Between state censorship and Western sanctions, publishing in Russia is a hot mess.
Panicked writers and editors remove anything from their books that has to do with politics, war (even just the word), queer people, or “childfree ideology,” which is the Putin regime’s term for any non-idealized information on pregnancy, childhood, and family life: a desperate measure to boost our dying demography. Meanwhile, bookstores offer illegally published works by foreign authors because sanctions have made it acceptable for Russia to thumb its nose at international law.
There are blooms of hope: successful, moneymaking book fairs in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, and other Russian cities. New writers are emerging, and there is an evident rise in reader interest. But the business is so confused and contradictory that you can find anti-state satires and explicit gay novels for sale online, while some anodyne academic books are considered so toxic people cannot have them on their shelves. If an author is labeled a “foreign agent”—i.e., insufficiently loyal to Putin—his or her book can be sold only in plastic wrapping plastered with an 18+ sign and a special warning, like cigarettes or pornography.
In the Soviet era, political censorship on behalf of the Communist Party was inescapable. Some Soviet authors such as Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, after fruitless struggles with censors, published their texts abroad and were ostracized at home.
So far in 2025, no official procedure for pre-publication censorship exists, although some members of the parliament have suggested it. But if a publisher issues a book which then becomes subject to a court proceeding, they can be severely fined. Books may be yanked from stores and libraries by order of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Everybody fears being labeled an “extremist” (instant criminal prosecution) or, milder but still palpable, a “foreign agent” (bureaucratic nightmares and unemployability).
In May 2024, the latest work by Vladimir Sorokin, Russia’s best-known postmodern novelist, was officially removed from stores for “child pornography” in what was clearly an act of censorship. Blue Lard dealt with the abuse of the protagonist’s children, who are at least 20 years old.
Last summer, Mouse, a dystopian thriller by Ivan Filippov, a young writer, political activist, and émigré living in Georgia, was banned by the Prosecutor General’s Office for “fake socially significant information.” It seems that now you can write only about dystopias that are completely real.
If an author is labeled a “foreign agent”—i.e., insufficiently loyal to Putin—his or her book can be sold only in plastic wrapping plastered with an 18+ sign and a special warning, like cigarettes or pornography.
The queer young-adult novel A Summer in the Red Scarf was banned in 2022. A poet named Evgenia Berkovich was condemned for her verses about the invasion of Ukraine, although the six-year sentence she is currently serving alongside her colleague Svetlana Petriychuk is for “justifying terrorism” in a play she wrote based on the real-life stories of Russian women who had married radical Islamists. The rumor is that their prosecution was initiated by the well-known Soviet actor, director, and, lately, blatant Putin propagandist Nikita Mikhalkov.
Normally, the powers don’t seem to care about what you write so long as you don’t attract attention by being well known or politically vocal. What doesn’t help is being aligned with any organization associated with the West, even if it’s something as innocuous as the Goethe-Institut, which promotes German language and culture.
“When an international organization we used to deal with is labeled ‘undesirable,’” a book editor tells me, “not only do we have no right to sell the books we made together, we also legally cannot keep the books at all. So, sometimes I spend my workdays looking for those forbidden books around the office and then take them home with me.” Librarians as well as publishers are stockpiling banned books in their own apartments.
People I know nervously check “the list,” the ever lengthening register of Russians labeled “foreign agents” that is posted online by the Ministry of Justice every Friday evening. Initially the law mainly targeted NGOs and charities sponsored from abroad. We are way beyond that now. Almost anyone can be added to the list for saying something incautious, or by just being popular outside Russia. Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov and prominent YouTube blogger Yury Dud are both on the list.
Then come the warning labels and plastic wrappings, which are imposed at the publisher’s expense. “Sometimes we already have the whole edition printed and ready,” says my contact, “but then at the end of the week we have to promptly remove all copies from the market and equip them with necessary stickers.”
Many bookstores stop selling books written by “foreign agents,” although there is no overt ban on them. There are no official regulations governing what is permissible, yet in practice, your editor, your editor’s boss, your ink-and-paper supplier, your typographers, will express their doubts about what they find controversial in your text. This is peak Russian censorship: a “voluntary” silencing, rather than the decree of a government censorship bureau.
Writers and editors are forced to guess what the unwritten rules are. For example, it is extremely unclear where the border lies between simply mentioning a subject and “propaganda.” Can you write about the horrors of war without somehow criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Can you depict post-natal depression without inspiring talk of a “childfree agenda”?
These questions have created a new sub-specialty in the legal profession: the careful analysis of texts before publication by lawyers in search of incriminating subject matter. But the lawyers tend to prohibit anything even hinting at taboo themes, and because of that, no one really likes the idea of seeking their counsel. Some editors lie about running work past an outside expert just to soothe their jittery distributors.
It has become quite natural to find words, lines, even whole pages blacked out in new publications. However, there can be no certainty as to whether such an eye-catching, dramatic device will work in court as a defense. As with hiring a lawyer, it is an offering to the unseen censor.
Proper literary criticism, and even normal book-club discussion, has been muted. News about a book fair closing because of death threats to the hosts or an author being stalked by Russian nationalists rarely makes it to the papers, and if it does, it is only on some news site blocked in Russia or a niche Telegram channel. If a work is safely published and sold in Russia, it still has to be guarded from possible snitches. One editor urges popular anti-Putin online media outlets such as Meduza to never review the company’s books in order to avoid unwanted attention.
Books have historically been the most accessible vessels for public discussion in Russia, since Russians have almost never had any coffeehouse-like public spaces for debate. In the last 30 years, this was changing, but after Putin’s abrupt and aggressive ultra-conservative turn, books once more represent the rare but tangible possibility of a free-spirited, open, and intimate dialogue between author and reader. Sure enough, book sales are up.
As much as it hurts to see the fear that accompanies most publishing deals now, the efforts of editors and booksellers to preserve what can be preserved do actually help to keep the printing presses—and hope—running.
Katya V. is a poet, a feminist, and a tutor of Russian and English
