Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere

Wiener Studien zur Zeitgeschichte, vol.6, 2014

Censorship and its counterpart, the `underground' production and distribution of printed texts and images, existed ever since a `public sphere' came into being. The volume approaches this phenomenon by covering cases from the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, Central Europe, South America and China. In a long-term as well as global perspective, the well-known practise of samizdat under communist rule may be understood as part of a long tradition of underground publishing still relevant today in places like Russia, Iran, or China.