Readership
Samizdat originated from the dissident movement of the Russian intelligentsia, and most samizdat directed itself to a readership of Russian elites. While circulation of samizdat was relatively low, at around 200,000 readers on average, many of these readers possessed positions of cultural power and authority. Furthermore, due to the presence of “dual consciousness” in the Soviet Union, the simultaneous censorship of objective information and necessity of absorbing information to know how to censor it, many government officials became readers of samizdat. Though the general public at times came into contact with samizdat, most of the public lacked access to the few, expensive samizdat texts in circulation, and expressed discontentment with the highly-censored reading material made available by the state.
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