Piotr Wciślik’s recent book is a major contribution to the flourishing research on Eastern European samizdat, the dissident underground press and book publishing movement that developed across the Eastern Bloc especially during the 1970s and 80s. It is the second attempt, after Siobhan Doucette’s Books are Weapons,1 to present a complete history of this movement in Poland to an anglophone academic audience. While the valuable monograph by Doucette provided an accurate historical account, paying great attention to details, Wciślik’s work excels by offering insightful interpretations of Polish samizdat with implications transcending narrow chronological and topical boundaries.

Although Wciślik locates his book in the field of intellectual history, he does not limit himself to an analysis of the keynote texts distributed by samizdat, such as Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless or Adam Michnik’s New Evolutionism. Instead, his main interest is to understand how the ideas propagated in these texts actually achieved political significance. To do this he centres his task not on examining the political thought elaborated in the texts published through samizdat, but rather on analysing the political thinking that developed alongside the networks of samizdat and their participants. The book looks at those samizdat networks not only as key infrastructure of the dissident movement, but samizdat itself as a certain kind of culture in the anthropological sense of the word. Wciślik is interested in the imaginative worlds of the printers, distributors, editors and publishers of underground books, and how they made sense of what they were engaged in. Therefore, his approach is situated between an analysis of the ideas of opposition thinkers and the reconstruction of the world of social practices of the people who printed and distributed those thinkers’ texts. As he puts it, his ambition is to complicate the division between dissident “thinkers” and “makers”. This is a fresh perspective that addresses gaps present in research into samizdat and dissident cultures.

Asking questions about how samizdat activists thought about their actions, Wciślik searches for answers primarily in samizdat publications themselves and in the documents created by the independent Solidarity union. He excludes from his analysis both the documents produced by the communist secret police and oral history interviews collected years later, as he considers these two types of sources to be of little use for intellectual history. Although he is ready to admit that a “wealth of information [...] can be found in reports of police operations, especially when it comes to evidence of activities, which were purposefully undocumented by the activists themselves”, he insists that the political police officers were unable to understand the underground press in any other way than “the reverse image of the communist party’s own propaganda apparatus, from the perspective of which there can be no such thing as orchestrations of actions without a conductor (the imperialists, the revisionists and their agents)” (p. 9).

This bold methodological statement is only partially convincing. To be sure, analyses of samizdat networks written by police officers indeed tend to reveal more about the worldview of those officers themselves than about the dissidents they’re writing about. However, historians interested in the way samizdat activists framed their own practices do find in the archives of the Security Service many primary documents that detail specific situations, conversations, and observations of samizdat activists appearing in interrogation reports, reports by secret informants, or in transcripts of wiretaps. We need to keep in mind that samizdat activists had good reason not to write about every detail of their activities in the publications they created. Moreover, these sources can be used to give a voice to those who did not write articles in the underground press, which were in fact the majority of grassroots activists. It might even be interesting to compare the ideas about underground activity emerging from samizdat publications with the picture that emerges from police documents and reports, taking into account the latter’s shortcomings rightly pointed out by Wciślik. In spite of these self-imposed limitations, the sources Wciślik bases his book on are sufficiently broad and skillfully used.

Piotr Wciślik presents his findings in chronological order. He guides his readers from the beginnings of samizdat in Poland in the second half of the 1970s, through its rapid expansion during the Solidarity carnival in 1980–1981, and the transition to the underground during martial law, up to the emergence of samizdat into open action during the transformation process in 1989. This may create the impression that the book largely reproduces the conventional story already told by Doucette and a number of Polish researchers of the topic, but it avoids rehashing work that has come before it.

For each of the described periods, Wciślik finds an appropriate key to understanding the relation of samizdat ideas and practices by focusing on particular and time-bound issues which coalesce into his overarching analysis. For the late 1970s, he depicts the creation and dissemination of samizdat as an example of prefigurative politics, revealing how ideas like Havel’s “living in truth”, democracy, and freedom of speech were put into practice mainly by small groups of people collaborating on initiatives related to the free speech movement. A particular strength of the book is the way it depicts the tensions between the leaders of the Solidarity union movement and the activists engaged in creating the independent press in 1980–1981. The same can be said about Wciślik’s analysis of the tensions between the democratic values of the opposition movement and the conspiratorial logics of the underground during the period of martial law and after. Although his book can be seen as a tribute to the hard work of samizdat printers and distributors, Wciślik is uninterested in showing these individuals only as heroes. Instead, he asks important questions about these communities’ conflicts, difficulties and disputes.

Wciślik’s book deals with the Polish samizdat in particular, where underground publishing flourished most extensively, but its interpretative scope is much wider. He reflects extensively on the legacy of the independent publishing movement, juxtaposing its role in mobilizing protests with similar functions that have been attributed to Facebook and other social media platforms more recently. Here, the concept of “samizdat social media” introduced by Wciślik is of key importance. While he is not the first to notice the similarities between samizdat and contemporary social media, which he acknowledges in his introduction, he goes beyond existing research in problematizing them carefully. In effect, he succeeds in turning the term social media into a category capable of retrojective historical application and analysis.

Wciślik rightly concedes that “the notion of ‘social media’ was not a self-description that unlicensed media activists had at hand”. Contemporary terminology used to denote the specific features of this media form included “‘independent culture’, ‘independent publishing movement’, ‘trade union press’, ‘firm’, or ‘publishing market’”. While each of these terms highlighted different aspects of the phenomenon, Wciślik argues convincingly that these “various guises” did express the conviction of many dissident media activists that “they were doing something different with respect to established patterns of public communication”. Their practices and self-perceptions indeed resembled “basic features of a social medium: horizontal, decentred communication flow; reliance on voluntary involvement; and accessible means, blurring the usual division of labor in media production, diffusion and reception.” Wciślik’s point is that these practises lent themselves to what he calls “prefigurative politics of achieving a transformative effect on the public through exercising democratic agency here and now” (pp. 13–14).

Thanks to his inspiring analytical perspective, readers do not need to be specially interested in the history of dissidents, underground printers, or Cold War history to find much of worth in this book. By telling the fascinating story of underground media activism in late socialist Poland, Wciślik provides important insights for understanding contemporary cultures of protest as well as for grasping the strengths and limitations of today’s social media.

Note:
1 Siobhan Doucette, Books Are Weapons. The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism, Pittsburgh 2018.