...Alexander Gribanov; Masha Kowell Among the many documents released one way or another during the early 1990s, there are two that open the window into the perception of samizdat by the top Soviet authorities. The first of them was signed by Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, in the last days...

... the samizdat journal Jews in the USSR (Evrei v SSSR, Moscow, no. 1–20, 1972–79), but 636 Poetics Today 29:4 increase significantly the number of copies, although paper was relatively expensive and resulted in a bulky text—the photograph paper itself was thick and tended to curl.15 Moreover, the KGB...

... for Poetics and Semiotics 736 Poetics Today 29:4 KGB and the CIA], where a human life costs no more than in the battle for Berlin” (2004: 339 Indeed, in the seventies, the decade of solitude and illness that led up to his 1979 hospitalization in an institution for the handicapped, Shalamov, who...

... style. To Shklovsky, an admiration for Korolenko represented old-fashioned tastes. 12. The Soviet secret police, later renamed several times to become eventually the KGB. 242 Poetics Today 27:1 when fear appeared. He was not afraid as long as he could sense where the blow might come from...

... the point of view of under- mining the foundation of the state, samizdat was much more dangerous. A large portion of samizdat was sharply-political (which for the KGB was a synonym for anti-Soviet). It’s enough just to look at the most popular works of samiz- dat: Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolymskie...

... 1997 Archives of the Security Services of Former Repressive Regimes: Report Prepared for UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Samizdat Archives, OSA Archivum 1967 AS 10 Texts of “ Protocol of Search ” of Galanskov's Apartment by KGB and Militia on 17 January and 21...

... thwart- ing the state-imposed monopoly on information. The two documents he unearthed in his quest date from 1970–71 and are directly related to the problematics of samizdat as well as to the methods for suppressing it. Most significant, as Gribanov stresses, is the KGB’s sheepish...

... accessible to another social group, namely, the Soviet government and KGB officials, the apparatchiks, some of whom would be given (or allowed) to read subversive works ex offi- cio, on the know-thy-enemy principle. Because The Gulag Archipelago was meant to be published abroad, the servants of the regime...

...- .  Translation of this and other Russian texts is mine. .  The founder of the ChK (the precursor to the KGB) in 1918. .  A member of the politburo in the mid-1960s. 716 Poetics Today 29:4 ing and irrelevant, they also made a distinction between two types of truth. In this case, they drew...

... of another abandoned monument, that of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka (KGB), demolished after the Russian ‘‘Velvet Revolu- tion’’ of August 1991. As if paraphrasing Shklovsky’s statement about the advent of the ‘‘red restoration’’ in the late 1920s, contemporary writerViktor Pelevin (1999: 11...

... fiction. Brecht’s words assume that there are different kinds of estrangement, such as secret police estrangement and artistic estrangement.2 But his provoca- 1. The Soviet secret police underwent many name changes (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, MVD, KGB); hence the different acronyms that appear...

... Vladimir Pozner for the interview referred to above). Disappointingly, Shklovsky was guarded by his, in Todorov’s words, ‘‘redoubtable wife, who looked like a Russian baba and by an official interpreter, apparently a KGB man; thus a face-to-face conversation proved impossible (cf.Todorov 2002: 78–79...