Streaming and the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

The lifeblood of the underground dissident movement in the Soviet Union that flourished in its post-Stalinist era was samizdat, a method of disseminating uncensored, oppositional texts that required only typewriters, onion-skin paper, and carbon paper. Samizdat was essentially a chain letter, produced, without a printing press, on thousands of typewriters scattered in apartments across the Soviet republics.

According to historian Benjamin Nathans, whose To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement won
the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, the most prolific samizdat typists could pound their typewriter keys with sufficient force to produce as many as 16 copies at once (and had the bulging shoulders to prove it). Western shortwave radio broadcasts in which samizdat texts were often read aloud guaranteed that the dissidents’ message would spread deep into the provinces and around the world.

Contrary to the ways they were generally portrayed in the international media in their time (roughly 1956–1991), Soviet dissidents were not Western-style liberal intellectuals who happened to be marooned in the Soviet Union; rather, the movement consisted primarily of men and women who had grown up in the Soviet system and sought to reform it rather than overthrow it. As such, they focused on “legalist” arguments intended to expose the government’s failures to obey the country’s laws as written and the rights guaranteed to Soviet citizens in the country’s 1936 constitution. Foremost among these rights were freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and transparency of judicial proceedings—all of
them laws the Soviet state summarily flouted.

The genius of samizdat in spreading dissident tracts is that it got the message out without depending on the government to uphold the freedom of the press that the 1936 constitution also promised. Even in the non-totalitarian West, as The New Yorker journalist A.J. Liebling wrote, freedom of the press “is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Though many dissidents famously faced arrest, lengthy trials, pre-ordained sentencing, the gulag, and exile, samizdat itself was not susceptible to the types of attacks underground presses have faced in the U.S., via the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, Project RESISTANCE, and the like. The dissidents had no press to be smashed. Efforts to suppress samizdat, as Nathans writes, turned into “a gigantic game of whack-a-mole.”

We saw some similarly ingenious strategies for circumventing state (or states’) efforts at suppressing printed dissent in the U.S. in the 20th century. During the Jim Crow era, Black Pullman porters would famously sneak bundles of African American newspapers like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier—which had no distribution below the Mason-Dixon Line—onto interstate trains and covertly distribute them in Black communities when they reached the South.

As we’ve seen aggressive moves by the FCC to suppress the dissenting speech of late-night network talk show hosts and comics in 2025, as well as the capitulation or collaboration of their host networks and affiliates, many streaming industry pundits have suggested streaming as an ideal end-run around state efforts to suppress dissenting or unpopular speech. YouTube, some note, offers an unregulated, liberated zone where podcasters, comics, and creatives can freely express their views and vigorously vent their spleen.

But YouTube, like other video-sharing platforms, is no samizdat. They are corporate entities, dependent on data centers, CDNs, and other infrastructure elements that are owned and operated by technology companies with stakes in their own survival. Silicon Valley’s titans, for the most part, signaled their buy-in to the current presidential administration at inauguration time if not during the 2024 campaign season. The transfer and taming of TikTok is just one sign of things to come.

When Twitter became X, it transformed quickly from an indispensable medium for cancel culture—which once provided a collective voice to the unincorporated voiceless—to, if not a vehicle of state repression per se, then certainly a megaphone for oligarchs and their propaganda.

Rely on streaming platforms as free-speech safe spaces while you can, but keep your typewriter and onion-skin paper handy. You may need them sooner than you think.