SOURCE: Oushakine, Serguei Alex. “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.” Public Culture 13, no. 2 (spring 2001): 191-214.

In the following essay, Oushakine revisits the political documents of samizdat, arguing that the writing of the dissident movement within the Soviet Union was mainly a surface phenomenon, and that it often shared the symbolic space with dominant discourse texts in echoing and even amplifying the rhetoric of the regime, thus creating a rhetoric of mimetic resistance rather than open opposition.

I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system. This is perhaps what happened in the history of the Soviet Union.

—Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

At a certain point, the struggles of the dominated were so romanticized … that people finally forgot something that everyone who has seen it from close up knows perfectly well: the dominated are dominated in their brains, too.

—Pierre Bourdieu, In...