Pia Vincenti Guzzi

Unexpectedly Samizdat was born. No one knows how it began, no one knows how it works, and yet it is there, it exists and supplies answers for its readers' questions ... in the end there is always someone who comes to his senses and shakes off the curse of lethargy. (Nadezda Mandek'stam)

After the death of Stalin, with the "thaw" of the fifties and sixties in the Soviet Union, a movement of intense spiritual and moral renewal began to form, making itself known through Samizdat, a self-edited or independent publication in opposition to Gosizdat a state publication permeated with the hegemonic, high-sounding ideology of the regime.

As an alternative to the rigid dogmatism of the official culture, Samizdat - liberal literature of the underground - is not only one of the most interesting artistic, philosophic and intellectual phenomena of this century, it is above all a spiritual event of lasting value destined to influence and profoundly transform every fibre of political-social life both in the East and in the West. It manifests clearly and unmistakably the desire to overcome fear, falsehood, indifference, to create or re-shape the conscience, to reawaken a sense of responsibility, to re-confirm ideals suffocated by atheocracy of state, to establish new interpersonal relations founded on the supreme value of the spirit present in each person and which, more familiar with man than man himself, is the only one to consecrate the human person's true dignity.

Radical and challenging is the message conveyed by Samizdat: moving in the exclusive sphere of supernatural, transcendent reality, it shows itself to be antithetic both to scientific materialism, the basis of the Soviet system, and capitalist consumer-materialism. Compared with both types of materialism, different in conception and formulation but equally alienated, Samizdat proposes its own new humanism, inaugurates its own "Renaissance", triggering unprecedented anthropological upheaval, to promote the inviolable soul and inner being of man, to reaffirm the primacy of the individual over society, to place at the centre of the universe a human person emancipated from the obligation and conformism of collectivist slogans, a person finally restored to himself, once again, an individual, a creature fashioned in the image and likeness of God.

Facing myopic opposition and ferocious repression of the government, mortifying censure and uncouth managerism of the party, piercing the darkness of apathy and acquiescence, it is for this new man that Samizdat demands autonomy and liberty - precisely that liberty which comes from the spirit - it is for him that it invokes hope in re-generation and redemption.

From the beginning, with the birth in Moscow and in Leningrad of the first clandestine magazines, Samizdat advances, flowing like swollen river, that cannot be stemmed. From its underground bed it lifts a cry which is the voice of millions of human beings who have suffered violence and humiliation, men and women - most of whom have neither face nor name - eliminated in "white crematoriums" in the North, or swallowed up by the concentration system of the Gulags. All that they communicated with their life and death is being scrupulously collected, recorded and becomes "word", testimony, accusation, profession of faith, spiritual will and testament for the whole of humanity. All those voices "not in the choir", voices of dissent and therefore bridled by the apparatus of the regime, find free expression - from poetry to tales, from essays to memorials, from letters to petitions - in the pages of the clandestine editions of Samizdat. This self-production is destined also to self-reproduction and self-distribution. This unique editorial chain, based on the absolute moral principle of respect and defence of man and his rights, continues to grow: photocopied, typewritten, it multiplies in geometric proportions, circulating over an ever wider area from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, even at times crossing the Iron Curtain and filtering into the West.

Within Samizdat, in the coagulation of instances, contestation, renewal and challenges it awakens, we can identify three doctrinal elements, Marxist-Leninist, liberal, Christian. It is on this last one that we wish to dwell here. The religious Samizdat produced in Christian environments bears undeniable witness to the vitality of the faith and the spirit of resistance of believers of various confessions, beyond any attempted manipulation, pressure, compromise or interference on the part of the regime. For Soviet socialism it was not enough to deny God, it also sought in every possible way to eliminate him from hearts, to enucleate him from consciences, building a society intrinsic with secularism, in which every supernatural element was not only restricted and suffocated in ever more confined spaces, but also reduced, through an insidious atheistic campaign, to the dimensions of complete rarity and alieness. Unlimited was the suffering of those who refused to accept that God be deprived of all authority, relentless the repressive machine organized by the regime, but nevertheless, at the end of all the suffering and death faced for faith, at the end of all agony borne for Christ, there is always new life and light, light for the victims and for the executioners, light for those persecuted and for the persecutors, light for that Eastern land so sorely tried but also for this West "spared" and guilty of having too often built a wall of silence and indifference around the drama of their brothers in the East. In the prisons and psychiatric hospitals, in the lagers and on the border lands, Christians bore choral witness, united by a sacrificial offering in which emerged true unity rooted in martyrdom, also of this "folly of the cross" which inited all of them in Jesus, the spokesman was the literature of the Samizdat.

"MY DEAR SON ..."

My dear son remember that Mary, the Mother of Jesus was told: «A sword will pierce your heart». I share each fearful day of prison with you. I eat food, God's gift and I sigh: you are denied food and yet it was given by the generous hand of the Creator to good and bad alike. With you I bear the pain of this new deportation and I ask myself: where have they taken you and why have they taken you? What rude hand, what hard heart would inflict new wounds on your young soul?

(...) I have seen faces contorted by cruelty assume human features for just a kind word. What a grave duty to lift-up fallen men who have become like savage beasts. I know everything my son, I know how hard it is to do this and so my heart is deeply anguished and I feel that God, who created man in his own image and likeness, suffers even more.

(...) Just as all my life I have believed that good will triumph, so too I believe it now. I keep on hoping that humanity and justice will return. Each of them is a person and I cannot allow myself to think that evil may win (...) You too, believe in men, believe that under the hard skin of bad feelings, hidden deep inside, there is the image of truly divine origin (...)

(From two letters dated 1976, by Lidija Vins, a Lutheran-Baptist of Ukraine)

"IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM I HAD TIME FOR DEEP REFLECTION ..."

While in a lunatic asylum I reflected at length on the fact that in the world everything comes about according to the will of God. This will is so wondrous as to respect the liberty of man and at the same time lead man and the whole of humanity along God's mysterious ways (...)

Criminals have confined an inoffensive person such as me in an asylum, thinking in this way to frighten me and prevent me from proclaiming the Gospel (...) it would seem natural to ask are they not all powerful? It would seem so (...) but they have failed to make me afraid, indeed one day they will be covered with shame when people read these memoirs.

Perhaps I will be interned again, but the result will be the same. If I am killed they will make me a saint, not for my merits - I have none - but by their crime. They still do not know what is worse for them: eliminate me, lock me up or leave me in peace (...) Where is their power? (...)

This little example offers a clear indication of the relationship that exists between the freedom of man and the Great Almighty Power. Every action generates a mysterious reaction which we may not understand, not recognise; it is this, nevertheless, which restores the balance and meaning of things. The result is that everything moves in the original direction willed by God.

(from Memoirs of the Red House; 1969; by Gennadij Simanov, Russian- Orthodox Christian).

"I THANK GOD THAT I CAN PRAY ..."

(...) I thank God that I can pray. I find particular comfort in the Way of the Cross, because through my small sacrifice I can unite myself with the redeeming sacrifice of Christ. In the convoy of prisoners and in the cell I am the only one detained for religious reasons. I have encountered people lacking all humanity and I have had occasion to speak a little about God.

If those in our country who profess to be atheists could see this world here, they would see the chasm into which their ideologies push people: they not only deprive man of eternity, they also rob him of all humanity.

I am calm, serene. At the moment I am meditating on the priesthood of Christ and daily I renew my fiat to the Lord. To the best of my ability I have worked for the glory of God, for the good of the Church and my country. I have no regrets; my only fear is that the Lord may accuse me of doing too little. Pray for me, that I may always behave like a priest towards the enemies of God and the Church.

(1983, from a letter written by Alfonsas Svarinskas, Lithuanian Catholic priest).