Size: 14x10cm./5.5×3.9inch.
Weight: 73gr./2.5oz.
Pages: 162
Published: 1969
 
Polish book „Upiory Rewolucji” meaning:”The Ghosts Of The Revolution” by Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski published by the Underground Voice Publisher in the People’s Republic of Poland in Warsaw 1969.
First edition was published a few months earlier in Paris in 1969. The book contains sketches and Russian glossy printed in the last ten years in “Kultura” (with the exception of two not printed anywhere).
They arose from the belief that “the fate of Central and Eastern Europe depends almost exclusively on changes and transformations in Russia itself”.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, a writer, was a former Gulag prisoner in a Soviet Russia in years 1940-1942. After being released, he wrote in 1951 his most famous book „Another World” memories about his imprisonment in the Gulag.
Underground publications (tissue paper, second circulation) were published in countries where censorship was in force (PRL, USSR, etc.). In Poland publications were published by the opposition as The Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and the Solidarity. These were non-debit publications, i.e. without being allowed to be distributed by the appropriate office (in Poland until 1989, it was the Publications and Performances Control Office), often ignoring copyright, confidentially distributed. They were published in circulation from a dozen or so copies to several or even tens of thousands of copies by illegal (“underground”) publishing houses or by private persons. The circulation of press and books, for example in the “NOWA”, rarely exceeded 4-5 thousand copies.
Due to militia persecution, espionage infiltration and the system of controlling the trade in paper, ink and printing presses were in force in totalitarian countries, independent publishing houses never managed to achieve a large coverage, except for the Polish People’s Republic in the second half of the 1980s.