samizdaty

Noun

samizdat (countable and uncountable, plural samizdats or samizdaty)

1. (attributive, often, uncountable) The secret copying and sharing of illegal publications, chiefly in the Soviet Union; underground publishing and its publications.
   • [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). […]...1975, F[erdinand] J[oseph] M[aria] Feldbrugge, “Samizdat: Origins and Organization”, in Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union, Leiden: A[lbertus] W[illem] Sijthoff, →ISBN, pages 1 and 3
2. (countable) A samizdat publication.
   • In Poland, some samizdats are different: they are professionally produced and are sold for money. But the money that these Polish consumers pay for these illegal samizdats is not dissipated in the domain of individual or corporate profits, nor does it help support the government and its publishing...1986, The Portable Lower East Side, [New York, N.Y.]: [The Portable Lower East Side], →ISSN, →OCLC, page 4