Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition [Hardcover]

George Saunders (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0913460273 | ISBN-13: 978-0913460276 | Publication Date: June 1974 | Edition: 1st

Accounts by veterans of the struggle in the 1920s and early 1930s to continue Lenin's revolutionary course, and by leaders of the opposition movement of the 1970s.

Index, Annotation, Photos

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Pathfinder Pr; 1st edition (June 1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0913460273
• ISBN-13: 978-0913460276
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,206,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The future in the past, April 6, 2002

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (Paperback)

The current leaders of Russia and the other parts of the former USSR are a different name for the same old group of bureaucrats that muscled their way in under Stalin. Workers, oppressed nationalities, women have to fight them at every step to preserve the gains won during the workers revolution in 1917, to move forward for a decent life. The words of these Bolshevik fighters who refused to let Stalin and his successors stop them from defending the revolutionary ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, their words, and example and struggle will be come weapons for the new generation of fighters in these countries.

3.0 out of 5 stars A problematic source, June 12, 2010

By 

Ashtar Command "Seeker" (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (Paperback)

"Samizdat" is a book published in 1974 by Monad Press, presumably a publishing arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, at the time a Trotskyist organization. The book contains documents from the Soviet underground opposition. Since the publishers are left-wing, the collection mostly includes leftist samizdat. The texts are of varied quality, and the two main items are very problematic.

The longest document is titled "Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist" and is purportedly an autobiography by a Trotskyist survivor of Stalin's labour camps. Unfortunately, the text is disjointed and contains quite a few erroneous or even bizarre statements, making me wonder how much of it is really true? The editors admit that the memoirs have been heavily amended and altered during their circulation as samizdat. The anonymous Bolshevik-Leninist claims to have met both Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Sergei Sedov, Lenin's widow Krupskaya, Zinoviev and Kamenev - the two latter in prison. He claims to have shared a cell with Zinoviev, who supposedly told him that Stalin was present at Zinoviev's first trial - in disguise, posing as an unknown Asiatic comrade! When Zinoviev realized this, he quite simply fainted. The author also claims to have met Sergei Sedov (one of Trotsky's sons) at the labour camps in Vorkuta. While Sergei was indeed there, other parts of the story don't make any sense, as pointed out by the editors themselves.

Another problematic document is "Memoirs of Aleksandra Chumakova", apparently found in the same samizdat manuscript as "Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist". The author supposedly worked for the notorious Lazar Kaganovich, and claims that Trotskyists spoke openly at party meetings until 1932. She retells a romanticized and unbelievable story about a 15 year old girl who was imprisoned by the secret police, and on one point she talks about the Left Opposition containing people of "Russian and Jewish nationality" - the same expression used by the anonymous writer of "Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist". This is doubly strange, since neither Lenin nor Trotsky recognized the Jews as a separate nationality. I doubt that Trotskyists emphasized the "Jewish" character of their movement. That sounds more like something neutral on-lookers or opponents might say, since Trotsky was technically a Jew (his real name was Bronstein).

Brigitte Gerland's "Vorkuta" sounds more trustworthy. Gerland was a dissident German Communist imprisoned in the Soviet Union but subsequently released and transferred to West Germany. Some of the information in her article (such as the different Trotskyist factions in the labour camps) are confirmed by other sources. Thus, Ante Ciliga mentions that imprisoned Trotskyists were divided in different factions in his book "The Russian Enigma". Here, the problem is something else. The editors at Monad Press claim that the Ukrainian fascist movement UPA was actually socialist, while Gerland's article explicity says that they were *not* socialists but pro-American, and therefore refused to co-operate with left-wing dissidents! Where on earth did all these "socialist" UPA fighters go, one wonders? Deep undercover?

The rest of the book concentrates on Pyotr Grigorenko, a former Soviet officer who became a dissident during the 1960's. The book reprints documents written by Grigorenko and some of his collaborators. While Grigorenko wasn't a Trotskyist, he did claim to be a Communist, and his organization was called Union of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism. Grigorenko was quite active, organized protests in support of the Prague Spring, and became well known in the West (eventually, he was apparently allowed to leave the USSR). A document from a smaller and less known dissident group, the Union of Communards, is also reprinted. They too claimed to be leftist, and demanded free elections and a multiparty system in the Soviet Union. Yet another leftist document published deals with the forced Russification of Latvia (the Soviet authorities denounced it as a forgery). Mostly as PR window dressing, "Samizdat" also reprints a short piece signed by Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev.

"Samizdat" may be of some interest to serious students of Soviet history, or perhaps to Russians, but some of the documents reprinted may say more about the phenomenon of samizdat itself, than they do about the actual opposition.

5.0 out of 5 stars Revolutionary opponents of Stalin's regime, April 22, 2002

By 

George Fyson (Auckland, New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Samizdat; voices of the Soviet opposition (Paperback)

Opens a window on the lives and deeds of those who were the most ferociously persecuted under the regime of Stalin and his Soviet successors: the oppositionists who stood firm on the platform of the Russian Revolution. While most of this generation were wiped out in the mass executions of the 1930s and 40s, some lived through it and told their story, as part of the rising Samizdat ("self-publication") movement of the 1960s and 70s. The "Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist", some 130 pages long, alone make Samizdat worth reading. Former Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, imprisoned in the 1960s for four years in a psychiatric hospital for counterposing Marx and Lenin to the rotting Soviet regime, also tells his story here. Essential to understanding the course the former Soviet bloc has travelled from the 1917 revolution to today.