Peter Reddaway Samizdat collection

Peter Reddaway, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs of The George Washington University, is a prominent Soviet historian of the Cold War period and a central figure in the Russian samizdat distribution network. He was a prominent advocate of human rights who spoke out on behalf of the oppressed, and a preeminent collector of Soviet samizdat materials. His main scholarly expertise is in the politics and government of Russia and the other post-Soviet states, human rights, rights of minorities, religious freedom and psychiatric abuse. Professor Reddaway received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Cambridge University and did graduate work at Harvard and Moscow Universities and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before joining GW in January 1989, he taught at the London School of Economics and then directed the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. Professor Reddaway assembled one of the largest private collections of Soviet political samizdat spanning the period from the late 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Samizdat, from the Russian “sam” (“by oneself") and “izdatel'stvo” ("publishing house") means "self published" and designates prohibited publications created in secret and distributed via underground networks during the Soviet era. These materials were produced at great risk to the individuals and groups responsible for their creation and distribution. But, in the end, ongoing dissent helped to apprise others of conditions within the USSR and supported a coordinated effort to destabilize the authoritarian regime, including the sustained Western effort (by Radio Liberty and other organizations) to broadcast back into the Soviet Union the content of contraband samizdat smuggled out of the USSR. Access to this material, and the associated cultural output essential to substantively interpreting it, is critical to the understanding of the late 20th century and the various ways in which Soviet dissidents resisted the dominant political hegemony. The relevance of the collection goes beyond the study of the Soviet era to encompass the broader study of resistance to totalitarian regimes and dissent more generally.