were killed, hundreds were wounded. Seven of the
Speaker 2: organizers or people accused of being organizers, were later sentenced
Speaker 2: to death, and tons of people served years in prison.
Speaker 2: The bodies of the slain were buried in a secret grave,
Speaker 2: the location of which wasn't revealed to their families until
Speaker 2: fucking nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 3: What yeah, wow.
Speaker 2: And so it's like we never hear about strikes in
Speaker 2: the USSR, largely because they didn't happen, because you all
Speaker 2: got killed if you did it. I mean just kidding.
Speaker 2: It was a glorious workers republic and everyone was paid equally,
Speaker 2: so it didn't matter, and no one needed to strike,
Speaker 2: and if they did strike, it's their fault for being
Speaker 2: counter revolutionaries. They're probably capitalists. Anyway. There was no news
Speaker 2: about this in the official press of Russia, and one
Speaker 2: of the participants was an anarcho syndicalist worker named Peter Suda,
Speaker 2: who spent years in prison after the strike. In nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight, when samas Dot supposedly had stopped because censorship
Speaker 2: had lifted, the narcosyndicalist group he worked with KAS still
Speaker 2: had to put out their journal in an underground fashion.
Speaker 2: According to one thing I read, the other thing was
Speaker 2: that they could finally do it because of whatever klasmod
Speaker 2: Either way, in nineteen eighty eight, Peter was finally able
Speaker 2: to publish his account of what he'd experienced at the
Speaker 2: state twenty six years earlier in nineteen sixty two, but
Speaker 2: probably related to that, in nineteen ninety, a year before
Speaker 2: the end of the USSR, Peter was beaten to death
Speaker 2: by the KGB. Wow.
Speaker 3: So anyway, right, Like was it, yeah, finally able to
Speaker 3: and then he dies It's yeah.
Speaker 2: I know, And it's like, well, he could have been
Speaker 2: killed also just for being an anarchist organizer. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but like the implication in both things I read was, yeah,
Speaker 2: that like absolutely, because he's the one who like kind
Speaker 2: of broke the news on this thing years decades later. Anyway,
Speaker 2: getting around censors is cool and good and it rules
Speaker 2: that people were able to do so much with it.
Speaker 2: They tracked the abuses of the dictatorial system, despite official
Speaker 2: attempts to claim that no repression was ever happening. They
Speaker 2: kept entire legacies of literature and art alive, and they
Speaker 2: kept their spirits up with their homebrew reading mania, their
Speaker 2: binge reading, just like their binge sex. And they probably
Speaker 2: got really, really tired of typing all the time time.
Speaker 3: I'm sure they did. I'm sure they were over it,
Speaker 3: but it was so vital and this is a beautiful
Speaker 3: story and it's such an important one inspiring. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's the long period of time to be navigating different
Speaker 3: versions of censorship and imprisonment and death and the stakes
Speaker 3: and exile. But the spirit feels pretty unbreakable, and that's
Speaker 3: why they were ultimately able to make some changes. Although
Speaker 3: I'm not positive that rushes.
Speaker 2: No, it didn't didn't work out great.
Speaker 3: I feel super free to say whatever. I'm sure in theory,
Speaker 3: but you're watching your back if you're saying whatever you
Speaker 3: want right now. Yeah, you know, the journey continues, but
Speaker 3: it is super inspiring and important reminder right now how
Speaker 3: vital art is and sharing of information and organizing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's why librarians are fucking crucial and important.
Speaker 2: Keep archives of things. Archivists are fun and crucial and important.
Speaker 2: And encrypting your hard drive. My final plug of this
Speaker 2: show is learn about encrypting your hard drive and especially
Speaker 2: any kind of backup drive you have. Encrypt it not
Speaker 2: just with like the kind of password you want to
Speaker 2: type in every day all the time, but like six
Speaker 2: or seven randomly picked dictionary.
Speaker 3: Words, something that I will forget and never remember.
Speaker 2: Well, what you have to do is you create anamonic
Speaker 2: around it. It's like you have to actually practice to
Speaker 2: do it. This is actually why I say that, like,
Speaker 2: although in a weird way. Actually, if you do it
Speaker 2: as your like regular open your computer thing, then you
Speaker 2: can remember it because you type it every day. Right.
Speaker 2: But yeah, like preserve information. It's important. Much like I
Speaker 2: was actually thinking, I'm probably gonna download most of Coolsen
Speaker 2: Media and keep it on encrypted hard drive somewhere.
Speaker 3: Not a bad idea.
Speaker 2: It's got to be an archive, yeah, But in the
Speaker 2: meantime you don't need that. You can just use your
Speaker 2: regular podcast app or subscribe to Cooler Zone Media and
Speaker 2: get all of the same content without the ads. Because
Speaker 2: maybe for good we live in a society where you
Speaker 2: can do that. But at least right now.
Speaker 3: You can, yep, take advantage of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the kind of thing that I took for fucking granted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, while you still can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness, Well we ourselves over at somewhere News.
Speaker 3: Do have a Patreon that you can subscribe to and
Speaker 3: get ad free versions of all of our things and
Speaker 3: some bonus content. Yeah, do that, but you know, some
Speaker 3: more news, even more news are shows, watch listen. You
Speaker 3: can do both through all the shows. Hell yeah, watch
Speaker 3: it or listen whatever you prefer while it lasts.
Speaker 2: Let's see if you're not listening to it could happen here,
Speaker 2: It could happen here. Is also it's on the cool
Speaker 2: Zone Media network, and there's been a bunch of good
Speaker 2: episodes recently about things like should you leave the country
Speaker 2: and the answer is like probably not unless the answer
Speaker 2: is yes, But you know.
Speaker 3: It's I will. Let's definitely listen to that episode because
Speaker 3: that's a conversation I keep having.
Speaker 2: It's a good breakdown of it. It's a good breakdown
Speaker 2: of like, look like for most people, that's not going
Speaker 2: to be the answer you know, surround yourself with things
Speaker 2: that don't inspire despair but also don't inspire you to
Speaker 2: stick your head in the sand, is what I would
Speaker 2: have to say. And that's my plug. Yeah, mine too, Sophie.
Speaker 1: You got anything, Yeah, I mean, just listen to our
Speaker 1: every Friday on It could happen here. We do episodes
Speaker 1: called Executive Disorder. Listen to that if you want to
Speaker 1: be the most up to date on things going on politically.
Speaker 2: Do you think that there's a joke that could be
Speaker 2: made a sort of school house age level like crude
Speaker 2: joke around and ed?
Speaker 1: Do you think I keep trying to get us sponsored
Speaker 1: by a thing that goes with that joke.
Speaker 3: That feels like a gimme.
Speaker 1: And I just need them to do their jobs. Well,
Speaker 1: it'll happen. I'm manifesting it. It's gonna happen.
Speaker 2: Sometimes we get the ads for like the girl version
Speaker 2: of Pills.
Speaker 1: For I just I just uh want once we're once
Speaker 1: we're off recording, I'll tell you a very funny thing
Speaker 1: about this entire situation.
Speaker 2: Haha. And what's gonna happen after we stop recordings. I'm
Speaker 2: going to say the most embarrassing thing I've ever done
Speaker 2: while drunk, but you don't get to listen to it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah hahaha, Bye bye bye bye.
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