Giving Voice to Truth in Samizdat

Chapter 1 explored how the sense of history shaping lives and giving meaning to actions for Soviet citizens entailed imagining a unified history. We saw that in the post-Stalin era, this gave way to a plurality of new imaginations of shared history, while community perspectives that engaged with their specific histories gained traction through samizdat. That is, samizdat facilitated the change and pluralization of imaginations of historical time. This chapter considers the imagination of social space as expressed by samizdat voices. Voices can endow the sense of social space with varying characteristics. For example, lyric voices tend to create a