samizdat

American  

[sah-miz-daht, suh-myiz-daht] / ˈsɑ mɪzˌdɑt, sə myɪzˈdɑt /

noun

1. a clandestine publishing system within the Soviet Union, by which forbidden or unpublishable literature was reproduced and circulated privately.

2. a work or periodical circulated by this system.

---

samizdat British  

/ səmizˈdat /

noun

1. 1. a system of clandestine printing and distribution of banned or dissident literature

   2. ( as modifier )

      a samizdat publication

---

Etymology

Origin of samizdat

1965–70; < Russian samizdát, equivalent to sam ( o )- self- + izdát ( el'stvo ) publishing agency; coined as a jocular allusion to the compound names of official Soviet publishing organs, e.g., Gosizdát for Gosudárstvennoe izdátel'stvo State Publishing House

Example Sentences

I’ve been thinking about the samizdat from David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.”

From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 10, 2025

But the text of his speech was quickly leaked by his supporters who posted it online in a modern-day version of samizdat, the way works of dissident writers were copied and shared in Soviet times.

From BBC • Apr. 21, 2023

One day in the mid-1970s, Kurkov’s older brother brought home an unbound, hand-typed samizdat copy of a new work by Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago,” which had recently begun to circulate among dissidents.

From New York Times • May 24, 2022

The dissidents in the Soviet Union wanted Western, democratic, liberal values to infuse their societies, and were beginning to create that through samizdat.

From Salon • Feb. 23, 2022

This doctrine was so dangerous that the manuscript describing it had to be circulated in secret, an Athenian samizdat.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan