Samizdat refers to literature written and circulated in the Soviet Union during the period between Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Works were intended to circumvent strict regulations on freedom of expression and often featured critiques of topics such as politics or culture, or republished ‘western texts.’ To avoid regulations on the press, samizdat publications were usually hand-typed for person-to-person distribution.

The NKVD (Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs]) was originally created in 1917 under the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to oversee police work and prison and labor camps. It was reorganized in 1934 to serve as the interior ministry for the USSR and oversaw law enforcement until it was dissolved and replaced with the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1946. During the 1930s, the NKVD ran the GULAG, a system of forced-labor camps and political prisons, and carried out operations of mass-deportations, counterintelligence, political repression, and mass-executions. The GULAG was officially disbanded in the 1950s.

Citations:

Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Gulag.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag.

Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Samizdat.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/samizdat.

“NKVD.” Wikipedia. August 20, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD.

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