Tamizdat – Тамиздат

[The article reposted below, about books banned in the Soviet Union (and now also in Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation), caught my attention for two reasons.  One, it’s about Russian literature, and, as many readers of Rick On Theater will know, I studied Russian in college and then in the army. 

[Two, I am utterly opposed to censorship for political or religious reasons.  As I’ve said many time on this blog, I am pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  I’ve blogged on various kinds of censorship, mostly in this country, on ROT, and, having read “Banned by the Soviets,” I knew I had to add it to my coverage of this act.]

“BANNED BY THE SOVIETS, AVAILABLE IN NEW YORK”
by Sarah Chatta

[This article ran in the print edition of the New York Times on 1 March 2026 in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted online as “The Kremlin Banned These Books. You Can Find Them in a New York Library” on 23 February.]

A professor has built a collection of contraband books from an earlier era.

Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper.

Soviet tourists visiting Western Europe brought mini-volumes of “Doctor Zhivago” [Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), 1957 in Russian (Milan, Italy); 1958 in English (New American Library)] back home with them. Members of the Moscow Philharmonic were said to have lined their sheet music with book pages. From balloon-launching sites in West Germany, copies of George Orwell’s [1903-50] “Animal Farm” [English; 1945] were lofted into Eastern Europe.

Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.

Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world.

[Hunter College at Park Avenue and East 68th Street is a division of the City University of New York (CUNY).]

The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.

[White Rabbit Books at 200 West 86th Street, Manhattan, New York City, is a bookstore with Russian, English, Ukrainian, and Hebrew books designed for various children’s ages.  It hosts book club activities and cultural events for children and teenagers. (White Rabbit Books in the United Kingdom is a prominent music and literary publisher based in London and Essex, not associated with the NYC shop.)]

The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through.

[Chatta is a little free with her English renderings of samizdat (самиздат) and tamizdat (тамиздат). They’re two Russian portmanteau words formed by joining two words (or parts of two words, to coin a new word that combines their meanings (English examples: ‘televangelist’ = ‘television’ + ‘evangelist’; ‘cockapoo’ = ‘cocker spaniel’ + ‘poodle’).

[The Russians, and especially the Soviets, were very fond of acronyms (GUM [ГУМ]; Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazín [Государственный Универсальный Магазин], or State Universal [that is, ‘Department’] Store; since 1991, Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin [Главный Универсальный Магазин], Main Universal Store) and portmanteaus (Soviet: Comintern [Коминтерн]; Communist International [Коммунистический интернационал; Kommunisticheskiy internatsional]; post-Soviet: Zomboyashchik [Зомбоящик], Zombie [зомби] +  Yashchik [ящик; ‘box’] = “Zombie Box,” slang for a television).

[In this instance, the second part of the portmanteaus is from the word izdatel'stvo (издательство), which means ‘publishing house’ or ‘publisher.’ The portmanteau use was meant as a pun on the name of the official Soviet state publishing house, Gosudarstvennoye izdatel'stvo (Государственное издательство), known as Gosizdat (Госиздат).

[Sam (сам) is the Russian word for ‘self’ (samoubiystvo [самоубийство]: ‘suicide,’ literally ‘self-murder’), so samizdat is literally ‘self-publisher’ (as if there were publishing company with such a name) or, more colloquially, ‘self-published.’ Unfortunately, in the more comfortable English term, the wry pun is lost—but it probably wouldn’t really connect with an English speaker in any case.

[Tam (там) is Russian for ‘there’ (the opposite of tut (тут; ‘here’), so tamizdat (тамиздат) is literally ‘there-publisher’ or ‘over there-publisher’—meaning, of course, somewhere other than the USSR.  Again, we’d more likely say ‘published abroad.’

Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle [b. 1954; U.S. Ambassador to Russia: 2008-12].

With this collection, the story of the “significant intellectual effort of both Soviet creators and Western partners — the publishers and funders and whoever else, smugglers — it is all in one place,” said Alla Roylance, New York University’s Slavic studies librarian, who donated some of her own books to the Tamizdat Project. “That is incredibly relevant these days,” she added, as the Kremlin unleashes a new wave of censorship.

Page by page

Mr. Klots grew up with contraband Russian literature in the Soviet city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains. His mother, he said, “would take a train to Moscow just to stop by an apartment of one dissident who would give her Solzhenitsyn.” Then she would stay up late into the night duplicating the borrowed book, page by page.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident, best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian, 1962; English – censored, 1963; uncensored, 1991), August 1914 (Russian, 1971; English, 1972), and The Gulag Archipelago (Russian, 1973 by a Parisian publisher; English, 1974).]

“One of my childhood memories is my mother typing something at night and me falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter,” he said.

Countless Soviet households have similar stories of treasuring contraband literature — hiding “Doctor Zhivago” under a grandmother’s mattress, making a copy of the poet Anna Akhmatova’s masterpiece, “Requiem.”

[Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a Russian and Soviet poet who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966. She is best known for Requiem, an elegy about the Stalinist terror (published in Russian in Munich in 1963 and in English in 1973).]

In the winter of 2022, Mr. Klots had just finished writing a book about the history of Cold War censorship [Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023)]. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Kremlin began a crackdown on free expression at home at a scale unseen since the Soviet era. Russian officials targeted authors, arrested publishers and censored fan fiction websites. The police raided bookstores, and officials drew up lists of objectionable literature, requiring librarians to pull works by Vladimir Sorokin [Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright; b. 1955], Lyudmila Ulitskaya [Russian novelist and short story writer; b. 1943], Haruki Murakami [Japanese novelist, essayist, and short story writer; b. 1949], Truman Capote [American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright; 1924-84], Susan Sontag [American critic, essayist, and novelist; 1933-2004] and Danielle Steel [American romance novelist; b. 1947], among others.

“All of a sudden it became no longer history, but the present and reality again,” Mr. Klots said. “I just couldn’t stand in front of my students and only teach and only tell them about the peculiarities of Russian literature.”

[It’s also not confined to the former Soviet Union! On 6 February 2025, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, the Pentagon agency responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs), announced it would remove books related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” from its schools. See “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025). 

[An order to remove certain books from service academy libraries was issued on 29 March 2025. The action was directed at the U.S. Naval Academy before being expanded to West Point (9 April) and the Air Force Academy (15/16 April).]

He founded the Tamizdat Project, through which he built the library, raised money to help students fleeing war and persecution, and archived oral histories of literary repression. When the Tamizdat Project announced it was publishing a book by an author critical of President Vladimir Putin [Linor Goralik, Exodus-22 | Исход-22; 2025], Russia branded the organization a “foreign agent.” Now, anyone in Russia who so much as shares the Tamizdat Project’s website without a disclaimer could be penalized.

Mr. Klots shrugged off the threat. The Tamizdat Project plans to publish five new titles this winter and spring. If history is any indication, he said, the impact of a tamizdat book could be like a stone thrown in a lake: “Wherever it falls, the waves get much bigger.”

A pure detective story

New York City is a fitting locale for the work of the Tamizdat Project. For most of the 20th century it was home to the publishers, academics, activists and philanthropists who saw the potential of contraband books during and even before the Cold War.

The first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union, “We” [Мы, romanized: My] — a dystopian vision of totalitarianism by Yevgeny Zamyatin [Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire; 1884-1937] — was published twice in New York before it could be released at home. Mr. Zamyatin managed to send his manuscript abroad, and E.P. Dutton released it, in English, in 1924. More than 60 years later, when Soviet authorities lifted the ban, some of the country’s citizens had already read it. Mr. Zamyatin’s Russian-language original had already been printed in 1952 by Chekhov Publishing House in New York.

“It was just a pure detective story, how every single book got published as tamizdat,” Mr. Klots said.

Chekhov Publishing House received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency through the Ford Foundation, writes the British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders [British journalist and historian; b. 1966] in “The Cultural Cold War,” and was one of numerous literary ventures in the city supported by the agency. The C.I.A. also had a banned-book dissemination program, known for years as the International Literary Center, headquartered on Park Avenue. Under the stewardship of the exiled Romanian aristocrat George Minden [1921-2006], the organization ran a vast international book distribution network that smuggled some 10 million books and magazines into communist countries, often by mail and in diplomatic pouches.

At its height, the Cold War project of printing literature banned in — and very often destined for — communist countries explicitly involved more than a dozen New York publishing houses.

Government analysts described Cold War book distribution, probably one of the least expensive of the C.I.A.’s covert operations, as a “demonstrably effective” way of reaching the Soviet elite and influencing their attitudes “toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence.”

Newly relevant

As the scope of Russian censorship has widened in recent years, the history of New York’s Soviet-era banned-book publishers has gained new relevance. “Even if these people are no longer around,” Mr. Klots said, they “laid the foundation for a project like the Tamizdat Project to exist and to build on their legacy.”

One of the Tamizdat Project’s most significant donations came from the family of Edward Kline [1932-2017], a philanthropist who led a double life in New York. Most knew him as the millionaire chief executive of the Kline Brothers department store chain, but the Soviet human rights movement knew him as a chief advocate and underwriter of its publishing work.

The Tamizdat Project has started to reveal the extent of Mr. Kline’s activities. Among his many endeavors, he acquired and revived Chekhov Publishing House, releasing what became canonical 20th-century Russian literature: original works by Nadezhda Mandelstam [Soviet writer, translator, educator, linguist, and memoirist; 1899-1980], Lydia Chukovskaya [Soviet and Russian writer, poet, editor, publicist, memoirist and dissident; 1907-96] and Joseph Brodsky [Russian and American poet and essayist; 1940-96].

Mr. Kline’s daughter, Carole Feuer [b. 1960], spoke with the Tamizdat Project about the years when Soviet exiles like Mr. Brodsky frequented her family’s Park Avenue apartment. During one visit, a leading dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexander Godunov [1949-95], defected to the United States in her living room [1979]. “He was somewhat cute,” she said, “and it was the day I was supposed to go to college.”

Several years earlier, Mr. Kline started Khronika Press with the Soviet dissidents Valery Chalidze [Soviet author, publisher, dissident, and human rights activist; 1938-2018] and later Pavel Litvinov [Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident; b. 1940]. Khronika produced a bimonthly magazine in Russian and English that regularly broke news of arrests and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union [A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR (1973-82); Хроника защиты прав человека в СССР (Khronika zashchity prav cheloveka v SSSR)]. For a time it served as the main voice of the Soviet opposition.

Without Mr. Kline, his old collaborator Mr. Litvinov told the Tamizdat Project, Khronika Press “wouldn’t have existed.”

A growing movement

Today Mr. Klots is one of many in a growing community of Eastern European immigrants picking up where the Soviet human rights movement left off. A new group of Russian dissidents recently created a new Kronika in New York, this time backed by PEN America [nonprofit organization whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide] and Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], with a more expansive mandate than its predecessors: to preserve independent media from places where journalists are persecuted, including Russia and Guatemala. It calls this work “digital resistance to state censorship.”

In Brooklyn, Anya Morlan-Stysis opened Kvartira [731 Washington Avenue], a nonprofit bookstore that caters to Eastern European exiles and their supporters. Against bright yellow walls and a wide array of children’s literature, Kvartira hosts talks with dissident authors and evenings for participants to write letters to political prisoners. It is the only brick-and-mortar shop listed in New York City as a vendor by the banned-book publisher Freedom Letters. (Last September Russia added the store’s website to a register of proscribed sites, citing unspecified “extremist information.”)

In 2024 Knopf published “Patriot,” the memoir of the late opposition leader Aleksei Navalny [1976-2024], which Russia has since outlawed for inciting “hatred and enmity” toward the government. Last summer Abrams [Books; U.S. publishing house] released an English translation of “Pioneer Summer” [by Ukrainian-Russian duo Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova], the gay teen romance that the Kremlin banned after it became a popular sensation. This represents only a small fraction of the global output of contraband titles, some 600 or 700 by Mr. Klots’s estimate, produced since 2023.

[The Pioneers (Пионеры) was a children’s communist organization in the USSR. Children joined in elementary school and remained until around the equivalent of our middle school/junior high; adolescents shifted over to other organizations.

[On the surface, the Pioneers resembled the Boy Scouts and other similar organizations, but along with the scouting activities, community projects like collecting scrap metal, and sports, the Pioneers also went through ideological indoctrination and military simulation games and basic military instruction.

[Membership was virtually mandatory as the Pioneers and the Pioneer Palaces were the only outlets for any kind of programs for children and youth. Inducements, such as preferential admission to universities and especially to the top schools, made membership attractive. Children who chose not to join were often marginalized by their peers as well as the party apparatus that controlled access to both amenities and necessities.]

“I can’t help thinking about what will actually remain from this new time of tamizdat that’s so exponentially growing today,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone reading Solzhenitsyn as their bedtime reading, can you? But everyone was doing it not so long ago.”

The Tamizdat Project hopes to help a new generation rediscover such books. “It’s enough for a text to find itself elsewhere for it to become a new book,” Mr. Klots said.

[Here’s a list of past posts on the topic of censorship: 

•   “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010)

•   “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010)

•   “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy [Allegro] (22 May 2011)

•   “Culture War” (6 February 2014)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)

•   “‘How to Free Speech’” by Lee C. Bollinger (23 November 2015)

•   “Fighting for Free Expression” (5 February 2016)

•   “‘Arts and the State’” [1990] by Paul Mattick, Jr. (14 November 2021)

•   “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023)

•   “‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship’” by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith (21 April 2024)

•   “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024)

•   “‘The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization’” by Dr. Indira Etwaroo (4 May 2025)

•   “Degrading the Arts (Redux)” (14 May 2025)

•   “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025)

•   “More on Censorship of School Theater” (12 December 2025)

[Sarah Chatta is an editorial assistant in the Opinion department of the New York Times.  In addition to her editorial work, she writes for the paper.  Before joining the Times in October 2024, Chatta held several diverse roles in journalism and education, including fact-checker at the New Yorker, where her writing and translations were also published; freelance editor for Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent Russian newspaper published in Riga, Latvia; investigative story coordinator for the syndicated tabloid television newsmagazine Inside Edition; and international reporter for the Daily News in Sri Lanka and the Chilkat Valley News in Alaska.  Chatta studied Russian and creative writing at Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio), which informs much of her current reporting on Russian literary and cultural history.]