With the formal publishing houses and mimeograph and xerographic machines controlled by the state in the Soviet Union, dissident literature circulated in manuscript form, copied over and over by hand or typewriter. Despite these difficulties, samizdat (literally self-published) writing flourished in the 1970s and 1980s and exerted a significant cultural and political influence. Although individual works migrated to the west, often with the exiled writers themselves, very little was ever formally published due to the relatively limited market and low potential for profit.

In the mid-1970s, the Center for the Study of New Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UMass Amherst began collecting samizdat to document political and social dissent in the Soviet Union. Laszlo M. Tikos, Head of the Department, established the Center both to create an archive of the New Russian literature and a place for its systematic study.