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HU OSA	300-85 C
Authority entry:	Samizdat Archives

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HU OSA 300-85

Parallel Entry/Entries Arkhiv Samizdata

Names AS, SA

Date(s) and Place(s) of existence

Established in 1971; as a separate; closed on September 30, 1992. Functioned as part of Slavic, Baltic, and Eurasian Archives till 1994.

Business location

RFE/RL, Inc.,Oettingenstr. 67, Am Engluischen Garten, 8000 Munchen 22, West Germany

Mandate, functions and sphere of activity

Samizdat is a Russian word. In the former Soviet Union it meant privately circulated publications (political essays and documents, belles lettres, public appeals, letters to the Soviet leadership and international organizations, information bulletins on certain matters hidden by authorities from the public) that could not be officially published because of censorship and were spread secretly, very often of great risk.

Radio Liberty was “the only Western short wave broadcaster to the Soviet Union to concentrate on the need of Soviet listeners for complete information in their own language about the actions and interests of their own government and peoples” (“Radio Liberty Committee: Annual Report, July 1, 1973 – June 30, 1974”). That is why its staff gave Samizdat very serious attention and started incorporating Samizdat texts into its programs as early as the 60-s. Later, they developed several radio programs relating to samizdat, such as “Pis’ma dokumenty” (“Letters and Documents”), “Obzor Samizdata” (“Samizdat Review”), “Dokumenty nashego vremeni” (“Documents of our time”), “Dokumenty i liudi” (“Documents and People”), “Prava cheloveka” (“Human Rights”). In its role as the major channel for broadcast back to the USSR of the unofficially distributed manuscripts, appeals, and letters called Samizdat “RL gave its listeners the precise words of Soviet dissenters” (“Radio Liberty Committee: Annual Report, July 1, 1973 – June 30, 1974”). As Mario Corti , a former chief of Samizdat Archives (SA) noted in his interview with OSA: “It was due to these programs that many Soviet citizens who had no connections with dissident circles became aware of Samizdat.”
Samizdat Archives (SA) was an important link in the chain connecting Samizdat authors with their audience. Its major goal was to help the radio to bring to the Soviet public the voices of their fellow-countrymen who dared to think and to speak on their own. In spite of many obstacles, every piece of broadcast information was expected to be exact and accurate. RFE/RL were permanently under fire from the Soviet KGB. There was an awareness that Samizdat documents might be fabricated to undermine the Radio’s prestige among its listeners in the Soviet Union.
In this context, as a description of the Samizdat project of 1973 put it: “The research staff in charge of maintaining Arkhiv Samizdata engages in careful study of each Samizdat document before deciding to register it. Extreme care is taken not to permit the registering of falsified or fabricated documents, whether such falsification is done in the USSR or elsewhere. Moreover, the research staff refrains from registering a genuine document if there is reason to believe that the Soviet author or authors would disapprove, or when available information indicates that publicity about the existence of the document abroad would be harmful to the author or authors still in the Soviet Union or would compromise the methods by which the document managed to find its way abroad. In case of doubt of any of these matters the registration of a document is delayed pending further clarification of the factual situation.”

Thus, major functions of SA were:

(1) to take custody of and maintain control over Samizdat documents arriving at RFE/RL;
(2) to evaluate the reliability of each document;
(3) to select documents for publication.

In the course of time RFE/RL became an important research facility for experts on the Soviet Union. Then SA made available to scholars texts of all the registered samizdat documents, and its staff provided reference services to researchers studying Soviet dissenters.

Administrative structure

The number of staff members at SA varied in the course of time. As an RL memorandum of October 30, 1985 indicated, at that time it numbered eight: Chief; Deputy Chief; Research-Analyst; Editor; Research Editor; Research Specialists (2); Research Editor, Assistant; Administrative Assistant.
The central role in building the SA belonged to Peter Dornan. “Dornan joined Radio Liberty in 1956 as a research analyst. He was instrumental in the creation of Samizdat Archives in 1968 and was its custodian until 1988, when he retired… Thanks to Peter Dornan, Samizdat documents played a key role in Radio Liberty broadcasts” (Mario Corti, “Radio Liberty’s Peter Dornan”, [obituary], 1998 [?]).
After his retirement, Dornan was succeeded by Mario Corti. Corti became interested in Soviet Samizdat while working in the Italian Embassy in Moscow (1972-1975). He helped Soviet dissidents to smuggle some Samizdat materials to the West. Many of them ended up in Munich, at RFE/RL. “…in 1979, at the urging of Albert Boiter, then the director of the research at RFE/RL, [Corti] joined the staff of the Samizdat Unit at RFE/RL” (Jennie Anna Lenine, “Mario Corti visit, January 20-21, 1997”). In 1984, he became Deputy Chief of SA. In December 1991, Corti assumed the position of Deputy Director of the Information Resources Department.
The Chief of SA was also Custodian with exclusive access to new arrivals. As “Procedures for Processing Samizdat Documents” issued in 1979 put it: “No original documents will be photocopied or used without approval of the Samizdat Custodian”. In the 80s Mario Corti as Deputy Chief was also permitted Custodial functions.

Relationships

Though the first Samizdat publications had reached RFE/RL several years earlier, it was towards the end of the 60-s, with the growing production of Samizdat in the Soviet Union, that the flow of Samizdat materials to the Radio Liberty considerably increased. For the needs of broadcasting programs to the USSR, the staff of the Soviet Research Department began collecting Samizdat documents. The project was initiated by Peter Dornan and Albert Boiter. As a result of their efforts, on May 31, 1968, the first issue of an in-house Samizdat bulletin was circulated inside the radio. Later it became a more or less regular in-house weekly “Materialy Samizdata” (“Materials of Samizdat”).
In 1971, SA was set as a separate unit within the Research Department (which was under the responsibility of the RL Program Policy Division). In 1976, with the merging of Radio Liberty with Radio Free Europe, the Research Department became the Research on Soviet Affairs Department, part of the larger Information Resources Department.
In November 1990, RFE and RL research activities were incorporated into the newly formed Research Institute, a separate division of RFE/RL, Inc. The Information Resources Department was divided into several parts including Samizdat Archives, Soviet Red Archives, and Soviet Monitoring. In 1992, the three of them were merged into one Slavic, Baltic, and Eurasian Archives.

Other significant information

In the course of its history, SA participated in several collective projects whose major purpose was to mobilize additional resources to improve the success of SA objectives.

The first one started as early 1971. By this time “it was clear that the import of the [Samizdat] material demanded wider dissemination and interpretation than Radio Liberty could undertake alone. In April 1971 a group of scholars and journalists, all of whom had long experience in dealing with Samizdat materials, met in London for a round-table discussion on the meaning and significance of Samizdat and the outlook for the future”. They agreed that the collecting of Samizdat materials available outside the Soviet Union into a single central archive would be of great value for scholarly and historical purposes. The Research Department of Radio Liberty in Munich was chosen as the location of the collective archives.

“More than 100 different individual scholars , journalists and official organizations have contributed documents to the collection” (Register of Documents”, 1973).

“In return Radio Liberty agreed to make available to scholars in an appropriate form the texts of all Samizdat documents placed in the archives” which brought into being the publication of “Sobranie documentov Samizdata” (‘Collection of Samizdat Documents” (Ibid.).

In April 1976 a group of Soviet-area scholars and writers met in Munich to found the Samizdat Archives Association (SAA), an independent international research organization. Its purpose was “to encourage efforts to make the texts of such [i.e. Samizdat] materials most readily available to libraries and individual scholars, as well as to support research projects which make use of Samizdat materials for scholarly research purposes”.

We do not know much about SAA activity, but at least this information explains why some volumes of “Sobranie dokumentov Samizdata” indicate the Samizdat Archive Association as their publisher.

Rules or conventions

ISAAR(CPF): International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families General Intenational Standard Archival Description; OSA Internal Rules.

Dates of description

Online version updated 6 January 2012