https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/09/21/american_pandemic_samizdat_149787.html
American Pandemic ‘Samizdat’
COMMENTARY
By Jay Bhattacharya
September 21, 2023
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Censorship existed even before literature, say the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat.
Samizdat – translates as: “We publish ourselves” – that is, not the state, but we, the people.
Unlike the underground of Czarist times, today’s samizdat has no printing presses (with rare exceptions): The K.G.B., the secret police, is too efficient. It is the typewriter, each page produced with four to eight carbon copies, that does the job. By the thousands and tens of thousands of frail, smudged onionskin sheets, samizdat spreads across the land a mass of protests and petitions, secret court minutes, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s banned novels, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984,” Nicholas Berdyayev’s philosophical essays, all sorts of sharp political discourses and angry poetry.
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Had the experience in typing school
— My sainted Mother’s idea to keep the “idle hands” from being the Devil’s workshop one summer when I was to young to get a real job and too old to be left alone without getting into trouble. It included: business accounting, shorthand, composition, and letter writing. Argh! And you wonder why I hate schools?) — were we had timed typing tests with only three pages of onion skin and carbon paper. If we corrected a mistake, the carbon copy made it obvious. I still remember minus five points for a mistake on the original and minus one for a correction. When I complained, my Mom sat down at an old manual we had at home a pounded out the test page at an amazing WPM without a single mistake. Then she turned to me and asked: “Now want to complain about shorthand?” I knew to shut my mouth because she had her secretarial school medals in her “hope chest” when she was best of class in various disciplines. Guess the genes failed because I never was as good as her in those skills. Sigh! Sadly —
Have to admire the dedication to the produce the manuscripts. Like the Irish monks duplicating texts by hand during the Dark Ages.
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Reinke Faces Life 