The Samizdat Text Corpora (STC) project aims to bring together the various linguistic and regional bodies of samizdat literature to create a unified constellation of materials for scholarly research. As envisioned, the final product will comprise a union catalogue and digital repository of samizdat held by IS[R]A institutions as well as by individuals around the world. IS[R]A members will be able annotate and comment on individual texts and engage in scholarly discussion with fellow researchers.

The project rests on six pillars:

Research-centered: the research and cataloguing of materials will be guided by scholars and specialist archivists, those who can best understand the changing needs of researchers.

Rich description: we will draw from the best of archival and bibliographic descriptive practices, placing emphasis on both the description of individual items—their physical characteristics and textual content—and of the context in which these items were created and collected.

Integration: works will be identified and described in a centralized manner; as they emerge, individual copies will be connected to central records.

Mapping: we will also record the existence of "undiscovered" works, those which exist today only in the form of secondary references or in the testimony of former dissidents.

Multiple language access: the repository will support multiple languages, providing access to all works in English as well as regional languages.

Community: STC remains a single piece of a larger effort to build a community of scholarship around samizdat, dissidence, and alternative culture. As a tool, it will not stand alone but will be integrated into a suite of IS[R]A-supported resources intended to capture current research and open up new possibilities.

The Samizdat Text Corpora (STC) project was conceived by several founding members of IS[R]A, including Olga Zaslavskaya (Open Society Archives, Budapest), Dr. Ann Komaromi (University of Toronto), and Gennadii Kuzovkin (Memorial Center, Moscow). The back-end database was developed in 2007 through the joint efforts and support of Dr. Ann Komaromi (with support from the Canadian SSHRC) and the Open Society Archives (Kathryn Máthé, Olga Zaslavskaya, Olga Zubkovskaya, Szabolcs Polányi, and József Bóné).

Our current objective is to identify, locate, describe, and digitize Soviet samizdat periodicals created between 1956 and 1986 that are held in institutions in Europe and North America and to present our results online for research, education, and public debate.