The Libraries That Weren't Supposed to Exist

Basement libraries and buried archives: a brief history of reading against the state.

In 2013, in the Syrian town of Daraya, around forty young people began carrying books out of bombed houses and into the basement of an abandoned apartment building. Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, had been one of the early centers of the peaceful 2011 Arab Spring protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and by 2013 it was in the second year of a brutal siege the regime had imposed in retaliation. The Assad government had cut off food, water, electricity, and humanitarian aid, and barrel bombs were falling on the streets daily. And yet the library that grew in that basement reached fourteen thousand volumes at its peak, catalogued by hand, lent out with due dates to anyone who could reach the basement alive. The young men who built it sometimes read by flashlight while the ground shook above them.

The Daraya library is one of the most thoroughly documented underground libraries in recent history, but it’s one of many. Under regimes that share nothing else in common, small groups of readers living under restriction have built collections of their own, stocked with the material their governments were working to remove from circulation. The pattern has recurred across continents and centuries in forms that vary wildly, and the history of these libraries is also part of the history of how authoritarian power has been resisted from within.

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What an authoritarian regime is, and what it does to information

An authoritarian regime is a government that has freed itself from meaningful accountability to the population it governs. The fully developed version is recognizable: elections that can't change the outcome, opposition leaders in jail or in exile, press owned or controlled, courts that rule the way the people in power want them to, and information managed from the top through both censorship and propaganda. But most of what we call authoritarianism in practice doesn’t start at the fully developed version. It moves toward this through a gradient: elections tilted before they're outright rigged, opposition harassed before it's criminalized, press captured by loyal ownership before it's nationalized, judicial appointments ideologically filtered before judges are purged. Each step expands what the regime can do, and each step requires corresponding control over what the population is able to know and say about what's happening.

Every government, authoritarian or otherwise, needs some baseline of cooperation from the population, because no regime has the resources to coerce every citizen at every moment. Democracies secure that cooperation through accountability, which lets citizens remove leaders who fail them and gives the governed a reason to accept outcomes they didn't personally choose. Regimes moving in the authoritarian direction can't rely on that mechanism, so they use other ways of keeping the population in line. The most powerful and lowest-cost of those alternatives is the control of information, because a population that can't verify what it's being told tends to do what it's told, or at least fails to organize the kind of resistance a regime needs to worry about.

Authoritarian information control operates on several fronts at once:

Restriction

The regime narrows what the population can access:

• Banning books and periodicals

• Controlling printing and broadcasting equipment

• Censoring films and monitoring religious sermons

• Limiting internet access

• Removing material from public collections

Distortion

The regime floods the remaining channels with propaganda, manufactured news, doctored images, and official narratives that contradict what citizens are seeing with their own eyes. George Orwell described this precisely in 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Surveillance

The regime monitors conversations, correspondence, reading habits, and online activity, so that citizens learn to censor themselves before the state has to.

The long narrowing of thought

Each generation that grows up inside a controlled information environment inherits a smaller vocabulary for describing the situation, a thinner knowledge of how things have been organized elsewhere, and fewer conceptual tools for imagining alternatives. This is the longest-running front, and the hardest to reverse once it has taken hold.

Information control reaches every medium through which one mind reaches another. Written work is the part of that effort most visible in retrospect, but the same control runs through speech, images, film, music, public ritual, and now the platforms where most of modern communication happens. The written record, however, draws the regime’s particular attention because it’s durable. A book can be hidden, buried, passed from reader to reader, and retyped letter by letter, and can carry its contents intact across decades. A conversation evaporates the moment it ends, or digital communication disappears when the platform it was on ceases operation. But written work is how a population leaves messages for the future in which the regime is gone.

Populations under these restrictions don’t stop reading of course, and they often read more as the supply tightens. Reading becomes the primary way people check the official account against independent sources and keep their own perception intact, which is the first defense against the Orwellian demand that they deny what they’ve seen. Reading also connects each reader to a larger community of people who have held similar thoughts, which reduces the isolation authoritarian regimes depend on to make dissent feel like private madness. Reading also preserves the vocabulary and conceptual range a population needs to describe its own situation accurately, which is what the regime’s long-term narrowing of thought is designed to erode. And reading is what keeps the written record alive across time. A document survives only when enough readers copy it and pass it along to the next generation, which is how the accounts written under authoritarian conditions reach the generations that need them.

Readers under restriction tend to look for suppressed political analysis and histories of what the regime has tried to erase, for religious texts the regime has banned or rewritten, for foreign literature that shows life organized differently from how the regime insists it must be, and for ordinary novels and poetry that affirm the inner life of a private person (which is what authoritarian systems are most determined to deny). For example, one of the books that became central to readers in the Daraya basement library was Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a self-help title about personal agency, in a siege whose defining condition was that personal agency had been taken away. Readers reach for whatever the regime is working hardest to take from them, which means an underground library’s collection often functions as an inverse map of what the regime fears most.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

What an underground library is

An underground library is an organized collection of books and other written material maintained outside the sanction of a regime that has restricted access to such material. The “underground” part refers to the relationship with state authority, not to physical location. Some underground libraries have hidden themselves in basements, sealed cellars, and buried containers. Others have operated openly in private homes or community spaces as deliberate acts of defiance, accepting state harassment as the price of visibility. Still others have existed primarily as networks of circulation, with no fixed site at all. What unites them is the underlying refusal: the state has decided that certain books should not be read, or that certain readers should not have access, and the library exists because readers have decided otherwise.

The form an underground library takes depends on what the state is restricting and how far the state is willing to go to enforce that restriction. Where the state controls printing equipment, readers reproduce texts by typewriter or by hand. Where the state monitors postal mail, readers move material in person between trusted contacts. Where the state raids private homes, readers bury or hide collections beneath floorboards, inside walls, or in the ground. Where the state has destroyed institutional libraries, readers excavate the wreckage for what survived. The specific tactics vary; the underlying work does not. The underground library selects what to keep, catalogues it so that it can be found again, circulates it among readers who want it, and gives access to the community the collection is meant to serve. These are the four functions any library performs, and underground libraries perform them under conditions that should make the work impossible.

Taken together, the historical record supports a simpler definition than the one most people carry around. A library is not fundamentally a building or an institution; a library is what forms when a group of readers decides to keep particular books available to each other and organizes itself well enough to do so reliably. Buildings, professional staff, funding, and state sanction are scaffolding that makes the work easier. But scaffolding can fall away, and a library continues to exist as long as the readers continue.

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Three case studies

Underground libraries have appeared in dozens of documented cases across the last two centuries, and the pattern likely extends well beyond what any historical record has preserved. The ones we can see today are the ones that produced enough surviving material to leave a trace legible to historians, whether through rescued archives, later memoirs, testimony from survivors, or court records from trials of the people involved. Even the visible ones span a strikingly wide range of conditions, as a partial list suggests:

• The Vilna Ghetto’s underground reading rooms during the Holocaust

• The Polish flying universities that operated in Russian-partitioned Warsaw in the late nineteenth century and were revived under communist rule in the late nineteen-seventies

• The secret schools that operated for African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction

• The women’s reading group Azar Nafisi held in her Tehran living room under the Islamic Republic from 1995 to 1997

• The Polish underground press that flourished during the Solidarity era

The range of these cases points to how broadly the same basic structure reassembles itself under pressure. Three of the most thoroughly documented instances come from different parts of the last century and illustrate how varied the conditions can be while the underlying library work remains recognizable.

Warsaw, 1940–1943. Inside the Warsaw Ghetto, after the Nazis sealed roughly four hundred thousand Jewish residents behind its walls, a historian named Emanuel Ringelblum organized a secret archive to document what the Jewish population of Warsaw was living through. His team, eventually several dozen contributors drawn from across the ghetto, gathered essays, diaries, letters, drawings, photographs, ration cards, wall posters, and original sociological analyses of ghetto economics and internal politics. They interviewed refugees who had fled occupied towns elsewhere in Poland and transcribed their testimony. Understanding that most of them would not survive to tell the story themselves, they buried the archive in metal boxes and milk cans beneath ghetto buildings, intending it to be found after the war. Ringelblum was captured and executed by the Germans in March 1944, and most of his contributors were killed during or after the ghetto uprising. Two of the three buried caches were recovered, in 1946 and 1950, and the recovered material now forms the largest body of Holocaust documentation written by the victims themselves.

The Soviet Union, 1950s–1980s. Because the Soviet state kept tight control over printing presses, photocopiers, and any other equipment capable of reproducing text at scale, readers turned to the one piece of equipment the state hadn’t fully restricted: the personal typewriter. A dissident writer would type a manuscript on layers of tissue-thin paper separated by carbon sheets, producing four to six copies per run. Each copy moved through trusted hands, was read within a few days, and was either passed onward or retyped by the reader to extend the chain further. The practice acquired a name, samizdat, from the Russian for self-published. Over several decades it put banned works by Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, and many others into the hands of Soviet readers who otherwise would have had no legal way to reach them. Penalties for possession or distribution were severe, with thousands of people convicted under anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda statutes over the postwar decades. The practice spread through the Eastern Bloc under related names and continued operating until the Soviet system collapsed in 1991.

Daraya, 2013–2016. Much of what is known about the Daraya basement library comes from two book-length accounts by the journalists Delphine Minoui and Mike Thomson, both based on interviews with the people involved. The library ran for nearly three years inside the besieged Damascus suburb, growing from a few hundred books to more than fourteen thousand. The collection was catalogued by hand and lent out with due dates. The basement functioned as both a reading room and a study space, and some users supplemented the collection with books they downloaded onto their phones during the rare windows when mobile networks worked. When the siege ended in August 2016 through a negotiated evacuation, the library’s founders and users were among the thousands of civilians and fighters bused north to Idlib. The library was left behind and ransacked by government forces shortly after the evacuation. Some of its founders had died during the years of siege, but the ones who survived carried the story out.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

The same forces today

Underground libraries are still being built. In the United States, PEN America has documented nearly twenty-three thousand instances of school book bans since 2021, concentrated largely in Florida and Texas, and reports from affected districts describe informal lending networks forming among parents and students to keep removed titles in circulation. In Ukraine, librarians have evacuated and hidden collections during the Russian invasion. In Afghanistan, underground schools have continued teaching girls since the Taliban banned their education in 2021. Each of these cases traces the same arc the earlier ones did: a restriction is imposed, and a group of readers decides the loss is not acceptable and finds a way to keep access available.

The same four kinds of information control that authoritarian regimes apply deliberately also occur in democracies, produced by different mechanisms but with overlapping effects. Restriction in a democracy is rarely outright prohibition; it shows up as the steady removal of titles from school and library collections, licensing and liability pressure on publishers, and content removals across platforms. Distortion in a democracy isn’t state propaganda; it’s the combination of algorithmically amplified content and coordinated disinformation campaigns that erodes the shared factual ground a news ecosystem requires to function. Surveillance in a democracy is conducted mostly by private companies rather than the state, but the data collected on reading habits and search histories changes what people are willing to look up. And the long-term narrowing of what people find it possible to think shows up as the consolidation of information access through a few corporate platforms, which decides, increasingly, what most people encounter at all.

These pressures differ from outright authoritarianism in scale and mechanism, but they still affect what most people end up reading. Four practices drawn from underground libraries give readers ways to keep access to books and ideas stable if information channels should narrow. Each takes on a different angle of the narrowing, and together they form the basis of a reading life that holds up under institutional pressure.

Keep physical copies of the books that matter most

Digital access depends on licenses and platforms you don’t control. Those licenses can be revoked or rewritten without warning, and platforms can remove or narrow what they make available at any time. A book on your shelf is a copy that doesn’t disappear when a license expires or a platform decides to take it down.

• Build a personal library of titles that have shaped how you think

• Prioritize physical copies of books that appear on banned-book lists

• Keep at least one copy of any book you would want to lend or reread

• Buy used copies of out-of-print or hard-to-find titles before they disappear from circulation

Track what’s being removed from public collections

Knowing what titles are being pulled from institutional circulation is the first condition for keeping those titles readable elsewhere. Without that visibility, removals happen out of sight and accumulate without resistance.

• Look up which books are being challenged or removed in your country, region, or local school district

• Follow local reporting on library funding decisions and any government oversight of what libraries can stock

• Pay attention to which authors and topics show up most often on removal lists, since the patterns tell you what’s being targeted and why

• Subscribe to newsletters from organizations that track book censorship in your country or internationally, such as PEN International, IFLA’s FAIFE committee on freedom of access to information, Index on Censorship, or your national library association

Move books between people, not just own them

A shelf only serves whoever owns the shelf, but a lending habit serves an entire network of readers. The underground libraries did their work through circulation, and informal lending today does the same work at much lower stakes and with much higher cumulative reach.

• Lend books deliberately rather than waiting to be asked

• Send a copy of a book to a friend whose recent conversation made you think of it

• Join or start a reading group built around banned titles and works outside mainstream algorithmic circulation

• Buy second copies of meaningful books to give away

Diversify the sources of what you read

When most of what a person encounters arrives through algorithmic feeds run by a few companies, the supply is already concentrated in ways that make the reader vulnerable to whatever narrowing those companies decide to enact.

• Subscribe directly to writers and publications you trust

• Buy from independent publishers and bookstores when possible

• Visit physical libraries and bookstores to see what’s outside the algorithmic feed

• Read across formats: long-form journalism, books, archived material, primary sources

These practices share an underlying premise: that a reader’s access to books and ideas is fragile, and that the fragility is not visible from the inside until something has already been lost. Access tends to disappear in small increments that go unnoticed until a reader goes looking for something and finds it gone. By the time the loss registers, the work of restoration is far harder than the work of preserving it would have been.

Underground libraries are how reading survives when the state decides what cannot be read. Every book that moves between readers outside the state’s reach is a failure of the regime to control what its population can think. Enough of those failures across a society become something authoritarian power has never been able to fully suppress: an empowered citizenry. An authoritarian regime needs to control what its subjects are able to believe, but that control becomes impossible once enough people are reading past the limits the regime has drawn. These libraries have always been one of the ways authoritarian power gets weakened from within, and the work of sustaining them has always been open to any reader willing to take part.

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