It is necessary to sing about sanna carbon copy! My generation treated her tenderly. At the age of 16 in Krasnoyarsk I started publishing a magazine. I don’t even remember what it was called now - it was a completely stupid name, we made eight copies of it, not knowing that it was prohibited. So before Metropol, I already had some experience in samizdat. Now I remember that Galich once wrote: “Erica” takes four copies...” - thereby singing a hymn to the typewriter and the carbon paper that was its integral part. Indeed, the typewriter took only four copies: the first remained with the owner, the second was very highly valued, the third was slightly less valuable, and the fourth was too pale, barely readable. In general, samizdat could not exist without carbon copies. Once, when I was a little over 20 years old, I brought my stories to the Young Guard, and the editor to whom I showed them looked at me reproachfully from under his glasses and said: “Not only are the stories anti-Soviet, but and a third copy!..” They say that KGB officers sometimes inspected the papers of secretaries at enterprises in order to suddenly find a carbon copy with an imprint of something forbidden. For example, when I printed something obscene, after that I always tore my carbon paper into small pieces. But tearing up a carbon copy every time would be a luxury: it was not sold in stores and could be obtained from secretaries’ offices. Carbon copies disappeared along with the Soviet regime, when the means of duplicating equipment became free and accessible. It’s right that you decided to send the carbon copy to the museum, because nothing like this will probably never happen again.

Evgeniy POPOV
writer

Magazine "Ogonyok" No. 9 dated March 19, 2000, p. 1

Museum of the 20th century