Comment by orbital-decay
17 hours ago
>Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish. After Pajitnov adapted Golomb’s geometric discoveries for the nascent digital world, he had no choice but to distribute his game as a samizdat
Samizdat very specifically refers to censored texts. Yeah sure various versions of Tetris informally circulated around on floppies/tapes just like all other games and software, but that's not samizdat and had nothing to do with freedom to publish or censorship, there just weren't many viable ways to distribute the software to private users (and not many of those to begin with). It was way too long ago and I don't remember if any Soviet magazines like Radio had actual listings, but Tetris was a popular game in them.
did not make it fast enough
The parent comment already removed the part about vinyl recordings, but I still really want to point out that people in the USSR had to be creative (have to be even now) to bypass censorship.
This created things like roentgenizdat or "ribs" (gramophone recordings made from polyester X-ray films)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_(recordings)
> This created things like roentgenizdat or "ribs" (gramophone recordings made from polyester X-ray films)
This is a plot point in the excellent Star City, a spin-off of For All Mankind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_City_(TV_series). Also see this project by English musician Stephen Coates: https://www.x-rayaudio.com/
Yeah I edited it out because it had a different name, and more importantly there were totally different circles of people. It wasn't a single underground community or something like that. Later on there were VHS clubs ("video salons"), completely different people again. Some describe all that as samizdat but it really wasn't. Article's mention of Solzhenitsyn in the same sentence with Pajitnov makes little sense.
> Samizdat very specifically refers to censored texts.
No, samizdat was not just about censored texts. The larger point of samizdat is specifically about viable ways to distribute your stuff even if it was not seen even by a single censor. It was even used for cooking recipes and fanzines.
The point is that in USSR it was not possible for an ordinary person to publish anything because the equipment and how to use it was a state secret tightly controlled by KGB. If you wanted to publish something you made and didn't have a cozy relationship with the communist party, samizdat was the only option.
>The point is that in USSR it was not possible for an ordinary person to publish anything
That's another extreme and just wrong. Of course if you were a dissident or just had wrong friends you couldn't even publish a cookbook, but plenty of non-members of either the party or the writers union were publishing their stuff, see Kir Bulychev as a notorious example or an ordinary guy with the disdain for the party (and his father was a lawyer thrown out of the party and his grandfather fought in the White Army, so he was certainly "на карандаше") who nevertheless was one of the most popular Soviet science fiction writers. Or Genrikh Altov (known to some HN users for his TRIZ) who was a political prisoner and had a conflict with the union.
So yeah, it was possible. Before 1987 your stuff had to pass the editorial board and литование by the censorship body, and of course you must not have been viewed as disloyal or suspicious. Travelers, beginner writers, critics, etc. all published their stuff. I have a 1982 fungi reference book written in Ukrainian by a non-member of either the union or the party, just a long-time amateur outdoorsman.
In any case, games were freely published. Magazines in particular routinely published listings sent by random readers.
> Before 1987 your stuff had to pass the editorial board and литование by the censorship body, and of course you must not have been viewed as disloyal or suspicious.
It's not really publishing as a private person. Which was impossible/illegal as people didn't have access to printing equipment. Yes you could publish it by sending it to a newspaper or magazine.
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