English Dictionary

[page 1] In a general sense any copy of a document which has been produced in the Soviet Union outside the chain of state publishing houses may be referred to as samizdat. […] [page 3] This term is modeled on the shortened form—gosizdat—of State Publishing House (Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo). […] According to Julius Telesin, a Russian writer who emigrated to Israel in 1970, the word samizdat occurs first in the late fifties when a Moscow poet, exasperated with the operation of the censorship system, bound together the typewritten sheets of his poems and wrote Samsebiaizdate (Publishing House for Oneself) in the place where the name of the publishing house would normally appear. He also used the term samizdat with the same meaning but, as Telesin observes, samizdat (self-publishing house) subsequently acquired a wider meaning.