MÁRIO MATOS E LEMOS
Soviet Union: the alternative information.

The restrictive conditions to which the soviet press - in the sense of mass media - was always submitted are well-known. Less known is samizdat , a word used to define the manuscripts put into circulation clandestinely intending to break the informative monopoly of the State. The concept already existed, but the word samizdat is written for the first time in May 1967. Until Stalin's death clandestine communication is not very significant, but, since 1954, after Khrushchev's speech condemning Stalin's policy, anthologies of poetry and literary journals, manuscripted or typed, then novels, as Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago , began circulating, specially in the universities. Later, intend to counter the internal information politics, emerged periodical samizdat , of which the probably most important is the Chronicle of Current Events , first edited in 1968, which had all the characteristics of a periodical.