How Do You Publish a Book the State Has Banned? One Typewriter at a Time

The characteristic method was a typewriter loaded with as many sheets and carbons as it could take, usually four to six, since more produced copies too faint to read, and the typist worked through the text producing that many at once. Each recipient was expected to retype it and pass copies on, so a text spread as a branching chain rather than from a single source. Carbon copies of copies degraded, so late generation texts are faint and full of accumulated typing errors. Photographic copying was used where a camera could be obtained. Access to a photocopier was strictly controlled precisely because of this, with machines registered, locked and their output logged.

The material was more varied than the political focus suggests:

• •Banned novels and poetry, including work by writers published abroad
• •Historical accounts contradicting the official version
• •Religious texts, which were hard to obtain legally
• •Translations of foreign books and articles
• •A regular bulletin recording arrests, trials and sentences
• •Practical material, from music lyrics to yoga manuals

Participation was a criminal offence and the penalties were real, which shaped how the practice was organised. Charges included anti-Soviet agitation and the spreading of deliberate falsehoods, carrying sentences of years in labour camps followed by internal exile, and from the 1960s onwards compulsory psychiatric detention was used against some participants, which had no fixed term. Possession alone could be enough. People therefore kept copies briefly, avoided knowing who else was involved, and typed at night. A chronicle of arrests circulated continuously from 1968, compiled by people who knew that producing it was itself the offence it documented, and it continued for fifteen years as successive editors were arrested.

Two companion terms describe variations and both were coined as jokes on the official vocabulary. Material smuggled abroad, published properly there and then brought back in is distinguished from home-made copying, and a great deal of the best-known writing of the period travelled that way, printed in Paris or New York and returned by travellers and diplomatic bags. Recordings circulated by the same logic, with Western music copied onto discarded hospital X-ray film because blank vinyl was unobtainable, producing playable discs with a ghostly image of somebody's ribs on them. Foreign radio broadcasts fed the same networks with material to transcribe, and the jamming of those broadcasts was correspondingly heavy.

The practice did not overthrow anything and its significance lies elsewhere. It kept a body of literature and history in existence that the state had removed from public life, so that when restrictions lifted the material was already there rather than needing recovery. It created networks of people who trusted each other, which became the basis of organised opposition later. It demonstrated that the official account could be contradicted in writing and survive, which mattered psychologically in a system that presented itself as unanimous. And the underlying logic recurs wherever publication is controlled, with photocopied and now digital versions of the same practice appearing in every country where a state attempts to decide what may be read.

Typing a banned text with four to six carbons and requiring each recipient to retype it spread material as a branching chain that had no source to seize, at the cost of faint degraded copies. Novels, history, religious texts and a continuous chronicle of arrests circulated this way. Participation carried labour camp sentences and psychiatric detention, and the networks it created outlasted the system.