In 1972 the Soviet Union and Europe suffered a drought that resulted in catastrophic crop failures. Although the Soviet Union was perenially plagued with periodic droughts and crop failure, 1972 was significant since the main crop affected was wheat – a dietary mainstay for both people and livestock. This failure brought about talks between the United States and the Soviet Union that culminated in the grain agreement of 1975 between the two countries; the United States pledged to send 8 million tons of wheat a year to the Soviet Union. This agreement was significant for the Unites States shipping industry as it came on the heels of the United States-Soviet Maritime Agreement of 1972. The earlier deal called for one-third of the U.S.-Soviet trade to be carried in U.S.-flag vessels, one-third in Soviet-flag vessels, and one-third in third flag vessels – the latter enabled United States’ allies to benefit from the trade agreement. In addition, part of the 1972 agreement was the opening of 40 United States and the reciprocal opening of 40 Soviet ports to trade. As a result, the Soviet grain trade offered a steep increase in American ships visiting Soviet ports.
“The [1972] accord, described by the Administration as “an indispensable first step” toward a contemplated vast increase in Soviet-American commercial relations, also provides for the unloading and loading of Soviet merchant vessels in East Coast and Gulf Coast ports for the first time since 1963. New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are among the United States ports in which American union leaders have agreed to handle Soviet vessels under the over-all accord.”
Of those ports opened to the West was Petrograd, today’s St. Petersburg. Due to both accords, Petrograd saw both the import of grain and a collateral clandestine trade in foreign media grow. Soviet merchant sailor sea bags increasingly contained magazines, newspapers, records, and pornography; they imported these materials at their peril: the Soviet state followed a stringent policy of censorship and ban on materials deemed subversive to the Communist Party, the State, and society. In spite (or despite) the threat of imprisonment or worse, the trade of forbidden items flourished in Petrograd and other large urban areas. Media was often translated and copied via various means and entered the underground economy in forbidden texts; these materials had the blanket term samizdat (самиздат). This was a coy play on the word Gosizdat (Госиздат):
“[Which] is a telescoping of Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo, the name of the monopoly‐wielding State Publishing House. The same part of the new word means “self.” The whole samizdat—translates as: “We publish ourselves”—that is, not the state, but we, the people.”
The means of samizdat production could be by the author of the media or by a reader – and thus not sanctioned, and being forbidden, it circulated outside of official distribution channels. All media in the Soviet Union was censored and sold under license by the State; samizdat, not so – it circulated under the noses of the authorities. In early periods, samizdat came in typewritten, photographic, or longhand forms; by the end of the Soviet era, some were produced via primitive computer word processing applications. Examples of samizdat comprise of smuggled books may be found where their pages were photographed and cut to size and stapled or sewn together and glued into a cover of another book; still, others were created with photostats placed between plain cardboard wrappers, or simply stapled-together manuscripts. An underlying ethos of samizdat was that the production of these materials meant resistance to state repression, and to resist was a means to live.
In the late-1970s, when the Soviet Union opened itself ever so carefully to the West in a time of need, did an American merchant seaman acquire the small collection of photographs below for a carton of cigarettes and smuggle them out of Petrograd to the United States. The collection features a series of four photographs and a single photograph. I am unsure if the four and the one are connected; the latter is a single photograph of a woman posing like a Greek statue; the remaining four photographs offer some sort of erotic social satire – as explained to me, they employ universal characters of the Soviet period used in dirty or satirical stories: a militiaman, a market trader from the Caucasus, a street tough, and a bodybuilder. Each hunts for a woman’s body and attempts to possess her; in the end, she chooses the bodybuilder, to the chagrin of all.
Samizdat often seen by Westerners involves forbidden literature such as the political tract “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist” or hand-made books; photographs such as this collection are rarely commented upon. Nevertheless, despite the harsh cultural repression at play in the Soviet Union, the images represent resistance and the need to poke fun at authority.
This was quite the trade for a carton of cigarettes. My lingering question is what was the context that led to the trade.
References
“Moscow Accepts Sea Freight Rise; Signs U.S. Accord.” New York Times, October 15, 1972, Page 1
Jean S. Gerard. “The U.S.-Soviet Maritime Agreement: A New Plan for Bilateral Cooperation.” Fordham International Law Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1977.
George Saunders (Editor), Marilyn Vogt (Translator). Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition. Pathfinder, 1974.