Reproducing on one’s own (by hand or on a typewriter, rarely on a mimeograph machine) texts that state censorship would never have allowed to pass was not an activity that concerned only literature, on the contrary; in the beginning it included documents of all kinds, secret materials, protests and appeals, verses, novels, philosophical essays.

Samizdat were different not only in the ideas and debates they spread to a wider audience, but also in their format. Typed, often stained and creased, with numerous typographical errors and anonymous covers. The format of samizdat was born out of a lack of resources and the need to go unnoticed. Over time, dissidents in the Soviet Union began to admire these qualities for their own sake; the botched appearance of samizdat contrasted sharply with the well-crafted and regular volumes of state-authorized texts. The samizdat format gained more importance than the ideas it expressed and became a powerful symbol of the rebellious but materially deprived spirit of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union; the format itself elevated samizdat reading to a clandestine act of valor.

Along with the paper world we have the so-called contraband audio. A homemade “bone disc” Ribs, “rib music”, “bone discs” or roentgenizdat (roentgen- from the Russian for X-ray, named after Wilhelm Röntgen) were homemade phonograph records, copied from banned recordings that were smuggled into the country. Their content was Western rock and roll, jazz, mambo and other music, and music of banned emigrants. They were sold and traded on the black market. Each disc is a thin, flexible sheet of plastic recorded with a spiral groove on one side, playable on a regular phonograph turntable at 78 rpm. They were made from cheap, available material: used X-ray film (hence the name roentgenizdat). Each large rectangular sheet is cut into a circle and recorded individually using a makeshift recording lathe. The discs and their limited sound quality are reminiscent of the mass-produced flexible disc and may have been inspired by it.