Octobriana, and the Russian underground

Beneath a bland and outwardly passive surface, Russian society is rife with tension. There si a constant undercurrent of dissent. This springs, above all, from the intelligentsia - writers, artists and musicians, from most (so the evidence indicates), of the articulate elite that is not already caught up in the apparatus of running State and Party. Octobriana, a kind of Russian Barbarella, is the spirit of the October Revolution. but she is also the spirit of the opposition to established orthodoxy. Created in Kiev n the 1960s by a group which Peter Sadecky was a member, she has now spread to Moscow, Erivan, Tbilisi, Tashkent, Alma Alta and elsewhere. In a society in which all published material is censored, where intellectual opposition is countered with massive prison sentences, the creators of Octobriana have escaped into dangerous satire and fantasy in which license and pop styles of the West clearly play a part. Octobriana became the heroine of an illegal magazine, secretly printed and circulated by hand in a number of universities, of considerable fame, her perpetrators constantly eluding the authorities. Peter Sadecky tells of his own involvement in the Octobriana set, of how the cult of Octobriana was orn and developed, what it has meant to a generation of Soviet students, and how - after traveling to the remotest parts of the Soviet Union - he was eventually able to smuggle the material out to the West.