This is part of a series on nonviolent protest methods, which explains approaches and provides inspirational examples from history. For additional resources, please explore the Museum of Protest’s activist guides and view items in the collection.

The mimeograph machine whirring in a basement. Carbon paper pressed between thin sheets of tissue. A journalist hiding typeset galleys beneath floorboards as police raid the building upstairs. Throughout history, the simple act of putting ink to paper and distributing words has been one of the most powerful—and dangerous—forms of nonviolent resistance.

Gene Sharp, the scholar who catalogued 198 methods of nonviolent action, classified newspapers and journals as Method #10 under “Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion,” recognizing what dissidents have always known: controlling information is essential to both maintaining and challenging power.

This method encompasses more than traditional newspapers. It includes underground publications produced in secret, exile journals printed abroad and smuggled back, samizdat typed on carbon paper and passed hand to hand, alternative press organs challenging mainstream narratives, and dissident journals documenting abuses that official media refuse to acknowledge. Each represents the same fundamental act—using the written word to break a regime’s monopoly on truth.

Why this method matters for movements

Protest publications serve five interconnected strategic functions that no other form of resistance can fully replicate. Communication is the most obvious: disseminating suppressed information, countering state propaganda, and reaching audiences far beyond what direct action can achieve. When Frederick Douglass launched The North Star in 1847, he articulated why this mattered: “The man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress—the man STRUCK is the man to CRY OUT.” He understood that even sympathetic white abolitionist papers could not substitute for African American-led publications.

The second function is morale. During the Nazi occupation of France, the underground newspaper Les Petites Ailes de France quoted Napoleon to inspire its readers: “To live defeated is to die every day!” Publications sustain hope during periods when visible resistance seems impossible. The third function is documentation—creating records of human rights abuses, political trials, and state violence that become evidence for future accountability. The Soviet Union’s Chronicle of Current Events documented 424 political trials and 753 convictions over fifteen years, ensuring these injustices would not be forgotten.

Fourth, publications serve as organizing infrastructure, coordinating protest activities, sharing tactical information, and building networks across geographic distances. Poland’s Solidarity movement newspaper reached 30,000 copies daily in 1980, functioning as the connective tissue of a mass labor uprising. Finally, the very act of publishing becomes an act of defiance—demonstrating that opposition cannot be silenced, that the regime does not control all information, that resistance continues.

The mechanics of underground publishing

Understanding how dissidents have physically produced publications under repressive conditions reveals both the ingenuity of resisters and the universal challenges they face. In the Soviet Union, the state controlled all printing presses and photocopiers so tightly that the KGB collected typing samples from every registered typewriter before national holidays to trace unauthorized texts. This forced samizdat publishers to extraordinary measures.

The standard method involved typing firmly on thin tissue paper with multiple carbon sheets, producing four to six copies simultaneously. Single-spaced text with no margins economized on scarce paper. Each recipient would then retype the document and pass copies along in chain-letter fashion, with time limits often imposed that created frenzied round-the-clock reading and typing sessions. The resulting documents were, as one historian noted, “wretched”—filled with mistakes, corrections, and blurred or pale type, pages wrinkled and dog-eared from repeated handling. But this ragged appearance became a potent symbol distinguishing samizdat from the glossy lies of official publications.

In occupied France during World War II, the situation demanded different solutions. Hélène Viannay gained access to a hidden printing operation in the Sorbonne’s cellars through her position as a volunteer firefighter, which gave her keys to university buildings. Railroad workers called cheminots became the primary distribution network, passing newspapers along rail lines. By 1944, the French underground newspaper Défense de la France had grown from a few hundred copies to 60,000 readers.

Polish publishers by the 1980s had developed semi-professional printing operations, with editions reaching tens of thousands. The underground press grew so large that by 1981, approximately 1,896 independent serial titles were being produced, with an estimated 200,000 total readership. Even during martial law in 1982, 954 independent titles continued publication. This scale required storing and transporting tonnes of paper clandestinely.

Samizdat and the Soviet bloc’s information war

The term “samizdat” comes from Russian meaning “self-published”—coined by Moscow poet Nikolai Glazkov in 1953, who labeled his typed poems “Samsebyaizdat” (Myself by Myself Publishers) as a satirical play on Soviet state publishing houses. After Stalin’s death, samizdat emerged during the Khrushchev Thaw as the primary means of circulating ideas the state wished to suppress.

The most important Soviet samizdat publication was the Chronicle of Current Events, founded on April 30, 1968—the UN International Year for Human Rights. Poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya single-handedly produced the first ten issues. The Chronicle maintained a deliberately dry, factual tone to maximize credibility, running regular sections on “Arrests, Searches, Interrogations,” “In Prisons and Camps,” “Persecution of Religion,” and “Persecution of Crimean Tatars.” Its instructions to readers captured the brilliance of samizdat organization: “To receive the Chronicle, one only need pass on the information that one wishes to receive it, and one will receive it.”

Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 movement, launched in January 1977 with 242 original signatories including playwright Václav Havel, distributed its human rights manifesto through samizdat while simultaneously arranging publication in Western newspapers—The Times, Le Monde, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. This dual strategy of underground circulation and international attention limited the regime’s ability to repress well-known dissidents.

Poland’s underground press achieved unprecedented scale under the drugi obieg (second circulation) system. The newspaper Robotnik (The Worker) traced its lineage to an 1894 underground paper. By 1980, its print run exceeded 20,000 copies, peaking at 70,000 during the August strikes. After Solidarity was legalized, its weekly Tygodnik Solidarność reached an astonishing 500,000 circulation. Zbigniew Bujak, the underground Solidarity leader, later observed: “The history of martial law is, to a meaningful degree, the history of underground publishing.”

Anti-colonial press and independence movements

Colonial powers understood the threat posed by nationalist newspapers, developing comprehensive legal frameworks to suppress them. British India’s Vernacular Press Act of 1878, known as the “Gagging Act,” specifically targeted Indian-language newspapers while exempting English publications—a discriminatory measure requiring security deposits and authorizing seizure of presses without trial. The Indian Press Act of 1910 prosecuted approximately 1,000 publications in its first five years, collecting half a million rupees in securities and forfeitures.

Despite this repression, the Indian nationalist press flourished. Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Kesari, founded in 1881, became so influential that Tilak was imprisoned twice—including a six-year sentence in Mandalay prison following articles that colonial authorities deemed seditious. Gandhi’s publications—Indian Opinion in South Africa (1903-1961), Young India (1919-1931), and Harijan (1933-1948)—served as organizing tools for successive campaigns. Gandhi stated plainly: “Satyagraha would have been impossible without Indian Opinion.”

In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah founded the Accra Evening News in 1948, understanding newspapers as weapons. He declared: “The newspaper is collective organiser, a collective instrument of mobilisation and a collective educator—a weapon, first and foremost, to overthrow colonialism and imperialism.” In 1950, the paper announced the launch of the Positive Action Campaign—a series of civil disobedience acts that would help lead Ghana to independence.

Kenya’s Muigwithania (“The Reconciler”), organ of the Kikuyu Central Association, was edited by Jomo Kenyatta beginning in 1928. British Governor Sir Edward Grigg warned London that the paper’s “emotional and semi-religious propaganda may spread very rapidly among excitable and ignorant natives.” The colonial response was predictable: the paper was banned in 1940, and Kenyatta was eventually imprisoned for seven years during the Mau Mau Emergency.

In Algeria, El Moudjahid became the official voice of the National Liberation Front during the independence war, first published clandestinely from Algiers in 1956, then relocating to Morocco and Tunisia as French forces hunted its publishers. The philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon contributed many unsigned texts later collected in Pour la révolution africaine. French intelligence attempted four times in 1958 to forge fake issues to spread misinformation—testimony to the publication’s influence.

Vietnam’s revolutionary press tradition began when Ho Chi Minh founded Thanh Niên (Youth) on June 21, 1925, in Guangzhou, China. The date is still celebrated annually as Revolutionary Journalism Day. Ho Chi Minh described the function clearly: “Journalists are also revolutionary soldiers. Their pens and sheets of paper are their sharp weapons.” He would go on to write over 2,000 articles using nearly 200 pen names over fifty years of revolutionary struggle.

American civil rights and abolitionist journalism

The African American press developed sophisticated distribution strategies to circumvent Southern suppression. The Chicago Defender, founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott with just 25 cents and a 300-copy press run, became the nation’s most influential Black weekly by World War I. Its secret weapon was the Pullman porters—African American railroad workers who smuggled the paper into the South along rail lines, with each copy read by four to five people before being passed along. The Ku Klux Klan confiscated copies before distribution; white distributors refused to circulate it. But the paper’s vivid exposés of lynchings—with graphic descriptions of violence—helped fuel the Great Migration that would transform American demographics.

The Pittsburgh Courier peaked at 350,000 weekly copies in 1957, while Muhammad Speaks, founded by Malcolm X in 1960, reached 600,000 to 900,000 weekly at its height, sold door-to-door by Nation of Islam members. These publications created what historian W.E.B. Du Bois called an “intellectual revolution”—the Crisis, which he founded in 1910 as the NAACP’s magazine, was described as “the bible of the militant Negro.”

A century earlier, the abolitionist press had pioneered American protest journalism. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, founded January 1, 1831, ran continuously for 35 years until the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification. Though circulation was modest (around 3,000 paid subscribers), three-quarters were free Black readers in the North. The danger was real: Georgia’s legislature offered a $5,000 bounty (equivalent to $150,000 today) for Garrison’s arrest, North Carolina indicted him for felonious acts, and possessing the paper was a crime in several Southern states.

Frederick Douglass launched The North Star in 1847 after raising funds during speaking tours in England, Ireland, and Scotland. When money ran short, he mortgaged his home to keep publishing. The paper’s motto declared: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are Brethren.” Douglass understood that the abolitionist cause required African American voices leading the conversation, not just sympathetic white allies.

The civil rights photography that appeared in Black publications proved transformative. When Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender published graphic photos of Emmett Till’s mutilated body in September 1955, they forced white America to confront racist violence it had long ignored. Rosa Parks later said: “I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn’t move.” Representative John Lewis called Till “my George Floyd.”

Labor’s ink-stained battles

The American labor movement produced some of history’s most influential protest publications. Appeal to Reason, founded in 1895 in Kansas, became the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in American history, reaching 760,000 weekly copies at its peak in 1912-1913, with special single-issue runs of 4.1 million copies. The paper serialized Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle before book publication, investigations that led directly to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

A network of volunteers called the “Appeal Army” drove subscription sales across the country. Contributors included Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Jack London, and Helen Keller. The paper supported Debs’s presidential campaigns, helping him achieve 6% of the popular vote (over 900,000 votes) in 1912. The government’s response was predictable: editor Fred Warren was imprisoned at Leavenworth in 1909, contributor Kate Richards O’Hare was convicted and sentenced to five years, and federal agents conducted repeated break-ins at the Kansas offices.

The Industrial Workers of the World published the Industrial Worker beginning in 1906—one of the longest continually published radical union newspapers in North America. The IWW was ahead of its time on race, believing that racial divisions detracted from revolutionary struggle and organizing without regard to race, religion, or national origin. The organization published its preamble in Japanese and organized immigrant workers excluded by the mainstream AFL. By 1919, approximately 90 known American IWW periodicals were being published in 19 different languages.

The 1960s underground and feminist revolutions

The 1960s-70s underground press in America created what amounted to an alternative media ecosystem. The Los Angeles Free Press (1964), Berkeley Barb (1965), and East Village Other (1965) led a movement that by 1969 encompassed 500+ titles with combined circulation estimated at 1.5 to 4.5 million copies. The Underground Press Syndicate, founded in 1966, grew from 15 newspapers to 271 papers by 1971, with members freely reprinting each other’s content.

The Liberation News Service, founded in August 1967, functioned as the “Associated Press” for underground papers, eventually serving more than 500 publications with twice-weekly mimeographed news packets. It covered the Pentagon protests, Columbia University strikes, worker actions, and international liberation struggles—stories mainstream media ignored or distorted. The FBI targeted LNS with COINTELPRO operations, IRS investigations, and forged letters designed to sow discord.

The feminist press emerged from this underground ecosystem. Ms. magazine, founded by Gloria Steinem and colleagues in 1972, sold out its initial 300,000 test copies in three days, generating 26,000 subscriptions and eventually reaching an estimated 3 million readers. The magazine’s “We Have Had Abortions” feature in 1972, signed by 53 prominent women before Roe v. Wade, pioneered the consciousness-raising journalism that would characterize feminist media.

Off our backs, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1970, became the longest-running feminist periodical in American history, publishing for 38 years. Operating as a collective using consensus decision-making, it covered the edgier topics mainstream feminism avoided. Britain’s Spare Rib (1972-1993) published 239 issues, addressing taboo subjects including orgasm, lesbianism, domestic abuse, and female genital mutilation.

LGBTQ+ publications followed similar patterns. The Advocate, founded in 1967 in Los Angeles, emerged from protests at the Black Cat Tavern and became the oldest continuing LGBTQ publication. Earlier, ONE Magazine (1953-1969) had won a Supreme Court case in 1958 establishing the right to mail gay publications. After Stonewall, Come Out! (1969) became the first gay liberation newspaper.

Resistance under occupation

World War II produced the most extensive underground press network in history. In the Netherlands alone, 1,200 separate newspaper titles were produced by the resistance. The main Dutch paper, Het Parool, saw four of its editors sentenced to death—two escaped to Allied countries, and editor Frans Goedhart escaped three days before his scheduled execution with help from sympathetic officials.

France’s resistance press grew to include publications like Combat, edited by Albert Camus, which declared: “There is only one task: to resist, to organize.” The communist L’Humanité published 383 issues of 200,000 copies over five years despite many journalists being killed, including Gabriel Péri, shot in December 1941. Témoignage Chrétien was unique for claiming “spiritual resistance” based on Christian ideals.

The GI underground press during Vietnam represented a different kind of occupied territory—American soldiers resisting from within the military itself. Between 144 and 300 antiwar newspapers circulated during the war, published at bases in the United States, Germany, France, Japan, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Vietnam GI (1967) was the first; Fatigue Press from Fort Hood became the longest-lasting. By 1970, antiwar periodicals were available near most military bases worldwide. The papers connected isolated soldiers opposing the war, with letters sections functioning like “social media” of the era. By 1971, the military admitted it could not continue the ground war due to soldier disobedience—a shift influenced by these publications.

The digital inheritors

Today’s protest publications have migrated online, but the essential dynamics remain unchanged. During Belarus’s 2020 uprising, the Telegram channel NEXTA Live became the primary coordination tool, piercing information blackouts and reaching millions. Analyst Franak Viacorka called Telegram the “main method for facilitating the protests.” Hong Kong’s 2019-2020 movement similarly relied on Telegram channels for logistics, tactics, and morale.

Digital platforms offer advantages—encryption, difficulty of blocking (Russia and Belarus failed to block Telegram effectively), and the ability to operate from exile—but also new risks. Hong Kong’s National Security Law created such a chilling effect that activists deleted social media accounts, pro-democracy groups disbanded, and journalists erased names from digital archives. The surveillance capabilities of modern states exceed anything the Gestapo or KGB could have imagined.

Yet the fundamental insight remains valid. As Mary Joyce and Patrick Meier demonstrated in their 2012 “Civil Resistance 2.0” project translating Sharp’s 198 methods into digital forms, the technology changes but the strategic purpose endures: breaking monopolies on information, coordinating dispersed resistance, documenting abuses, maintaining morale, and demonstrating that opposition cannot be silenced.

The price of publishing truth

The dangers faced by those who publish against power cannot be overstated. Soviet samizdat participants faced imprisonment, forced psychiatric treatment, and exile. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, founder of the Chronicle of Current Events, was diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia”—a notorious Soviet psychiatric invention—and confined to the Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital. Václav Havel spent nearly four years in prison. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was deported from the USSR entirely.

In South Africa, New Nation editor Zwelakhe Sisulu was imprisoned for two years in solitary confinement. Max du Preez of Vrye Weekblad faced government attempts at financial and legal strangulation. The Rand Daily Mail was closed in 1985 after breaking stories on apartheid abuses, including the truth about Steve Biko’s death in custody.

Under Nazi occupation, the risks were existential. The White Rose students in Germany were executed for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. The French Resistance developed a “24-hour rule” requiring captured members to resist torture for 24 hours to allow comrades to escape and destroy evidence.

Yet people continue to publish. Frederick Douglass mortgaged his home to keep The North Star running. Julius Wayland of Appeal to Reason committed suicide in 1912 amid ongoing persecution, but the paper continued. Polish underground publishers maintained 100 independent publishers operating simultaneously through martial law. The pattern holds across centuries and continents: wherever power seeks to monopolize truth, someone will find a way to put ink on paper and pass it along.

Practical lessons for resistance publishers

Historical experience offers guidance for those considering this method of resistance. First, organization matters more than technology. Soviet samizdat succeeded with typewriters and carbon paper because of its chain-letter distribution system that made every reader a potential publisher. The instruction to pass information to “the person from whom you received the Chronicle” created self-replicating networks impossible to fully suppress.

Second, credibility requires accuracy. The Chronicle of Current Events maintained its influence through deliberately dry, factual reporting that contrasted with Soviet propaganda’s obvious falsehoods. Andrei Sakharov called it “the best in the human rights movement, its principles and highest achievements.” Publications that exaggerate or fabricate quickly lose the trust that makes them valuable.

Third, distribution is as important as production. The Chicago Defender succeeded because Pullman porters smuggled it into the South. French Resistance newspapers spread through railroad worker networks. Underground GI papers survived through coffeehouses near military bases. Creating a publication means nothing if it cannot reach its audience.

Fourth, international connections provide protection. Charter 77’s simultaneous publication in Western newspapers limited reprisals against well-known signatories. Tamizdat—publishing abroad and smuggling copies back—extended samizdat’s reach. Modern movements coordinate through transnational digital networks that share tactics across borders.

Finally, the act of publishing itself is a form of resistance, regardless of circulation numbers. The ragged appearance of samizdat documents became a badge of authenticity. The existence of an underground paper demonstrated that the regime had not achieved total control. Vladimir Bukovsky captured this with his famous definition: “I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it.” In that cycle lies the essence of newspapers and journals as tools of nonviolent struggle—the willingness to accept personal risk for the chance to tell the truth.