Josephine von Zitzewitz and Gennady Kuzovkin have been working together for several years, researching the culture of samizdat in the Soviet Union. The present project develops the findings of “Reading Habits and Dissent during the Period of Stagnation”

http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/reading-dissent/

Josephine von Zitzewitz is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Slavonic Studies, working on Leningrad Samizdat, with a particular focus on samizdat journals, the networks that formed around them and their function as social media. She previously held a lectureship at Oxford University. Her monograph on Leningrad samizdat poetry, “Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974-1980 Music for a Deaf Age” is published by Legenda. 

Gennady Kuzovkin is a historian and director of the research programme "The History of Dissent in the USSR" at the “Memorial” Society, an independent research institute in Moscow. He has over twenty years of research experience and at present coordinates several projects, many of them web-based. A recent resource to emerge from one such project is the first directory of samizdat on the Russian internet: http://samizdat.memo.ru/samizdat/introen.