Transnational Book Diplomacy beyond the Cultural Cold War: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the Tamizdat

Project Information

TAMIZDAT

Grant agreement ID: 101109157

DOI

10.3030/101109157

EC signature date 28 April 2023

Start date 1 October 2023

End date 30 November 2026

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 265 099,20

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TAMIZDAT (Transnational Book Diplomacy beyond the Cultural Cold War: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the Tamizdat)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The TAMIZDAT project undertook a comprehensive analysis of the transnational production, circulation, and reception of Soviet (S) and East European (EE) literature published abroad – known as tamizdat (which literally means “published over there”), which refers to S and EE texts that were censored or unpublished in the Eastern bloc but smuggled out and printed in the West– during the Cold War period (1954-1991). The main research objective is to overcome prevailing narratives that represented Western (W) and Eastern (E) cultures as isolated blocs, and interpreted tamizdat merely as an ideological weapon of the ‘Cultural Cold War’ (Scott-Smith, Romijn and Segal, 2014). It is framed in a new scientific paradigm for the investigation of the Cultural Cold War, which spanned from New Cold War Studies to Cultural Diplomacy and Transnational Relations. By focusing on small state and non-state actors instead of superpowers (Autio-Sarasmo and Miklóssy 2011), it analyses book diplomacy to demonstrate cooperation instead of opposition, interaction instead of confrontation, and multipolarity instead of bipolarity.
With this aim, the research treated tamizdat as the result of socially and culturally regulated activities, emphasizing the agency of actors – state and non-state institutions (covert and overt organizations and literary associations, publishing houses, literary journals etc.) and individuals (writers, dissidents, human right activists, editors, translators, publishers, diplomats, literary agents etc.) – in the transnational production, circulation, and reception of manuscripts (samizdat) and books (tamizdat). TAMIZDAT sought to outline a comparative intellectual history of XX century by tracing the ‘topography of Cold War culture’, a map of transnational routes and socio-cultural networks of tamizdat across the ‘Nylon Curtain’ (Péteri 2004), an ideological and geopolitical border permeable to cultural objects.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project has achieved significant milestones and has yielded valuable insights in data collection, methodological developments, and preliminary data analysis and digital visualizations. The work realized so far have been dedicated mainly to achieving the Research Objectives (ROs) through intensive archival research and the subsequent data mining necessary for structuring the data to perform digital data analysis and visualization of maps and relational networks.
Archival research was conducted at major institutions, including the Hoover Archive (Stanford), Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori (FAAM, Milan), Houghton Library (Harvard), Pontificio Istituto Orientale (Rome), the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam) and the Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee (ASAC, Marghera). With the aim to assess the material and symbolic production (Bourdieu) of tamizdat, case studies focusing on key works were selected, including A. Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle (V kruge pervom), Cancer Ward (Rakovyi korpus) and The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULag), N. Mandel’shtam’s Hope Against Hope (Vospominaniia), V. Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy), S. Alliluyeva’s Twenty Letters to a Friend (Dvadtsat’ pisem k drugu) and Only One Year (Tol’ko odin god), and G. Orwell’s Animal Farm translations in Polish (Folwark zwierzęcy), Ukrainian (Kolgosp Tvarin), Czech (Farma zvířat) and Russian (Skotskii khutor).

A corpus comprising approx. 3.000 letters has been systematically compiled from the personal papers of Olga Andreyev Carlisle, Leopold Łabedz, Gleb Struve, Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Samuel Walker, Erich Linder, George Minden, Alec Flegon, and from the collection of Free Europe Press, Alexander Herzen Foundation, Mondadori, Il Saggiatore, Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. Employing micro-historical methods, comprehensive data on individuals and institutions involved in the production and circulation of tamizdat have been gathered. The analysis of correspondence has been realized to recollect data on the relational networks among the socio-cultural actors (writers, publishers, translators, dissidents, human rights activists, diplomats, associations, covert organizations etc.) cooperating in the production and circulation of manuscripts (samizdat) and books (tamizdat).
From this corpus comprehensive data on the employees and collaborators of several institutions (Free Europe Committee, Congress for Cultural Freedom, International Advisory Council, International Literary Center, Associazione Letteraria Internazionale, Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, Mondadori, Il Saggiatore, Harper & Row, Atheneum, Posev, Instytut Literacki, Alexander Herzen Foundation and Flegon Press) have been also gathered, with the aim of assessing the role and position of each individual, whose agency was determined in the transnational circulation and publication of such texts. For each collections, the letters have been annotated in DOCX files by recording several data [date of sending, sender(s), receiver(s), person(s) and/or institution(s) mentioned, summary of content and comments]: the files were converted into TXT format to make easier the extraction of data in cases where using digital tools for data mining was proved ineffective. Throughout this process, a number of optical character recognition (OCR) tools and large language models (LLMs) – including Transkribus, Adobe Reader, Mistral, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Qwen and ChatGPT – were tested to transcribe the letters. The data mining from this corpus is still in progress, due to the large amounts of sources analyzed and to the necessity to extract manually the information from the Russian handwritten sources (which represents most of the cases, with an average of 2200 letters), as the digital tools to transcribe them were proved unsatisfactory for the intended purposes. In order to structure these data, a multi model dataset with relational, temporal and spatial attributes has been created by the fellow on the platform Nodegoat: the record of data on the model is still in progress. The preliminary results of this work, as well as the digital visualizations of the ‘Solzhenitsyn Galaxy’ and the ‘Polish Galaxy’, has been presented and discussed in several international conferences and workshops.
An additional corpus of 200 operational reports and memoranda of the secret book distribution programs coordinated by several covert organizations (among which Free Europe Committee, Congress for Cultural Freedom, International Advisory Council and International Literary Center) in the years 1956-1991, has been also systematically compiled and analysed. The corpus has undergone computational text analysis, generating statistical data on various aspect of the circulation of tamizdat: occurrences of titles sent, categories of books sent, categories of recipients, points of sending and receiving, numbers of copies sent monthly, etc. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of these data allowed to assess the impact of the secret book distribution programs, map and visualize the routes and flow of tamizdat from W to E bloc, quantify and assess the circulation and reception of tamizdat in the E bloc. The data mining from this corpus resulted in the creation of a dataset (composed, at the moment, of 14.000 records) which has been used also to the creation of digital visualization (stream graphs, cluster visualizations, GIS visualizations). The preliminary results of this work, as well as the digital visualizations, has been presented and discussed in several international conferences and workshops. For a detailed account, please refer to section
To place tamizdat in the context of the Cold War and US “soft power” strategies, a timeline of major political and cultural events (1957–1991) has been created. This work identified 1977 – the year of the ‘Biennale of Cultural Dissent in Eastern European Countries’ – as a crucial year for the transnational reception of tamizdat. At the Biennale of Dissent an exhibition titled Libri, Riviste, Manifesti, Fotografie, Videotapes, Samizdat (Book, Journals, Posters, Photographs, Videotapes, Samizdat) showcased a collection of 2.000 tamizdat, giving to this publishing phenomenon an international resonance. Crossing the data recollected in several archival collections (Biennale, Free Europe/Radio Liberty), a corpus of 200 tamizdat exhibited at the Biennale of Dissent and donated to the Ca’ Foscari University Library has been found by the fellow: the data of these 200 books have been structured in a spreadsheet used to analyse the reception of tamizdat in the W bloc. Data analysis of archival sources conveyed also interesting information about the networks of socio-cultural actors involved in the organization of this event: these data has been also extracted and structured into a relational dataset. Digital visualizations of this dataset have been realized (relational and stream graphs). The fellow is planning to realize a digital exhibition of this book collection – Tamizdat@Ca’Foscari – as planned in the DoA.
For allowing the preservation and accessibility of research outputs, by the end of the project the datasets will be shared in CSV format on the permanent OA repository Zenodo (CERN), in compliance with FAIR data principles and in line with the DoA.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The TAMIZDAT project is addressing current gaps in the scholarship on Soviet and East European dissent and alternative print culture by applying a socio-cultural and transnational approach to the study of tamizdat, which has traditionally been under-investigated compared to samizdat.
This research moves beyond the traditional interpretation of tamizdat as a mere soft power tool. By treating it as a socio-cultural phenomenon arising from transnational and transgenerational practices of political and cultural resistance, TAMIZDAT foregrounds the agency of small state and non-state actors (dissidents, émigrés, human rights activists, translators, literary agents, publishing houses, organizations, etc.) in the production and circulation of cultural objects by conferring them symbolic value and legitimating them as such in the fields of power and cultural production.
Methodologically, the project integrates traditional archival research with sophisticated Digital Humanities approaches – such as Data Feminism, applied to challenge the power structures that shape data practices.
The testing of OCR and AI tools for transcribing Russian and Polish manuscripts, and the implementation of a multi-model database created by the fellow on the platform Nodegoat, represent relevant methodological innovations in the field of Slavic Studies, contributing to the development of the brand-new Slavic DH field. The use of advanced data mining, data analysis, data cleaning and visualization tools, as well as the records of data and metadata in a multi-model database allow new insights on quantitative analysis of archival holdings until now analysed only qualitatively, ensuring the highest standard of replicability.
The quantitative corpus of archival records from reports and memoranda of covert book operations offers a major contribution to the Cultural Cold War Studies as well. The analysis of statistical data and the visualization of routes and relational networks provide an unprecedented tool for mapping what the fellow define “topography of Cold War culture”, by 1) tracking the transnational circulation of tamizdat, 2) quantifying the flows of cultural objects across and beyond the Iron Curtain, and 3) individuating the targets of the secret book distribution programs. This methodological shift, providing a focus toward quantifiable and structured data (author, title, year of publication, publishing house, translator, editor, number of copies sent, country of sending, country of target recipients, etc.), allow to measure and evaluate also the socio-cultural impact of the transnational circulation of knowledge and information across and beyond the Nylon Curtain, rather than the (geo)political and ideological impact of the covert book operations only.

Integration of social sciences and humanities: the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpora (letters, reports and tamizdat editions) offers a relevant contribution to Eastern European and Russian Studies by integrating social sciences and humanities. The extraction and structuring of data from the letters provide relevant information about the relational networks of a large variety of social groups (Soviet and Eastern European émigrés, dissidents, anti-Communist activists, human right activists, etc.) involved in the transnational production, circulation and reception of tamizdat. This analysis allows to assess the symbolic value of tamizdat as an alternative practice of political and cultural resistance, by revealing the links between several generations of specific social groups. As, for example, in the case of the Chernovs and the Andreevs, two family groups composed by Russian émigrés of the political and cultural diaspora whose members has been involved in the transnational production and circulation of several tamizdat editions (such as A. Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and N. Mandel’shtam’s Hope Against Hope). Thanks to the qualitative and quantitative analysis of a corpus of 2000 letters, it was possible to assess how the agency of the Chernov and Andreev’s family members was deeply rooted in and informed by the legacy of a transgenerational political activism which – when confined in the literary and geopolitical extraterritorial spaces of Russian diaspora, the so-called “Russia abroad” (russkoe zarubezh’e) – resulted in a peculiar form of cultural resistance performed from the other side of the Nylon Curtain: the tamizdat. In this perspective it was also possible to establish the symbolic value of tamizdat as a tool of transgenerational cultural resistance, and not only as a tool of soft power. The preliminary outcomes of this analysis have been presented at the XVIIth International Congress of Slavists (with a paper titled Transnational and Transgenerational Networks of Tamizdat: Toward a Women’s Intellectual History), in a seminar (The Agency of Russian Émigrés in the Socialization of Tamizdat: The Networks of the Chernov and Andreev Families) and in a forthcoming book chapter (The Transnational Socialization of Tamizdat as a Family Affair: The Networks of the Chernov and Andreev Families).

Streamgraph of the amounts of books sent per months to each EE country by PSPD programs (1963-66).

Relational network of the “Solzhenitsyn Galaxy”.

Cluster graph of tamizdat editions exhibited at the Biennale of Dissent (1977).

Cluster graph of Italian tamizdat exhibited at the Biennale of Dissent (1977).

Arc map of the global flows of tamizdat sent by PSDPD programs (1963-66).

Arc map of the flows of tamizdat sent by PSPD programs across Europe (1963-66).